Day trip to Southern Missouri

One of the things that we've done for the past two years (that I hope we do every year), is make a trip to Nevada, Missouri (pronounced like NUH-VEY-DUH, not like the state of NUH-VAH-DUH...must be a Missour-AH thing). ANYWAY, my college roommate, Wish, lives down there with her husband and her adorable 10 month old son Peyton. Wish and I were roommates for all 4 years of college and I love that girl! I also hadn't met her babe (and had only seen her 7mos preggo last christmas) so Tim and I got up early to make the trip down on the 22nd.

Nevada is about a 2 hour drive away and last year Tim was in for a bit of a culture shock driving down south in Missouri. There is not much there in terms of scenery other than farms and a few gravel roads (with names of A, AA, F, FF). Wish also has a HUGE property with cows which I think Tim thought was NUTS (understandably when you come from here and there is no land to speak of in which to have anything). She also has an adorable house that they remodeled inside and lives in the country- it's actually very peacful and serene out there. I am happy for her!

It was great to see her this time around too... it's always weird to see my close friends as parents for the first time, especially in this case since Wish and I spent all 4 years of college together. She is a great mom though, as expected, and Peyton is absolutely adorable. He was such a happy baby, didn't fuss at all. And I've decided that 10 months is an adorable age. Some talking, some crawling and so much personality!

I did manage to snap one picture- here's the big guy with Tim after his (Peyton's) lunch of yogurt and pears. Mmmm!

After we left Wishs' we headed back to Kansas City thinking we could hopefully finish up our Christmas shopping (for my mom since I hadn't done that the other day). Instead we ended up hanging around with my family just chatting and playing games...putting off all of our shopping to almost the last minute. We finished all of our shopping the following day and ended up getting everyone some pretty cool stuff! We then hunkered down for what would turn out to be the Christmas blizzard of 2009...literally. We did not know when we got home that day after shopping that we wouldn't be leaving the house until our flight on the 26th (and not on purpose but because we literally couldn't!) Not a bad thing though to be stuck inside with family, enjoying the holiday.