December 2014

During November, I started to have some pretty debilitating hip/pelvic pain. Blessedly, our home teacher is in the physical therapy field and recommended a physical therapist he knows. He diagnosed a rotated pelvis (something like this) and worked on my muscles, which offered some relief the same day. He also gave me some exercises to do to help, and I am happy to report that I am repaired! :) What a relief!

Thomas' birthday was a busy day for us both. He had some Elders Quorum duties to attend to, and I went to a friend's baby shower. I also made 2 Bûches de Noël, one for the baby shower, and the other for our ward Christmas party, also on the same day. In the evening, we helped with and attended the Christmas party.

We kept the ice cream cake I made especially for Thomas' birthday to ourselves :)

I made some really yummy gingerbread cookies this year to give to some friends. The recipe I found worked really well for my Williams-Sonoma Message-In-A-Cookie cutters. It was fun coming up with Christmas sayings to stamp into my cookies.

Later in the month, we got to go to the Bradshaw Family Christmas Party. Good food, good company, a good time as always! :)

For Christmas, we had our Christmas miracle: we woke up to snow! It snowed most of the day and it was really nice to actually have a white Christmas. We stayed home and watched The Bells of St. Mary's (loved it!) before delivering some goodies & getting to work on turkey dinner. We had a couple from our ward over for dinner and ended up making a few plates up for some other friends, too. I guess we didn't get pictures of the whole ensemble, but we put together basically all the fixings (green bean casserole, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, steamed broccoli, cranberry sauce, pineapple, rolls).

After Christmas, we met up with some good friends who moved out of the ward this summer for dinner & games. They are also expecting, due 2 weeks ahead of us :) They and we had kept the news quiet for a fairly long time, so it was really exciting to find out about them!

My family came into town on the last day of the year on their way to take my sister off to college! We had a good couple of days with them but only got this picture, and technically this was January 1:

We're excited for Morgan's university experience and we're so glad they could stop and visit us on the way! They came bearing lots of gifts & hopefully enjoyed their time here. My dad worked on our car a bit and I got to talk baby stuff with my mom and sister :) It was simply nice to be together.

oxox

August 2014

August was a bit crazy for us. Between visits from Thomas' dad, a summer party I was in charge of for work, etc., it seemed like we were always up to something!

We went to our ward campout:

The highlight, of course, was our trip to California when my sister came home from her mission.

My aunt, cousin & cousin's daughters picked us up from the airport. We got to play with my aunt's dog and it was a joy to spend time with these relatives I don't get to see very often!

The next day, we and my aunt went to a different airport to greet Morgan when she arrived:

That weekend, among other things, we had a special surprise homecoming/birthday party for Morgan:

Thomas & I got to spend an afternoon with Lanessa, hiking around Coloma:

After which we met my family at their ward luau:

We were finally able to go back to the Sacramento temple together (for the first time since our wedding!):

...which was a miracle in itself. The temple had been closed for cleaning/maintenance about 2 weeks prior to our visit (other visits we've made have landed us right in that window). The day of, we decided we had to arrive at a certain time for a certain session due to a commitment later in the day. We were running behind, but arrived with enough time to make the session. After dressing, we were informed we might have to wait for the next session because that one was so full (which would mean not being able to stay)! Miraculously, everything ended up working out. We were able to attend that (extremely full) session and get out in time for the later appointment.

All told, it was a great visit and fun to have Morgan home.

oxox

June 2014

We tried out Red Lobster for the first time thanks to some gift cards!

We hiked the Y on a whim! There were a lot of wildflowers.

Getting out in nature is so relaxing, and really puts things in perspective.

We went to an outdoor concert with our friends, the Hunts!

We took a scenic drive:

We ate our fruits & veggies:

Thomas went to a fathers & sons activity:

Samuel had a birthday:

And we went to Samuel's work party:

We also had Thomas' friend from Seattle, Tony, and his wife visit us for an evening on their way to southern Utah. They took us to dinner at India Palace and we showed them around Provo before winding down with a round of Pandemic. [picture to come... maybe?].

oxox

March 2014

In March, I had an opportunity to help teach a PREP workshop with my fellow PREP curriculum students. That was a good experience.

We celebrated my birthday and our anniversary with a trip to Tucanos. On my actual birthday we went to the temple and to Denny's for my free grand slam and finished out the night with blizzards from DQ.

My cousin returned from his mission, so we went to his homecoming talk and then to an open house.

We decided to take a long weekend for our 4th anniversary and go to the cabin! We weren't expecting to see quite so much snow...

But we had a lovely time anyway and even made a romantic meal together.

Thomas had an Elders Quorum (& families) activity that weekend that we came back for:

And we brought some friends back up to the cabin for lunch & games afterward.

oxox

January 2014

We spent an evening at the Thanksgiving Point Museum of Ancient Life with Thomas' brother Robert and his twin daughters.

They were in town for a few days for Camille's sister's wedding. We attended the reception. We also went to the Draper temple while we were in the area.

One of our resolutions/goals for the year is to do "date night" twice a month. We decided that each month, we'll each plan a date night, and one at home and one on the town. We switch off.

I planned our first "at-home" date night. I borrowed a Wii from some friends and we played games. Unfortunately, we both had the flu that weekend, so "date night" lasted about an hour and then we went to bed early! Oh well, it was fun to do something we don't normally do (play video games together).

Thomas got us tickets to a magic show at BYU. It turns out one of the magicians is a guy in our ward. He was our favorite act!

We also got to celebrate the birthday of a friend in our ward. Jason is the Elders' Quorum President and Thomas is one of his counselors so they are fairly close.

oxox