Going to the zoo, zoo, zoo

We're back in Chicago. Christmas day we drove Jon, Haley, Nate, and Dexter to Ohare airport. After a teary goodbye (okay, only really teary for Kelly) we went back to Ryan's parents' house and had Christmas presents with his parents, younger brother, and his older brother's family who was visiting for a couple of days.

Jon, Nate, Haley, Dexter, Kelly, and Ryan in front of the tree

Natalie and Hope were generously helping everyone open gifts

Yesterday we went to Lincoln Park zoo in Chicago and stopped at a great pizza place for lunch. Mark's family had to leave this morning, so the house is quiet again and we are back to making preparations for our trip to England. We had to go to a thrift store today to buy suitcases because after talking for months about taking two suitcases each over to England we realized that we do not in fact own four suitcases. Thankfully the salvation army came through and we are now equipped to haul our life overseas.

Ryan and Natalie checking out the frozen pond at the zoo

Christmas Fun

We've been having a great time hanging out in MI with Kelly's parents and her brother and his family. Here are some of the things that kept us occupied:

First, Grand Haven has this awesome light display choreographed to music that we went to see. The picture doesn't do it justice. It was really quite impressive.

Grand Haven light display

Nate has been reading a book with Kelly's mom called "Mr. Cookie Baker" so she finally got to play Mr. Cookie Baker with him in real life. They made and decorated some Christmas sugar cookies together.

Nate being Mr. Cookie Baker

We had a couple of quite warm days, so the snow turned into great packing snow. We made a large snowman named Toby. Unfortunately the next day was even warmer and Toby's head melted away.

Nate and Dad with Toby

On Saturday we got to go to Grandma Boonstra's house to celebrate Christmas with Grandma, Uncle Doug, Aunt Cindy, Rachel, and Stacey. We had some good food and had a fun time opening presents.

Nate really enjoyed his new "I Spy" books...

At the end of the night we went over to Uncle Doug and Aunt Cindy's house to see Uncle Doug's impressive train sets. Nate particularly liked blowing the train whistles.

Nate and Uncle Doug watching the train go around

Last night we had Christmas with our family and opened gifts. We are trying this year to not take a lot of pictures of people with their presents since we realized looking back at past Christmas pictures that it is not very exciting. There is a picture though of dapper Dexter all dressed up from going to church.

Jon and his little man Dexter

Today is Christmas Eve. It snowed a good couple of inches last night so everything looks fresh and beautiful again. Just in time to have a white Christmas.

Back to Michigan

Exciting news-we have our visas in hand and we have a place to live in Cambridge! And it's a 3 bedroom house so come on out and visit. We were happy to get it since the demand for housing in Cambridge seems to be pretty great. One of my previous co-workers helped us out enormously by going and looking at the place for us.
Yesterday we returned to Michigan after picking up Kelly's brother and his family at the Ohare airport. We got up to Michigan late last night but the grandparents were more than happy to wait up for us.
Today we played in the snow with the kids. Then we played inside with the kids. I'm not sure how we entertained ourselves while the kids were napping...

Us with our shiny new visas

it's lovely weather for a sleigh ride with you...

We've had a snowy couple of days! Well, we seem to have taken care of our visa applications (following some really beautiful governmental incompetence), so if we truly sent them to the correct office we should have them in time to fly out to the UK and be allowed into the country. Thursday night we had a fun dinner with one of Ryan's high school friends and his wife. Friday we re-packed boxes and took care of a lot of paperwork stuff that has to get done sometime before we leave. Saturday it snowed pretty much all day and night. In the afternoon the city that Ryan's family lives in had free "sleigh" rides (a sleigh with big wheels...more of a horse-drawn carriage really) that left from a parking lot literally in Ryan's back yard. So we waited in line in the snow and took a ride around the park. The snowflakes were so cool because the temperature was just perfect to have beautifully formed flakes. We tried to take some pictures of them, but most just ended up kind of blurry. Use your imagination.

snowflakes

sleigh ride--yes it was cold

We got to have dinner with our college friend Meg on Saturday night. The ride home was really snowy and it apparently kept going the rest of the night because we woke up to about 10 inches of snow. Since Kelly couldn't easily run in it, we both suited up and started shoveling the driveway. Shoveling was SO much fun, that we completely lost track of time and the next time we looked at the clock it was 10 minutes to church time. So we and Ryan's brother Dale went to church in our sweaty snow clothes. It was pretty funny.
This afternoon we went downtown chicago to a Bavarian festival with our friends Jeremy and Liz. Though toes were a bit numb, it was fun and we enjoyed some good Bavarian treats.

More winter fun

We've spent the last almost week up in Spring Lake with Kelly's parents, though we didn't see them much the first part of the trip up here. We first went to our college friend Brent DeVries' wedding.

Kelly and Brent

college friends after the wedding

Bennigan's was after the wedding reception, not where the reception was. :-) It was fun to see some college friends that we have not seen in a long time. We also spent a night with Ryan's brother and sister-in-law in Zeeland, MI. One of their two daughters had a Christmas concert at church on Sunday that we got to be there for.
When we were back at Kelly's parent's house we got to decorate the tree that we previously cut down.

decorating the Christmas tree

We also got to try cross-country skiing. Ryan was pretty comfortable on the skis. Kelly a bit less...The park that we were skiing through was really beautiful. We ended the ski trip with all of us going down a "most difficult" hill called Pigeon Plunge. A few snowy falls, but no major injuries.

Kelly, Ryan, and Dad on skis

Tomorrow we are going back down to Chicago and will be there until the 19th when we come back to MI after picking up Kelly's brother and his fam at Ohare. We have visa interviews tomorrow too in Chicago, so we're hoping and praying that everything goes smoothly to get our visas before we are scheduled to leave for England.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Yesterday we went with my parents to cut down the family Christmas tree. We found this lot off the side a road with a hand-written sign that said "$20.00 any size tree". We drove back to the field and were the only people there. We checked all of the trees and found the best one, cut it down, strapped it to the top of the car, and drove back out to the road where the house was. The door had note on it with instructions just to leave money in the box next to the door. Welcome to Michigan.

The "tree farm"

cutting off dead branches

More snow and a trip up to MI

We had about 5 inches of snow fall on Tuesday night, so we had to wait for roads to clear...again. We did manage to make it up to Michigan yesterday afternoon to stay with my parents for a bit. And we had our first trip to Meijer (for those who don't know, it's a big store with just about everything you can think of and a great bulk candy section). Now we have to start sorting through the stacks of mail that I had sent to my parents' address during this last 3 weeks. The fun never stops.

Safe and sound in the windy city

We arrived safely in Chicago Sunday night! We left Sioux Falls, SD around 9AM and got into Chicago around 7PM. It was the flattest roads we had seen yet across the country so we were excited to be able to actually get up the speed limit pulling the trailer. The roads were cleared but it was quite a storm that we waited out. We spent a good half hour chipping ice off of the truck before we could leave in the morning. Yesterday we unloaded the trailer and started sorting out what would be stored in Chicago and what we were taking to MI for storage. We are hoping to head up to MI on Wednesday AM, but another storm is predicted, so we might have to push that off again until Wednesday afternoon or Thursday. I think we've waited out a storm just about every stop on this trip, so it wouldn't seem right to not have a storm to wait out here.

Our travels so far...

Well, we haven't had much wireless internet access until now, so here goes the condensed version of our last two and a half weeks.
Our first day we left SF at 5:30 am and drove a long day all the way to Seattle. Our trailer is overweight for our underpowered truck, so we ended up going 35 miles per hour over mountain passes, but we made it and saw some beautiful scenery on the way.

We spent five days in Seattle with my (Kelly's) brother and sister in law and nephews. We had planned to leave on Sunday but had to wait out a snowstorm in the eastern WA mountains so we stayed until Tuesday.

Kelly and Nate at botanical gardens, Jon and Nate roll Ryan at the tot lot, Nate just chilling, and baby Dexter Troy

Next we stopped off in Wenatchee, WA and spent a day and night with a college friend, Amy, who is a nurse there. She showed off the nightlife of Wenatchee.

snow in the eastern WA passes

Kelly and Amy at McGlinn's in Wenatchee

The day before Thanksgiving we drove the rest of the way to Montana and made it late that night. When we got there they had gotten 8 inches of snow in the storm that we waited out and the temperature was -9F. We got an abrupt introduction to winter. We had Thanksgiving with Ryan's extended family at his cousin Justin's new house.

cousin Justin, his wife Kim and baby Austin

We stayed a week and a day in MT and got to do some farm chores (feed cows, move chickens, collect eggs, shovel grain) and had a great time. We stayed with Ryan's aunt and uncle Connie and Pete. We were completely spoiled with the fresh food and home cooking for every meal! We waited out another storm in MT and left on Friday to head Chicago way.

Ryan's b-day, shoveling hay for cows, feeding Petri the cow an apple, and the chicken coop

We drove a long long day trying to outrun a storm but gave up the chase in Sioux Falls, SD which is where we now sit. I've never seen a forecast for 100% chance of ice pellets before. If you're wondering, they're not pleasant. Hopefully this will clear up tomorrow and we can make it to Chicago.