The Days after Christmas

Christmas was earlier this week. Daniel and I both got wonderful gifts from our families that we opened along with a few gifts from Santa. Daniel got a new razor and I got some kitchen things. Daniel must have been extra good this year because Santa brought him some cinnamon rolls to bake for Christmas morning breakfast.

This year, instead of getting physical gifts for each other for Christmas, Daniel and I each took six months of the year and planned one exciting date per month. Then we put all of our ideas and plans into envelopes and opened them Christmas Morning.  Daniel made some excellent plans, and I'm pretty excited about some of mine too. I think that I'm going to wait until they come to tell you blog readers what they are. It will make for a lot of great suspense for all of you blog readers.

This week Daniel went to his first boys' book club. They read the Hobbit. (We went and saw the movie Christmas Eve. It was a good movie, but I didn't realize they were going to make 3 different 3 hour movies for the book. It was well made, but I'm not sure I can handle another 6 hours. Daniel will probably convince me to see them somehow. ) I think he had a pretty good time at both the movie and at book club.


While Daniel was at book club, I finally got around to organizing our pantry. In all our descriptions of our house, I'm sure that some of you didn't even know we had a pantry. And, until last night, it was pretty empty. Now it is full (thanks mostly to my mom and her Christmas gift),and it is fairly organized! It probably needs more of a system, but at least all of the food is out of the garage and boxes and into the pantry.

Cold Nights but No Snow

With Christmas just around the corner the temperature here in the house has definitely dropped.  Unfortunately there hasn't been any snow (or maybe it's fortunate because no one down here knows how to deal with snow).  I just worked my last day before Christmas and was able to wrap things up pretty well for a long weekend/holiday.  Now we're just making last-minute preparations.

This last week there really hasn't been very much to talk about.  I found out that there's a book club in our Elders' Quorum and the book for December is The Hobbit (thanks to the new movie), which I've been trying to read since I found out.  I don't think I'll make it before we get together, but I've already read it, so no worries.

One highlight of the week was that I came home yesterday and Elissa had made some really good potato cheese dill soup (or whatever they call it).  It was really nice with the colder temperatures and was seasoned really well.  I think she got the recipe from Mom.  Anyway, I won't drag this post out forever since we don't have much more to say.  Merry Christmas everyone!  We wish we could spend it with all of you!

It's Beginning to Feel a Lot Like Christmas

This last week we had a cold front sweep through Austin. (All of our friends in Utah and Idaho are going to roll their eyes) It froze for 2 nights in a row, which is pretty cold for here! We decided that we should try out our new fire place while sipping hot chocolate. It was lots of fun. I even made Daniel start reading one of the Ramona Quimbey books with me while we sat by the fire. It was a lovely evening enjoying our new house! It seemed very Christmas like because we were in front of a fire with coco basking in the lights of our decorated Christmas tree. We could have been in a Christmas movie (except we would have been reading a Christmas book and it would have been snowing outside for effect.)

Saturday was our ward Christmas breakfast. Daniel volunteered to bring a dozen scrambled eggs, sausage and our griddle to help keep it all warm. I admit I wasn't too excited to wake up at seven o'clock to cook up eggs and sausage and be to the church by eight. Daniel took my complaining in stride, and we did get up and get everything to the church on time. The breakfast ended up being pretty good, and it was fun to see every one around before they left for the holidays. Also, all of our eggs got eaten, and our griddle stayed clean because they ended up not needing it.

Settling Into a New Ward

Well, with the new house comes a new ward.  Our ward wasted no time getting us in to meet with the appropriate leaders and giving us callings.  We had a tithing settlement, then got called in to meet with a member of the Bishopric, then one with the Elders Quorum, and I got stopped in the hall and asked to teach the 3rd hour lesson the following week.  Now that they've done the sustaining, I can tell you that Elissa got called as a Primary teacher and I was called as a teacher for the 15-18yr old sunday school class (don't worry, there were only 6 kids this last week).  Elissa even got a visiting teaching assignment.

Church isn't the only thing that's been going on lately -- this last weekend we tried waiting outside a store for a deal for the first time.  Tiff's Treats (a local treat delivery company) was selling cookies for more than a 50% discount and we thought it would be fun to go.  We waited in line for quite a while but unfortunately we hadn't come soon enough because we had to go for tithing settlement before we got cookies.  We're pretty sure we were the first to give up on it.

Elissa had a great idea this year for Christmas for us to take Christmas money and plan some exciting dates for the upcoming year with it.  We split 6 months each and we're both really excited about them (but we can't share any details because Elissa doesn't know what I've planned and I don't know what she's planned).

Thanks everyone for reading our blog, and we hope you have a great Christmas!

Setting Up House

We have been busy setting up our new house. Yesterday we probably put 20 boxes out in recycling. It is good that most of our things are out of boxes now so we can find things again. We only have a couple more rooms to go, and we are completely unpacked! Also,  as an early Christmas present, my mom helped me get together the materials to make throw pillows for our new couches. I finally got all the pillows put together. They help coordinate our new valences and our couch and the whole room. You can't see it all, but here is a picture of our new pillows on our new couches.

We also started setting up for Christmas this week, as we started to empty our boxes. We have our Christmas tree all set up along with some other Christmas decorations!

Thanksgiving

Today was Thanksgiving, but before we talk about the joys of actual Thanksgiving, I have to talk about going to the grocery store the night before Thanksgiving because it was pretty crazy!

I'm not sure if any of you have ever been to the grocery store the night before Thanksgiving, but it is like a crazy mad house. First, we decided to go to a new grocery store that is closer to our new house. Since it was dark and we had never been there before, it was already hard to find. Once we got to the store, we  had to search for a parking spot and had to wait to get a cart because almost every cart was in use. Once we got inside we had to tread carefully around throngs of people. It was interesting because people that we started in the dairy section with were just about ready for check out at the same time, even though we didn't coordinate or follow each other around. It was basically crazy.  Fortunately, the store had everything super stocked so there were no fights over the last can of pumpkin or the last box of stuffing mix. Though it was a mad house inside, the store clearly did everything they could to make it a pleasant experience. Next year though, I'm just going to the store a week!

Today, I cooked a turkey for the first time. It was only a boned turkey breast (with extra meat), and I'm not sure I've graduated to a new grade. I put it in the oven and it cooked and cooked and cooked. It got two hours in and I was worried that I put it in upside down! After a lot of struggle, I got it turned over, but I'll do better next time. In fact, next time, maybe I'll just buy  boneless Turkey breast for Daniel and I. It seems a lot easier than a bone in chunk of turkey. (Or I could just buy a frozen pizza!) Everything else went pretty smoothly though. We have enough left overs for several meals. So all in all, I think we had a pretty successful dinner!

Making The House Our Own

Those dedicated readers who check our blog every waking moment (maybe it makes us feel better to pretend they exist ;) ) were probably wondering why we haven't made our post for this last week yet.  Well, the answer is pretty simple.  We have had a busy couple of weeks as we worked on moving our things from the apartment to the house.  Since we took 2 weeks to get this posted, we're each going to make a blog post.

Elissa's parents came down to help us out and with their help we were able to get a lot done around the house.  I'm going to talk about a few of the highlights.

We didn't really love the valances that were left in the main room, but Elissa managed to find a great fabric to re-upholster them with.

All it took was a little help from Elissa's mom and a staple gun (and lots of staples).  We think the blue looks a lot better for the color scheme we want in our house.

The other new and exciting thing I want to talk about is our couch/love seat combo.  We visited a place called Austin Couch Potatoes Furniture.  They had lots of great couches for reasonable prices and we found one we think will look good AND be comfortable.  We decided that we should do something to try to tie some of our colors together, and Elissa wanted a project, so we decided to make some throw pillows.  So far Elissa has made 2 very nice pillows with some more to come (sorry about the bad pictures, my phone doesn't do well with the lighting in that room):

Well, we'll be sure to give you all a picture tour of the house when we get everything set up and put away.  Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving!