7 Years Ago...

Happy Anniversary to us!  

7 years ago yesterday (December 27th), John and I were sealed together in the Salt Lake Temple.  I wanted to post a few wedding pictures, but because our scanner is not working, I'm posting one of a really fun trip John and I took 5 1/2 years ago.  While we were in England, we took a vacation to the Isles of Scilly, just off the coast of Cornwall.  In the 7 years we've been married, we've traveled to a number of places, including the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, England, Scotland, Wales, France, Austria, Germany, Hungary and Canada.  I'm hoping we'll add many more places to the list!  We've endured a lot of school together, finishing our degrees at BYU, moving on for me to pursue a graduate degree in England, John completing 4 years of dental school and now arriving at our halfway point for John's 1 year residency, here in Ohio.  We have a beautiful boy, wonderful family on both sides and are so happy!  

Christmas!

We spent Christmas Eve at our Bishop's house with his family and a few other families, eating dinner, playing games, sharing talents and reading the nativity story out of Luke.  Though we were away from home this year, we had such a fun time, making up for any loneliness we may have felt!  Below are a few pictures of the dinner, John doing the hokey pokey (our Bishop's family has a tradition of doing the hokey pokey every Christmas Eve), Caleb as a sheep and Caleb wearing a crown from a cracker (English tradition).   

After coming home and getting everything ready for the next morning, it was off to bed!  

Christmas morning we slept in (Caleb doesn't wake up until 9 am most mornings!) and then began opening presents.  We were so excited to show Caleb his train table that he got for Christmas, he LOVES trains!  

This is Caleb when he first woke up, he ran to the train table!

We opened presents until noon.  Caleb would open a present and want to play with it before we could move on to the next.  Here it is the day after Christmas and we just finished with the last present!  It wasn't that he had that many, it was because he took so long to open them!   After we opened presents, we had our Christmas breakfast (rather lunch!) and got ready for our Christmas dinner.  We had one of John's fellow residents over for dinner.  He is from the country of Georgia and was all alone for Christmas.  We played games the rest of the night and that was our Christmas!  We missed our family, but it was a wonderful Christmas!  I hope everyone else also had a really nice Christmas!

Today, the day after Christmas we went bowling, here are a few pictures of that too!

Kirtland Nativity

Today, Caleb and I joined up with my friend Laurel and her kids, to see the nativity sets displayed at the Kirtland Visitor's Center.  The nativity sets that are displayed, come from all over the world and are definitely worth seeing.  It was tough to keep Caleb's little hands away from the beautiful sets!  A big thank you to Laurel and her kids for taking us along!

Caleb was happiest running around in the snow.

  

Christmas time is here!

I love the Christmas season!  The lights, food, service, gifts, love, music, the whole package!  Last weekend we finally made it out to find a tree.  We chose such a cold day!  On the radio, we heard the wind shield was 7 degrees, yikes!  Not only was it extremely cold, we went out just as it started snow.  Even though I bundled up Caleb, he screamed the moment we stepped out of the car.  Being new to the area, we really didn't know where to find a tree, so we ended up going to a tree farm where we had to go and cut down our own.  The trees weren't all nicely lined up by the parking lot, it was a hike to find the perfect tree!  Not a hike I would have chosen considering the weather and a screaming toddler.  Caleb would not let me put him down, nor would he let John hold him.  Alas, an hour later we finally found our tree, sigh.  It was not the perfect one I wanted to find, and it was a bit more than I wanted to pay, but by that point, none of us cared much about anything, except making it back to the car!  

Those few miserable hours finding a tree was worth it in the end, we now have our Christmas tree!