Grandma's Christmas Surprise

For Christmas, we decided to make my Mom a toy box. This is not to say that my Mom loves playing with toys, but she does love all of her grandkids playing with toys. She has been looking for a toy box to put in the living room, but could not find anything.

The boys in our family built a beautiful big box that can double as a bench! Both my Mom and the grandkids loved it! It was pretty funny to watch. Here is a little clip:

Christmas Memories!!

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Christmas Eve

On Christmas Eve my family has always had a really great tradition to make a whole bunch of appetizers, and make that our dinner. We eat shrimp,cheese squares, crab roll-ups, stuffed mushrooms, artichoke dip, vegetable and fruit platters, tyropites, and a lot of other great things. This year I really learned to appreciate all of the work my mom puts into making that dinner. I decided to go help her this year.
Matt and I got there around 11 am, and I helped cook for about 6 hours in all, and my mom had been cooking for about 3 hours prior to that!
I was a lot of work, but a lot of fun to be able to help out and learn how to make some new yummy foods!
The only trouble of the whole day, was that Brett and Matt could not stop snitching in the food!

Merry Christmas!!

We hope everybody has a wonderful holiday!

Temple Square

Last night Matt and I went to Temple Square with my parents, Eric, Heidi, and Tiana. It was a lot of fun to see the lights, but very cold and crowded!

Afterwards we went back to our apartment for hot chocolate, cake, and chips and salsa for Eric's birthday.

Temple Square always makes me feel very Christmasy. I can't believe Christmas will be here in less than 48 hours! Wahoo!!!

Tradition

Every year my friend Jen and I have a tradition of getting together for Christmas. Doesn't sound like much of a tradition, but it kind of is because we don't see each other very often.

I met Jen back at my very first job: Partytime!

We both have a lot of great memories from there, but I think it is safe to say we are glad to move on.

Thanks to Jen and her husband Aaron for being such great friends to us...we are super excited to go skiing after the New Year!

My Favorite Boys

These pictures really don't have anything to do with anything, but I wanted to post them because I love them.

These are two guys I am very grateful for and love very much.

A couple of nights ago I spent some time down at my parents house, and left a little bit teary eyed. I am so grateful for such wonderful parents!

I'm especially grateful for the special relationship I have always had with my Dad. There is almost nobody that I feel more comfortable joking around with and just having fun. He is a great guy!

Hark the Herald Angels Sing!

We had the chance to go and hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Sing with The King's Singers. It was really great. We went with my parents and Matt's parents. Afterwards Matt's parents took us out for dessert, which was delicious. It was a really fun and COLD night!

I have to confess: I think I am a Christmas-a-holic. I absolutely love everything about this season (besides the stress). Christmas music is one of my very most favorite things, so I always love a chance to go to a great performance like the Tabernacle Choir.

Our First Christmas!

We are so excited for our very first Christmas together!

We decided to call December 1st our Christmas Day Extravaganza. We got our very first tree, bought wrapping paper, tree decorations, and a few decorations for our apartment. We were pretty tired by the end of the day, but it sure was fun.

We decided we would be a little bit old fashioned, and we strung up popcorn and cranberries to put on our tree. It was a lot of work and a huge mess, but turned out really cute.

Thanksgiving

I wish I had a few more pictures of Thanksgiving, but....I don't, so enjoy what's here.

We got to have 2 Thanksgivings, which was a lot of fun. We spent Thanksgiving day with my extended family on the Goodrich side. There were about 70 or so of us, and then we spent the day after Thanksgiving with Matt's parents and brother, making 5 of us in total. It was a big difference, but we love spending time with both sides.

Dinner was delicious at both places, but I must say, Matt's Dad is definitely gourmet!

We spent the Saturday after Thanksgiving down in Cedar Hills with my family watching the BYU Utah game. Unfortunately (for Matt) the U lost. There were certainly no tears from me:)

Friends

We have a couple of groups of friends from highschool, and surprisingly, 5 years after highschool, we are all still great friends.

Matt's friends call themselves the "Sensational 6" and include Ryan, Bryan, Jae, James, Andy, and Matt.



My friends call themselves the "SCC Club"...don't ask what that means! They include, Shyla, Lauren, Teran, Amy, Jeni, Julie, Kamie, Chalece, Nikki, and me.



We are able to get together with Matt's friends once a month, and I see my friends a lot less frequently, but it is always great when we get together.

We are both so grateful for all of our wonderful friends!

The first picture includes all of Matt's friends and either their date or wife. The second picture does not show all the girls. Three were on a mission at the time and one was unable to make it.

Country Bumpkins

In October, Matt and I decided it would be fun to
go visit my Grandparents! We had such a fun weekend
in the country. My Grandma and Grandpa Goodrich live in
a little town called Tridell. We got to ride the
3 wheeler, hike up twin peaks, pick apples, and feed
some horses.





The best part was when my Grandpa decided it would be much more efficient to put us in his tractor bucket to pick the apples. He hoisted us up so we could get the apples at the very top!



After a couple of nights there, we went to my Grandma Fletcher's house in Vernal. We had a chance to go to the cemetary where I have a few family members buried, and
go out to dinner with my Grandma.



The whole weekend was great. It was a beautiful time to be there. The leaves had all just changed colors and were scattered all over the roads. It was also fun to be with my Grandparents and hear fun stories from their lives. We Love Grandparents!

San Diego

We spent the Labor Day weekend in California with Matt's family. We had a lot of fun, and it was great for me to have a chance to get to know his extended family better.

We got to spend some time at the beach, the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, the USS Midway, and harbor tour. Here are a few pictures.

P.S. I promise my blog posts are going to get better, but since I was only half committed to this blog thing when I started in July, I was a big slacker and now I'm trying to catch up.

Rough Day?

I had my wisdom teeth out in August, which a lot of people do, so it isn't particularly eventful, but the pictures are just too funny to leave them off this blog.

I was part of a pain medication study, so it was kind of rough to not get the medication I wanted or needed right off the bat.

I was pretty swollen and got sick from the loritab they sent me home with...I'm definitely glad that is over!

Here are a couple of the pictures.

Happy Birthday Camille

I had a great birthday this year. Matt woke me up to a wonderful breakfast in bed and I got to have a really relaxed day!

One thing I absolutely love is my nieces and nephew, so I thought, what a better way to spend my birthday than with them? So, we went swimming with Lizzy, Andrew, Tiana, Rachelle, and Grandpa.


We finished off the night by going to Chucky Cheese! I felt like I was a kid again and it was a lot of fun.

On that note, another reason I spent my birthday with my family is because my sister Rachelle was moving to Maryland with her family the week after my birthday. I am pretty close to my sister, so it was hard to see her go. She and her family are having a great time in Maryland and will be back in about 6 months...yipee!!!

Honeymoon

Everybody always says that we have a great honeymoon story that could become a book one day, so I guess I will write about it here.

We left for our honeymoon on the morning of June 3rd to go to Cancun Mexico. When we got to the airport, we were told that our flight to Dallas was delayed. We were a little bummed, but knew we still had plenty of time to make our connecting flight to Cancun. Progressively throughout the day, the flight was delayed more and more so we started to panic. After 5 hours in the airport, and knowing we had already missed our connecting flight, the plane arrived.

Everybody was excited and ready to get on the plane, when they announced that there had been an oil spill! That took another 45 minutes to clean up, and we were finally on our way.

We arrived in Dallas not knowing quite where to go since we could not get another flight until late in the morning on June 4th. Matt called his Dad, who is in the hotel business, and graciously he found us a great place to stay. That first night of our honeymoon, we did not have a lot of options, so Matt ran across the street to Denny's and we ate a midnight meal.

We got up early the next morning to try to catch an earlier flight on standby and (here is where the only amazing thing of the whole week happens) we got on it!

We got to Cancun around 11 am. When we arrived at the airport, the travel company we were with claimed they could not find our information and they did not want to drive us "all the way" to our destination. So, we stood out in the rain, and hoped something good would happen...what else could we do? Finally they found our information and put us into a shuttle. Wahoo!!

We arrived at the Coco Bay Resort, which was beautiful, and went to our room, to find 2 single beds on opposite sides of the room! We went to the front desk to explain there must have been a mix-up. I said to the receptionist "our room has 2 beds in it instead of 1" and she replied with an emphatic "So?" Still, she agreed to let us switch rooms.

We got our bags into the room, and not wanting to waste anymore of our little time left, we headed out to the pool and beach. Within about 30 minutes we realized we were getting a little bit red, so we slathered on the sunscreen. Little did we know that those 30 minutes had already done the damage. After awhile we went to go eat dinner. As we went to our room to change, we both started to mention we were feeling pretty burnt. By that evening, pretty burnt became blisters and practically being unable to move (I am not exaggerating in the slightest!). We were so sore and were both limping. Every movement was excruciatingly painful, and I'm sure neither had ever been even close to being sooo sunburned before in our lives!

The next day, we decided despite the sunburn, we did not have a lot of time left, so we would try to make the best of it. We went out on a sailboat, went snorkeling, and kayaking. While we were on the kayak, Matt was playing around a little bit and tipped the boat while I was standing up, causing my already broken toe (which I broke when I kicked the wall accidentally while we were moving into our apt) to twist pretty painfully. I told him to let me out so I could walk back because my foot was throbbing. He rowed over to the beach and I climbed out and sat there for a minute. Suddenly I heard him yell "move!" I looked up just in time to see a big wave hit the kayak and see it running completely over my body. Neither of us could get it off very well, but just after we did, before I knew it another wave hit the kayak and it ran over me again. I had cuts and bruises up the sides of my thighs and I started to cry. Behind us we heard a couple of the natives laughing at me, and I decided I was safer in the boat after all so I got back in and we rowed back.

The rest of the trip was more relaxed and significantly less painful, but unfortunately we were only able to experience that on the day and a half we had left.

We left on June 7th to catch our flight back to Dallas, which of course was delayed. We were pretty worried again that we would miss our connecting flight. We got off the plane in Dallas running as fast as we could, and barely made it to our flight to SLC.

It may sound like I'm complaining, but honestly, all in all we had a wonderful and very memorable honeymoon, but I think it is safe to say we will probably be staying close to home for our next few vacations:)