Holiday Adventures

With the winter break in full force, I've had a lot of time to think these past few weeks and ponder my life and my blessings. I know there are a lot of lucky people in this world, but I can't stop thinking about how I AM THE LUCKIEST MAN ON EARTH. I have the most gorgeous, kindest wife with the best personality and she makes me happy everyday. I have an amazing family; both my immediate family AND my "family-in-law". I am blessed to live in an AMAZING city, go to an AMAZING school and live in an AMAZING apartment. I am blessed to carry a testimony of Christ and His church and have all of the other blessings, which I receive daily from the hand of the Lord in my life.

Anyway, enough with the sappy stuff...


Our holiday season was great! Here's what we did:

1. Decorated our Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving.
2. Worked
3. Jolene's finals at school. (She did great on all of them by the way)
4. Hosted a Christmas party with friends.
5. Hosted a candy making party with family.
6. Had people over for dinner.
7. Went to a work Christmas party.
8. Went to our ward Christmas party.
9. Went to a family Christmas party (my dad's side of the family).
10. Went to another family Christmas party (my mom's side of the family).
11. Got a little sick of partying. :)
12. Worked some more.
13. Conducted the ward choir Christmas sacrament program. (Jolene played the piano as I directed the choir).
14. Had a family slumber party on Christmas eve at my grandparents house (Thanks Nan and Pop).
15. Opened presents Christmas morning.
16. Spent the afternoon and the next day with Jolene's brothers and their families.
17. Worked even more.
18. RELAXED!
19. ATE TOO MUCH.
20. Celebrated our 6 MONTH-IVERSARY!
21. Stayed up ALL NIGHT on New Year's eve to celebrate New Years.
22. Celebrated New Years.
23. Went to Logan to visit my parents for a weekend.
24. Started school...again.
25. Still haven't taken down our tree so I guess we're still celebrating. :)


Tanner and Ella had tons of fun opening their presents, although I think they had more fun playing with them.



TNT came over and we had a blast making cake balls, english toffee, fudge and rolo pretzels!




My mom's side of the family... notice how about half of the cousins' faces either have a goofy look or a fake mustache. :)


Jolene and I, just a few weeks before our 6 Month-iversary.



The kids LOVE 'gampa'.




Herold. Our snowman that we made in Logan while visiting. He was cool, but he didn't come to life and start telling us to chase him.



Oh the joys of being a kid. If I did this now, Jolene would make a much bigger deal out of it than we did with little Benji.



Ben, Scott, and Bean kind of fought at first, but became best buds before long. As you can see in the following video.



Sabrina loved to grab Ben's shirt and just pull him around. Ben liked it too! It was funny watching them together.

Halloween Adventures

There comes a time once a year, once a year when you have to forget about everything that pleads for your time and attention. Sometimes you have to set aside work, school and the stressful part of life and just dress up like Link or a buff man with a knife in his head and decorate your trunk like a giant monster in order to attract little kids to come by and take your candy. That was the case with Jolene and I this year as we attended our ward's 'Trunk or Treat' festival. It was fun playing Dr. Frankenstein and creating our very own monster... out of a red tablecloth, white paper, plastic eyeball candy bowls and our trunk. That idea was given to us by Jolene's mom (Thanks!). All of the little kids seemed to love it, or at least they loved the candy they so willingly took from it. The younger ones occasionally were too afraid to reach inside between the gaping teeth into the dark trunk for a 'candy' that they couldn't even see from their perspective. Others kept looking at my head, wondering how the knife got there ( a fun toy that we bought in Portland at Saturday Market). I told them that when they grow up they should never make their spouses mad or else... :) It was also fun seeing Jeff and Tia in the parking stall next to us dressed up as Robin Hood and Maid Marian bearing a little one by the name of Friar Tuck. Little Ben was very cute as he played in the leaves and smiled at the strangely dressed people passing by.



After the 'Trunk or Treat', we had a few people over and played a fun halloween game called NIGHTMARE. It's a very strange game that my parents bought for me when I was around 10 and I have played it every year as a halloween tradition since. There's a video trailer of it below that you can watch if you would like. If you think it looks weird... well, it is, but it is pretty fun to play with a group of people once a year. The game comes with a game board and dice that you roll. The object of the game is to collect all 6 of your keys and reach the middle in less that one hour. To spice up the came they give you a VHS tape on which a man who goes by the name "The Gatekeeper" yells at you and tells you what to do. He interacts with each player in different ways and awards keys or gives punishments depending on things that you do. After so many times playing it I had to search and buy newer versions of the game to get some variety, but we normally just stick to the first one unless everyone in the group has already played it. It gets a good laugh every time.



Later that night we received a wonderful halloween card from Jolene's friend, Carly. As we opened it and watched the video our halloween was changed forever... in a good way. We loved the video and wanted to share it with everyone, but due to the massive population of the world and our time limitation we decided to just share it with our families. All of the videos we made are posted below. ENJOY!!!

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

To the Moore Family

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

To the Alcorn Family

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

To Tera and Nate Gibb (my sis and bro-in-law and there 2 yr old, Tanner)

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

To Justin and Lisa Alcorn (my bro and sis-in-law)

Our weekend in Logan!

For conference weekend, we went up to Trav's parent's new place to hang out with the fam. It was fun! We got there Friday night. On Saturday, we went shopping and helped make a fort out of heavy-duty cardboard boxes. It has two rooms with vaulted ceilings, and a tunnel connecting them. Tanner loves it! It's big enough for Travis and I to fit through too.
That afternoon the Gibbs came to join us.
We went for a ride behind Dad's lawnmower with Tanner. Whee!

There's a garden in the back, and I couldn't believe how many pumpkins were hiding in it!





They had some indian corn back there too.



Happy Harvest!

Happiness

More cakes, and Ella's 1st birthday party! :)

Sunday, a time for friends

Our dear friend Carly was in town, and since we were unable to join the Saturday festivities, Travis and I decided to throw a little get together of our own. The main event: Pot Roast. Three full crock pots of it, made by my dear husband.

I made a chocolate cake, which I think looked better than it tasted.Travy even does the dishes!
Josh contemplates "gypsy"

It was a fun night! :)

Cake!

I love cake. More specifically, I love decorating cakes. Today I made a butter pecan flavored cake, with buttercream frosting, and sliced bananas drizzled with caramel for the filling. The bananas inspired me to go for a monkey theme (click on pictures to enlarge).
I am currently enrolled in a cake decorating class at BYU, so look forward to more cakes in the future! :)

Welcome to our blog!

Blogging... everyone else is doing it so why not us? Well we decided to do this because it's a great way to let everyone know how our lives are going and to keep track of our friends and families. Hope you enjoy! :)