Snowy Holidays

Snowy Holidays means we get to cover Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, and Valentine's Day all in one!

This past Thanksgiving we stayed in Rexburg and celebrated by having dinner at our clubhouse with a group of people from our ward. Some of our good friends were there so it was really enjoyable! Everybody brought something, and our dinner was fantastic! After dinner we lounged on the clubhouse's amazingly comfortable couches to chat and watch a Christmas movie. It was lots of fun. And we have a lot to be thankful for this year!!

The only Thanksgiving picture I got was of my half eaten pie.

We were in Rexburg for Christmas too. Christmas Eve we had a traditional dinner with our neighbors and friends, the Carsons. It was Abbie's first turkey, and it turned out great! We always have fun spending time with them.

Joshua and I both agreed we needed to keep my family's tradition of baking goodies to take to people and making a cheese ball!! Since lots of our friends were out of town, we figured we only needed to make one kind of cookie. I picked the most important - peanut butter kiss cookies! We both love those! And they're not something we would usually make.

And my first cheese ball was a success! Pretty and delightful to the taste buds.

Christmas morning we slept in. Really late. Then we opened presents! We had no tree so this is where Santa left the presents:



It was kind of fun opening presents just the two of us. I got the coat rack of my dreams. I'd written Santa a very specific letter asking for it. It must mean I was a good girl this year since I got it! We both got a few movies. Funny since we have nothing to watch them on. I guess we'll have to head over to the clubhouse and watch them on the big screen!

Awkward picture, huh?

It was the only one of me and my incredible new footie pj's!

Joshua had asked if it could be one of our traditions that he make breakfast every Christmas morning! How could I say no to that?! I think I'll love this tradition. So here he is making our eggs, bacon, and hash browns:

It was really strange for me to have such a quiet Christmas. We talked to our families on the phone. I took a long nap while Joshua called some other close friends. Then we spent lots of time playing Sorry and Monopoly Jr! It was nice to get some two player games!! For dinner we had Hawaiian Haystacks! They're my favorite. I even did it the good way and boiled my chicken.

New Year's Eve we picked up one of Joshua's good friends, Matt, from the airport. He couldn't check into his apartment yet so he crashed at our place for a few days. The three of us went to my and Joshua's stake party. We gorged ourselves with tons of pizza, subs, and chips. And maybe a few veggies. We watched people dance awkwardly and wandered around. We stayed for the big countdown to ring in 2010! It was kinda fun. And kinda lame at the same time. Then we came home to have Martinelli's! And then we had our real entertainment - listening to Joshua sing after sucking helium out of the balloons they sent home with us:


We didn't do much for Valentine's Day. I finished Joshua's Valentine from last year. He made me breakfast in bed. After church we had a yummy pasta dinner, some Martinelli's, and some cake that I don't know what it's called. I just know that it was delicious.

We'll pretend this is a good picture. Because it's the only one.

Enduring to the end...

I'm completely done with four of my seven classes! This blog, which I procrastinated a bit, will finish one of the others up. I did try working on it before, but our computer died a tragic death a few weeks ago and finally today I figured out how I could get pictures from our camera unto the school computers. They're difficult for some reason. I feel technologically challenged when I work on this thing. Everybody told me how easy blogspot is to use, but it's taken me a while to figure it all out. Tomorrow I have family history and get to take my sociology final. I get to study for that when I go home tonight.

Thursday I have nothing to do!! I am soo looking forward to it. I'll get to spend the day at home for once. It will be a day full of laundry (it's been neglected lately), but our apartment is clean and I'll get to bake cookies so it's all good. Sunday I realized that I missed spending time at home. We've practically moved into the library. We come to school when I have class every morning and pretty much stay until the library closes. We even were at the library until it closed on Friday and Saturday last weekend. :(
But we've gotten so much done!

I had tons of stuff due today for two of my classes. I did start it all early and worked on it beforehand, but somehow there was still a lot for me to do yesterday. I made it to bed by 2:30 which is pretty good considering how late I had to stay up for midterms in those classes.

Friday I have a final at 7 am. Yuck! I don't know how my teacher got so unlucky, making all of his students unlucky too. He has finals at 7 am on Thursday and Friday. Thankfully I'm not taking his other class until next semester and hopefully they'll be nicer to him then. I'll finish studying for that final tomorrow and after 8 am on Friday morning I'll be free!

Right now though all I care about is sleep. At work today I kept yawning ridiculously between calls. I finally got up to grab some wordsearches to possibly make me more alert. Oddly enough the wordsearch on top when I sat down again was full of words like sleep, catnap, siesta. I looked at the title of it and it was called "Take a Nap". Now if that's not a sign I don't know what is. ;) I get to go to bed in two hours! We're so close to being done. Today was the big day. I can make it until Friday. I can make it until Friday. I just have to keep telling myself that.

Christmas is coming!

Winter must have been confused. We had a very white Thanksgiving. Wrong holiday, but we still enjoyed it. We've pretty much had snow on the ground since then and some days I like it more than others. I like when it's snowing and that just means it's warm enough to snow. And I like when it gets played in.


We have some Christmas decorations I was super excited to pull out, but now our problem is that we have nowhere to put them. There are some randomly on the kitchen counter, table, and our desk. Just having them out makes me happy.

One of the best parts of Christmas is the food!! I can't wait to bake cookies later this week. And Dairy Queen candy cane blizzards are to die for. Peppermint ice cream is my favorite, but we haven't gotten any yet besides that blizzard. After we go grocery shopping next time there will have to be a few cartons in our freezer. Tried the candy cane Oreo's - not impressed. At least now we know not to buy them again. WinCo had red and green gumdrops in their bulk candy. We got a little bag and it's swell. Spearmint and cinnamon without all the other weird flavors.

Joshua wanted me to mention hot chocolate. That boy loves hot chocolate!! He makes it for us all the time. It's our regular drink at home. It's breakfast in the morning, goes well with dinner, and a bedtime snack. I'm glad I'm not the only one obsessed with hot chocolate.

And we found the Christmas music station on the radio!!! Self-explanatory.

Feeding Duckies

We first visited the nature park in August. Back then there were cute little baby duckies. As we were walking toward the pond, we stopped and watched while one of the mommy ducks herded her little ones across the street. It was too cute. She reminded me of a school crossing guard. At that moment I knew I need to have a duck pond one day. More likely, I'll just dream about owning a duck pond. The ducks were so fun to watch and I felt a little attached to them.

Some of our baby ducks.

We visited them in October again, but it was harder to pick our baby ducks out from the rest. This time we brought bread to feed them. We quickly realized it was not nearly enough.

The first Sunday of Thanksgiving break we headed over to the duck pond with more bread. We figured the poor things got neglected when it was snowing outside. As Joshua, our friend Katie, and I approached the duck pond, they were nowhere in sight. We continued talking normally and then I started hollering to them. It was the neatest experience! The majority of the pond was frozen over with a thin layer of ice. The ducks were all on their little island thing across the ice from us. When they heard us they headed over, but they were swimming in a weaving line through water and the duck in front was breaking the ice for all the others. This huge line of ducks reached us and climbed out of the pond to swarm us. Again, we did not have enough bread. Those ducks would eat multiple loaves if we brought them. They were so close to us and were letting us pet them. They'd never gotten that close before! One duck in particular was hanging out by us and not even trying to steal the bread out of our hands. It followed us around. While all of the other ducks swam back across to their island thing, this duck stayed behind. He sat on the ground near us until we were leaving.

Shavonne and Katie petting our duck friend.

He tried following us home. If we had a place for him, he would have been invited. Notice all the duck prints on the ground. The snow was untouched when we got there.

Joshua and I went to feed the ducks again later in the week on Wednesday. This time they swam across most of the pond before having to climb up and walk on the ice to us. Again they swarmed us. I made enemies with a duck. Most of them were just friendly and wanting food, except for one; one of the ducks was mean, unfriendly and wanting food. We had a loaf of bread so you'd think there was plenty to go around, but this one duck kept coming right up to us. He would steal bread from the other ducks and nip at our knees the second we weren't paying special attention to him. I was getting really annoyed and would move away since they'll follow the food wherever we take it. He always worked his way to the front again though. We went again that Friday morning. Joshua knew I didn't like that specific duck and said he'd try to keep it away from me. That duck came right on up to me again the next day though. He kept right on nipping at my knee and stepping on my feet as I stood there and shook my finger at it and kept saying "no, no duck". At that point I realized I was being a little ridiculous. That duck wasn't going to listen to me. I still don't like him. But I do miss all the other ducks. They're nice ones and most of them will let us pet them now.

Hurrying to us.

Joshua with most of the ducks.

The Smells of Autumn

Living in Rexburg we actually experience all four seasons. Autumn and spring are my favorites. I always love the crunch of leaves as I walk from class to class and can't resist building leaf piles to jump in occasionally, but this year it was the smells that got me. There was this stairwell I walked through every day where the leaves would pile up and it became my favorite place on campus. You'd just catch a whiff of fallen leaves and there was something about the leaves which always managed to be damp that would cause me to stop. I had to stop and take it all in. I'm not sure I've ever appreciated autumn this much before. I've never been one to enjoy rain (though I do love puddle jumping after it rains) but I was glad that it rained enough to keep those leaves wet and smelling good. I found myself saddened as it got colder and all the leaves had fallen. My leaf piles in that stairwell got cleaned out, but now I know where to go looking for that wonderful autumn smell next year.

Joshua and I did enjoy playing in the leaves some this year too. It wasn't all about the smells. We headed over to the nature park one Sunday to feed the ducks and I couldn't resist running through the leaves.

Just some pretty pictures.

Running through the crunchy leaves!!

"Something wicked this way comes" - or just Halloween

We were stoked for Halloween to come this year! Especially Joshua. At least a month before he started coming up with ideas of things to dress up as. I was totally at a loss which is strange since I love dressing up. We tossed around ideas and never came up with anything fun for me. In the end that was alright though because we didn't do much to celebrate or party once Halloween actually arrived. But getting ready for it sure was fun!

Our first step in getting ready for Halloween was at the beginning of the month. After having looked at Halloween decorations, I knew I had to have some candy corn. How convenient that they put all the candy in the aisle by the decorations. Pumpkin candy corns are the best. I considered buying an autumn mix bag because then you get all the kinds of candy corn and having chocolate candy corn can be exciting. However, I just knew I would pick out the pumpkins first and then be sad so I went for a bag full of wonderful, little orange pumpkins! I am in love with candy corn, or more accurately, mellowcreme pumpkins. Naturally I bought the big bag. That bag lasted me the entire month.

Dancing around the store.

Our Halloween adventures also included buying some decorations for our apartment and picking out the perfect pumpkin. Our pumpkin patch was a little limited. We got lucky and together we found one that was just right! Since we don't have any Halloween music and Joshua probably got sick of me singing the Monster Mash (or maybe I was just singing it in my head) we found some spooky Halloween music on YouTube to listen to while we carved our pumpkin that night. We even got to watch Disneyland's Halloween fireworks! They were so fun!! I'll admit we were a little jealous of the people who filmed it and actually got to see them in person. After that we found Hocus Pocus to watch. Last year we had watched it together on Halloween and that was a happy thing. I'm thinking that should be a tradition.

Our "pumpkin patch" - there aren't many options in Rexburg.

The winner!

We were glad we didn't buy our pumpkin at Broulim's.
The selection wasn't that great, but they had a fun little maze!

Pumpkin guts. Ewww.

Half way through carving I decided I don't enjoy it much. Or maybe I just need to work out because it made my arm hurt. The end product was worth it, but I'm sure glad we only got one pumpkin.



A couple days before Halloween we drove to the Haunted Mill. Haunted it sure was. I had never been to a haunted house before though I've always wanted to. Honestly, I did not know what to expect. The group in line behind us was planning their walking order so the scared ones didn't have to go first. Joshua and I decided we would take turns going first. Starting out he went first, and that plan went out the window. I stayed close behind the whole way. And we both scream like little girls. It was totally creepy but we had a blast!

We were very un-Halloween like on Halloween. We probably just worked and all that jazz, but we did go out for dinner. Craigo's has some of the best pizza ever and it's a buffet! They have pasta too. I couldn't ask for more. It was fun to sit in our booth and watch all of the cute little kids in their costumes. And the adults too. There was a whole room full or Hogwarts students! Not that I want to dress up as Hermione, but it did make me feel lame for not dressing up. I have a whole year to plan a good costume for next year now!

We hit the after Halloween clearance sales, but pretty much all they had left was candy corn. No good chocolate. Thank goodness I love candy corn or I would have been super bummed. I gave in and got an autumn mix bag that time. A big bag. It was gone in about week. I don't know how that happened since the first bag lasted me so long. I'm ready for more candy corn. Can't wait for next year!!

Family History

I'm taking a family history class this semester and one of our assignments is a service-learning project related to family history. Creating a website was one of the options and my teacher encouraged us to use blogspot if that's what we chose. I think I could have gone a really long time without creating a blog, but for some reason the prospect of creating one for a school assignment was appealing to me. Possibly because of the convenience since I spend plenty of time on the computer anyway. Any way you look at it though, I figured it's a great way to keep family and friends updated with what's going on in our lives, plus it can be our family's history. :) It will be wonderful to have later since neither of us are good journal writers.

This class has me very excited about doing my family history! I figured it would be mostly about our ancestors, but it is also about recording our own family history. I've even started my Book of Remembrance which isn't due until December just because I thought it would be fun! (Amazing considering I think we all know how I like to procrastinate.) This week in lab we'll be learning to search for our ancestors and I'm truly looking forward to it. We've already learned to input information into PAF and FamilySearch. I hope I'll find some ancestors and be able to do their temple work this semester! That would be such a neat experience.

I hope you all enjoy this blogging experience and our lives with us!