Greetings from the city of trees! Chelsea is deep in notes for her final exam this week and very excited to be finished soon. I, on the other hand, am busy making sure she stays awake and have been given the task of updating this blog (equally as excited for the semester to end to give Chelsea a break from studies). I thought that this would be a terrific time to post updates for what we have been up to for the past few weeks, since we clearly haven't posted since before Thanksgiving. After so much talk with so many people about what to expect during a Boise winter the season, and it's activities, are finally here! One event that we had heard a lot about was the Festival of Trees in downtown Boise. The festival takes place in the convention center and is a display of Christmas trees both traditional and very nontraditional (a tree made of tutus and ballet slippers). The trees are sponsored and decorated by different companies, groups, people, etc. and are auctioned off for charities in the area. The festival of trees is the week surrounding Thanksgiving and was a great way to get pumped up for the Holidays. It was pretty incredible. After looking at elaborately decorated trees for a little while it was easy to forget that they really are remarkable and nothing like the normal household tree. Below we included more pictures of trees than you probably would like to look at, but I promise you that they are wicked amazing in person.
One of the first trees we came accross was made from a collection of wine bottles. Yes, someone did buy this 'tree' and I do believe the intent is to put it up.
URS Corp sponsored this tree. Asthetically, not our favorite, but we gave props to the support.
The first of a few Peanuts themed trees, this upside down tree was my favorite. There was great detail on the display including a small framed picture of woodstock inside the dog house.
John Deere #1
BSU tree #1
Chelsea's favorite
John Deere #2
BSU tree #2
Hawaiian theme
This was the 'Pink' tree from BodyBuilding.com. The tree was fashioned with pink sports gear and gave all proceeds from the auction to breast cancer organizations.
Seperate tree has Barbie getting a physical...ummm
We were so grateful to have had a safe Thanksgiving and grateful that everyone back in Michigan enjoyed the holiday as well. It was difficult to have missed out on familiar traditions, but we were thankful still to have been invited to the home of a family at church. The day could have been akward, coming into a new family, but they made sure we felt very welcomed.
The holiday was a great time to be reminded of where we are at. There have been a lot of discouraging moments with the many changes we have encountered and it hasn't been easy to stay positive through all of them. But the day reminded us how fortunate we are. Even though we cannot find high paying jobs we are among the riches epople in the world. We have a beautiful apartment with rooms (bigger than some houses) devoted to storing our clothes. We are far from the homes we grew up in, but we are here together and are never alone. And sometimes we catch ourselves waiting for God to deliver blessings that will make US happy. But we have such a terrific opportunity to bring glory to God by allowing him to work on His terms, but we get carried away with foolishness. In these past few months we have really been able to see how God has blessed us with trials and strength to get through them.
We are very excited to go back to Michigan soon and see our families (especially new family we have never met before). We are grateful for prayers during Chelsea's exams and miss everyone a ton.
