Happy Valentines Day!!!

For Valentines we decided to stay home instead of trying to fight the crowds at all the restaurants, plus it saved us money :)

And my amazing husband made it pretty special, spoiling me with flowers, gifts AND a candle lit dinner with cheesecake for dessert.

  
Thanks for the AMAZING dinner baby :)

Happy Birthday…

To the most AMAZING Hubby ever!

Spence celebrated the big 23 as well! I wanted to make it a special day for him so I made him a cake all by myself, and decorated the dining room for him.

We were going to go out to eat, but plans fell through! I felt so bad. But we did have family come over for cake and ice cream, and a special night!

Feeling crafty…

 With the upcoming Valentines Holiday, I wanted to start decorating but I didn't have very many Valentines decorations, so I decided to be crafty and make my own!

Here are some of the things I made!

 I made these with wooden blocks that I painted, and added embellishments, pretty simple

 

I made the garland on the shelf, It's hard to see, but its scraps of fabric and ribbon all tied on a longer piece of ribbon. That one took forever.

 This heart shaped wreath was made pretty much the same way as the garland, but with wire.

This one is hard to see, but I  bought the wreath pre-made but added the red sparkly embellishments. Nothing too special, I wanted to do more to it, but life got busy.


 

Bringing in the New Year!

Every year Spencer's oldest brother and his wife host a New Year's party to ring in the New Year! This was my second time going to the party with Spencer, last year we were just dating at the time, it was fun but also nerve wracking since it was the whole 'meet the family' ordeal. But it turned out very fun!

Basically we spend three days up in Logan and spend time with family, playing games, eating lots of yummy food, and of course counting down to the New Year. 


This year one of the games that we did was a gift exchange. Each adult was supposed to bring a gift that they made themselves, and then we put all the gifts in the center taking turns picking a gift, and opening them. The trick was if someone wanted the gift you opened they were allowed to steal it, until it had been stolen twice. After it was stolen twice, it was consider locked. It was a lot of fun to see everyone's talents and to see what gifts were the popular ones this year.



Here is one of my gifts…. I didn't take pics of the other :( 

  

And of course we always bring in the New Year with style... 

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!