Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Years Group Post

It's official. Jordan and I need to become more of a picture-taking family. All of these pictures are more or less shamelessly stolen from family members (love you guys!)
Update: I'm actually getting around to writing this post on 7/14/14. So, as it turns out, there will now be more or less no pictures.... oops!

Thanksgiving -
Thanksgiving was spent in Manti with the Wonderful Walser family. On the way up we discovered how important it was to have a working windsheild wiper fluid  nozzle, specifically on the driver's side. That was some wet, muddy snow we were kicking up!
We got to spend a lot of time with Aunt Caty & Uncle Adam's kids, Alex, Neala and Lici (Alicia). These poor snow-deprived children have grown up in Vegas, and so were very excited about building a snowman. Well...we tried. The sandy snow we were getting in Manti didn't want to help us out, but we tried! It was fun to see them so excited and re-opened my eyes to how much fun snow can be! And then my toes froze. And it stopped being fun.
Dinner was fantastic, the company beyond compare. We even got to join in on the Despain/Till Thanksgiving circle via phone. Hooray for technology!

Christmas -

We had a lot of fun decorating our little apartment for Christmas. We even had some presents (mostly our own Black Friday purchases) to put under the tree!

For our Christmas trip (soon after our fireman fiasco), we first quickly swung by Manti to say hello to the family and exchange gifts. Grandma Walser learned from Thanksgiving that I am a huge fan of peppermint patties, and gave me an appropriate gift.

She is one. Classy. Lady.

After nowhere near enough time, we braved the weather (which wasn't too bad) and started the trek up to Oregon. We slept in my attic bedroom with the two beds pushed together. It was so fun to get to spend that much time with Jordan in the home where I grew up! We also accomplished finally cleaning out my room. We didn't have much snow to speak of, but we made out like bandits with all kinds of good loot, including a new T.V., which we thought we were buying ourselves, but Mom beat us to the punch. The hardest part of Christmas was getting all of our gifts back with us!

A big highlight of our Christmas adventure was getting to talk to Hermana Chrysta Despain for the first (and with the way her mission is going, second-to-last) time since she started serving in Tampa, FL. It was so great to see her!

New Years -
For our New Year's Date we treated ourselves to a fancy dinner at La Jolla Groves at the Riverside Mall. A bit pricey for us starving non-students, but worth the splurge! Those guys have some fancy menu options. It was really good to have an excuse to dress up and do something different. We also made some plans for the  new year (writing this post up 7 months later gives me a good chance to check our progress!)
Resolutions:
Health - Lose extra weight, do 30 minutes of cardio 3x a week, improve on pullups and mile running time, stick to the Feel Great in 8 Challenge
Academic/Skills - Get Jordan graduated, find a new job, find a home, program (on the computer) a playable "Hand and Foot", learn how to sew with the machine (Angela), look into becoming a certified veterinary technician (Angela)
Character - Talk negatively about others less, and serve more.
Spiritual - Be 100% on church callings, including home and visiting teaching. Finish the Book of Mormon, attend the temple monthly, be consistent in journaling.

(July Update - well, a lot of the health goals got shot to pieces with the pregnancy. Now that I'm feeling better, I should really pick up on them! But I think pullups and running a faster mile might be out of the question for me. Academically we still have a little bit of work to get Jordan graduated, and I more or less gave up on certifying as a veterinary technician, but there's no reason not to finally open up the sewing machine! I think we're doing fairly well on our character building and spiritual goals, but might need to pick it up a bit on our progress in the Book of Mormon, and we definitely need to be more consistent journallers)