Our first real blizzard, and part 1 of Christmas 2008

First of all, we of course have to include some pics of our Boston.  Here we are doing his favorite thing - cuddling.

And here he is under the blanket his Nana knitted for us.  He loves to get under it and stick his nose out to sniff.

So the week before Christmas, we experienced our first real snow storm in Buffalo.  The only time we had ever seen this kind of thing was the big snow storm of 1993 in Alabama!  We had to go out and play obviously!  This is in our front yard.  Check out how deep it is:

And I thought I'd throw in a pic of our cute little tree.

Back to the snow.  Here is our balcony.  The snow is up to the seats of the chairs!

This is in front of our house as we were leaving to drive south for Christmas:

And here's our little Saturn amidst the snow:  (Isn't the street beautiful, though?!)

We set out for the 11 hour drive to Nashville while we were under a lake effect snow warning.  It was not fun.  For the first 6 hours of the drive, we were in snow and had to go 20-40 miles per hour.  Here are some shots of what we were driving through in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio:

We were SO excited when we saw our first bit of grass that wasn't covered in snow about 6 hours into the trip.  Needless to say, the drive to Nashville took 14 hours instead of 11, but we were very thankful to make it there safely.

The next day, we met several of our Nashville friends at Chick-fil-A for lunch.  We had to eat there since the nearest one to Buffalo is 105 miles away. :(  Man, it was good!  Here are the dudes - Kevin, Wes, Zeb, and David:

And the girls - Melodie, Amber, Sara, Leslie, and Jennifer:

The Brown family also came out to eat with us.  Here is Chanda and Cadence:

Sweet Cayla:

And here we are playing with smiley Annika:

It was really great to get to see and hang out with our Nashville peeps for a little bit!  After lunch, Wes, Boston and I got back in the car for the rest of the drive to Gadsden, AL.  The 3 hours was nothing compared to the 14 hours the day before!  I'll share about our Christmas celebrations in the next post.  Hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and a fabulous New Year's!