100th Post!

I think it's kind of appropriate that my 100th posting on this blog will also be my last one of this year/decade.

We've had a great year and are so happy to be married to eachother. We were lucky enough to be sealed together this August and I am so thankful that I'm able to be stuck with Josh for Forever! He is my best friend and I love him so much!

We've had a fun time this year, going on lots of vacations together and with friends. I lost my very special friend (Tinkerbell), and we added a sweet teddy-bear-of-shrek puppy to our family (Torque). Bentley is still running around like the crazy mutt that she has always been.

We've enjoyed our new house and took advantage of having a pool in our backyard during the very hot summer/fall weather.

Josh has switched his shift to a night shift, which he Loves! He has seen a lot more action (three foot pursuits in the first three weeks!) and loves not having to wake up at 4:30am anymore. I'm still getting used to not having to make dinner anymore, and to not seeing him when I get home from work. I'm lucky enough to be able to see him almost every day for an hour so at lunch time before he heads off to work.

We just had our 3rd Thanksgiving and Christmas together and I can't remember what life was like without having Josh around!

Wishing everyone a safe and Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas!

Christmas is my FAVORITE holiday! Josh and I had a good time putting up decorations, getting a REAL Christmas tree, baking goodies, buying presents and hanging lights. (Hanging lights wasn't really "fun" but you know how those things go)We spoiled ourselves and got everything we could ever want ;)

Josh got his dirt bike, a couple days early but still counts, an xbox 360, a bunch of games and controllers for it and a bunch of other stuff. I got a very pretty pink & silver CHI hair straightener that I Love! I also got a pink xbox controller so I can play with josh, and wii fit, some fun wii games, three pairs of amazing shoes (surprisingly all of them are sneakers) and a bunch more fun stuff!

Josh originally had to work on Christmas Eve until midnight, but because his knee was so messed up and he had a hard time walking, they sent him home after only one hour. So we both got off work early and packed up our dogs, presents and other crap and made the drive up to my parents. They weren't expecting us until Christmas day sometime and I decided to surprise them. They seemed pretty happy when we showed up at the door that evening :)

All of my sisters were there along with husbands/boyfriends. Melanie and Keats left their dogs at home, but without theirs we had 8 dogs running around plus the new pet cats. It was a crazy time, but we had a lot of fun. There were new board games to play and wii games to try out. I think the most popular one was the Cabela's Hunting one on the wii that comes with a rifle to use. The boys had a fun time trading off hunting different animals.

We ate a LOT of food, went to a crazy walmart the day after Christmas to buy cheap Christmas decorations, played games, froze our butts off and took a family picture. It was the first time since my wedding that we were all together.
My mom gave us no warning of wanting to take a picture, so this is how we look after a bunch of lounging around :)
And then this is how it is normally around the house. hehe

It's funny because it really represents how the weekend went lol

Here are a few pictures from mine and Josh's house....
police nutcrackers and a bagpipe playing one.... (Josh plays the bagpipes in case you didn't know)

Our tree

Josh making me nervous while he walked around on our roof to hang up lights.

I tried to take a picture of our lights because I thought it looked really good.... but the pics didn't work to well :(

We missed seeing Josh's family this year and hope they missed us too ;)

Hopefully everyone else had a great Christmas and will have a safe and fun New Years Eve!

Josh and His Toy

Years ago Josh had a dirt bike when he lived at home with his parents, but had to sell it when he wanted to buy some bag bipes to learn how to play.

Apparently he has been wanting one ever since then and.... well, he finally convinced his wife to let him get one......

I am not a huge fan of motorcycles in general, and dirt bikes fall into that category. The only time I've been on one was a long time ago when my younger cousin had a little tiny one to ride. I got on it and twisted the handle a little to hard because it shot off (and when it took off it made my hand twist the gas even more!)and then crashed me into a bush and a wall, landing me on my butt.

So obviously I don't have a very fond memory of that dirt bike.

I was worried about Josh getting himself hurt if he got a dirt bike, but he reassured me that he would be careful and that even if he broke his leg or something he would still be able to work. So I gave in and found a great deal on an almost brand new bike on craigslist.

His friend/our neighbor has a dirt bike as well and they were super excited to take it out to the desert for their first ride. I was working when I got the following picture....

***WARNING*** YUCKY PICS BELOW***

Followed a little bit later by this picture....

YUCKY! It hurts my stomach to look at it!

Surprise Suprise, on his FIRST time riding the stupid thing he crashes hard! Trying to do a wheely he falls over, flipping the bike and landing his knee on the wheel spoke, following that up with running over himself.

Tire marks go up his side and he has a nice big rasberry/burn on the underside of his arm.

Here he is all proud of his war wounds. His knee got hurt pretty bad, he needed to go get stitches but decided to play nurse on himself instead. It's healing up pretty nicely after a week of care, but he will have a nice scar after this.

We went out and bought him some knee/shin gaurds yesterday so hopefully this won't happen again. He told me he was nervous I would get mad that he got hurt, because he knew I was worried about it and he messed himself up good the first ride, but I told him I was just glad he didn't break anything. He then informed me that he would have sold the bike that day if he had broken something on his first time out. lol (maybe that would've been a good idea..... ;)

Time to Catch Up!!

I think this has been my longest blogging break ever! I apologize to my little sister Amanda, as I know she's been wanting me to update for a while.

Nothing to crazy has happened in our lives, but I feel like I have a lot to catch up on. So if there are a bunch of posts in the next day or two that's why.

THANKSGIVING

We were lucky enough to have Josh's parents and sister come to our house for Thanksgiving this year! Josh had to work so there was no way for us to go somewhere else. I had an interesting time trying out baking pies, making pie crust, stuffing, rolls, sweet potatoes and TURKEY etc. I made Josh's mom pull the guts out of the turkey as I just couldn't do it (yucky!).

Bethany (Josh's youngest sister) went on a ride-along with him on Thanksgiving Day. And when they got off and got home dinner was ready to eat! Josh's dad rode along with him the day after Thanksgiving while me, Bethany and my mother in law (Ila) went Black Friday Shopping! We spent tons of time in lines waiting to buy our awesome deals that day, but we had a good time. (And I think I convinced Ila that she can KINDA like Walmart ;) )

On Saturday we spent the day shopping again (with everyone there), had In-&-Out burgers for lunch, went to the Mesa Temple lights and then had Cheesecake Factory for dinner. yum yum!

We are so glad that his family was able to come and be with us for a couple of days! I got to spend more time with them than Josh as he had to work most of the time, but I had a good time with them and our dogs LOVED having them around! :)

Here are some pictures.... I couldn't move them around as blogger is being weird lately with pictures so they are a little random.

The doggies loved Josh's dad!

My very first pie/pie crust :)

Torque hanging out with Josh's dad

Socialism in America

I know when other people post youtube videos on their blogs I hardly ever watch them. I hope you take a minute and actually watch the two videos below. They contain words from a couple of the Prophets of our church and are really interesting to hear.


This first one has words from President Monson, President Hinkley and President Benson....



This second one is a clip from Radio Talk show host Glenn Beck. He is a convert to the LDS church and is very interesting to listen to. He has the 3rd most listened to radio show in the nation and a very popular news show on Fox News. In this clip he plays some audio from President Ezra Taft Benson that talks about socialism in America.....

Vegas Vacation cont...

While we were in Vegas we got the chance to spend the evening with Josh's aunt and uncle. It was great meeting them and we all had a fun time! We even got to eat dinner at my favorite place EVER! CAFE RIO!! mmmmm it was sooooo yummy!Here are a couple more random pictures from our trip....


While we were gone we had some of our neighbors taking care of the dogs for us.....

This is some of what we came home to at 11pm on Sunday night

These pictures don't do justice to the awful mess that was made in our house!

We walked in the door and were greeted by Torque, our puppy that HAS to be locked up when nobody is there watching him. Apparently they had forgotten to lock him up (But they had locked Bentley up, and she is the one that can be out and be okay) and they had also locked the doggy door so the puppy was locked INSIDE the house for who knows how long. *sigh*

It took us about an hour to get it all cleaned up, it had seriously looked like a tornado had gone through our front room and living room, pooping and peeing all along it's path. :P
I guess we can say there is a silver lining... we had been thinking about changing up our decorations, and Torque had done us the favor of pulling them down and eating the ones he thought we didn't need anymore.

Looks like we need to find some new dog sitters, anyone interested?? lol

Halloween Night/Vegas Vacation

We went to Las Vegas for Halloween weekend with our friends Billy & Kristen. We wanted to dress up and we came up with the idea to go as the The Flintstones.....(Fred & Wilma)


(They were Pebbles & BamBam)

Kirsten & I with the Stratosphere in the back

The men in the elevator.... hehe

We walked around the strip and inside some casinos (It was coooold outside) We kept getting stopped by people that wanted to take pictures of us, or get in a picture with us. At first we thought it was pretty funny, but by the end of the night it was getting a little old ;)

We had a good time, but I personally think Vegas is a little over-rated.

ONE YEAR in MARICOPA!!!

Today marks the one year mark from when we moved into our house in Maricopa! That year has FLOWN by! I can't believe we've been here a year already......

I Love our house and am so glad that we were able to get it and make it our own. It looks different from back when we moved in (the pics above are from a year ago, and then now)

As part of our celebration we bought a new patio set for our back yard. (okay so it wasn't to "celebrate", but we really needed/wanted one) :)

I'm excited for the years to come in this house! :):)

Halloween!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

Right now Josh and I are out of town and having a blast for our Halloween!

(We had to make up for missing it last year because of preparing to move the next day)

We should have some fun pictures to post in the next couple of days!

Hope everyone has a great Halloween!!

EwUH!

This lovely guy almost got made into mush the other day....

Josh & I were about to unload the patio set we had just gotten and Josh called me to the gate to show me this slimy yucky thing just chilling right in our path. (It was dark and I would've stepped right on him. EW!)

Josh got a broom and tried to scare him away, but he wouldn't budge. He had to be pushed with the broom .... blah! he was all squishy and yucky!

I was directed to hold the gate open so josh could push/scare him out. That's when mr toad decided he would start hopping and hopped right at me. I screamed and dropped the gate and ran away. Which was sucessful at scaring our little visitor into the bushes.

A couple of days later my dad came to visit and when I walked out to help him inside there was another toad (or the same one), hanging out in our front yard.

A few days after that Torque was in the backyard barking like a crazy dog, which he never does, so we went out to see what he was doing. He was standing barking at our new tree/bush. We thought he was crazy so we yelled at him to come inside, but a couple of minutes later he was barking again. Josh went out to find ANOTHER toad hiding back there that Torque had cornered.

We think they might be attracted to our swimming pool.... I hope not because I don't want to see anymore, and don't want them swimming around our pool!

Yuck!

Haunted Houses

A few weekends ago Josh & I went to a haunted corn maze / haunted houses thing out in Glendale. We went with 4 of our friends and had a great time! It was fun because one of the guys had never been to a haunted house before and he was nervous about going in them.

It was one of the best haunted houses I've been to, it actually scare me multiple times! We only got one picture from that night, and it was with this scary clown guy that was walking around out in front.....