Christmas

Christmas this year was so fun. We had four different Christmases. We started out on Christmas Eve at our apartment, where we exchanged gifts from each other. Here I am getting ready to open the first gift.

Here is Matt opening his first gift. Then we went over to Matt's parents' house for Christmas Eve dinner and his family tradition of watching Nora's Christmas and Muppets Christmas Carol. We also all got pj pants.

Kyle was so cute...he just wanted to open all the presents under the tree. He kept getting them out and bringing them to us.

We got him this little guitar. He was just so excited to actually be able to open a present.

Then we went over to my family's house to spend the night. We played our usual Christmas Eve game, but we decided against playing the traditional Risk because it was already so late. So we played Battle of the Sexes instead. All of my siblings came home and slept over so it was fun to have everyone together again.

Here we are on Christmas morning tearing into the gifts! Laurie woke us all up at 6 a.m.

Allison got this cool Disney Princess blanket that had a crown that lights up. She proudly wore it all day.

Matt got a giant tub of homemade chocolate chip cookies.

Here we are with our cute cute stockings.

Matt found a pear in his stocking! It was hilarious! We always get a piece of fruit in our stockings, and Matt got a pear because he always makes fun of our pear pie! I got a caramel apple in my stocking. Mmmm.

Here we are sitting in all the wrapping paper and stuff after all the presents were opened.

Matt also got a roll of cookie dough in his stocking. He loves cookies and I rarely make them, so he got some cookie dough. The funny thing is that I got some chocolate chips in my stocking as a hint that I should make cookies. Ha!

Laurie gets this giant peanut butter pie every year.

After we had breakfast at my family's house, we headed down to Spanish Fork to my grandma's. All the cousins come over on Christmas and we have a cousin gift exchange. My cousin gave us a lovely six pack for our gift! Ha ha!

He put a note on it that said, "Make sure to drink responsibly or don't drink at all." Don't worry, the bottles were empty. And it had a gift card in it.

Scott and Mystie weren't there so Michael decided to open their gift to see what it was. Here he is carefully slitting the tape.

After that we headed to Lehi to Matt's grandma's house for dinner and more presents. Here I am concentrating on opening my gift from Grandma Lively. Apparently I stick my tongue out when I am concentrating.

We had lots of fun and got some awesome presents! We even got this cool House Divided hot chocolate mug.

We got snowed in at Grandma Lively's that night, so we didn't make it back to our apartment til the next day. But we had a super Christmas. Here I am enjoying our new indoor bike trainer.

It was such a fun Christmas, and I'm glad we got to spend time with each other and with our familys. Merry Christmas to everyone!

Snowed in

I will blog about Christmas later, but I had to share this great adventure we had. On Christmas Day we were enjoying a lovely time at Grandma Lively's house in Lehi. We were getting ready to leave when we noticed it was a complete blizzard outside. It had snowed quite a bit in the morning, but the afternoon was pretty clear, so we thought we'd be ok. Anyway, we got in the car and started to make our way to the freeway. It was a complete white out. We could barely see two feet in front of us. So we decided to turn around and go back to Grandma's house for a few hours to wait it out.

Matt's dad and brother decided to try themselves and came back a few minutes later saying that the road was closed. To make a long story short, the road didn't open back up again so we all spent the night at Grandma's. She got out all the blankets and pillows and we all spread out all over the house.

I was laying down on the couch and the dog jumped right on up next to me and weasled his way in there. (I'm not the biggest fan of dogs.) Anyway, we were all spread out on the floor and watched a movie while we waited in hopes that the storm would clear up.

But it never did, so this is where we spent Christmas night. It was quite the adventure. But the funniest part was when I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and there was Matt's uncle sitting at the table in his boxers eating cookies! Hee hee! But we ended up getting probably about a foot and a half or two feet of snow. It was crazy!

And the stockings were hung

I decided that we needed these stockings for our first Christmas together. I saw them at the store and thought they were adorable, so I got them for us. And Matt's is not deformed, it just has stuff in it! Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

I love to see the temple

Last night for FHE, we went to Temple Square to see the lights. This is one of my favorite Christmas traditions.

It was very cold. But we had a lot of fun.

Matt especially loved the orange lights.

And I liked the pink ones. And they had this new display of Mary and Joseph that was on top of the reflection pond. I absolutely loved it!

Hurray for the temple lights!

Who needs a reindeer?

Who needs a reindeer when you can have a horse on your balcony? I am totally not kidding, an apartment at the complex just up the street from us has a horse with a wreath around its neck on their balcony. See....

It is one of the weirdest things I have ever seen in my life. So of course I had to take a picture of it. I made Matt pull off to the side of the road, and I had to take like 12 shots to get a decent one. WEIRD!

No room in the inn

So Matt and I got into the Moab 1/2 marathon in March. Apparently there are so many people that want to do it that they have a lottery drawing to see who actually gets to run. Well, we got into the race and the other day I was trying to book us a hotel room. Come to find out....they are ALL BOOKED. Everyone I talked to said they have been booked for months, and that I should reserve a room like a year in advance! Who knew?

So we are staying in Green River, which is about 50 miles away from Moab. So I guess we'll be getting up earlier than planned on the day of the race. But it was better than Option #2, which was camping out on the Moab church lawn or something of equal discomfort. And if I'm going to run a 1/2 marathon, I'd rather not sleep with a rock jabbing me in the back the whole night before.

P.S. Marathon training is going quite well. We've made it through the first 4 weeks of training, and we're starting on the 5th. Go us!

Today I am grateful for...

...the bus! Otherwise I would be stuck driving all the way to Provo in this...

...instead of taking a little nap on my way to work. Good thing the blizzard at least waited until after my morning run!