Winter Wonderland

Good news: Most of the kids from The Hope for Little Angles Of Haiti who had parents in the process of adopting them, are now in the US. Lori is now with her little boy, Nathan in Florida waiting for the final OK to take him home. They have found Jessica and she's alive, but she might not be going home to them because she's with her birth father and he decided he wants to keep her after all. Go to lori's blog for more info about the heroic pilot and crew who refused to get off the tarmac until the kids were on the plane and everything else: countdowntohomecoming.blogspot.com

I have been sick for the last week. SO not fun! I've checked twitter probably a billion times during that time. I usually am not one to get bored, but this week I got SO BORED. I pretty much just sat around the house for the whole week. Ok, it was actually just 4 days, but still!

I woke up early Tuesday morning to go swimming, and just didn't feel good. I thought maybe I would feel better after getting up and having something to eat. It did not get better, I actually felt like I was going to throw up so I went back to bed. I felt like that for the next 4 days, and for a couple days, I was having periodic, severe stomach cramping. Or something. Pete told me I'm not good at describing pain. All I know is that if I moved around too much, my stomach would start hurting really bad for a few minutes. I tried to move around as little as possible when that started happening, hence the boredom. I watched a couple movies and read a lot (blogs and books). I even thought about going to a doctor because it was so weird, but it started to feel better on Friday so I held off.

We had been planning on going to Heber to play in the snow this weekend since we really don't have much snow left here in Salt Lake, and my dad said there was a lot up there. I was really worried I wouldn't be feeling up to it, but since I was feeling pretty good on Saturday, we went! I'm glad we went, I really needed to get out of the house! As soon as we got there, we all put on our snow clothes and started converting the pile of snow from my dad's driveway into an awesome snowboard/sled ramp. Of course, we couldn't really make it too awesome, but we made it pretty fun. The kids were kind enough to help out by sledding down the hill several times to pack it down.



Once we got it packed down good enough, Pete tried his snowboard on it, and it worked! So, my snowboarding lessons were suddenly upon me.

I've lived in Utah my whole life and I've never been skiing or snowboarding. I've always been really nervous about trying it, plus it's so expensive so I just never did it. Recently, Pete and I decided we wanted to take up snowboarding so that we'd having something to enjoy about the winter. I mean, we're in the state with "the greatest snow on earth" so we really should take advantage of that! Pete had been snowboarding before so he knew he liked it and went ahead and bought himself a snowboard and all the equipment that goes with it. I wanted to wait until I'd tried it before spending a bunch of money on the gear. This was my first little try.



I fell the first 2 times I went, but the 3rd time I was able to stay up! I was really glad to have my first few falls on a little hill in my dad's back yard where it wasn't too scary or embarrassing. Now I won't be so nervous for the real thing!

After a few more times like that, Pete set to work building a jump, which is not easy to do when the snow is really powdery and you can't pack it down very well, but he managed to make a pretty good little one.

I think being outside doing something actually helped me feel better because I felt much better after the "snowboarding" then when we left Salt Lake. Or maybe it was just a coincidence. Whatever it was, I'm just really glad I'm not going to feel like that forever! Do you ever start thinking that when you get sick?