Awww Yeah

For those that thought the Bears couldn't score on offense....you were wrong

See you in Miami

Can I Brag a Little?

This post is purely to show off my two adorable little nieces. As most of you know, my brother and his wife, Andrew and Amie, have a little girl named Jordan. She will be two in March. I can't believe it! As some of you may not know, my sister and her husband, Allison and Benoit, just had a baby on December 30th. Her name is Eden Elizabeth, and though she came earlier than we expected, she is doing great! I will get to meet her in March! My sister cleverly pointed out that now we have "The River Jordan" and the "Garden of Eden" in our family. My dad is under the impression that we should name our first child Israel. All I can say is, sorry to disappoint you dad, not on the list of names. And I do have a list :-) Although it's dwindling. Seems like people keep having the same bright ideas for names that I've had.

Our Iowan Adventure

That's Iowan as in Iowa. The state. I wish it was just a gross misspelling of the word "Hawaiian". That would mean we'd been to Hawaii, not Iowa. Well, anyway...

As most of you know we visited our family in the great state of Illinois between Christmas and New Year's (which isn't much more exciting than Iowa). We had a great time with Jon's family and with my Mom and Dad. On New Year's Day we started on our six-hour drive home at about two o'clock that afternoon, as both of us had work the next day. Two hours into our trip, the car got really loud, so we tried to change lanes to see if it was just a "loud road". When Jon started seeing smoke in the rear-view mirror, we decided that it was not in fact the road, and that perhaps we should make our way to the side of the highway. Much to our dismay, a blown out, smoking tire was there to greet us as we exited the car. So, we dug out the spare from the trunk (naturally, I overpacked, so getting to the tire wasn't exactly an easy feat). As Jon changed the tire, I stood by our belongings and tried to keep my new fluffy blue robe from blowing into traffic. I thought it was a good idea to document the situation while I was just standing there...

What a man!

Our sad busted tire...

Things don't look so good...(neither do I, come to think of it...)

I was taking things in stride and just thought we were making life a little more interesting. We get off at the next exit to find the nearest Wal-Mart, only to learn that it's about 30 miles away. So, we putter down I-80 at 50 miles an hour with our hazard lights on until we reach Wal-Mart. It was like an oasis! You can always count on Wal-Mart to be open, even on New Year's Day! We went in and laughed with the mechanics about how glad we were that they were working, blah blah blah. Then things started to go downhill. It's not a good sign when you tell the mechanic what size your tire is and he curses. An hour and many phone calls later, we still had no tire. In one hour I went from laughing and documenting to tears. It's all in good fun until no one has your tire. Little did we know when we bought our "economical" Nissan Sentra last August that it was such a rare gem that only ONE company makes ONE tire that ONLY goes on our car. Ridiculous. To make this long story shorter, we spent the night in Des Moines, got up early, got our gold-plated, diamond encrusted tire and headed back to KC. On a good note, however, a very generous man from our church in East Peoria had given us an unexpected Christmas gift that made this little unexpected adventure (ahem, expense) a whole lot easier. We thank the Lord for that and for him!