Christmas in California!

Mark and I just got back from spending 9 fantastic days in California! We flew home in the 21st and went straight to my parents house in Yuba City. We stayed there until Christmas Day and then we drove down to spend time with Mark's family in Turlock. Since we were in Egypt the last 2 Christmas's it was really great to be home with our families this year. While we were home we baked cookies, went to In N Out Burger (delicious!), visited with old friends, got some great frozen yogurt (Greeley is seriously lacking in the frozen yogurt department) and had fun hanging out with our parents, siblings and their families. We had a couple of rainy days in Yuba City which I enjoyed and the other days we had beautiful warm (55-60) degree weather with lots of sunshine. Here is a sideshow of the fun things we did while home. Most of the pictures are from April's parents house in Yuba City. I was really happy to get some updated pictures of my siblings and parents. We also took some of my nephews and niece, Cade, Cameron and Lisa.

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FYI: My siblings from oldest to youngest are: Derek, Katie, Davin, Susanna and April. Katie has the 2 boys Cade and Cameron and Susanna and her husband Ryan have a little girl Lisa. My brother Davin is married to a great girl named Tara, and of course you know Mark my wonderful husband.

We are so glad that we went home. We hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Christmas in Colorado!

Since Mark and I are in California Christmas day we decided to have an early Christmas morning at our apartment in Colorado together. We opened our stockings and our presents from each other and I made the traditional Orange rolls that my family always has. Fortunatley I bought two cans because the first batch did not turn out and it would be catastophic to not have these when opening Christmas presents. Even when we were in Egypt we had them because some friends with Commisary privlegdes were kind enough to get them for us. The first batch was way underdone so we put them back in and then we burnt them, good thing for second chances!

Aprillee with her Wii Fit! I am so excited to use it when we get back.

Mark with the presents. We ended up getting a few more then planned, we are just tying to help the economy!

This picture is for my dad, his favorite part of Christmas morning is seeing all the wrapping paper from the presents on the floor. I do love Christmas! Below are the Christmas Traditions that Mark and I like to implement into our holiday season. I really do love traditions.

1. Read and act out the Nativity Christmas Eve with lots of songs and have a short testimony meeting after.

2. Bake and decorate sugar cookies to take caroling.

3. Read a Childrens Christmas Story each night from December 01 to Christmas Eve, each year we will buy a new story to add to the collection.

4. Type up a Christmas Newsletter each year

5. Drive around and look at lights, handing out an award and bag of candy to the best decorated house.

6. Decorate for Christmas the day after Thanksgiving

7. Have Pillsbury Orange Rolls and Hot Chocolate for breakfast Christmas morning.

8. Open one present on Christmas Eve. Mark and I are planning on buying our kids three prestents each year, one that they really want, one that they really need and one that reminds them of Christ. We will see how we do. So it would be nice to open the one the reminds the of Christ on Chirstmas Eve.

It will be fun to do these traditions with our kids and to add new ones over the years.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

All I want for Christmas.. are my wisdom teeth back in!

*Caution: Viewer Discretion advised due to a gross picture of Aprillee's teeth*

Friday December 12 2008 is a day that will live in infamy in my life (at least until I have children). At 10:45 am, sweet, cheerful April walked into Dr. Mellin's office here in Greeley to get her wisdom teeth out. While she did not expect this to be a pleasant visit she had hoped it would turn out a little bit better than it did. Today is day 5 after the extraciton and I feel like crap! I have been lightheaded and weak and sick to my stoamch since Saturday. Here are some lovely pictures of me trying to recover.

This is me the day I got my wisdom teeth out. Not a happy camper. I was really sleepy because of the anesthesia and spent the day in bed with ice packs on my cheeks well, for at least for as long as I could stay awake. I wasn't in too much pain this day because I slept most of the day, since then it has been a different story. Mark has been a total sweetheart though and taken really good care of me. No real surprise there though. He is the best!

One of the worst side effects for me has been the drugs they prescribed. I apperantly do not react well to Viccadin. On the bottle it says "may cause dizziness and drowsiness". In my situation there is no maybe about it. I actually think this is a common occurrence but I am not a fan of the stuff. What is annoying is that not only does my jaw hurt like crazy but I feel lightheaded and nauseas too. Today I went back to the Oral Surgeon because it hurts so much and found out that my fear of dry sockets was not without reason. It appears that is where I am headed. Bummer! Why couldn't my mouth just heal normally? So he put in some amazing mediacted things called dry pakcets and I feel like a new person or at least a live person again... I am going back Thursday to have these taken out and then he will put some new ones in. I am a little nervous though because we are flying to California (Whoo-hoo!) on Sunday and was hoping I would be completlybetter by then. Hopefully Thursday I wil go in and my mouth will look amazing and I will be feeling all better.

Its been little difficult to be in the Holiday spirit since I had this surgery. Here is me with my annoying teeth in front of our tree. Notice the red sore on my lip, yep that is from them strectching my mouth open to take out the teeth. The surgeon is actually a very nice man who has a crappy job! (Although he probably likes it)

Here they are! Actaully, they had to break one of them to get it all out and the weird thing was that one of them actually had 2 teeth fused together. Yes I am special! Sorry if this picture grossed you out, you were warned. I guess I really do not want my teeth put back in but they sure have been a headache. Hopefully I can go to work tomorrow and I will feel all better.

Your fabulous Prize today is ... This handsome furniture set!

I used to love watching the Price is Right. Its too bad that we didn't win this furniture on the Price is Right, that would have been fun. Instead, Thanksgiving weekend we decided to take advantage of the sales going on and go look at furniture, also fun. I knew that I wanted a 2 person, aka a "Cuddle" chair, (I do love to cuddle!) and probably a couch and love seat. When we got to the warehouse I immediately spotted this set and loved it. We walked all around this warehouse looking at different sets but nothing was as great as this set. This place is huge, 2 enormous floors of furniture! There were some pretty wild sets but not too many cuddle chairs. It was very helpful that Mark and I have similar taste in furniture and that Mark was in the mood to look at items because it was a really big store. Something that I have noticed about myself is that I get a picture into my head of exactly what I want and rarely find it. While this can be discouraging it is also helpful because I spend less money! But luckily we did find this great set.

I LOVE this chair!! Something that we found really annoying though is that ottomans are always priced separately than the chair which really bugs me. And the ottomans always cost almost 1/2 as much as the chair. I told that salesmen that I found this really annoying and he said that the ottoman is the least bought piece of furniture and I said, " if you included it in the price of the chair people would buy more." (seemed like a no brainer to me but I am not a salesperson) But he didn't seem to think so.

Its a good thing we did not get a couch and love seat because they never would have all fit into our apt. (And we didn't need to spend that much money.) When we sat on and looked at the furniture in the warehouse it didn't seem quite so big because the place is so big but in our apartment it looks a little crowded but we do not care, we don't plan on living here forever so we will just enjoy it even if it looks a little funny. I also learned from this shopping experience that I don't even really like love seats, I would rather have 2 of these chairs, they are just so comfy. In case you cannot tell, its a lovely olive green with a light brown trim. It also came in dark brown but that was a bit too dark for us. We still need to buy a kitchen table. We are borrowing our friend Bethany's but we can wait awhile for that. I asked the salesperson if they have sales for most holidays and he said they do, maybe Presidents Day? We will see, probably not though.

Our beautiful tree and how we got it

Welcome to our home!
(I made this wreath last week to hang up on our door. I was quite pleased with how it turned out.)

Yesterday I got home from school and told Mark that we needed a tree! So we decided to go and cut one down from a tree farm but first we had to collect some help. Our friends the Depsain's have 2 cute little boys, Hyrum and Noah who are 4 and 2 and we thought they might like going with us to choose a tree. The Depsain's are moving this week and are trying to pack up their house so we thought it would be helpful to have the boys out from underfoot for awhile and did I mention that they had twins at the end of September? So we went over and grabbed the boys and headed out to the tree farm. We were racing against the clock because the farm closes at dark and that happens at like 4:45 so we took off as quick as possible. We got to the farm and jumped into the tractor to be taken out to the trees. As you can see, the sun had pretty much already gone down. Have you ever picked out a tree in the dark? Its a little tricky.

Noah, Hyrum, and April



After much (albeit hurried) searching we found a tree that we thought looked like it would work. We weren't really sure because as you can see its quite dark so we were hoping for the best. We seem to be a little off with our timing for outdoor activities. When we went to the pumpkin patch it was too dark to take pictures too, oh well.



Riding back to the house with Noah. It was fun to go out and pick our tree. I did it once with roommates at BYU-Idaho and had a lot of fun but Mark and I had never cut down a tree together so now we have.

As you can see our tree is quite bushy, so we gave it a "haircut" to thin it out some. There were also some gaps so we used floss to "rearrange" some of the branches. My dad would be proud, he always spent so much time wiring up branches and our tree growing up had perfectly spaced branches. We didn't have any wire but thankfully we floss and had each just gone to the dentist so we have a good supply of floss, good for so many things! Growing up we always had really tall thin trees, that had a lot of spaces between the branches so it was a little weird to decorate a tree that was so bushy. I felt like I didn't know how to do it.

Mark with our tree all lit up.

The finished product! I put up one picture with the flash and one without just so you can get the best effect. It was so fun to decorate tricky but its always fun to decorate a Christmas tree. Most of our ornaments are from Egypt so it was fun to think about where we got them. They are mostly glass though, so they are really hard to see. I think that theme trees are so pretty but I like having all the different ornaments because so many of the ornaments have special stories behind them. Come on over and we will give you some hot chocolate and tell you the stories.