Thanksgiving

This year for Thanksgiving, we spent it in Florence with my parents.  My little brother Dan and his roommate Ben came from BYU, Will and his family came down, and my grandparents came over.   After we ate, we went and shot a couple of Will's and my dad's guns.

Brandi

Daniel

Hailey-this little girl is WAY too cute!

 Elden & Hailey

Wednesday night we went and spent it with Elden's family and had a pre-thanksgiving. All the Warner kids were at home, so we all just sat around talking and playing with the babies

Our Cruise to Mexico

Last week Elden and I went on a cruise to the Mexican Riviera. It was wonderful! The weather was perfect, hardly ever a cloud in the sky.

We didn't take a lot of pictures-and the ones that we did they mostly look the same since it was just Elden and I and something in the backgroud, and elden taking the picture with his arm stretched out. We took a few pictures with an underwater camera when we were snorkeling-the coolest fish I saw that we took a picture of looked just like my swimsuit top. It was blue with white dots.... Maybe in 10 years when we take the rest of the pictures on the camera and develop it, I'll show you.

We left from LA on Saturday and were at sea on Sunday. Monday we stopped at Cabo San Lucas-which is probably one of my favorite stops we made. We tendered into the marina from the ship and took a water taxi for a 45min tour around lovers beach and then we snorkled for a few hours which was a lot of fun.

Tuesday we were at Mazatlan....we weren't very impressed (Kind of how I felt about Acapolco last time I was in Mexico). We got off the boat and got a map of the touristy places to go and so we thought we could go downtown where there was a market and a cathedral. So we took a taxi downtown and yes, the cathedral was probably the nicest building around, but wasn't really what we were expecting. So we could see the beach and we started walking towards it, and it wasn't very appealing so we kept walking to see if it got any nicer, so we kept walking...and walking...and walking. What felt like 7 miles later after I had blisters on my feet from my flip-flops, we took a taxi to the "golden zone" where they were supposed to have nicer beaches, after walking around there for a while we took another taxi back to the ship and swam in the pool.

Wednesday we went to Puerto Vallarta. I really enjoy Puerto Vallarta! We took a tour up in the Sierra Madre's and we stopped at a resort and snorkeled a bit and then went to see how they make tequilla (not by choice-everyone else on the tour with us wanted to go) Then we went back to the resort we had stopped at before and ate the best fajita's I've ever had and swam a little more.

Thursday and Friday we were at Sea...we slept a lot and spent time on deck in the sun...and eating. They had shows every night, so we went to those most evenings. They had musicals, comedians, magicians-and they were pretty good, but Elden was most excited to go to them so that when we came back we had towel animals on our bed with andes mints for eyes.

It was an awesome vacation and I think I'd like to make November Mexico trips a tradition!!!

Wedding

Last Friday was Elden's brother Dale's wedding. A lot of Elden's family came to visit, and we were able to spend a lot of time with everyone. It was fun, since I've not really spent much time with any of them. So now I feel like I know the family a little better.

I don't think we got ANY pictures of Dale and Stephanie, but we got some of the rest of the family-but not that many-so here they are.

WOO HOO!!!

I JUST PAID OFF MY CAR!!!!!!

Once upon a time (in 2006), I decided I wanted a new car. I was SURE I wanted a Honda, so I went and test drove some Accords and the place I was at, had a cute little Volvo. My dad used to have a Volvo that he had for like 30 years, and I thought I should test drive some of those. So I convinced my little brother Dan to go with me to look at the Volvo dealership, and we test drove 2 cars. An S40 (which Dan loved) and an S60...that I loved! I decided THAT was the car I wanted. I was close to buying the one from the dealership, but it was a little more than I had anticipated spending. So...one of my roommates from college had just bought her car on Ebay, so I decided just to look. I did...and I found this little 2004 turbo engine beauty with hardly any miles on it for CHEAP (considering it's a volvo)!

So I showed my dad, he said looks good....and I bought it. So I flew down to Phoenix to pick it up from the dealer, and drove it home. And have loved it ever since!

My husband is the BEST!!!!

I have to say that I'm pretty sure I have one of the best husband's EVER!!! (not JUST because he's incredably good looking!)

As of yesterday, we've been married for 2 years. We celebrated by eating dinner at home and then going to Manitou Springs to a fondue restaurant called The Mona Lisa and had chocolate fondue....because he knows how much I love chocolate. I remember when we were dating and talking about dessert for some reason, he was shocked when I said that it wasn't dessert unless it had chocolate in it-I don't think he believed me until after we were married and he realized how much I really really love chocolate! I would eat it all day if it didn't make me fat!

ANYWAY, he's a pretty awesome guy for many reasons (but i'm only going to list a few)! He's handy around the house-example-tonight he had me come downstairs and showed me the new lights he had wired and put in the basement in our attempt to finish one of the rooms. So hopefully in the next month or so, we'll have added another few hundred feet to our living space and the upstairs living room won't be wall to wall furniture anymore!!!!

Next...last week we were both home during the day. I'm always home because I run my family's flooring company out of my home (well...the office part of it anyway), and he was home because he was done with school for the day. He told me to bring my laptop in the living room and sit in our rocking chair while I worked...so I did, and he puts on a movie and brings out my little foot spa and all of my nail stuff and starts giving me a pedicure. Talk about the life!! Working while getting a pedicure....I told him I could get used to the idea!

Anyway, I was just thinking about how lucky I am and decided to make everyone that reads my blog jealous... :)

Family Fun & Travels

Emily and brother Carson

Last week I flew out to LA to help my sister Mary and her family move to Valdosta Georgia since Corban just graduated from USC to be a dentist in the Air Force. I hadn't seen little Emily since right after she was born, and now she's 4 months old...and SOOOO CUTE!!! I pretty much didn't put her down the entire time (of course, I had to hold her while we were driving across the country otherwise she cried). Not that I don't love all my other nieces and nephews...but little babies are so cute! Emily has big brown eyes and hair that stands up in a little mohawk sort of thing. She likes to talk, sing, blow spit bubbles, and put anything in her mouth including her toes (which is actually kind of funny), but other than not enjoying long road trips, she's a very sweet and happy baby.
The Mohawk

Those big brown eyes

It took us all week to drive across the country since we had to consider that Carson & Emily could only take so much driving. We stopped in a place called Oro Valley, right outside of Tucson AZ, Fort Stockton TX, when we stopped in Houston I got to see my friend Stefanie which was really fun and then our last stop was Mobile Alabama. I really love the south! It's so green and I love the trees that line the highways-you don't get that much out here in Colorado. Plus the people out there are generally really friendly and they call you "baby", "sugar", "babydoll", "honey"....and there's always the accents.

It was a lot of fun spending time with Mary, Corban, Carson and Emily. I was sad I had to leave the day after we got to Valdosta-especially because on the flight home I spent like 6 hours at the Chicago airport and I would have rather been spending time with Mary. Elden luckily had been hanging out at his Brother David's in Denver and so he slept there until I finally made it and we made it home at like 2am and then had to get up early for church the next morning...don't ask me what I learned, just be surprised I stayed awake!!

Don't Get Too Excited!-Pictures of our house

Since we bought our house in December, I've had several friends and family members that haven't seen it, want me to post pictures. Why!?!?!? Because they haven't seen it.
Once you do, you'll understand why it's not that big of a deal. It needs a lot of work and in a few years I'll be glad to show everyone pictures! For now....not that exciting.

Don't get me wrong! I love our house, because it's ours. We get to do whatever we want with it, we got an AWESOME deal on it, and it's close to the college and the interstate. It's exactly what we wanted for our first house (ok-the rooms could be a little bigger!)....but it's a fixer-upper!!! (luckily Elden's pretty good at that sort of stuff and I get the hookups since my family owns a flooring company!)

Our front yard needs A LOT of work!!!

This is our front room. It's really crowded right

now until we finish the basement so we can

put the TV and stuff down there.

We have a little wall separating the

kitchen and the front room.

Tiny Kitchen

Narrow Hallway
One of the bedrooms that is now the office/craft room

Another bedroom that we've made into our walk-in-closet
since our bedroom can only fit a bed, cedar chest & 2 night stands. (I didn't take
a picture of our bedroom because elden is asleep).

Standing in one room, across the hall from the

EXTREMLY small bathroom.

The bathroom that has a BIG window right in the shower so I have to be sure I either shower at night or
make sure i turn the water hot enough to steam up the windows.

Stairwell down to the basement

This is the first room we're fixing up in our basement. Right now it's got food storage, and my treadmill and the tv I watch while on the treadmill, but soon it will be our office/craft room so the upstairs bedroom will be our guest bedroom.

I HATE this room! Generally, I enjoy doing laundry. But not in here!! It's disgusting and annoying that the washer and dryer can't be turned the same direction. Also, the furnice and water heater are in here as well as....



A giant hole we had to cover up. My dad gave us some teak decking to put over it. Elden made the board that covers the hole up. But before that, it was just a hole, and one day I was doing laundry and fell in it. Bruised half of my leg!

A room in the basement. Right now it is storage for pad, but eventually our plan is to make that the laundry/food storage room.

This is the room we're going to re-finish to make into the living room. I can't wait. Right now...just a bunch of stuff in it.

This is our garage. Right now, it's US Floors storage-which is fine because we have to put a new door on it before i start parking in it. It's probably the original door from when the house was built. It's really heavy, and doesn't stay open without a board holding it up.

Our back yard has potential. It has a pretty nice slab of concrete for a basketball court. It needs a privacy fence (the back neigbor has 2 dogs that bark at me all the time!!!) and a really crappy boat trailer that needs a tire (anyone need a boat trailer???) that we need to get rid of. But it's perfect for our garden (you can see the frame of the square foot gardens Elden is building for me).