Christmas With the Moon's

A couple days after Christmas, we went down to Utah to spend some time with my family. That Saturday afternoon, my family gave my sister and me a baby shower. It was great to see all my family and some friends that I hadn't seen in a while.
That evening was the Moon family Christmas party. We had a great time eating dinner and acting out the Nativity scene. It was great to spend time with my family. I am very lucky to be part of such a great family.
The next day we went down to Temple Square with some of my family to see the lights. It had been a long time since I had done that. The lights were really pretty as usual, and there were a lot of really pretty Nativity scenes. We had a great time and survived the cold!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

This Christmas for Christmas Eve, we went up to Idaho Falls to Jake's brother's house. We spent to evening with Jake's brother's family, his parents, his younger brother and wife, and his new brother and sister. We had a great time. We had a dinner of fish, rice, nuts, olives, flat bread, and fruit, like the dinner Mary and Joseph would have had. We then acted out the Nativity Story. The angel decided she needed to ride the donkey. Jake was the donkey and I was Mary. Afterward we sang some Christmas songs. We had a wonderful time with family. On Christmas we went to Jake's parent's house. On our way up there, the snow was crazy. It had probably snowed about a foot and still snowing and the wind was blowing. The city hadn't gotten out to plow yet, so we had a hard time getting to his parent's house. It took us 3 times to get up his parents driveway in our truck that has 4 wheel drive. It was pretty crazy. We enjoyed seeing what his new brother and sister got for Christmas. We just hung out for the day with his family. In the afternoon we had a great time sledding in all the snow that we were getting. We had a wonderful Christmas with Jake's family and hope the weather is clear tomorrow so we can head down to Utah and celebrate with my family.

Our Baby's Room

I finally finished painting our baby's room. I'm really happy about how it turned out. Now all I need to do to finish is make some curtains and the baby blanket! The room before we painted it. All a lavender purple, definitely not for a boy! Our baby's room after!

Let It Snow!!!

This morning Jake got up to go to basketball. He took the car like he always does. Well, he had only been gone about a minute when he came inside. Our car got stuck in the snow out on our road. We had gotten about 8 inches of snow overnight and since our road never gets plowed, he couldn't get the car out of the road. We had to use our truck to get the car out of the middle of the road. It continued to snow half the day today. Pocatello hasn't seen snow like this for a long time. We went sledding again at Jake's parent's house today which was a lot of fun once we got the path carved. On the way up we had to help a couple of cars get unstuck from the snow on the road. The snow has been great, but it would be even better if our road would get plowed so we can drive our car again!

Meet Jake's New Brother and Sister!

Late Saturday night, Jake's parents got home from Ethiopia with Jake's new brother and sister, Getabelow and Meseret, who are about 10 and 7. After Sunday School, Jake and I went to his parent's ward and met them for the first time. It's crazy that they are here already after all this time of them talking about being here. In the afternoon we went up to his parents house for dinner and to spend time with the kids. They loved Jake since Jake would chase them around the house, tickle and tease them, show them magic tricks, and play foosball and the Wii with them. It was great getting to know them and we look forward to getting to know them more.
Meseret and Getu in the orphanage in Ethiopia.

Sledding!

Today Jake and I went sledding with some of our neighbors and our friends up at his parents house. There wasn't a whole lot of snow but we had a fun time!

33 Weeks

Well, I'm 33 weeks and 2 days along now. I'm starting to get a little more uncomfortable. My feet are swelling and Jake likes to put dents in them and see how long the dents stay. I'm still surprised at how big I am when I look in the mirror or this picture, because I don't feel that big. I am having a hard time putting on socks and tying my shoes. Not much longer and our little boy will be here!

What's For Dinner

My family has a website and there is a place to post recipes on it. My brother put a recipe on it for Cafe Rio Sweet Pork. I decided to make it today, and it was GOOD! Here's the recipe:

Ingredients:

1 can Coke 1 tsp. Garlic 3/4 c. Ketchup 1/2 c. Brown Sugar 1/4 c. Barbecue Sauce 1/4 c. Coke

Directions:

Pour 1 can Coke on any size pork roast. Cook for 5-7 hours on low (crock pot). After the roast has cooked, shred with Coke still in pan. Drain Coke and Fat. Mix the rest of the ingredients together and pour over the roast. Cook another 1-2 hours. Recipe may need to be doubled for larger roast.

I didn't have the extra 1/4 cup of coke, so I kept a little bit of the coke before I drained it. I also only put in 1/3 c of brown sugar because my barbecue sauce was spicy honey. It turned out great! Thanks Blaine!

Decorating For Christmas

Today Jake and I bought a permit to cut down a tree, so we went and cut down a Christmas tree. We found the perfect tree, but it was way too tall, so we had to cut it down to fit into our house. We had a great time decorating the tree and getting our house ready for Christmas! We've also put up most of our Christmas lights outside. It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Now all we need it snow!

Making Taffy

Yesterday Jake and I invited our neighbors over to make taffy. Last year we made taffy, but we didn't really like how it turned out, so we decided to try another recipe. Well, it took a LONG time to get the taffy to the soft crack stage. We had fun pulling the taffy. One of the girls even got a blister on her hand from pulling! The taffy was supposed to be while, but it turned out a caramel color. the taffy was hard too. Last year our taffy turned out a lot better, even though not that great. We always have next year to try again!Our final product

Ship Life

We spent a lot of time on the ship. One time we had 7 sea days in a row. We were also the youngest couple on the ship. The average age of people on the cruise was probably 65. We still enjoyed ourselves. One day there was a karaoke final that Jake sang in. He sang “La Bamba.” He did a pretty good job. He missed the starting of one line, but other than that he did really well. There were five singers and he took 3rd out of the five. He should have taken 2nd. The second place winners did “Copacabana” and they were terrible singers. The reason they won was because they had costumes and a gay guy dressed up in a ladies dress and they just put on a show, so they were put in front of Jake. The ship had a boat building contest to see who could build the best boat that could hold the most weight. Our boat was called the Stork and was on its way to Pocatello to make a delivery. It held 8 cans of soda. There were some boats that held 24 cans. We went to a lot of activities where we earned dam dollars that at the end of the cruise we cashed them in for prizes. We had over 220 dam dollars. We were able to get a bag, a sweatshirt, a shirt, and a towel with our dam dollars. The activities have kept us busy. We also were in a pentathlon. We’ve had to putt in golf, ring toss, football throw, shuffleboard, and free throw shooting. Jake won the pentathalon by shooting 9 out of 10 free throws. There was a ceremony where he got a bottle of champagne, a sweatshirt, and a picture frame. We sold the bottle of champagne for $5. We were also on two game shows that they had. One was a men vs. women where we had to see if we thought the same way as the other men or women our team. The men barely won. The other game was the Marriage Game. Jake and I were on as newly weds. We took second place. We should have taken first, but I messed up on one of the answers. It didn’t matter. The first prize was a bottle of champagne, so we didn’t need it anyway. There was lots of really good entertainment. We had a comic magician that was really good, a comedian, these 2 guys that played one piano that were amazing, flamenco dancers, and a few singers.

Teneriffe, Canary Islands

Our last stop was the Teneriffe, Canary Islands. We decided that we wanted to see if we could get a camel ride today since we didn’t get one yesterday, so when we got off the boat we asked a taxi driver and found out there was a place on the island that had camel rides. We walked to the bus station and got a ticket to go to the city where they give camel rides. We were a little worried that we wouldn’t have enough money to take the camel ride, but we had already bought our bus ticket, so we decided to head to the place and hope that we had enough. We made it there in fairly good time and had about an hour and 15 minutes before the bus that we needed to take back would come by to take us back to the city we needed. We found out it would cost 8 euro for a camel ride each, but we only had 12 euro and 15 American dollars. The camel place wouldn’t take American Express, so we didn’t know what to do. I was just going to take the ride, but at the last minute, Jake found someone that was willing to give us 10 euro if we gave them our 15 American dollars. We were both able to go on the camel ride. They had Arab garb there for us to wear while we rode the camels. It was fun. It was a really bumpy ride. Jake and I rode one camel, and they had to put a bag of sand on my side of the camel to even out the load. The ride lasted for about 20 minutes. I’m glad that we were both able to go. When we were done we found out that we missed the bus by about 5 minutes or less, so we decided to try to hitch hike to the next town to catch a bus. Some people that were riding camels with us picked us up and took us back about half way to where we needed to go. They were really nice. So because of that we didn’t need one of the bus tickets that we bought. We were able to sell it while we were on the bus back to Santa Cruz. We got back there with about 45 minutes to spare before we needed to be back on the boat. We had about 5 euro in change that we had to spend because this is our last port and the banks won’t take change and give us dollars, so we went and bought a spoon for my mom and some fingernail clippers. Our fingernail clippers were lost, so we really needed some, so they are our souvenir from the Canary Islands. We were glad that we were able to get our camel ride on our trip.

Reciffe, Canary Islands

Today we were in Reciffe, Canary Islands. It is an ugly island. We were going to go up to a volcano that they had on the island, but we decided we didn’t really want to pay all the money it was going to cost to go, so we just stayed in town. We had asked someone if it was worth it to go up there and they said it wasn't. They said it was better to go to the castle. Later on we realized that they gave camel rides at the volcano, so we wished that we would have gone because there wasn’t really a whole lot that we wanted to see in town. We were dropped off the shuttle in the middle of town, and then we decided to go to a castle. Well, after walking to the castle, we realized the castle was really close to our ship, so we backtracked about 1 mile or more from where we got dropped off. The castle wasn't worth it at all. Where they lift up the draw bridge. What was interesting about the castle was there was a time when there wasn't any work on the island and everyone wanted to leave. The king decided to pay the locals to build him a castle so they would stay. That's the only reason why the castle was there. It was a very small castle and there was a very small art museum inside. We walked quite a bit today. After we realized that we could ride a camel at the top of the volcano we were going to maybe get a taxi to take us up there, but the taxi wanted a lot of money and we decided that it wasn’t worth it. This is not an island that I would ever come back to. It is very desolate and not much grows here. Not what I expected a Canary Island to look like.

Funchal, Portugal

Marieda, Portugal was a really pretty island. We got off the boat in the morning and walked to church. We were going to take a taxi, but they wanted a lot of money. Finally one of the taxi drivers said that it was really close to walk, but the taxis had to take a round about way because of a road that was closed. It took us a little bit to find our church, and we got lost a couple of times, but we finally found it. We didn’t understand much because it was in Portuguese, but it was nice to finally be in church. Jake understood more than me, but when an American missionary got up and bore his testimony, I could understand about everything. When we were in Turkey there wasn’t a church nearby and in Gibraltar we weren’t able to make it to church on time because we couldn’t find the right transportation to get to the church. After church we changed and we were going to go to the beach, but there weren’t any beaches around. Crazy. We were on an island and there were no beaches. We found a really pretty park and just walked around in it and took pictures. A lot of things were closed and the things that were open cost more money to do than we wanted to spend, so after walking in the park, we just went back to the boat. The island is a really pretty island and we enjoyed our time that we had there.

Casablanca, Moracco

Casablanca is a DIRTY city and it smelled really bad. A man that we eat lunch with couldn't get off the boat here until the Moraccan government approved it because he was Israeli and had been in the Israeli military. Israel and Moracco don't like each other, so we were a little nervous because we figured they wouldn't like Americans either because we were allis with Israel. We got off the boat in morning. Right when we got off the bus that took us to town we were bombarded by people wanting us to get into their taxi. We had thought of going with another lady on the boat around the city and to another city, but the taxi driver didn’t want to go down to what we wanted to pay. So Jake and I decided to walk to the Mosque that we wanted to see, since it was fairly close and we could see it in the distance. We didn’t feel very safe at first, just because we didn’t know the language and we were in a Muslim country. We walked about a mile and found the Mosque. It was amazing. It was a huge building. We couldn’t go in because it wasn’t open, but it was pretty cool from the outside. There was also a huge plaza in front of the Mosque. When we were leaving we were trying to get a taxi to take us to the market place, but he wanted 10 Euro for the short trip. We said that we only wanted to pay 2, and he said no. We started walking away and he chased us in his car down the street and offered us 4 Euro. We said no 2, and then he said okay 2 no 3 Euro. We were kind of mad that he didn’t just accept our first offer that when he did say that he would drive us for 2 Euro, we didn’t accept. We figured we had a lot of time and we could just walk there. We walked a long way and a guy showed us a little market place and wouldn’t leave us alone. We tried to ditch him because he wanted money to show us around and we didn’t want to give him money. We thought that we had ditched him, but he then magically found us. We told him that we wanted to go around the city alone and after a long time he finally left us alone. We found a guy that spoke Spanish very well to show us to another market place that was huge and we found out that it was very close to where the bus dropped us off at. Supposedly people get lost in the market and then little kids will show you how to get out for about 50 cents. We stayed on the street and found some leather camels to buy and a magic box that has a secret way to open it. We went back to the ship to eat lunch and then we decided to go back to the market place to find a spoon for my mom. When we got there we were bombarded by people wanting us to buy stuff we didn’t want to buy. We told someone we wanted a spoon and it sounded like they didn’t know what we were talking about and they were trying to get us to buy a watch or something. All of a sudden out of no where he pulled a spoon out, but he wanted 10 Euro. We said that was too much, and we got him down to 3 Euro. It was kind of fun bargaining with the people, but we felt so pressured and bombarded by the people. After walking around the market for a while we went back to the ship. Casablanca is an interesting city.

Portimao, Portugal

There wasn’t much at all to see in Portimao. Jake and I walked around the city when we got to port. We saw some fountains that looked pretty cool. We also saw a couple of Catholic churches, but it seems like all the churches are starting to look the same. We went shopping for a souvenir from Portugal and found some of the clappers flamenco dancers use in their dancing and they said Portugal on them, so we got them as a souvenir. After that we went back to the boat because there wasn’t anything else to do in the city. It was a pretty boring port, compared to a lot of the ports we have been to in the past.