Valentine's Day 2016

We don't make a huge deal out of Valentine's Day and usually don't even try to go out to eat on the actual holiday so we can avoid the crowds. This year since Valentine's Day fell on a Sunday I knew all the restaurants would be insane. The first week of February I won a Nothing But Noodles gift card through a Facebook contest, so we decided to use that on Valentine's Day for lunch. That is one of my absolute favorite restaurants and I was SO excited to win that gift card! Chad also got me some beautiful roses too. Here are our pictures from Valentine's Day:

Enjoying our Valentine's lunch at Nothing But Noodles!

January 2016

So, we finally got a few snow days in January! It started snowing overnight on Thursday January 21 and continued into Friday. It started as freezing rain, then snow, then sleet on Friday. It was really icy, but enough snow to make everything pretty. It was nice to get a longer weekend because of the snow days too. I really enjoyed watching all the birds on the bird feeders during the snow. We saw so many birds! Here are pictures from our snow day:



About a week or so after the snow days I was getting ready to leave for work and happened to see 2 hawks in our front yard. I grabbed the camera and was trying to take pictures through the blinds - which is why some of the pictures are not as good quality. The hawks were HUGE and just hung out in the front yard for awhile before flying away. I see them all the time, but it's hard to get a decent picture of them. Here are the pictures I got that day:


And no month is complete without cat pictures! Here are some pictures of Sandy & Roxy from January:

Christmas 2015

We've had some crazy weather this year and Christmas was so warm that it just didn't feel like Christmas time. It was in the upper 70's and some people were even turning their A/C on! It never got hot enough in our house to merit turning the A/C on, but it was definitely weird with it being so warm on Christmas. Our tradition is that Christmas Eve is for me and Chad - we go to the Christmas Eve service at church, out to eat, then drive around looking at Christmas lights. Here are pictures from Christmas at our house:




On Christmas Day we had lunch with Chad's family at his parent's house. Then my brother came over to our house in the evening so we could Skype with my Mom and Mike and open presents that way with them. There was SUCH a beautiful full moon on Christmas night. I took some pictures, but they just don't even do it justice. Here are pictures from Christmas Day:

Behold the Lamb of God Concert 2015

My absolute favorite Christmas tradition is going to the Behold the Lamb of God concert. We've gone to this concert for the past 11 years now. This year was the first year it wasn't at our church. It was so popular that even doing 2 back to back concerts last year it sold out the first day the tickets were available. This year it was at Ovens Auditorium, which was fine, but the tickets were MUCH more expensive because of all the extra fees and it cost $10 to park. It's not like it's not worth it, but we like to buy extra tickets and treat friends to the concert and with it being so much more expensive we couldn't do that this year. I also enjoy concerts in a smaller venue, so it wasn't quite as enjoyable, but we still love it and will go every year as long as we can. Here are the pictures from this year's concert:

Friends Christmas Party 2015

We've been doing this Christmas party with the same friends for at least the past 8 years. It's gotten harder and harder to all get together regularly, but we always have this party and we always watch the 4th of July parade together. I'm so thankful for these great friends! Here are some pictures of our Christmas party this year hosted by Paul & Kelly: