the holidays

Our very first Christmas as a married couple was great. We went to Durango, Colorado to spend it with the Ash family. Kim and Michael were there with their two girls Averi and Sienna. Having kids around always makes Christmas better. Jared wasn't able to get work off until Christmas eve, meaning we drove for 8 hours that day to get there in time. Christmas morning we woke up early to open all the presents. We got a lot of really great stuff (thanks Randy and Tammie). After presents it was time for breakfast and I was very pleasantly surprised to find that Tammie had made gooey rolls just to make me feel more at home. All that was missing was the orange julius, but it was still amazing without it. The rest of the week in Colorado was full of movies and relaxing. It was perfect. We even took Grandpa Dustin out to lunch for his birthday and so now I have been in New Mexico. One more state to cross off. And Colorado lived up to its snow hype. After the first few days with very little snow, it dumped. We woke up one morning and it was time to get out the shovels.
For New Year's we drove back to SLC to spend the evening playing at the salt palace. But with the extremely cold temperatures and tired little girls we avoided the outside and did as much as we could inside. There was a room full of balls to throw around, a room of blow-up activities, and then the planetarium down at the Gateway. We got some hot chocolate and cider and eventually ended up in the hotel waiting for it to be midnight. It was a lot of fun to hang out and make fun of celebrities that were on the tv. At midnight we all gathered in Randy and Tammie's room for fireworks only to find out we were on the wrong side of the building. Oh well, we watched them on tv.
It was an amazing week with the family and now we have to get back to real life.

*We actually made a nice Christmas video with a lot more pictures but it would not load to blogger in any format we tried so if you're curious you can go to Jared's MobileMe account to see it. http://gallery.me.com/jaredash#gallery