Christmas and Recovery

This Christmas was not only exciting and fun but productive at the same time. I found out that I needed to have a laperoscoptic surgery to remove some cysts and the best time to schedule it turned out to be 2 days before Christmas. Lucky me! I went in for surgery on December 23rd and it was successful. Poor Abe had to wait, by himself for me to be done, at the hospital all day from 7:30 am to 4 pm! I am sure it was a long day for him but he took good care of me when I got home. I spent the next day sleeping.
What Abe didn't know is that I had secretly been saving my money this year to buy him something special for Christmas that I knew he really wanted but would never buy for himself because he is way too practical. So Christmas Eve I got up at 3 am to set out the gifts. I still felt pretty sore and groggy from pain meds but I was so excited for Abe to wake up that morning and see that Santa had come for him. haha

This was how it looked when he came out. The stockings were not under the tree before and neither were any of the blue gifts....

He could not tell why I was so excited for him to get up that morning because we had decided that other than the piano he bought for me we were not doing gifts this year because our Florida trip was our Christmas present to ourselves.
The funniest part was that when he came out he didn't notice the presents at all! He thought they were empty boxes that I had wrapped as decoration because there were two boxes that I actually did that to.

In Abe's stocking he got a hat(the one he is wearing) for when he runs outside in the morning and a large thing of red peppers because he loves them and puts them on everything. In my stocking I got a special Christmas treat that I love.

Next was the big gift which he still had not noticed. I told him to open it and he was surprised by its weight because he expected an empty box. haha It was definitely not empty though...he got a Wii system! He was really excited and totally surprised.

He also got a Wii fit which will probably be more for me than him but he was still happy.

And lastly he got the Tiger Woods golf game from my parents to go with his new Wii and an extra remote. The golf game has turned out to be his favorite thing for sure!

It made me so happy to give him an exciting Christmas. It was also great because I was still recovering from surgery and I ended up sleeping the rest of the day and it gave him something to do.

Earlier in the month we got me this digital piano which I absolutely love! This was my big Christmas gift for the year. I also got Harry Potter 2, 3 and 6 so now we have them all which gave me something to watch while I was in bed recovering.

It is a tradition of ours to do puzzles during the holidays with this one I think we bit off a little more than we could chew. It is a 1500 piece Christmas puzzle and we are still not done with it. That afternoon Abe helped me make cinnamon buns for lunch which were super yummy, but that was not all Abe made that day...

That evening I woke up just in time to get the table ready and talk Abe through some cooking instructions so we could have Christmas dinner with our good friend's Bonnie and Chris. Abe made a turkey breast, candied yams, mashed potatoes and stuffing! What a great husband to do all of that by himself! Our friends brought over a yummy honey baked ham, green bean casserole, rolls and a delicious home made pumpkin pie. It was one of the first real meals I had eaten in days and it was so delicious I can't even tell you!

This picture was actually taken a few weeks ago when we first got my piano but since it was my favorite thing I wanted to show it off. I haven't had a piano in years but I love to play. It has been a lot of fun having music in the house again.

It was a great Christmas. After our yummy dinner the boys played Wii golf while Bonnie and I worked on the incredibly difficult puzzle. It was a great end to a great Christmas, we are very blessed.

I am now feeling much better and hope to be 100% in another week. I want to publicly thank my cute husband for taking care of me and doing so much cooking and cleaning.
You are the best, thanks babe!

Snow in DC???

This is what it looked like outside our window last Saturday morning. When we heard it was going to snow here we thought about how much it snowed all of last year and expected maybe a few inches that would stick longer than a day... We were wrong!

Little did we know we would be in DC for their biggest snow storm in about 17 years!
Lucky us!!

I know to all of my UT friends and family this doesn't look like that much snow, but a couple of feet of snow here is like a hurricane hitting the city. Everything not only shut down on Saturday for the storm but things continued to be closed on Sunday even church was canceled and it had stopped snowing Saturday evening. Then you would think they would for sure have gotten the roads clear by Monday but no, everything was still closed down and no one went to work!

Finally today things started to get back to normal minus the people here that don't understand how to drive in the snow and go about 5 mph everywhere they go even up a slick hill or on totally cleared roads! Now I know why when I went to the grocery store on Friday the shelves where empty and the check out lines went down the isles.

Cakes and Christmas Parties

For our Ward Christmas Party I made a very large and delicious Andie's Mint Chocolate fondant cake. I had never done piping with icing before, and while it is not perfect, I was pretty proud of how it turned out.

I really liked how the top turned out but I ran out of time and couldn't do what I planned on doing on the sides and ended up with these three trees, oh well...

It was four layers of Chocolate fudge cake with bits of Andie's mint in it, then three layers of practically pure Andie's mint melted down and then topped off with fondant. It was really yummy!

Two nights ago we got together with our friends for a Christmas party. Even our good friends the Kohn's were visiting from California and were able to be there! We ate at a restaurant called Taste of the Worlds and it was pretty good. You can get Indian, Thia, or Mexican food there and surprisingly it is all good.

After we went to our friends the Purdy's home for some hot chocolate , wessel some birthday Bochliva because it was Jess's birthday. Dannie did such a good job with everything it was very gourmet, not the package stuff.

We had a couple very intense games of Jenga.

We also played a gift exchange game where the Bells went away with about half of the gifts! Sadly, Abe and I ended up with nothing. I actually had about 3 items until they were all stolen, but Abe wasn't lucky enough to roll a 7 or an 11 with the dice the entire game and never got a chance to pick a gift.

I had never had Bochliva before and I obviously don't know how to spell it either, but it was really delicious! Even Abe liked it and he doesn't like a lot of desert foods.

We are so lucky to have such great friends! Merry Christmas to everyone!

Christmas Lights at the Maryland Temple

A few weeks ago Abe and I went to a Messiah Sing-a-long up by the Maryland Temple. Afterwards we walked around the Temple grounds to see the beautiful lights and walked through the Christmas displays they had in the visitor center. It is one of our favorite holiday traditions! This guy is there every year sitting outside the visitor center every single night and greets people as they walk around and wishes you a Merry Christmas. We thought it was so great we took our picture with him this year.

The Temple is always beautiful but I especially love it when the grounds are all light up!

inside the visitor center they had displayed nativity scenes from countries around the world. The one above was Abe's favorite from Guatamala.

I had two favorite the one above was from Switzerland and it was really intricately detailed wood carvings and the one below I liked just because it was so tiny, I thought it was cute. Made with pearls in an oyster shell from New Zealand.

A very nice man offered to stand in the snow so we could have a picture with both of us in front of the Temple. Thanks nice man! It just doesn't feel like Christmas till we have gone to see the lights at the Temple.

Thanksgiving 2009

I know that I was super nervous about hosting Thanksgiving dinner, but it wasn't as scary as I thought it would be. Everything turned out good and we had good friends and family to share it with so it was great.

Abe's brother AJ, his sister Aliese and her husband Bryan and baby Lily and our good friends Kim and Paul Anderson came with their baby Rya. The food was really yummy especially the pies Kim brought! The Turkey that I was so scared of making was good but it was on the cool side because it got done 2 hours earlier than I thought it would. And even though we moved things up and ate an hour early it was not hot anymore by the time we sat down to eat. Oh well at least I didn't give everyone food poisoning or something. If cold Turkey is the worst that happened I am fine with that.

After dinner we played a very long but fun game of Phase 10 while we digested. It was a pretty competitive game and in the end Aliese was the champion. Good job Aliese!
It was a lot of fun and I would be happy to host it again anytime.

Birthday From Bad to Great

My birthday didn't start out so great this year but it ended with a perfect girls night out. The weekend before my birthday our washing machine broke down and the earliest they could come fix it was on my birthday between 8 am and 12 noon. I made plans to bring the little girl that I nanny for to my house for the morning to play while we waited for the repairman to come. She sometimes has a hard time napping at my house so I was really hoping that he would come before she needed a nap. I was unlucky about that, plus she happened to be having an abnormally fussy day due to having her H1N1 shot that morning. So I was trying to keep her happy all morning while waiting for the repairman. By noon he still hadn't arrived so I called Sears to find out that they were running behind and that he would call me right away to let me know when he would be there. I waited another 1.5 hours and still no call. When I packed the diaper bag that morning I only packed a couple of diapers because I thought that we would be home around noon and wouldn't need more than that...well we did. Luckily the repairman finally got there and it only took about 15 minutes for him to fix the washing machine. Too bad I had already called Abe to come home from work so I could take the baby home to change her diaper. So Abe came home just as we were leaving. Oops.

Abe was great though. He saw that I was stressed out and he went to pick up movie tickets for my friends and I for later that night to see "New Moon." He also went to the grocery store and bought me my very favorite kind of birthday cake and made it for me, Cherry chip cake with cherry frosting, yummy!

That night I went with my girlfriends to dinner at Cosi which was super yummy and fun and then after we went to see "New Moon." I didn't like the first movie at all so I had very low expectations but surprisingly I liked New Moon a lot! After the movie we went back to my house and had some birthday cake. It turned out to be a great birthday in the end thanks to my cute hubby, the really nice family that I work for and great friends!