the spring blizzard of '09

a tea party with our friend Lily...my friend Stacey's little girl! Stacey and i got to have deep dish cookies, ice cream and coffee later on! annie thought it wasn't fair that the little kids didn't get ice cream! =)
jesse and joshua...jesse's new hero. he followed joshua around the entire time! i think joshua enjoyed it too.
jesse and jonah...my best friend from when i first moved to colorado...janel...she took me under her wing and now after 15 years of not being in touch, we got to let our kids play together...okay so they played a little and stole toys a little.
so my friend mindi, megan and kansas from high school...we had this club called "girls in the box" and we had so many fun adventures together, now my friend mindi has 3 kids as well all about the same ages, just 2 girls and a boy....here annie is playing with sierra and kaia...they are as wild as we are! so much fun!
jesse fell in the snow outside the hotel we had to stay in and was not happy!

we drove into colorado and had about an hour and a half left when we ran into what the weathermen were calling a blizzard! seemed like it to us. we were stuck in limon with hardly any visibility and skidding off the road, so we decided to get a hotel there. the snow was so bad and the wind was so strong that we couldn't even see the hotel sign. we had to drive across the street later for dinner, we couldn't walk because of the wind and the huge drifts of snow. it was pretty fun to get stuck there!
from there we went to denver and saw so many wonderful, old friends! it was amazing to reconnect with my best friend from junior high and one of my good buddies from high school and lots of friends from church.
we went down south to stay in monument with some new friends! we had a great time with them as well! One morning while we were staying there God gave me a really powerful picture! i had a picture of a cover or a blanket of some sort, but it was really beautiful. it was a weave of some sort. I was praying for all the women in my life and i was in tears because i was grieving that i will not be seeing any of them for a long, long time. That is when i saw the beautiful woven colors. some of the patterns started from the beginning and were woven in a continuous, consistent pattern, some were short and beautiful, bursts of color, some came in and came in again later on. I could tell that the weaves were different women in my life. my mom's was the first weave and it was the backbone for all the other weaves to come off of. so instead of grieving my loss, i was able to see what i am carrying with me. something that will replace the dark, heavy and dirty cover of shame in the Kurdish women. because so many have contributed to my life and made it so beautiful, i am able to carry it with me to share it with the women there. i cannot wait!