Happy New Year

Here we are nearly at the end of January, and I haven't blogged in a while. We had a good low key Christmas with our families. Nathan of course was the center of attention and watching him get excited is really what Christmas is all about. We didn't do anything exciting for New Years, but that's the way we like it. We made a bunch of appetizers for dinner and played Go Fish as a family. Nate stayed up until 9pm and then off to bed. I didn't even last until midnight. I fell asleep on the couch. Really it doesn't make any difference to me being up to ring in the new year.

I decided that 2014 is going to be an amazing year for us. Last year we did some really great things, but we also had some not so great things happen as well. Yes that is a typical year and we deal with it and keep moving forward. This year will be the same, but I also think there are a lot of great things ahead of this year. There maybe be some unexpected good fortune this year, but we are making a point of continuing to change our mindset and habits so that no matter what we are faced with we can handle it and have a successful year.

So that being said 5 days into our year we were faced with our first, but not last, challenge of the year. To make a long story short I wound up in the ER on a Sunday morning and ended up having surgery at 5pm that evening for an ectopic pregnancy. I was lucky that we caught it that day because if another day had gone by it could have been a scarier situation as ectopic pregnancies can be life threatening. The surgery went well and I went home that night. Luckily we had a lot of help from the grandparents so I could take it easy for a few days. Nate was very sweet and concerned about how I was doing. So even though we are sad about the end result of this pregnancy the most important thing is that I am healthy and still able to take care of our precious boy.

Now that we are back into the swing of things 2 1/2 weeks after my surgery we've gotten back to some of our outdoor adventures. Last Sunday we headed up to Mount Charleston since we haven't had any snow time this winter. Unfortunately since it's been so warm here lately the snow was pretty iced over. We had to be careful walking on the icy snow, but we found a patch that Nate and Phantom could play in a little.

Yesterday we discovered a place we never knew existed. My dad was telling Eddie about this forest he found while motorcycling years ago so Eddie looked it up and found that it is located on the Desert National Wildlife Refuge north of town off the 95. There is a visitor's center and everything. I don't know how in 30+ years neither of us have ever heard of it. Past the visitor center you generally need a high clearance vehicle because the roads are pretty rocky. There are tons of different roads that lead to hiking and camping, including the Hidden Forest my dad had found. We decided to look for a place that has fossils instead of the Hidden forest. Unfortunately even though the map shows Fossil Ridge there is no clear sign or marker for where to park and hike to get there. We didn't find the fossil area, but we did get out and wander around and had fun looking at all kinds of different rocks, Yuccas and Joshua trees. There is so much exploring to do out there that we will definitely go back. The website I linked to above has a lot of information about the different hiking areas there so we'll have to go back and find the fossils another time.

Hard to really get the full effect, but there were Joshua trees for miles.

We have some busy months ahead of us, but I know we'll be making great memories along the way