New Years and My Birthday!

We got back to Seattle on the 29th, just in time for the next holiday festivities. New Years Eve we went out with a group of friends to a comedy show. Although I haven't been to many I feel a little leery about comedy shows since they could so easily go poorly. Luckily this one was a huge hit (or at least I thought so!). It was 4 improve groups who took turns doing little skits taking ideas from the audience. It was hilarious! At the end they did the countdown to midnight and handed out bottles of champagne to the crowd. 

2 days later I got to celebrate my birthday! We spent it snowshoeing (thanks to Leigha and Nino's awesome wedding present of showshoes to us!) near snoqualmie pass. I love being able to drive 30 minutes and be in the mountains and be able to snowshoe up them! We took Ben with us too, and he did really well and got rid of a lot of energy running around in the snow. It ended up being a perfect day for it too with blue skies.

Christmas in the Mitten

Ahhh, life has been crazy busy lately! We were able to scoot on over to Michigan for a few days for Christmas though. We left early morning Christmas Eve. After a little layover in Houston (which was much warmer than Seattle or Detroit) we made it back to Michigan just in time to go straight to party number one at Uncle Rick's house! As always, a great time. I wish we had made it a little earlier so we could have cought some of the other family member who came early and left early. Instead we got to party into the night with all the late night crazies. We made it back to the parents house in the wee hours of the morning just in time to catch a few hours of sleep before the next party on Christmas Day! Thankfully no one was motivated enough to get up extra early to open presents.

Around noon the Dougherty Family all came over for a little Christmas Festivities. We enjoyed the traditional alaskan king crab and pizza lunch along with mimosas and some chit chats and white elephant gifting.

Later that evening when it was back to just our immediate family (which is turning out to be A LOT of people when they're all there at one time in one house!) we did our own gift exchange and stockings opening. All the gifts were awesome, but really the best part was all being their together at one time...which is getting increasingly rare! Good thing we have several wedding coming up for good excuses to get together some more!

Sunday we all headed into church. I hadn't been to the new church building that was built recently, so that was fun to see. Being the day after Christmas it was kind of a small crowd, but it was nice to see a few people I knew that I hadn't seen in a while. After a quick brunch it was time to get ready for party number 3! This time it was the extended Raetz family...which included a bunch of little kids running around! It was my first time to meet a couple of them...super cute!

As is tradition, was made sure to get our Christmas family pictures including some of the whole group. Our group keeps growing every year, and we're still missing some people! Maybe someday we'll actually have the whole family all together. It's awesome to see all the generations though!

Monday we finally got to sleep in and relax for a little bit. Then we got to start doing a few wedding related things! That afternoon we met with Pastor Thompson to go over a mairraige survey he had had us take a while back...looks like we can get married :) We also went over a lot of details for our wedding ceremony and all that good stuff. So many details to figure out and decide upon still! After a couple hours of that, we headed out to another little party. This time it was a going away party for little brother as we're stealing him about to the West Coast now! We also met up with Nick and took him with us to Mr. B's for some food and beverages.

Tuesday we had a few more wedding things to do! We started out with another meeting with the Theatre to try to finalize a few details and go over what else needs to be figured out in the next few weeks. The list is getting smaller and smaller each time we meet! After that we headed to a few stores to find a new suit for dad and a cute little dress for mom! We ended up getting two options for mom...now she just has to decide which one to wear for the wedding! I think she should keep both though...that's one hot momma!

In our down time we did quite a bit of Dexter watching and got mostly caught up on the last season. I am quite convinced I may have to get Showtime in the fall just so I can watch this show...it is addicting! Although the show itself if awesome, I just had to add this little clip from the show that kept me laughing for quite a while. The internet clip is funny, but I think in the context of the show it's extra hillarious :)

Wednesday morning Ryan and I were headed back to Seattle, and Jordan and Kristen were headed out to San Francisco, so we all drove up to the airport bright and early leaving mom and dad with an empty house once again. Now they just need to come visit all of us west coasters!

The 10' House

One of the first projects that Ryan got to work on at his current firm was a pre fabricated home that was only 10 feet wide. The lot that it was to be placed on only allowed a teen foot wide buildable area so that was the biggest challenge of the house. Obviously Ryan did a fabulous job and overcoming that. They had been working on constructing the house in a factory about 2 hours north of Seattle, and they just now brought it down the the site to be placed. Here's a little video of it being placed on the site. After it was placed it just needed it's finishes applied so it should be completely finished shortly! It's really amazing to see Ryan's drawings coming to life. At least I get to live vicariously as an architect through him right now, and he does a great job!

Stones

My poor pitiful old lady puppy is having issues again. It all started when she started peeing uncontrollably around the house. She used to be able to go out twice a day and that was it. Now we were taking her out about once and hour and she was still having accidents. At first I thought it was because of the move and living with the puppy now, but after a while it was just getting ridiculous. Finally I took her into the vet to see if she had an infection. Sure enough, she did, so we got some medication for that. She was still having quite a few accidents, so I decided we'd try out some doggie diapers on her until the medicine kicked in. That helped a little to avoid such large messes. One of the first times I took off the diaper to clean it though I noticed a stone in it. I was super confused and tried to convince myself that it was already in there or just fell in there somehow. Then I decided to google it and see what the possibility of Tara having kidney stones or something was. Turns out she was having all of the symptoms. Monday morning I called the vet to ask them about it, and they said she should come in as soon as possible. Ryan was able to take her in during the day and they took some x-rays to find about a fist full of little stones in her bladder...ewwwwie. It's definitely a good thing we found them though before they turned into anything more dangerous like a bursting bladder! Over the next couple of days Tara was still peeing out stones which I'm sure was rather painful for her. We now have her on a canned food diet and several medications which seem to be helping so far. We're still taking her out as often as possible, but she's not having nearly as many accidents. Hopefully she'll be fully recovered by Christmas so we can leave her with a friend without feeling bad for them with her peeing everywhere!

Visit from the (future) In-Laws!

The day after Thanksgiving, Ryan's parents came into town for a visit! It was the first time they've been to Seattle, so we had lots to show them. First things first though, as soon as we got back from picking them up from the airport, we settled in for the Auburn/Alabama game...as if there was any doubt, Auburn kicked some serious booty ;) Once we were done winning, we headed out into the town. We immediately ran into a huge mob of people huddled around the Westlake Center. Turns out they were having the Christmas Tree lighting celebration. We decided to continue on to the Pike Place Market to get a taste of that, and of course get a coffee at the original Starbucks ;)

[ryan and his parents at the original starbucks]

We wandered around the market a little more, but by that point most of the booths were closing up, so we continued on to the waterfront for a delicious seafood feast!

[crabpot seafood feast]

Saturday Ryan got to show off one of his projects! He took his parents on a tour of it, and needless to say, they were very proud!

[in the doorway of Ryan's project that's being constructed]

After that we went on to the museum of flight. And saw all the planes. I had been there once before with Jordan, but it was a first for everyone else. There was so much to see, we barely made it out before they closed!

[in front of Air Force One]

By the time we got home from the museum, it was about time for supper, and since the Space Needle is obviously a must see in Seattle, we decided to combine the two by eating at the Space Needle restaurant! I've been wanting to go to it for a while, but never had a good opportunity. The restaurant is right below the observation deck, and it rotates around so if you have a window seat (which we did) you're able to see everything while you're eating delicious food!

 [space needle supper]

Sunday was our snow day! We drove out to Roslyn, WA and rented some snowmobiles for the day and took them up the mountain. It was a perfect day for it with more sunshine than we've seen in a while ;) When we came back down from the mountain we made our way down to the beach of Lake Cle'Elum where we could do some nice fast snowmobiling on the long straightaways!

After a long day of snowmobiling, we headed home with a stop over in Leavenworth. It's a super cute little German town that especially festive in the winter. We walked around all the little shops and even did a little wine tasting! All the lights were super pretty. We ended up having supper there before heading back to Seattle for the night.

Monday we spent the day seeing a few more sights around Seattle. We went back to the market again to see it during the day while all the shops were bustling.

After the market we headed down to Pioneer Square to partake in the Underground Tour (another super touristy thing that I've been wanting to do since we got here!) It was fun to hear a little bit about the history of Seattle and get to go through some of the original (now underground) sidewalks of Seattle and imagine what it used to look like.

Tuesday was pretty rainy, but we were able to drive around to a few other sites like Gasworks Park, Golden Gardens and the Ballard Locks (there was a HUGE boat coming through the locks while we were there). Tuesday night Ryan's mom and I went shopping for a dress for her to wear for our wedding. We ended up finding a super cute little number ;) Meanwhile the boys were cooking up some brats at home, so we got to come home to dinner! Wednesday Ryan and I had to go back to work, so his parents did a few more touristy things around town. When we got home, they had some great seafood ready for us! I wish I could come home to a ready meal every night! That was their last night in Seattle, so we hung out for a while and I had to say my goodbyes so I could get up bright and early in the morning to go back to work. I'm so glad they got to come out for a few days and can't wait for our next visitors to come out (*hint hint to everyone*)!

Yummy Yummy Turkey Day!

I definitely have lots and lots to be thankful for this year! In celebration of that, I spent most of the day on Thanksgiving cooking delicious foods. It was great fun trying out all the recipes and putting together the whole dinner myself! It also meant we ended up with A LOT of leftovers! So guess what I've been eating this week?!? Here's some of the deliciousness that I made.

Ben and Tara also got to enjoy a little rawhide Thanksgiving treat.