A little catch-up

The last month has been a little crazy, and I have become quite behind on this whole blogging thing... but I now have a few minutes to spare so I thought I would update you on all the fun we have been having since Thanksgiving. :)

Dallin and I successfully finished Fall semester at BYU. There were a few times when we doubted whether we would make it, but we did. AND I am now done with college. It feels so good to be with family, away from Provo, and free of homework for a few weeks.

During an especially stressful week, I came home late one night to this...

Dallin set up a fort in our front room. He even brought out the mattress and put it into the fort. We watched the Grinch, ate popcorn, and ended up sleeping in this contraption. It was so awesome, we ended up making another fort the next week! lol.

We had our yearly Christmas decorating party. I made a wreath this year that was a great addition to the house. And I also got to hang the stockings that I worked on all summer. :)

We were lucky to get tickets to the First Presidency Christmas Devotional in Salt Lake from our good friends Trevor and Whitney! We made the drive to Salt Lake, awed at the lights in Temple Square, and admired the creative tree decorating in the conference center. It is always so amazing to hear the Prophet speak in person.

After a week of taking finals, Dallin and I drove with Brandt and Liz to Logan where we spent the night relaxing, watching Sherlock Holmes, swimming and eating delicious food. The next morning we got up early in order to get ready for Jeff and Sydney's Wedding!!! What a beautiful couple! We are so excited for Jeff and Sydney!! Thanks for inviting us to your special day!

Dallin and I joined my family on the annual Christmas trip to Leavenworth, WA. Although the sledding hill was closed, and the live nativity wasn't going, we still had a wonderful trip and were able to go through a lot of stores we had never seen before! We did have to make a stop at the Hat Shop, Kris Kringle, and Los Campenos (the Mexican restaurant where we eat dinner every year.)

We spent a few days with Dallin's family at the cabin in Cocolalla. It was so fun to be with the whole family and spend some time with the neices and nephew! We went skiing and Sweitzer and tubing at the hill by the house. There were a few accidents, but no major injuries (thank goodness.) We had a delicious Christmas Eve dinner (thanks Mom!!) and a wonderful Christmas morning with the family.

We acted out the nativity on Christmas Eve,
here is Eliza as Mary,

and the wise men/woman :)

We drove back to Kennewick in the afternoon so we could see my family on Christmas as well. Danielle and Trevor waited until we got home to open their presents! I couldn't believe it! We weren't home until almost 4:30pm!


We love the Holidays and spending time with the family!

Season of Thanksgiving!

Well, it's time for the official Thanksgiving post, and Cassie has graciously given me the opportunity (i.e. assigned me) to write this post. Actually... it's probably past that time, but better late than never, right?

This Thanksgiving Cassie and I chose to stay here in Provo as opposed to making the long drive home. Now, it would have made a lot more sense to stay in town last year instead of driving head long into a nasty blizzard that was tearing through the NW, but what's done is done. This was our first Thanksgiving away from the family (I don't really count my time on the mission, considering they don't even have Thanksgiving) and so we had the chance to make our own dinner. We decided to share this day of thanks with our wonderful friends (and practically family) the Jensens!

Now do be warned, pretty much this entire blog is made up of pictures of food, so you may feel some hunger after reading. No real surprise with the pictures though... looking through them, I realize we hardly take any of ourselves! Either we're obsessed with food, or we really don't like pictures of us... I think it may be a combination of both. Anyway, enjoy your little piece of our Thanksgiving day! I can assure you that we did!

You can't have a big dinner like this without the food preparations, which typically are a whole other story themselves... and with us it was no different.

We decided to try brining the turkey this year. Mind you our brine was nothing special, just salt water, but it still tasted wonderful when it came out of the oven! The only problem? Turns out we didn't have anything big enough to hold the turkey in to soak overnight. Solution: A garbage can. Yup, you read that right. We cleaned out one of our garbage cans and plopped Turlock Holmes (as named by Brandt) into his nice pink home and stuck him in the fridge to rest overnight.

Exhibit A:

We ended up having to take out a shelf and stuff everything else into the top shelf, so our fridge looks kind of ridiculous. Excuse our mess :)

Along with the turkey, we were in charge of gravy, rolls, jello, drinks and pies.

We made some half wheat rolls. They were tasty, but we've been struggling to keep them from collapsing. It's a work in progress... They tasted very good nonetheless!!!

The biggest adventure was the pie preparation. Instead of making a normal, simple pumpkin pie, we decided to be adventurous and try a new recipe we found on this awesome blog.

This picture kind of makes it look like a big helping of ice cream... which would probably be very tasty on top of the graham cracker crust, but this is actually the beginning of our toffee cheesecake/pumpkin pie.

This pie was quite an adventure. We had so many other things to do on Wednesday that we didn't actually start making this pie until after 11 p.m. Little did we know that it was supposed to cook for a couple of hours, after which it rests in the oven for 30 minutes, and then in the open for 30 minutes and then can finally go in the fridge until it's time to eat. Well, we didn't get the pie in the oven until midnight, which means we were up three more times during the night to make sure everything was ok. Oh, the sacrifices you make for food... It was definitely worth it though! The pie was amazing!!!

So here's the feast!!!!! It consisted of turkey, rolls, garlic mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, jello topped with cool whip, turkey gravy, pumpkin pie and apple pie!!! I think we all agreed that it was pretty much amazing and we all are pretty good cooks. *brush the shoulder*

Here's the final product for our amazing pumpkin pie/toffee cheesecake. Yummy!

Brandt enjoyed the Heath's special grape punch. It was a hit!

And here's the turkey all ready to be devoured!

And here's what happens after the wonderful turkey dinner. *Sigh* I do love naps. I think we all passed out at one point or another.

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And just a side note, here's on of the things we've made with our ridiculous amount of pumpkin puree. Pumpkin smoothies with crushed graham cracker on top. They were pretty tasty!