Merry Christmas!

My New Pride and Joy!

Rencher Family Cabin

Island Park, Idaho

Hanging out with Grandpa Spainhower on Christmas Eve

Baby Reagan (the best baby ever)!

It has been a fabulous Christmas! Mostly it has been wonderful being with family and friends. They are so good to us! Our parents especially are amazing. Sometimes Iowa seems so far away and it just feels good to be back in Utah and Idaho.

We made it to Utah around 5:00 am on Saturday morning after driving through the night. We rode with Matt and Erin (friends we know from Iowa) and luckily the roads were great most of the way. Thanks to Matt and Erin for letting us catch a ride with them! Now we just hope we can make it back to Iowa safely on the 2nd of January.

We spent the actual holidays with my family. It was one family party after another and it was wonderful. Dad and Cathy have been working on finishing their basement and they were working until 10:00 pm the night before we got there so that we would have a place to sleep. They also let us take over their car the whole trip. Good thing they love us! Thanks Dad and Cathy for being so wonderful! The highlight of the whole adventure is we got to talk to my little brother Alan who is in Mexico on a mission right now. He sounds just like a little Mexican and happy as can be! Next Christmas he will be home...Yeah!

Nate worked on his Daddy skills over the holidays. He held baby Reagan all night long and wouldn't give her up. That is until she spit up on him. I was even more amazed when he picked up my cousin's 2 month old baby (Anya) from her baby carrier. He wouldn't share her either. This is kind of out of character for him. I guess he is realizing that ready or not baby Rencher is coming and he better be prepared!

Now I need to tell you just how good my husband and his parents are to me...I told Nate about 1-2 months ago that I really wanted to get a little piano keyboard so that I could keep practicing the piano. I have a real piano back home but it is too heavy to keep hauling around from apartment to apartment and state to state. So I took Nate to Best Buy one day to show him what I wanted, just a simple keyboard (not even a full sized one). Apparently Nate had bigger and better plans (and with the help of his parents he was able to pull them off) because on Christmas morning I woke up to a digital mini grand piano! At first I didn't know if I should believe it. I almost started crying I was so excited. This whole time Nate had me thinking we needed room in our car to bring back a baby crib not a piano. I was totally surprised! Somehow I always seem to get the better end of the deal because all Nate got was a football and a few shirts. He gave up his Christmas presents from his parents so that I could get my huge present.

We will be driving our new car back to Iowa which is very exciting!!! We picked up our new car on Christmas night in Pocatello. My parents drove us all the way up there to get it which made for a 4 hour+ round trip for them. Again, good thing they love us! We hadn't seen the car yet (Nate's brother Jarem bought it for us at the auction) so we had no idea what we had purchased. Luckily we love it. It is a Pontiac Grand Prix GT (I have to add the GT part for Nate even though I have no idea what it means). I am very happy to finally have two cars and even more excited to have at least one car that shouldn't be breaking down on us so often. No offense to the Green Ford Contour:).

We are now up at the Rencher Family Cabin in Island Park, Idaho enjoying a little R&R. We will be here to celebrate the New Year. And yes we have much to celebrate because we are so blessed!

Winter Ice Storm...

For my fellow friends of Iowa this isn't going to be the most exciting entry considering you were here to experience it for yourselves, but I wanted to share the excitement of my first ice storm with the rest of you.

Actually I think this was the second one, but I don't remember for sure. It seems we get extreme weather here all the time.

Nate didn't even try to go to school this day and luckily for him most of his classes were cancelled. They even closed down the whole school by 11:00 am. It ended up being quite a fun day because we just hung out at home together. I don't think we even attempted to go outside until 2 or 3 in the afternoon. Once we decided to venture outside it took us around 20-30 minutes just to get into our car. It was totally iced over. The ice on the windshield was so thick you couldn't even scrape at it.

Luckily we didn't get it as bad as some of the other states around us. We never lost power and were only kept inside for a short time.

The aftermath of it was actually very pretty. All of the trees looked like they were made of crystal and at night they would shimmer in the light.

After the extreme humidity when we first moved out here in August and now these crazy ice storms I don't see myself wanting to live in Iowa for the rest of our lives, but we are having fun for the time being.

More Pics...

The Pictures are kind of small but if you double click on them you can make them bigger.

Time to Catch Up...

This is the first time I have been able to sit down at a computer to work on our blog. Now that I don't have a regular job I don't have access to the internet very often. So this may be a long one as we have had some fun over the last few weeks...

Lets first talk about our wonderful 1999 green Ford Contour. What a gem it is:). It has been having some issues lately. Two days before Thanksgiving Nate and I were driving back from his school when the car just went dead (in the middle of a busy street). Luckily it started back up and we were able to get it home. We had someone jump us when we got home so that Nate could drive to Wal-mart to get a new battery. Unfortunately he only made it about half way. So he started running the rest of the way (about 2 miles) to Wal-mart. We must remember that the weather that night was so incredibly cold! The jog to Wal-mart wasn't the hard part...it was the jog back with the 50lb. battery that was hard! So where was I during all of this madness? I had to teach a group exercise class at the gym (which is about 10 miles from our house) in an hour so I was frantically searching for a ride or a substitute teacher. I ended up having to call my boss and she came and picked me up. Kind of embarressing.

Now the real drama begins...

Turns out it wasn't just a bad battery, but instead a bad alternater. We called around to find out how much it was going to cost us to have someone replace the alternater and when we found out it was going to be around $700 (I don't even know if the car is worth $700) we started trying to figure out how possible it would be for Nate to replace it himself. So we got a hold of an alternater the next day and Nate and one of his good buddies (Matt) started disecting our car. What a beautiful sight it was when the snow started falling, and falling and falling... It was honestly the biggest blizzard ever. And no we didn't have a car port or garage to work in so Nate and Matt were out in the blizzard. Again where was I during all the drama...Inside trying not to cry. Nate and I were supposed to be driving our car to Washington D.C. to visit Brian and Lindsay for Thanksgiving. The plan was to leave at 8 am so that we could get to D.C. before midnight. It was now almost noon and there was little hope of our car getting fixed. Turns out changing the alternater was a bigger job than Nate thought it would be.

Anyway...the story is getting long so I will sum it all up in a few words. We ended up leaving our dissasembled car in the parking lot, rented a car and left our worries behind. We would face the stress when we got home. We finally took off for D.C. around 4:00 pm which meant that we arrived at Brian and Lindsay's around 7:00 am the next day. Poor Nate had to do 75% of the driving because I am a sissy when it comes to driving through the night. Poor guy! As I replay this story in my mind I am being reminded of just how amazing my husband is, and just was a sissy I am!

Once we made it to D.C. we had a blast. It was sooooooo good to see Brian, Lindsay and the kids. Plus Lindsay and one of her girlfriends made the best Thanksgiving dinner ever! As part of the festivities we had to make these little turkeys and write what we were thankful for on the feathers. At the top of our list...Family, Baby Rencher and our Rental Car!

P.S. we did finally get our car fixed but we ended up having to tow it to the shop (Thanks to Logan and Ashley for helping us do that).