Favorite Holiday

We had a wonderful Christmas and I hope you did too.  Ryan, Isaac and I spent Christmas Eve with my family.  Jenny and Drew have been here for several weeks and Joe slept over.  Tom and Kelly Ann joined us later during the day on Christmas.

My mom has so many fun Christmas decorations.  She collects Nativities and has tons of them.  It is always comforting to go home and see all of the familiar holiday decorations.  Here are a small sampling of her collection.

Christmas Eve was a low key night.  We were going to do the light show at Hershey, but there was actually too much snow falling.  We set off but turned around after a few miles, since the roads were quite slippery.

Isaac did a great job waiting until 7:00 until her got up (despite a false alarm when he misread the clock at 1:00 in the morning). Isaac got me so many thoughtful presents and it was adorable because he could barely wait to give them to me.  I had to beg him to wait until Christmas.  This stamped coaster was my favorite gift from him:

 

Isaac made himself photographer for a while and here are the blurry results:

Ryan liked all of his gifts, but especially his tortilla pan set:

My parents got us a zoo membership and Ryan got me the Up fitness band, a beautiful pearl necklace and a bunch of Lush products.  Isaac was spoiled with helmets, jerseys, sports posters, and books. 

I also forgot to take pictures, but a few days after Christmas we had Ryan's kids over to open their presents from us.  His kids surprised me and Isaac with really sweet, thoughtful presents.  Ryan's parents and sister Katherine ended up dropping by and then later on his brother and his wife Patrick stopped by.  Patrick's present to Ryan was converting some hilarious home movies from VHS to DVD.  Ryan's siblings and cousins put together some hilarious "mystery" movies complete with soundtracks and previews.  We watched the movies together and it was HILARIOUS.  It was a really fun night with his family.

We are so lucky and so blessed!  Merry Christmas!!

Frankenstorm is coming!

So if you are anywhere near theeast coast at all you know it's all about getting ready for Hurricane Sandy right now.  Isaac already has school cancelled for Monday and Tuesday (as usual, my school district is still in session, despite the govenor declaring PA to be in a state of emergency). 

I learned a new fact about Ryan: he is obsessed with being prepared for extreme weather conditions.  He was concerned that I have no flashlights in my house.  Then I remembered that my mom had made me and Isaac 72 hour kits as a Christmas present about 5 years ago and I had only a vague notion of where I had store them and no idea what was in them.  So we drug them upstairs and went through them.

These are what they look like:

I believe most of these things were ordered from a website called The Ready Store.  Like I said, they were a gift from my mom, so I am not too sure about pricing or anything like that. 

 I will show you what we discovered in the kits. 

Panchos, hand warmers, candy (I am assuming to keep your blood sugar up, but the candy in my kit was all melted), little flash light, matches, emergency blanket,  a card with survival tips. There was also water purifiying tablets, but I don't see them in this picture. Then  the top the photo are pouches of drinking water and, this gross block of lard or something that you can break pieces off and eat every few hours. 

SO GROSS.  I would have to be in some serious dire straights to eat that. 

The only thing in the front pocket of the backpack was this whistle.

The other backpack was FILLED with all kinds of supplies.  There was this little tent.  Who knows how to set it up, but I guess if we really needed shelter this could do in a pinch...

There was this candle that burns for 100 hours-- could be pretty handy to have this week as I am sure we will lose power at some point.

This backpack was filled with food...

More candy... tons of MRE in those brown boxes and lots of random little foil packets of foods.  The one pictures above is "fortified snack bread"... whatever the heck that is.  I am sure if I am hungry enough, I would eat it.

Most of this looked totally disgusting... but I was kind of excited about those little squarish packets on the top right.  They are COOKIES.  Does my mom know me or what?  There were also lots of these little kits baggies with napkins and plastic silverware.

 More first aid supplies...

More handwarmers...

And finally, the ever important roll of TP. 

I was feeling rather prepared when Ryan discovered another rolling suitcase in my garage that turned out to be a part of the kit too.  BONUS.

The outside pocket had another roll of toilet paper.  And this is what we saw when we opened it up:



It looked like food we might actually WANT to eat!!!

Unfortuneatly, pretty much all of the food was expired.  This is the pile of stuff we had to throw out: apple sauce, Chef Boyardee, granola bars, juice boxes, cereal, canned tuna and chicken salad. The next picture shows the stuff we were able to save:

Pretty self explanatory except for the little bottle. 

So I definitely need to replace the food that actually looks APPETIZING that expired.  Ryan and I also discussed adding a heavy duty flashlight, a change of clothes for each family member, possibly some cash in case ATMS are down, and some additional batteries.

What do you do to be prepared in extreme weather?



rock you like a hurricane

I had a couple of long days of school meetings and Isaac's daycare is not in session yet, my mother took him out to her house to spend a few days and he was THRILLED. I missed him terribly though, and I only got him for one night before I had to turn around and hand him off to his father for the weekend. I missed him, but he had a lot of fun, and it gave me a lot of time to get things together for school.

Anyways, unless you've been living under a rock, I'm sure you've heard about the wacky weather on the east coast lately. Starting with the earthquake. Someone posted this on facebook and I had to share it, because, this was pretty much as intense as it got:

I was sitting in the high school auditorium listening to a presentation on sexual harassment, when what felt like a big wave or ripple went underneath me. I could feel that it was moving like a wave and that it had started behind me and passed underneath me, but that was it. It wasn't intense or scary. It almost just felt like someone really heavy was stomping down the aisle next to me. Of course, since we were already slightly bored sitting there being lectured at, we all got on our phones and discovered it had been an earthquake!

Then this past weekend, with hurricane Irene. Isaac was with his dad, which had me a little bit worried, since he was much closer to Jersey. I went out ot my parents' house for the weekend. My brother Joe and his girlfriend Kami were there. We went out to eat at Texas Roadhouse, and then stayed up playing Uno. Even though Leola is no where near the coast, the wind was still instense and the rain was coming down in sheets. The lights flickered a few times, but we didn't lose power. Before the hurricane made it up, quite a few counties, including the one my house was in was under tornado watch. Church was cancelled, a few tree limbs were down, but thankfully no one in my family had a flooded basement or a loss of power. My favorite bike trail is now underwater. My friend Nicole's street looks like this, but overall everyone I know is safe and sound. We were pretty blessed.

Anyways, tomorrow s our first day back at school. Isaac and I will both be in first grade this year. This is the first year since I started in the district that I will get to teach only one grade, and I am SOOOO excited. Have a great week!