Merry Christmas to all!

We had a wonderful Christmas holiday with both of our families this year.  We spent Christmas Eve and Christmas day at the Reimschiissel's down in St. George.  Not much of the "White Christmas" I was dreaming of, but it was fun.  JD gave me a wonderful jewelry stand, big enough for all the jewelry I could imagine, along with lots of other neat things, and JD was quite surprised with his new camcorder.  He has been fiddling with it since he got it, and can't wait to get all the bells and whistles to go along with it.  Check out the stockings I made.  I worked forever on them, and got them done in the nick of time--on Christmas Eve!  Do you like them?  We hope everyone had a lovely Christmas, filled with the Spirit of Christ.  Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Let it snow!

Boy, have we had some good storms lately.  They even cancelled school one day in Washington County where I work because of the snow.  It was taking SO LONG to get to school and back.  But while I was dreading driving in it, JD and his buddies were loving it.  They called each other up one night late to see if the other wanted to go make a snow-fort.  Of course both these grown-men wanted to go out and play in the snow for hours.  They didn't even ask the wives to come and play..how rude!  Just kidding.  Here is their creation:

Goodbye Christmas Tree

Christmas is over, and it was time for the tree and the decorations to come down.  But before it went out to the dumpster, I just had to take one last picture of it.  Isn't it cute?  JD went trekking out in a blizzard and cut it down for our little house, and we had fun decorating it.  This is the first year that we have had a tree and ornaments all together during the same year.  I'm still working on the decorating thing.  Hopefully I'll get better with time. :)

I love to see the temple!

Our ward had an activity where we had Pizza Factory for dinner and made gingerbread houses.  We decided to make our favorite place-the temple!  We modeled our house after the Timpanogas temple, although it wasn't quite to scale.  We had fun, even though our house didn't turn out very solid or stable.  We did, however, win a prize for the most creative house.  

Fun at the Gateway

While we were up visiting my family, we all went to Gateway.  We found out that the night we chose to go was also the night they were going to turn the lights on all over downtown Salt Lake.  It was packed.  At the Gateway, we waited around for what seemed like forever for the lights, but they never came on.  An hour past the scheduled time, and no lights. However, Jon Schmidt played at the Gateway also that night, and it was fun to listen to him and also a few other very good choirs while we were there.  We also got free hot chocolate and cookies.  Yum, Yum!  

An Apple a day...

While I neglected cooking the past few months, sweets have been sounding really quite good.  So one night I made some caramel apples, and they were so good we made quite a few batches of them over the next few weeks.  What do you think?  Don't they look tasty?

Happy New Year!

Here's wishing you a late Merry Christmas and a 'just-in-time' Happy New Year!  

Boy, what a dizzying few months.  I am loving my first year of teaching, but boy is it crazy.  I feel like there is always something else that I need to work on or catch up on.  If I only had time to spend an extra 3 hours there each day.  Oh well, life doesn't work that way.  Because I was so stressed there were a lot of things I neglected--such as:  my blog (obviously), writing missionary letters I've been putting off, cooking, cleaning my house, Christmas shopping, and finally, Christmas cards.  So, for those of you who didn't get a Christmas card (wait, all of you!), here it is.  But rather than a Christmas card, accept the New Year's card instead.