Fairbanks, AK

I got another week-long trip to Alaska again, thanks to the Army.

This time, I played it smart and took Mike. He actually made Alaska fun!

The day before we left for home, we went to the annual ice sculpting festival in Fairbanks.

There were amazing sculptures there. If it hadn't been 10 below zero, I could have stayed there all day.

The cool thing about the day we went is that we got to see the sculptures being created for the single-block carving competition. All the teams start with a 6 x 4 x 2-ish block of ice. They have the entire week to carve it and then it's judged at the end of the week. The sculpture above won the competition.

It was fascinating to see the level of detail they could achieve.

The teams obviously carefully plan out their strategy. They cut smaller blocks from the bigger ones, then assemble the pieces together melting and re-freezing them, as you can see in the wings.

When the cold got to be too much for us, we finally headed back to our hotel. Mike got this final parting shot just before we left. Overall, I have to say that I really enjoyed Alaska this time around. It makes a difference to have your husband along.

The Cookie Dough Fiasco

The Set-Up:

On New Year's Day, Mike and I invited Mike's older sister and her family over for dinner. Mike had read something in an email about about good, yet easy ideas to try. One of them was to use a muffin tin to make chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream bowls. Doesn't that sound good?

The Outcome:

Well, we tried it, and I'm here to tell you that it is not a good idea and it is not an easy idea.

The Execution:

We tried putting cookie dough around the outside of the muffin tin and baking it upside down. I thought I had put it on thin enough so that when the dough rose, it wouldn't be unmanageable. Ha. No. Not what happened.

The Mishap:

As you can see, a lot of the dough sunk down to the bottom of the tin, then overflowered like a cookie dough waterfall to the bottom of the oven.

It was a veritable explosion of dough, none of which made a useable cookie dough ice cream bowl.

The Second Shot (aka, The Mulligan):

Undaunted, I persevered and tried lining the inside of the muffin tin with the dough. Again, I tried to be judicious with the dough...just enough so that the sides were thinly covered.

The whole thing just rose and coalesced together. It ended up looking like skin cancer would if tumors were made of chocolate chip cookies.

The Final Product:
I got a mini muffin tin and put a teaspoonful of cookie dough on the top, baked it, and let the dough run down the sides. It made cute (sort of) little mini bowls that held one bite of ice cream. It was enough to please Mike, who ate all three bowls that worked (kind of) out.

The "Ah-Ha!":

I finally looked online to see if anyone had tips for making cookie dough ice cream bowls. In what turned out to be an "oh duh" moment more than an "ah-ha" moment, I found out you actually have to use an "oven-safe-bowl-within-a-bowl" method. And you have to use a modified recipe so that the cookie ends up being a little big crunchier...which in my mind defeats the purpose of making chocolate chip cookies. Who wants a crunchy chocolate chip cookie? I'd much rather have an ooey chewy gooey one.

The Take-Home Lesson:

So, use my example of something NOT to do. Stick with regular ice cream cone bowls and regular chocolate chip cookies. If you want to combine ice cream with the chocolate chip cookie, may I recommend putting it in the form of an ice cream sandwich with the ooey chewy gooey chocolate chip cookies on the ends? Less messy, tastes better.

When Winter Gets a 'Tude

I read somewhere that, during a freezing rain storm, once ice reaches more than 0.2 inches on trees, they are in danger of breaking.
Check. It. Out. I think we can safely say that this is more than 0.2 inches. The trees behind our yard bent lower and lower...
...and then broke one by one, shattering on the ground.

By Friday morning, I think we counted about 12 trees behind our yard that had snapped in half.

I also had to go back to work on Friday. It was a shame, because we had to clean off the cars and the ice had made these really cool patterns.

Seriously, how does it do that?!?

The front of our car was the coolest. I think it looks like crab legs. I can't even begin to figure out how that happens. If anyone knows, please email me.

Ice Storm!

On Wednesday night, the day of our big snow storm, we had freezing rain. Work was cancelled again and I was able to spend Thursday at home with Mike.
I'm not sure how thick the ice got in certain places, but we heard on the news that within 24 hours there were over 2300 car crashes in the western Washington area.

Mike and I were able to appreciate the beauty of the ice storm to its fullest because, except for a couple of hours, we had power. There were some people in our ward who didn't get power back until yesterday. There are areas north of us that still don't have power.

One thing that turned out to be a blessing was that we had a large snowfall before the freezing rain. I was in a few ice storms during medical school in Kansas City. I'm telling you...cleaning ice off a car is terribly frustrating, terribly time consuming, and just terrible in general. Because the ice covered the previously-fallen snow, it didn't stick to our car. We just had to break through the crust or clear the snow out from underneath it and the ice came tumbling down.

As the ice rolled down the windows of our car and made these fascinating patterns.

I'm ending today's post with this photo of a tree in our front yard, weighed down by all the ice. Normally, this tree is almost as tall as our two-story house. The storm reduced it to the appearance of a weeping willow. The poor thing looks like it's about to break. It didn't, but others didn't fare so well...which leads right into tomorrow's blog: When Winter Gets a 'Tude.

Winter Wonderland

We finally got our first snowfall of winter last Tuesday. Snow is something that I'm generally quite happy to do without, but you can't argue with how beautiful it makes everything look.

Even ordinary, every day things look magical when they're covered by snow--8 inches in this case.

We have a forested hill behind our backyard that looked particularly beautiful.

The snow was enough to cancel work, and we celebrated by going outside first thing and playing in the snow. Mike played in the snow, at any rate. I was content to be the family photojournalist.

Mike threw a snowball at me at one point. I couldn't believe it! My own husband! I wasn't even wearing gloves. I tried kicking snow in his direction and I even got a couple of hits in, but I was no match. A minute later, he thought it would be fun to throw snow in the air and for me to photograph it as it came back down. Remembering our snow fight moments ago, I kept "not quite getting the perfect shot." I think he ended up throwing 5 or 6 huge armfuls of snow on himself before I finally told him it was OK to quit. If you can't win a snowball fight through force...

Baby's First Picture

Thanks to our ultrasound last week, we found out that we're having...

A GIRL!!!

We are so excited!! We've already decided to name her Sophia Lily Clark. When we got home, Mike called all his friends and told them that his "Daddy's Little Princess" is on her way. He was NEVER this excited when he thought we were having a boy. Correction, make that when I thought we were having a boy. So sure was I that our baby was a boy, I even referred to her as "he/him" for the first 4 1/2 months. I think my Mother's Intuition is on the fritz. I'm seriously going to have to apologize to Sophia for the confusion.

Mike is the cutest dad. As we walked out of the ultrasound, he turned to me and said, "We should celebrate by going and getting Sophia her first outfit!"

Well, you can't say no to that, so off to the mall we went. We visited the typical stores like Gymboree and Children's Place, but Mike was unimpressed. I thought there were a lot of adorable clothes there, but Mike felt like they weren't cute enough. We finally ended up at JC Penney and separated from each other looking for clothes. All of a sudden, I heard Mike running up to me excitedly because he had found the perfect outfit.

And it seriously is the cutest outfit. He chose the one on the left. He even picked out the cardigan to go with it. The one on the right is a bonus outfit because...why not.

On our way to the cash register, Mike stopped and said, "We forgot to get her shoes!!! And socks!"

So back we went and got some things to complement the outfit.

I feel I must insert a note here: I didn't forget the shoes. That's not in my nature. I've actually had Sophia's first two pairs of shoes picked out online since before we got pregnant, just in case we had a girl. Now I'm free to get them, but I haven't had a chance to run it by Mike. They're handmade and a teeeeeeensy tad bit more expensive than the $10 ones you get at JC Penney. But they're so cute!!!!! Anyway, I didn't say anything at the store because I think Mike should be encouraged to get his daughter shoes. And, frankly, I'm willing to let Sophia have piles of shoes if it means I can dress her in them.

Goodbye, 2011. We'll miss you!

Ah, the end of another year. It seems like everyone from Dave Barry to Yahoo has an end-of-the-year recap, so here's ours.

January through March were kind of hum drum, as was the weather in Washington. We plugged on through work, school, and callings. Mike got deathly ill with influenza in February and felt so crummy he even asked to go to the doctor. He spent a week moaning on the couch and it took him a good month or so after that to bounce back to normal. However, Memory seems to be a fickle mistress and by the time flu shot season rolled around, the misery was sufficiently forgotten so that Mike was not even tempted to get a flu shot.

In April, I survived a week of being pediatric ward attending and was rewarded for my frustrations and angst with an awesome date planned by Mike, who designed and carried out a landmark "treasure hunt" that took us through historic Tacoma.

With the hope of the sun's return still far on the horizon in May and June, Mike and I took a trip to Disneyworld and learned a few lessons. #1: You never outgrow the magic of Disney. #2: The magic of Disney is hard to appreciate when you're forming new blisters with every step. #3: Break in new shoes before you go on vacation.

Mike and I celebrated our first anniversary in July. Our July 3rd anniversary allows us to take advantage of the Armed Forces tradition of the 4-day weekend around major holidays, so we took a drive up the beautiful Oregon coast, something I recommend be put on everyone's "bucket list" as something to do at least once during their lifetime.

We took another vacation in August/September to visit family in Utah, said good-bye to two siblings who are now serving missions, and welcomed my brother, Stephen, as he did a month-long ER rotation at the hospital where I work. Mike made Dean's list for Ashford University for the 2nd time in a row and I found out that my promotion to major came through but will go into effect during the first week of May 2012. Through the experience of commuting to Seattle three times a week, I discovered juggling work, church, and family life can get a bit dicey when Mike had less-than-stellar birthday festivities that were celebrated through my tears.

October through December saw a change in our blog name to "Semi-Bedrest Bulletin" since I was threatening miscarriage and had been ordered by the OB to keep activity to max of 4 hours a day. Trying to make lemonade out of some pretty big lemons, I imagined that I would use all the down time to get to all the unfinished projects and crafts that were sitting around taunting me with their incompleteness. What did I get done? Zilch. Nada. *insert spitty sound* As it turns out, when you're feeling exhausted and nauseated and bloated and crampy and light-headed all at the same time, you just want to lie down on the couch and do nothing. Even watching TV takes too much energy. Hence, the piles are bigger than ever and their friendly mockery has escalated into malicious persecution.

December 31st: I'm officially at 18 weeks and therefore I am off bedrest. It's such a relief and I know that we've been very blessed through the faith and prayers of our friends and family. Through all of our 2011 ups and down, I know more than ever that the Lord is mindful of us and continues to watch over us.

On that note, there's even more for us to look forward to in the year ahead. Over the next 5 months, we'll not only be preparing for the arrival of our as-yet-to-be-determined son or daughter, but we'll also be preparing to move. We've been told that barring any unforeseen circumstances, we're almost certainly, probably definitely going to DC after I graduate from my fellowship. This is as close to being 100% certain as you can get in the Army. DC is exactly where we want to go (except for the fact that we'll be farther away from family) and couldn't be happier with the decision.

In fact, we couldn't be happier. Period.