Happy Baby Shower Fran!

Do not be alarmed, baby and Vanessa are not in the same sentence anywhere in this blog post. This is a post about my wonderful friend Fran's baby coming in February so please no one be confused. Two weekends ago many of my close friends from college took over Fran's house for a great time celebrating Fran and Jason becoming first time parents. Eryn, Carson and I drove down to PA from NH, Beth came from VA, Jessica came from Pittsburgh and lucky Jill had the shortest drive from Ephrata. Eryn and I actually won prizes at the shower for driving the farthest. I was pretty proud:) Even though I almost threw my gps out the window for nearly failing us within the last 1/2 hour of our trip at midnight, but it all ended alright. Here are some pictures from the shower compliments of Bethany Lyle, official photographer:

A shot of the hysterical competition of who could dress the baby the fastest. Jay seriously needs help learning how to dress babies blindfolded. Who does this on a regular basis & can teach him?

Fran's sister Nathalie put together one of the nicest showers I've been to and everyone had a great time. And Fran was very gracious to host 5 extra girls plus one seriously cute 6 month old boy for a few nights. It was hours of laughter, fun stories and great memories. I love all these girls!
By Sunday evening it was just Eryn and I left at Fran's house and I actually wanted to try my hand at scrapbooking for the first time. This is pretty intimidating stuff for me since I completely lack any sense of creativity AND my friends could be professional scrapbookers (scrappers?). I'm sure there is such a thing, right? They all have amazing talent and I usually just sit there with my mouth hanging open looking through their books. Anyway, I'm determined to put something together for Sierra so I took this opportunity for Eryn and Fran to walk me through the process. Eryn basically did all the work because I made her, Fran pretty much has her own store of supplies that she opened up to me, and I did a fabulous job of gluing things to the page. Wha-la! Here are my first two scrapbook pages!
Maybe by next spring I'll have another page completed. At this rate I'll have Sierra's book done by the time she gets married.

Ice Anyone?

For those of you who don't necessarily follow the news from the Northeast part of the US, parts of New England are still trying to cope with days of power outages. Here is the little story of the Fringer family dealings over the weekend...
Friday morning around 1am Rob and I awoke to a BOOM and then flashing blue lights outside our window. I didn't know what was going on and was very confused in my sleepy state until Rob told me it was just our power going out and a cop car outside (possibly moving a fallen branch). Ok, I realized it would be a cold night but just snuggled under the covers and went back to sleep. Sleep did take a little while since I kept hearing crashes of branches falling outside but luckily nothing came near to damaging our house. When I woke again at the normal rising time we realized that the power would probably be out for a while once we looked outside at the massive covering of ice everywhere. It amazes me how something that looks so pretty can be so destructive. Here is what our property looked like.

So much for my beautiful, tall lilac tree
And another tree down

We were able to spend the night with some friends who were lucky enough not to have lost power and we had a nice time with them on Friday. Saturday Rob and Steve (our youth pastor) were all over the place assessing the situation at church, checking out our place and just trying to be of help to anyone who needed it. I was so surprised and felt so blessed that our power came back around noon on Saturday. So we had it pretty easy compared to most of the people in the greater Nashua area. Our only lasting effect was that our cable tv and internet didn't come back on until Tuesday night which wasn't so bad since I could probably do with less of both of those. As for the rest of our community, we are still hearing of people from church who even today (Wednesday) do not have power and may not until after Christmas since there seems to be a shortage of replacement transformers for the power lines. But it was a blessing to see so many people at church on Sunday even though we had to keep all of our coats on, and there were so many people offerering spare heaters, spare beds and anything else they could think of to people who had a need. I believe that the number was around 400,000 people who were affected by this ice storm and lost their power for a few days. Wow!