Christmas in the Mitten State!

Hello family fun time! We just got back from a lovely week in Michigan with the WHOLE FAMILY all in one place...imagine that! As soon as we got into town we headed out to hang out with the family that was in town so far, watching some football at the bar.

Buffalo Wild Wings!

Bright and early the next morning we and the Phoenix cousins met up with Grandma and Grandpa at their church. I think they had a lot of fun having all of us there...we filled up two whole rows! Later that day we started the Raetz Family Christmas party at our house. With all the kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids even the ones from Phoenix that drove up for the party. There were 41 of us in all who made it. It's awesome to see how many great people came from Grandma and Grandpa, and that was even missing the ones left in Arizona!

All 41 of the Raetz Family! Just missing a few...

The Grandpas

Bradley was not amused by the great-grandkids photo

But he sure was happy in his Momma's arms!

Great-Grandkids

Grandma!

Grandma and Grandpa!

Grandpa handing out coins to the Great-Grandkids

Great night with family, long night with small children running around all over the place...there's more and more of them every time I come home! There's already one more on the way!

Monday was Christmas Eve, so the big event for the day was Uncle Rick's Christmas Eve party to hang out and catch up with more family and friends! 

The Dougherty girl cousins!

Christmas day was time for just out little family of 10 to hang out with each other. We started out with some brunch, Christmas Parades on TV, and stockings!

Stockings!

Next came presents and of course our obligatory family photos :)

Yay pretty snow!

Little Brother and Sister!

Hi mom

Picking out a present!

I thought this was a super cute candid of Jordan and Kristen ;)

 The rest of the afternoon was spent at the movies watching Les Miserables. I (as well as the rest of my family) am pretty much obsessed with this story in any form it is presented, so I was completely in awe of it the whole time. It is definitely a different experience that seeing it live on stage, but the story and music are just as powerful, and the movie could do things that you just can't do on stage. It was pretty amazing. I laughed, I cried, it was awesome. After the movies we sat down for a lovely steak dinner, yum!

The day after Christmas was time for the next Christmas party! This time with the Dougherty side of the family starting out with some rocking whirleyball!! I haven't played this game in forever, but it was so much fun, especially with such a big group of people!

After the games we headed back to our house for some traditional Christmas alaskan king crab...yummmm. Of course before the night was over we had to get a few more of those fabulous family Christmas photos ;)

The rest of the time at home was spent with family, playing games, watching movies, having fun. We also got to enjoy some pretty snow while we were there too. Luckily people in Michigan actually know how to cope with snow so it didn't strand us at the airport when we headed home! It was pretty for a few days though!

Party Season Has Begun!

So we didn't actually have any Christmas parties yet, but this past week or so was a party week! It was my last week of work in the Navy!!! Wahooo! That means I get a little relax/vacation time now while studying and job hunting. I am already enjoying it so much! Last week we had a few different farewell parties with people I work with. This weekend we had a few parties with our Crossfit buddies! Saturday was one of the girls' birthdays so we went out on the town with an awesome group of our friends. We started out with a little mexican dinner then ended up at a piano bar. So much fun!

Here's a few of our pretty Christmas sparkly items around the house...I love sparkly lights!

GOTR

Last weekend I decided to use my enjoyment of running races to help out others! There's a great nationwide program called Girls on the Run (GOTR) that encourages elementary school girls to learn about fitness, nutrition, and running. It's an after school program that lasts about 10 weeks and culminates with the girls running a 5k. I ran my first 5k when I was 24, so I'm super impressed by these girls for trying it now! Anyway, my volunteer role came in during the practice 5k and final 5k where I got to be a running buddy for one of the girls and run with them and encourage them along the way/keep them entertained and motivated to keep going. Here's me and my little running buddy, Ella before the final 5k!

Giving Thanks!

So many things to give thanks for this year! This Thanksgiving, like most of my Thanksgivings lately, I started off the morning with a 5k turkey trot. I'm thankful this year that I ran my first official race with a sub 7 minute mile pace! I'd still like to work on my speed and hopefully break that 20 minute mark for a 5k, but this time I ran my 5k in 20 minutes and 51 seconds, with an average mile pace of 6:44! A year ago I ran turkey trot in 30 minutes and 58 seconds, so in a year I've cut over 10 minutes off that time! This time I was the 3rd fastest female and 14th place overall.

Other exciting news in the past week, I passed my first Architecture Registration Exam!! On to the next one now...woohoo!

When I got home from my run on Thanksgiving, I got right to some cooking. I spent most of the day cooking and cleaning in preparation for Ryan's parents to get into town. They got in early evening just in time for Thanksgiving dinner! It was a great dinner. I tried a few new recipes and I'd have to say the turkey recipe might have been my favorite out of everything. It was definitely worth the 30 hours of preparation it required! I got the recipe here, and stuck to it for the most part.

Ryan's parents were in town for the rest of Thanksgiving week and the beginning of the next, so we took a few days off of work and found some fun things around Seattle to do with them!

 Someone didn't like the Espresso we made him try!

 Our First Real Tree at our new house!

 Ryan putting on the lights

 Thanks so Jason's great idea, we put all of our race medals on the tree like ornaments

 Our Pretty Tree :)

 The market is all decorated for Christmas!

 We lucked out with some beautiful days in Seattle while they were here

 visiting the great wheel

 Yup, that's my husband

 Aaaand, those are my in laws ;)

 We went on a little hike near Leavenworth to wear Ben out

 Playing on the icy river

 Ben didn't really understand that despite the river being solid on the top, he should walk out to the middle! We got a few scares that he was going to sprint out there and break the ice and fall in!

 He liked to run all over the beach though

 And had fun jumping all around

 We spent the rest of that day in Leavenworth 

 It's all lit up for Christmas!

 Yay!

 Our little Georgians got to play in some snow too

We also spent a few hours one day at the EMP and went to the SciFi exhibit. It had the original Darth Vadar Light Saber in it and Yoda's cane. How cute is that?!?

The museum also had a horror film exhibit that had a scream booth in it that took pictures of you screaming :)

The last night they were here we went out to a local bar to play some trivia and got in a few games of shuffle board first. It was so much fun and out of about 30 teams we ended up tying for 11th, so that's not too bad considering most of the people there seemed to be regulars.

Beasts

This weekend Ryan was slightly cray-cray! We flew down to Sacramento for him and his buddy Scott to run the Spartan Beast. They did the Spartan Sprint back in the summer, so this was about a 4 times longer and harder version of that. It also just happened to be pouring rain and freezing for it too...eeeek! We flew down Friday night after work. Saturday morning we grabbed a quick breakfast and headed out to the race site which was in the middle of nowhere about 30 min east of Sacramento on a giant ranch. We got there in just enough time for the guys to get all checked in and get to the start line to start. The idea of these is that they start in heats of 300 and run into battle like the original spartans. Only this time the battle is against obsicals and your own determination.

While the guys were running, Scott's wife, Katie, and I were spectating. We spent most of the time near the start line where we could see them loop around for a few obstacles. Most of them we couldn't see though. Luckily we both had big boots on because it was crazy muddy there! A little over an hour after the guys started, they looped back around to the rope climb, so we got to see them do that first. Then they were off again for about another hour until the came back to climb across a long wall. If you can't complete or fall off of an obstical you have to do 30 burpees instead. The guys had to do that a few times and it looked misserable since the ground was all mud! A couple of hours later the guys looped back around into view and we saw them carrying sand bags up a super muddy and steep hill. After that they looped around to the last few obsticles and the finish line! I'm so proud of them for finishing...it looked really tough and not the most fun in cold rain, but they are BEASTS!!!

Originally we were planning on heading back to the hotel for a quick shower and going over to Walnut Creek to hang out and spend the night at Kimberly's. The race ended up taking a liiiiitle longer than we were expecting so we got back to the hotel after 5pm an were wet, cold, hungry, and exhausted. We decided at that point it was too late to make another drive out and would be better off just staying another night in Sacramento. We loaded up on some food, had a mini hotel movie party, and crashed big time. I'm bummed we didn't get to see Kimberly and Jason but we knew we would all just be huge party poopers when we got their anyway.

Sunday morning we got up bright and early and got our morning hotel breakfast. A few tables away from us was the guy who wins all of these races, Hobie Call. He's pretty much an obstical race celebrity, so that was pretty cool to see him. He had run the race (and won) on Saturday too in a ridiculously fast time.

We had left the dogs with a new dog sitter this weekend, so I was anxious to pick them up and see how they did. Turns out they had an awesome time. The family was sitting a few other dogs too, so it was a full house of dogs and one of the other dogs was a boxer the same size and age as Ben and they seemed to play really well together. Ben was so exhausted from all the fun that he slept the rest of the afternoon and evening after he got home.

Completely irrelevant from the rest of this post, we got a new car recently! It's a super cute VW Tiguan. We also, after living in our house for nearly a year, officially have a real door on the bathroom!! We're so grown up now ;)