Christmas Cards

For once I am actually ahead of the game with my Christmas cards! I have a bad habit of waiting until the last minute to order my cards. I am then left scrambling to get them addressed and dropped off in the mail! But this year is different! I already ordered my cards (and super cute return address labels!). While Ryne was on the Cape we had my mom take a few pictures of us. We then picked a few other pictures from the past year and picked out our Christmas card together. As I mentioned in my previous post I went with Shutterfly. I have had really good luck with their cards -- they look great and ordering cards is quick and easy! I even got my mom to order her Christmas cards this year through Shutterfly.

At first Ryne and I could not decided on the design we wanted. There are so many cute options. Some of our favorites were:


Since we couldn't decide on just one design we ordered two different cards! You will just have to wait and see which ones we went with!! I am very excited to get our cards in the mail... and for once they will be right on time!

And now that my cards are complete, I can now focus on my efforts on annual Holcomb calendar. For the past five years I have created a calendar for my parents using pictures from the Cape, our travels, and special events over the past year. I will be using Shutterfly for this project as I love how their calendars turn out!

Back in Time for the Holidays!

Wow... I cannot believe that it has been so many months since my last update. There sure have been quite a few events that have happened in the last few months!! The most exciting news is that Ryne and I got engaged in August! We are in full blown wedding mode.

Ryne and his dad are on the Cape for the week. It's been great having our two families together as we we work on our wedding plans. Today we met with the wedding coordinator at our venue, picked out the suits for the guys, and narrowed down our choices for the rehearsal dinner. It feels good to be able to check so many things off on our list!!

Tomorrow we are heading to Chatham for the day. On our list of things to see/do is to get our picture taken for our Christmas card! Once I have our picture selected I will then be able to order our cards from Shutterfly. I have ordered our cards from there for the past few years so I am super excited to get to work on our cards this year.

If you have not heard about the special offer Shutterfly is offering, be sure to check out the special offer they are offering. It's a great deal for fabulous cards!!

Now that I am in full blown wedding mode I will be updating my blog on a more regular basis. I want to document all of our plans as we get ready for our big day!

Updates Coming Soon!

I know... I am behind in blogging! I need to download a whole bunch of pictures. I also need to find some time to sit down and actually do the updating. But I promise to update on:

Christmas on the Cape
The Winter Storm
Traveling to NC with my parents
Baby Emerson
Start of Classes

So hang tight and I will try to get some updates down this weekend!

The REAL Nightmare Before Christmas

OK, so it appears I was a bit premature with my lost post. Having my flight canceled due to the snow storm turned out to be a blessing. Yesterday afternoon I was getting ready to head to a hockey game. I was actually pretty excited since it had been sooo long since I was last at a game. All of a sudden, out of no where I get this sharp pain in my lower back on the left side. I had no idea what had caused it.. all I knew was that the pain was getting worse by second. I was literally buckled over in acute pain. The best way to describe it is that it felt as if someone had stabbed me with a jagged knife and was twisting it around inside of me. The next thing I knew I was getting sick. It was at the point that I knew something was wrong. I called my parents and told them what was going on. We decided to monitor it for a little bit and see how I was feeling. I knew something was REALLY wrong when I peed blood (sorry if that is TMI). I started crying and was scared out of mind. I called my parents and decided I needed to go to the hospital. My friend Tamara came to pick me up and off we went. The entire car ride I was telling her that I did not want to wear hospital gown nor did I want to spend the night!!

I won't bore you with all of the details of my stay in the hospital but I will share these tid bits with you:

--Tamara and I entered the ER from the back which is NOT the way to go in. We got to see all of the behind the scenes including trauma and people on their death beds. Not the way you should enter an ER!!

--I got to wear a hospital gown OVER my clothes. Not sure why they made me do this but I was A-OK with that!

--I got to cruise around the joint while in my hospital bed

--EVERYONE told me that passing kidney stones would be the most painful experience EVER. Seriously, I did not need to hear that 1,000,000,000,000,000,000+ times. Seriously!

--When I had my CT Scan the lab tech told me that without moving I had to take my bra off because of the underwire. Umm... how am I to take it off without moving?!?

There is so much more I could tell you but I wont subject you to all of the fun details. In the end I was diagnosed as having two kidney stones. I think I passed the one last night and the other is still hanging out in my kidney. It was by far the WORST pain I have ever experienced and I hope I never have to experience it again. And I shudder to think what it must feel like if my stones were larger -- mine are/were 1-2mm. That's basically the size of a grain of sand. I am just praying that I did in fact pass it last night and that I am in the clear!!

On another note, I am scheduled to fly home late tomorrow night (only available flight before Christmas and I got the 2nd to last seat!). The Cape has about 18" and counting and Rob & Margaux got just shy of two feet!! Fingers crossed I can make it home tomorrow.. and that I don't experience any kidney stone attacks on my trip!

The Nightmare Before Christmas

Remember what I was saying in a post not all that long ago about how I have the worst luck when it comes to traveling?? Well, that luck has returned!! I am supposed to fly home to the Cape later on today. The only reason I am still in Raleigh is because NC State has graduation today. Yes... NC State is that university... the one who holds graduation on the Saturday before Christmas. To say faculty are not pleased is an understatement. Who knows what they were thinking when they decided to schedule graduation. But anyways... I digress.

So my plan for today was to go to graduation and then head straight to the airport to catch a 5pm flight to Providence. Rob & Margaux were to pick me up and I was going to spend the night with them. The three of us were then going to make our way to the Cape tomorrow morning to celebrate the Holcomb Family Christmas since Rob & Margaux will be in Maine this year. Well Mother Nature had different plans. Instead the mother of all storms is slamming the east coast -- from Florida all of the way up to Maine. Raleigh even got some snow/ice yesterday before it turned over to rain (on a side note, the Weather Channel keeps showing footage of NC drivers sliding all over the place -- classic!!). I was supposed to change planes in Baltimore. But as luck would have it, Baltimore is getting the worst of the snow (1-2 ft!). So it's looking like I won't be flying any where today. But what has me concerned is that the storm is supposed to turn into a blizzard for the Cape Saturday night into Sunday afternoon. If this holds to be true who knows if and when I will make it home. To say I am sad and disappointed is an understatement. I am not sure when we will be able to do the Holcomb Family Christmas now. I am sure when this is all said and done I will have some good stories to tell... right?!? So wish me luck as I attempt to make my way home for Christmas!!

Our Charlie Brown Christmas Tree

It's hard to believe that this our third year putting up a Christmas tree together! Where has the time gone?!?! It's one of my favorite memories with Ryne and I always look forward to it every year.

Each year we find a tree that tends to have a certain Charlie Brown flair to it. Some years the flair has been more pronounced than others (e.g. last year we had to trim some limbs off from the tree so that it would fit in the tree stand which resulted in the tree having a great big hole on one side!). This year we found plenty of Charlie Brown trees to pick from but even they were just a little too Charlie Brownish for us. After failing to find a suitable tree in Chadron we decided that we would find a tree when were up in the Black Hills. After much searching we finally found our tree. We brought it back to Chadron with us on Sunday and put it up that night. It seems that every year we always have major issues with the tree stand. I am not sure if the issue is us or the stand itself but without fail something always goes wrong (e.g. last year's tree). Well this year our problem had to do with the tree having a fairly small trunk. The small trunk made it hard for the screws of the stand to actually screw into the tree. We thought we had the tree all set and secure so we began stringing the lights. The next thing you know the tree is toppling over!!! Thankfully we caught and nothing was damanged. But this lead to a few stressful moments as we tried to figure out how to get the tree to stand firmly in the stand.

Ryne finally got the tree secured in the stand after much twisting and pounding. After we were satisfied that it was stable and not going to topple over again we went to work hanging our ornaments.




I have been collecting and making ornaments for our tree over the course of the year. I just love the personal touch that personalized ornaments have. I think this year's tree is our best looking yet. It turned out to be a beautiful tree and it smells so wonderful!!

Christmas in the Midwest

Last week I flew out to spend a week with Ryne and to celebrate Christmas a little early with him. It's hard to believe that I have already been here a week and that I have to fly back to Raleigh tomorrow. Needless to say I am not ready to leave and I am going to miss Ryne like crazy.

The weather out in Nebraska has been FRIGID!! There have been several days with temperatures below zero and a few days with snow. This past weekend when we were at his parents' house we saw about 8" of snow fall in the span of a few hours. But now that I live in NC and have gotten used to southern winters I must say that while I do miss the snow, I do not miss the cold. Brrr!!

The past week has been a busy and fun one! Ryne and I had started watching True Blood together when I was last out here. For those of you who have not seen the show, it is pretty messed up. I had no desire to watch it alone at night so we decided we'd wait and watch it when we were together again. So we spent the first few days watching True Blood and catching up on it. On Friday we drove up to spend the weekend at his parents' house. It was good seeing them and as always it was so relaxing to be in the Black Hills. Ryne, his mom, and I all went shopping on Saturday and we were quite successful. I think that was one of the quickest and painless Christmas shoppingn trips I had been on in a long time. We also enjoyed lunch while we were in Rapid City. Sunday morning we got up and joined Ryne's aunt, uncle, and cousins for a big family breakfast at the Old House (the Old House is Ryne's grandparents's old house and was the homestead for the family farm). Breakfast was soooo good and it was fun catching up and visitng with everyone. While we were at breakfast it began to snow and it started coming down pretty quickly. It was at that point that we knew we would have to head back to Nebraska a little earlier than we had planned because of the storm. I was a little bummed because I enjoy being in the Hills but also because I hadn't seen any of the bald eagles hanging out in Ryne's parents' yard (I will spare you the details as to why they were hanging out there). But as we were pulling out and heading home I finally saw some eagles -- 6 to be exact! And let me just tell you, those are IMPRESSIVE birds. I could not get over how large they were. It was so cool seeing them in the wild.

Monday night Ryne and I headed downtown to see The Blind Side. It was such a good movie and we both really enjoyed it. After the movie we watched the last episode of season one for True Blood. Now we just have to wait for season two to come out on DVD. Last night we cooked chili for dinner and relaxed in front of our Christmas tree. It was such an enjoyable night. Tonight we will exchange our presents and have our own little Christmas celebration.

It's been such a wonderful Christmas with Ryne...I just wish I could last longer!