Longest post ever

Happy New Year!

You would not believe how many pictures I have to post from the past few weeks! Thanks to the snow storm we had in salem and portland, I had an ENTIRE week off of school!! It was a great way to start off winter break!  

So here's a list of the great things Dan and I's winter break included:

• I finally cut my hair! It was so long...too long! I probably cut off about 7 inches...I didn't want to measure and be sad about it, so I just did it! I loved it for awhile, but it was slowly starting to drive me insane. So here's one of the last pictures taken with my long hair:

• Visiting with my favorite friend from the Dirty South, ASHLEY! We basically played scrabble, blink (to be mentioned later), listened to Dan's 'rymes' music and watched The Hills (don't even say anything...) the entire time. Good Stuff! Now she's back in Mississippi being an awesome Teach for America teacher. 
  

• Hanging out with our adorable niece and nephew. They are the cutest kids ever. I have a trillion pictures of them (Attn: Anita!!). Eddie is talking and saying all sorts of crazy funny things now too.

Leila

Eddie

• Finally we got to spend Christmas with our family!! It was great to spend time with our family after being so far away in Florida for over a year. We visited with both of our families, saw grandparents, hung out with the kids, watched movies, played games, etc. We ate ridiculous amounts of food, baklava (courtesy of Dan!), and Dan's mom made us breakfast (with bacon!) every morning! We definitely enjoyed ourselves. 

I got to go skiing at Mt. Ashland with my dad and brother, Sam. It was pretty cool. Sam and I hung out and cruised down the slopes. Hopefully, we'll get a chance to go again in the spring. 

Here is Chester, the new addition to my dad's family. He's pretty cute, I'd say the cutest of the 6 dogs (yes, 6! it's ridiculous)

• I also got to spend some time with my sister, which I'm going to post those pictures on another post, because there are a fair amount of pictures!

• For New Years we went out in downtown Portland. I'm pretty sure Dan and I hold the record for having the most boring new year's eve's (always falling asleep at home) and one absolutely amazing new year's eve (2006 in London!). So this year we tried to even it out some! 

We went to the Cheesecake Factory with Ashley for dinner and ordered WAY TOO MUCH food!

Here we are playing Blink (the fastest game in the world!) waiting to be seated. Basically it was a fair game between Ash and I, but Dan...well he put in good effort.  :)

Miranda joined us downtown and we ended up walking all around downtown Portland looking for a decent place to go. After $60, a couple of hours of dancing, a new years countdown, getting lost a few times and 5 huge blisters later we headed home exhausted! 

Here I am trying to seduce Dan onto the Dan floor....haha! It worked, he's a good dancer!

• New Years Day I had to pull myself outta bed at 630am (after being out until 3am!) to head to Eastern Oregon to visit my best friend Natalie! I'm also going to post more pictures of that on another post, because I had too much of an amazing time to not talk about it more. :)

So that was basically our winter break in a nutshell! Now, I am enjoying a couple more days of partial freedom (I'm working at my student teaching site a little bit, getting ready for next semester) until the MAT program starts back up on Monday. Dan is getting back to painting. He also is getting into working out and made a little isometric workout station in our house (it's pretty nifty!). We're waiting to hear about getting into Art school still. 

Thanks for those that updated us on how their holiday's went!