Birthday Celebrations

This year I celebrated the big 23! For my Birthday we went out to eat at one of my favorite places, Sizzlers. YUM! Then we came home to have cake and ice cream with family! It was a fun, and relaxing birthday! Thanks for everyone who came to celebrate with me!

Presents!

  Making a wish!!

  If you look closely the candles are supposed to be in the shape of 23... we didn't have enough candles
 

Everyone who came to celebrate

 

Christmas Celebrations

Since it was our first Christmas together/ not with our own families, we decided to split up the holiday between both of our families…



For Christmas Eve we first went to Spencer's parents' home. We mostly just hung out for a bit, exchanged gifts with his siblings, and ate pizza. Before everyone sent their kids to bed, or started to leave his parents had a little devotional they had prepared for us. It was really neat. It was a talk about the three levels of Christmas. For each level they gave each of their children a gift for them and their spouses.

• The first level was that of gifts, decorations, lights, and Christmas tree. For that level they gave us homemade ornaments made by a women on their mission in Denmark
  
• The second level was that of baby Jesus. The gift for that level was a nativity set
  
• The Third level was the adult Christ. The gift for that was a cristus.
  

It was such a good talk, and very generous of them to give all eight of their children these wonderful gifts. It definitely brought the spirit into the Christmas celebration.

  The grandchildren and their gifts from their grandparents  (all the princess dresses were homemade for them, and all the big girls got home made jewelry boxes from grandpa)

 

 Some of the gang!

After spending time with the Nielson Family, we headed over to my Mom's house. Every year for Christmas Eve we get new PJ's and a new family movie. This year the movie was Despicable me. While the kids watched the movie, Spencer, my Mom and I played games. It was a pretty fun night. Before it got too late we headed on home to put out our own gifts from "Santa".

(didn't get any pics from my family :( I was too busy playing games)



Can I just say that I LOVED spending Christmas with just the two of us! Such a fun adventure! We spent the morning just the two of us, emptying out our stockings, and exchanging gifts. I definitely felt very spoiled this Christmas! I hope spencer felt the same :)

After spending the morning just the two of us we headed over to his parents to spend some time with his family. It was mostly just a relaxing afternoon with them. We ate food, hung out, and opened gifts.

Then we headed back over to my Mom's again for some yummy food, and to spend time with my family.

Over all it was a fun, and relaxing Christmas. :)\

 

Zoo Lights!

  For the past few years my family has gone to see the lights in Spanish Fork. This year we were going to go, but for some reason we procrastinated doing a lot of the fun things we wanted to do plus I had been dying to go see the zoo lights. So this year we went to go see the zoo lights! I'm so glad we did! Spence and I brought my siblings, Savannah and Dylan. It was so much fun! I loved all the lights, they were amazing! It was a little disappointing that we didn't see very many of the animals but the lights made up for it! 

On the drive up 

some of the CUTE lights
 

As you can see in many of the pics... Savannah happily jumped into every picture!

 

They even had reindeer there!!

 

 The tigers were probably the most active! It was fun to see them playing with each other!

 

Savannah and Dylan  taking a peek at the sleeping animals

Originally we had planned on going zoo lights, dinner and then heading over to temple square, but dinner took so long that we ended up just going to zoo lights and dinner. I felt bad because Kevin and Jeni drove all the way up to salt lake to meet us for dinner and temple square, but since dinner took 2 hours
we only had fifteen minutes for Temple square so we had to pass altogether. But it was still fun to have Kevin and Jeni join us for dinner! 

We went to Wingers for dinner, which always end with messy hands and Faces... I tried getting a pic a Spence with his messy face... this is all I could get! ;)

Kevin and Jeni
 

 Miss Savannah 

 My baby bro, Dylan!

Gingerbread houses

I have been wanting to do gingerbread houses for the longest time! It has been years since I have made some, so this year I insisted we made some, but it couldn't be any gingerbread houses. I wanted to actually make the gingerbread houses with homemade cutouts actually made from gingerbread cookies. So we got a recipe from spencer's mom and attempted to make them. Apparently there were some tricks to make the dough that would help the houses to be hard enough to stand…. So our attempt ended in failure. I was so embarrassed. All of the cookies were so flimsy that no one's house would stand up without collapsing in on itself. Oh well maybe next year…

Here are pics of the attempt/failure... 

 

 

rolling out the dough

  Kevin and Jeni's attempt

 Spencer's attempt

 Savannah's attempt/ disaster

  It was very messy business

  Dylan's end result; he actually did pretty good (sorry for the sideways pic)

 Dylan and Savannah

 

The whole crew! 

Family Christmas Dinner

My oldest sister Tiffany started a new tradition a few years back where our whole family goes out to eat and then we do our Christmas gift exchange, afterwards we all head over to temple square to see the lights. As always Tiffany does a very good job at picking the restaurant! This year she picked California Pizza Kitchen. Can I say YUMMY!? Mmm, I sure do love that place! It was definitely a lot of fun and a very crazy night! Especially at temple square, it was PACKED SOLID. But either way the night turned out very fun! Thanks again Tif for the amazing night!

My gift from Tabby!

Some of the group

All bundled up!

Me and my cute niece, Millie- with my crazy husband in the back

** pics borrowed from Tabby, again, I really need to get better at taking pictures!