Sherman Minton Bridge Closure

The Sherman Minton Bridge is one of the three bridges in our area that connects Indiana and Kentucky. On September 9th of last year a crack was found in the bridge and so it was closed indefinitely. It is now January 9th, 4 months later, and we are still waiting. I think it is supposed to be done in April or so, but until then we continue to deal with the repercussions of a closed bridge.

When the bridge first closed, rush hour traffic was horrendous. Rory works across the river from us, so this impacted him every morning and night. Rory had to leave for work before 6 to get there at a decent time before the worst of the traffic hit. If he didn't take that early bus then his travel time would triple or quadruple. After a few weeks the city seemed to have things a little more under control and the traffic was looking better. Rory was able to go to work a little later and make it at a decent time again. The situation was still not perfect, but it was looking better.

Well sometime in the past week a couple changes were made that I think were supposed to continue to help the situation. In reality, traffic just got worse than it was in the beginning! Rory drove to work on Friday because the buses are always really off schedule Friday afternoon and he hates waiting for them. Lucky for him he hit traffic and spent about 30 minutes just stopped in one place.

This morning Rory came in and woke me up and asked if I could give him a ride to work because the bus hadn't shown up. This new traffic change has thrown everything out of whack again. According to mapquest we live 4.59 miles from Rory's office. Not too far right? It took us almost an hour to get to Rory's office this morning. An hour to go less than 5 miles!! That's what happens when way too many people are trying to use just 2 bridges to get to work in the morning. At least it only took me 10 minutes to get back home after dropping Rory off because no one wants to come this direction in the morning. :)

There is a radio show in the morning that we sometimes listen to if we're in the car that early. They put together a hilarious song about the closure. Someone called in Friday morning and asked them if they would play it again because the traffic had gotten so bad again. At least I think it gave Rory a good laugh while he was stuck in traffic. I've attached a link to the song. I apologize in advance for the few bleeped swear words. You might think this song is exaggerating, but this is how you feel when you're stuck in that traffic! :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl_er9MQHNM

37 Weeks!

I'm full term! I can't believe I've been pregnant for 37 weeks already. It seems kind of surreal right now that I'm so close to the end. Within the month we should have a new baby! Crazy! I know people want a picture so I'm finally posting one. You may notice I'm not wearing my wedding ring. That's because it no longer fits... In the past few days my hands have swollen a little and my feet and ankles have swollen quite a bit. I'm ready for this baby to come! :)

This picture was taken after a large meal at Red Lobster... :) I don't know that it made me look any bigger, but I was pretty uncomfortable with a very full stomach. :) Why did we go to Red Lobster for dinner? To celebrate Rory passing his 3rd actuary test!!! He took it six weeks ago and just found out today that he passed! We're pretty excited. Just two more tests and an online class and he will have his first certification!

Merry Christmas 2011!

Our last Christmas before our family grows! We were planning on a pretty low key Christmas here by ourselves since it's pretty late for me to be traveling, but Rory's parents made it out to visit! After 26 hours of traveling they made it here! It was quite the accomplishment to get out here flying standby just days before Christmas. We picked them up from the airport about 5 pm the Friday before Christmas.

After a little shopping at Sams to pick up food for our Christmas Eve dinner we headed to Chuy's for dinner. Chuy's is a great Mexican place. After stuffing ourselves we decided to check out the Lights Under Louisville. It was a really cool lights display in a cavern under the city. It was pretty neat to drive through the cavern and see all the displays.

Christmas Eve morning we spent some time in the kitchen getting things ready for dinner and finished last minute things for Christmas. Then we went to the movies and watched the new Mission Impossible movie. After the movie we had time to play Rook while the food cooked for dinner. We had prime rib and au gratin potatoes for dinner. It was really good!

See our cute Christmas tree? :) Rory wanted a Utah Jazz tree so that is what we did.

This is a little better shot of the tree.

We had purple, green and white lights. Then Polly made us some Jazz logos and we put them on purple, green and gold Christmas balls. We also used a purple and gold garland. The final touch? Old school Jazz basketball cards. :) Oh and you can't forget the Jazz blankets we used for the tree skirt.

Before bed my family always opens up a present. So after dinner Rory and I each opened one up. Rory got to open up the power drill his parents got him so that he could attach the heater we got to the wall in the baby's room. :)

Rory gave me a sweet Jimmer jersey! Too bad it doesn't quite fit right now....

Christmas morning!

Don't you like our Jazz and Ninja Turtle stockings? :)

Rory got an awesome Leonardo snuggie! Plus some cool turtle socks!

The back view. Don't you love the shell? We had to get a shot where you could also see the sweet ninja turtle pjs too. :) Our son has no chance but to love ninja turtles. :)

We had to take a picture with our sweet new hats. Of course Rory's is Leonardo. :) Mine is a cute BYU winter hat. :)

Our first Christmas away from home was great! It helped to have Rory's parents with us to help us celebrate. We did have to take them back to the airport at 1:30, but it was fun to have them there for the weekend. Rory and I are excited to have a third member of our family next Christmas! I can't wait until I can buy our little guy Christmas presents! :) I hope everyone had a great Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Butterfield Thanksgiving

For Thanksgiving this year we were in Fruit Heights with my family. We had an amazing Thanksgiving dinner and had a lot of fun with my family and grandparents.

Like I said in the previous post we went down to St. George Friday afternoon, but we went back up to Fruit Heights Wednesday morning. Wednesday night my mom and Jenny threw me a baby shower!

I got lots of cute stuff, but one of my favorites was the cute penguin hat from Jenny! :)

Sometime in the middle of the night Wednesday a huge windstorm blew in. The storm lasted about nine hours and they recorded wind speeds up to 102 mph. It was the nastiest wind I have ever seen! It was so loud! Around 5:30 in the morning I woke up to go to the bathroom (one of those fun parts of being pregnant ;)) and the light started flickering. When I was walking back to our room I heard the printer coming back on and realized the power must have gone out. We were lucky that our power was turned back on later that afternoon. A lot of people in the area didn't have power for a few days.

Without power there are only so many things you can do. One of them is play games! :) We played a little Scum and then we had a Rook tournament! Rory and Scott pretty much dominated, but it was still fun.

At one point in the storm Rory and I decided to try and venture outside. The wind was super intense! Not only was it windy, but cold too! I didn't last very long. :) This is us when we got back inside.

My little brother Nathan had fun running with the wind and then against it. It was pretty funny to watch him speed one way and then really struggle to come back. Just after I came back inside a chair came flying down the sidewalk and flew into a telephone pole and pretty much exploded into a bunch of pieces. It almost took out Nathan!

For lunch we went out to eat, but we soon found out that most of the restaurants were closed because of power outages. Luckily we were in the Winger's parking lot when their power returned and they opened up for us!

Towards the end of the storm we started hearing things popping on the roof. We soon realized that it was shingles popping off. We also watched all morning as different parts of the fence went down.

The damage wouldn't have been so extensive if the wind didn't last so many hours. Driving around after was crazy. We saw multiple trucks that had been blow off the road and were laying on their sides. There were so many huge trees that had been uprooted and fallen over. It was a crazy storm! I'm glad my parents didn't have any more damage to their house than they did. We heard of people who weren't so lucky.

Friday night we went to Temple Square to see the lights! It was pretty nippy outside and it started to snow! It took us a few tries to take pictures because the snow was blowing into our eyes! :)

Even with the crazy wind storm we had a blast with my family! I'm glad we got to come out and visit before our baby comes. We had a great Thanksgiving vacation!

Thanksgiving

For Thanksgiving this year Rory and I took a long vacation in Utah for Thanksgiving. We flew in the Wednesday night before Christmas. We spent Thursday with my family, but I'll write about that in the next post. Friday afternoon we flew down to St. George to visit Rory's family.

Soon after we got there we all went to go see Arthur Christmas. It was a pretty cute movie. :) Later that night we played our traditional game of Deal or No Deal. We had a lot of fun all playing together and everyone did pretty well this year! In the picture below we are watching Hunter and Heather play.

It was our turn!

Here Rory is playing "Howie" from the actual game show and I'm helping take down the numbers for Rhett and Julie as they played. :)

Saturday morning Polly threw me a baby shower!

This was at the top of the diaper cake. It's pretty cool, huh? There is even a little Jazz logo on the back of the cap. :)

Aren't these the cutest cupcakes? I love the little ducks!

I loved the idea for the drink. It's like a little pond!

Rory and the rest of the boys went golfing during most of the shower, but they got back a little before we finished. They had to come down and get some of the Cafe Rio we had. :)

After the shower everyone played a little pickle ball. Rory did pretty well for his first time!

Saturday night we had a gingerbread house decorating competition!

Rory and I came up with the fantastic idea of making a gingerbread igloo! It was pretty intense! We spent almost 2 hours creating our masterpiece. But it was worth it because we took 1st place!

This is kind of random, but I had to add this picture of Rory and our nephew Boston. Aren't they cute? :)

We had a blast in St. George! We stayed until Wednesday morning, but out trip definitely wasn't long enough!

Turkey Treats!

Last night for FHE Rory and I decided to make some fun treats to give to people. Last week I had seen an article with fun Thanksgiving treat ideas so I showed some to Rory and we decided to be a little more creative than just normal cookies like we normally do. :)

The hardest part was trying to find candy corn! There wasn't any at Walmart or our grocery store so I finally ended up at Bass Pro Shops where I finally found some! Who would have thought it would be that difficult to find?

Rory and I had a lot of fun putting our turkeys together. Here are the instructions if you want to see how we did it. Once you figure out how to get the back Oreo to stand up straight on the base Oreo and stay then you're pretty much home free after that. :) Rory did the cute little feet. He was pretty proud of them. :)

Dallas

I'm a little behind on this post, but better late than never right? A few weeks ago BYU played TCU so we decided to take a little trip to Dallas for a few days.

We beat Mike and Polly there by a few hours so we were in charge of picking up the rental car. The only cars left in the size we'd rented was the Grand Marquis. The guy renting us the car asked us if that was ok. We were like, uhh, sure. We had no idea what kind of car that was. He said he had to ask because a lot of people don't like them. We thought whatever and walked out to see about 8 huge cars we could choose from. Of course we thought we better choose the light blue one. We felt like we were super old driving this huge car. All it needed was some big steer horns on the front hood. It was pretty funny. :) We could even fit 3 people in the front seat if we wanted and the trunk was huge! Everything is bigger in Texas right? We nicknamed him Jumbo Jerry. :)

Rory and I flew in Wednesday evening so we found our hotel and then decided to get some dinner. We found a Creole place and decided to give it a shot. The food was super spicy! But it tasted pretty good. Both our mouths were on fire by the end of dinner! :) Around midnight we picked up Mike and Polly from the airport. The Dallas airport is not fun to drive around because it is HUGE!

Thursday morning we went to check out the Mustangs of Las Colinas. They were these huge statues of horses running through a little river thing. They were pretty cool.

After we had fun with the mustangs we headed to Grapevine Mall to get out of the cold! Shouldn't it be warmer in Texas? It was super windy and definitely not warm!

Grapvine Mall is really big outlet mall. It was fun to walk around and they had some cool stuff to do. We talked Rory into being a hamster in a big ball on the water. It was pretty funny to watch.

He spent most of his time on his backside. It looked really hard to stand up in, but he made a valiant effort.

Here he is standing up! It took a lot of core strength to keep from falling over!

After that we thought Mike should have some fun too. So we put him in the hurricane simulator. It was pretty funny to watch him get pelted with wind! :)

For lunch we went to the Rainforest Cafe. It was delicious! Plus it's just fun to eat with animals moving around you and lightning storms going on. :)

After lunch we did a little more shopping around the mall and then we headed to the BYU football team fireside. After the fireside we went to in Mississippi where there wasn't a chair left in the building, we thought we better be a little early. This one wasn't nearly as full so we actually got cushioned chairs! It was fun to see Carter and talk to him for a little bit.

When we got to Texas one of the first things we did was check to see if there was a Cafe Rio or Wingers in Texas. Rory was dissapointed to find out there was neither. He then thought he'd try Costa Vida because that's close enough. We found one in Colleyville, TX. We had no idea where that was so we thought it was a lost cause. At the time we had no idea that the fireside was being held in Colleyville. Rory was pretty excited to find out it would be right by us! So after the

fireside we headed to Costa Vida for dinner. It was pretty delicious. :)

After dinner we drove about 45 minutes to Rory's cousin's house to spend the night.

In the morning we headed to the stockyards. We saw this car and had to take a picture. These are the horns we needed for Jumbo Jerry!

Rory riding a bull! :)

They did a cattle drive down the middle of the street. The steer were huge! I'm glad they weren't running at me with those horns!

They had some fun little shops along the street. We felt like we were in a Western movie.

Rory and Mike trying on cowboy hats.

They had this cool maze that Rory and Mike had to try out.

Polly and I watched them from a lookout spot. It was pretty funny to watch them running around the maze trying to find the different check points. :)

After the stockyards it was time to go to the tailgate party before the game! It was by Rangers stadium. You can see the baseball stadium behind us in the picture below. Thankfully the final game in the world championship series was being played in St. Louis and not here otherwise we would have had some crazy traffic problems!

Walking to Dallas Cowboys Stadium! (It was super windy so I had my hood up.)

Here is the massize jumbo tron! The stadium has a roof, but part of it was open for the game.

The cougars running out of the tunnel!

Carter got us some crazy good seats! We were on the second row in the BYU section! It was amazing!

In case you're wondering, BYU ended up losing the game after putting up a good fight. We had a lot of calls that didn't go our way, and a few key mistakes. TCU got some nice no-calls that might have made a big difference for BYU. Oh well, we had fun at the game!

Saturday morning before we left for home we decided to check out Dealey Plaza. This is where John F. Kennedy was shot and killed. I really didn't know very much about it so it was pretty interesting to go through the museum. They had lots of cool little videos to watch and some very informative displays set up.

Once we finished up in the museum we went outside to see the actual place Kennedy was shot. In the picture below we're standing in the same place Kennedy's car was when he was shot from a window from the building behind us.

Even though BYU lost we had a great trip! We had a lot of fun sightseeing and enjoying time with family!