2 years ago

2 years ago today, the hubs came home from his mission! I was a complete bundle of nerves that day and couldn't believe that after waiting 2 long years, he was finally home for good! It's been an amazing 2 years since he's been home. Let's look at some of the things we've done since then, shall we?

-We got engaged(obviously)
-I got my endowments
-We got married(again obvious)
-We've been to Disney World twice
-We almost burned down our first apartment
-We've welcomed 1 niece and 2 nephews into the family
-We took our first trip to Logan and had Aggie ice cream
-We took our first road trip
-We visited Derek's mission
-I had my first trip to Washington and fell in love with Seattle
-We moved into my parents basement
-We paid off all our debt aside from student loans
-We bought our first adult purchase in the form of a TV on Black Friday
-We inherited a car that is solely in our names, no one else
-We've been to 3 midnight premieres
-We got our first puppy, a purebred dachshund named Charlie, for free

There's lots more I'm sure but those are the big things that I can think of right now. I just can't believe he's already been home for 2 years. The whole waiting 2 years seemed to take forever but these past 2 years have flown by, seriously. Waiting for him, marrying him, and getting to love him for the rest of eternity is the best thing I've ever done for myself. He's amazing and was totally worth the wait :)

Let's have adventures!!!

Derek and I are about to embark on a glorious adventure! For 2 years, Derek served the Lord in the beautiful state of Washington. Tonight, we take our first road trip as a married couple and head out to that wonderful place.

We couldn't be more excited!!!!!!!!!

We have many things planned, people to see, and time to spent together. Those are the best vacations, when we just get to completely focus on each other and spend time together. I'm excited for my first trip to Washington!

See you when we get back!

Welcome to Adulthood

Some people think that turning 18 makes them an adult. If that's the case, I've been an adult for 4 years. Yikes! Even though I've been married for a year and a half of those last 4 years, I've never felt more like an adult then I have lately.

There's nothing like car troubles to make you realize that you are, in fact, an adult and have to take care of the problem on your own. When you are younger, your parents take care of it all while as an adult, they help out but it's pretty much up to you. Just saying I'll be really grateful once we get this all figured out and the car is fixed. Just hoping we get it done in time to be able to take our Washington trip since it's hanging in the balance right now.

Also another thing that makes you realize you are an adult is when you get called to teach in Primary. That's right, Derek and I are now Primary teachers for the CTR 6 class. Our first Sunday teaching is this week, wish us luck!

Bon appetit!!!!!!

Well, well, well. Apparently I've decided to become French. Quite literally.

I've always had a fascination with Paris. Even from a young age, I've dreamed of going there, learning the language, effectively becoming French. My fascination grew immensely with the release of the movie Julie & Julia. I watched this movie and instantly fell in love. I found the idea of both stories very appealing. Julie's was learning to cook by cooking her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Julia's was finding her way through life, immersing herself into French life, culture, and food. Both of these women discovered themselves through their journeys, something I've always dreamed of.

After I had first watched the movie, I decided I was going to learn to speak French. My original idea had been to learn French cooking but I figured that might be a little out of my league. On our lovely trip to Disney World, my wonderful husband bought me a book that would help me learn my new language. I've been practicing a bit but not enough to really get anywhere. I've got to start working on it!

One night, while rummaging through the $5 movie bin at Wal-Mart, I came across Julia & Julia and actually screamed because I was so excited to buy it. Since it's purchase, I've probably watched it at least 15 times. Crazy I know. But each time I watch it, I enjoy it more and more. For my birthday, again my wonderful hubby purchased me something that I'd been dying to own. Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I love it! I've become a bit like Julie Powell though in the sense that I am now kind of obsessed with Julia Child and all things French. I bought 2 books on my kindle about her and have even been entertaining the idea of following in Julie's footsteps and cooking my way through Julia's cookbook. I'd love to be able to blog about that but of course it would be like plagiarism and whatnot so maybe I'll just do like a French Friday or something.

I've really just come to appreciate all things French and am trying to convince the hubby to allow us to live in Paris for a year, maybe more. Bon appetit!

May the 4th be with you.....or in otherwords, my birthday!

Today is my lowly, humble day of birth. 22 years ago I came into this crazy world and I'm been rocking it, for the most part, ever since. I've found a new way of looking at birthdays this year. Instead of thinking about getting older, I've decided to treat it almost like New Year. What I mean by that is I'm seeing it as a chance to improve myself, set new goals, see what I can accomplish from birthday to birthday. Obviously the goals will end up being like new year resolutions but I'm hoping to make them more meaningful and really just accomplish the things I set out to do. So here goes-

1. Read the Book of Mormon and Bible front to back

2. Learn to be more organized

3. Go back to school

4. Start keeping a journal again

5. Attend the Temple more often

6. Learn to be more patient

7. Spend more quality time with my husband

8. Stop letting the little things get to me

9. Get healthy (like always. Follow that blog here)

10. Keep up with this here blog and really document our lives

11. Ignore other people's drama

Well that's what I've got for this year. I'll be posting updates on these on the 4th of every month until my birthday comes again next year. We'll then assess the progress and set new goals for the next year. I'm really looking forward to getting all these things done, and starting tomorrow I'll be working on all of them. Can't wait! Happy Cinco de Mayo tomorrow!

p.s: cool fact about my birthday. My zodiac sign is a Taurus. Their lucky numbers are 4 and 6 and their lucky day is Friday. I was born on Friday, May 4th, at 1:56 pm. I am boss of my birthday!

We're Moving!

Whelp, we're about to move for the first time in our married life. Now it's not anywhere excited or adventurous but it is practical for what we need.

Currently we reside in a 3 bedroom(we're only able to use 1), 1 bathroom basement apartment with our rent being $600 a month, INCLUDING utilities. All-in-all, we've had it pretty sweet. Derek's uncle owns the house and has been so good to us in regards to when we pay our rent, helping us out when we were short a few months and allowing us to get our most adorable puppy Charlie. We absolutely love living here and the freedom that we get with having our "own" place. We also really enjoy having our own kitchen, bathroom, washer/dryer, and our bedroom. It has been the perfect place for our first year of marriage. Not to mention, my mother-in-law lives upstairs so we get to visit with her any time we want! However due to my inability to fully pay for college and having to get student loans, we've decided that we just aren't able to pay our rent any longer and thus need to move.

My wonderful mom and stepdad have been gracious enough over the past almost 3 years to take excellent care of my mother's brother, Uncle Pat. Unfortunately, Uncle Pat passed away a week ago and is finally in a better place and no longer suffering. My parents, in their never ending quest to always help their children, have agreed to let my husband and I move in with them. We will be downgrading from the freedom of our apartment, to the cozy comfort of the master bedroom of their house.

Don't worry, we're not stealing the master from them. Whoever built their house put the master in the basement and my parents didn't want to sleep down there so it's rotated from my sister, to me, to my brothers, and now back to my husband and I. We've been trying to figure out over the last few days how in the world we are going to fit all of our things into one bedroom. Granted we have a walk-in closet and a bathroom but trust me, it's going to be a very tight fit lol.

We're definitely going to miss living in our "home" but are excited for this opportunity to live with my parents, save money, get my student loans paid down (or paid off), and spend more time with my side of the family. We're also especially grateful to my parents for being so willing to help us out, even if it will be a little inconvenient for them and cause some stress until everything gets settled.

Well, we've got a week to move out/in so I best get off here and get to packing! Once our new "home" is set up, I'll post some pictures!

HOPPY EASTER!!!!!!!

I was so happy that I was able to spend this Easter fully enjoying the company of my husband. Last year I had worked a 10 hour graveyard shift so all I had wanted to do was sleep all day. This year was definitely an improvement!

We woke up Sunday morning to the realization that we'd unfortunately overslept our alarms and had missed most of Church. Derek jumped out of bed and ran into the living room to hide my eggs while I slowly got up and found some comfy pajamas to wear. It took me about 3 minutes to find all my eggs. The hardest one to find was in the lights of one of the ceiling fans! I then hid Derek's eggs in our room and he found them all in about a minute. Not many hiding places in there lol. Derek boiled some eggs and we got down to the task of dying them.

It's really fun to dye eggs! I hadn't had the pleasure of doing it the past few years so it was nice to do something fun and spend the time with Derek, acting like little kids lol. We had bought a dye kit that came with stickers of eyes and mouths so we could make little faces on our eggs. We had fun sneakily making the faces to show each other. Once we finished with our eggs and took some pictures, we decided we were hungry and ate our funny-faced eggs.

All the eggs laughing because he cracked his shell

Derek's eggs

My eggs

Last year Derek had given me an Easter basket but unfortunately I didn't return the favor. This year I made sure that didn't happen again. When we finished our lunch of eggs, we gave each other our baskets and it was fun to see how happy he was that I had gotten him something. Definitely something to remember for the future.

Derek's basket

My basket

Charlie soaking up the sun

We spent the rest of our day relaxing until it was time to go to Derek's aunt's house for dinner. It's always fun visiting with her and her family and the meals are always fantastic. We spent more time visiting family, went for a drive, then came home. My brother-in-law Tyler is taking mission prep classes right now as he is getting his mission call any day now so he asked if he could come over and give us the first discussion. He came and Derek helped him out with it. It was so fun to see the kind of things my wonderful hubby had done on his mission and he was so at ease and in his element. It was amazing to see. At least we got our spiritual thoughts in for the day though so that's good. All-in-all, it was a fantastic Easter and we enjoyed every minute of it!


p.s: I tried a new thing on the photos, made them look like they were taken in the 60's. I rather like it :)

DisneyWorld Days 6 & 7: Fun Times

Sunday we had planned on going to Downtown Disney all day since we didn't want to make Allyson come to the parks on her day off. Instead, she did end up coming to pick us up and we went to church with her and the rest of the family. After church we went back to their house to have lunch and play games. It was lots of fun. We then decided to go back to the hotel to go swimming. We swam for a while and played pool side trivia. Derek and I then left to go to Downtown Disney for dinner and shopping.



Monday morning we got up, packed our bags, and then went to another hotel for a meeting about the Disney Vacation Club, which we TOTALLY want to be a part of one day! When we got back to our hotel, we grabbed our bags and checked out :( we were definitely not ready to come home at all! We decided to have lunch before taking some pictures around the hotel. We stayed at All-Star Music and all the All-Star resorts have a kind of restaurant in them. Ours had this place that made BOMB ham and grilled cheese sandwiches. I kid you not I probably had 4 the whole week! So since we liked them so much we decided those would be our last meal there! After, we took more pictures!

All-in-all, it was a really fantastic trip and we've decided we are definitely a Disney family lol.Some of the best highlights of our trip are as follows: getting a free bottle of wine because it was our anniversary(we didn't drink it lol), spending time with our family, finding hidden mickeys, eating French food, deciding to learn French, seeing our Disney Characters(family tradition), and most importantly, just spending time with EACH OTHER!!!! I can't believe it's already been a year into our marriage, that's the best thing of all and we spent that special day together in the  most perfect way we could. We'll definitely be planning another trip to either Disneyland or DisneyWorld very soon :)

DisneyWorld Day 5: MAGIC KINGDOM

Alright seriously, what's not to love about this park?! It really is a magical place and I just love it so much. Surprisingly we didn't really have to wait too long for most of the rides, we made use of the fast passes and kinda just went where we wanted. There's a benefit to already having been there once. You know what you like and don't have to waste your time on things you don't like.

We didn't take a ton of pictures this day because we were just having too much fun to worry about photos lol. You really just get to enjoy yourself here. We didn't have to worry about acting like adults or what people would think of us. We just got to have fun! No stress from our lives back home, no time constraints, it was so RELAXING! This day was the actual day of our anniversary so it was just the perfect place to be on that special day. This was Saturday, and our last day in the parks.  I'll finish up the rest of our trip in  my next post.

DisneyWorld Day 4: EPCOT

I have to say that I think EPCOT might be one of my favorite parks. I love walking around to all the different countries to see the various cultures. The rides are interesting and it's just enjoyable. But really I just LOVE the countries. You really get to feel like you are traveling around the world. When Derek and I went here on our honeymoon, we rode all the rides first and by the time we got to the countires, it was too dark to take any pictures or really enjoy anything so we decided to do those first this time, after a few other things of course.

So there was our day in EPCOT. Another great thing about EPCOT is that our cousin Allyson works in this particular park so we got to see her throughout the day, which was also fun. I will have to say though, the only thing we haven't done in EPCOT is MissionSpace. The reason for this is I get awful motion sickness and even with the patches that I was using(which totally helped), we weren't sure they'd hold up on that specifc ride. I'm kinda bummed about that because we love riding the rides but that one was just a no-go. Well the next post is about the most magical place of all-THE MAGIC KINGDOM!!!!!!!!!

DisneyWorld Day 3: Hollywood Studios

Our morning started off with me running to the gift shop to buy some mole skin because wouldn't you know it, I got some wicked blisters on my feet and walking was not at all pleasant. When we got into the park we ended up sitting in the corner of a store putting the mole skin on before we could head anywhere else. Hollywood Studios is a pretty fun place. I think one of the reasons I like it so much is because everything looks like it's from the 1950's lol. Well onto the pictures

Man, I feel like I need to explain everything about these pictures. There's so many little stories I want to tell regarding each one but that would just make for too long of a blog post so once again I'm letting the pictures speak for themselves. I just love DisneyWorld, there's so much to say about it! Tomorrow is EPCOT, see you there!