Christmas 2009

This Christmas we spent a week in Chicago with my family. It really was a blast! I only have pictures of the first two days because I forgot to snag the rest from my family, but if I get more later, I’ll be sure to send them. Here are some things we did:

1. We went bowling.

2. We spent a day in downtown Chicago. Mike has never had a city Christmas before, so we showed him the real city. Macy’s has a big tree, so we stopped by that. We also looked at all the Macy’s windows. We went to the bean and we went to the Christkindlmarket (a German market in Chicago). We bought ourselves a new ornament there and Mike even got to eat some Popeye’s!

 

3. We visited the Museum of Science and Industry. They had trees there from all the countries of the world. They had a cool mine exhibit and a body exhibit. Everyone even got to see how big Tennyson is!

4. We decorated sugar cookies. Some of the best were a pregnancy test cookie Mike made, gingerbread Mike and gingerbread Nichelle my sister Amanda made, and a Rudolph my dad made.

 

5. (This is where the pictures end) We played a lot of Killer Bunnies.

6. We had a wonderful Christmas, of course!! We got the best gifts! The day was perfect. It even snowed for most the day… a white Christmas!

7. We saw Avatar in 3D and Sherlock Holmes… I highly recommend them.

8. We went to Feed My Starving Children and donated some of our time to help the less fortunate. It is one of our favorite things to do when we visit.

9. Mike got to have his first taste of a Claim Jumper Chocolate Motherlode cake.

10. We went to the Shedd Aquarium (on one of the busiest days ever!) and we saw the new Fantasea dolphin show. It was cool; I’ve never seen trained beluga whales before!

That’s a brief summary of our week. I hope I’m not missing anything; we did a ton of stuff! If I ever get more pictures, perhaps I’ll post them. It was a fantastic trip.

Catching Up…

Okay, so we are a little behind… I’m going to tell you about Thanksgiving! (Ignore the fact that Christmas Eve is tomorrow.)

We spent Thanksgiving this year in New Hampshire with Mike’s family because Mike’s brother Paul came home from his mission in Spain. Here’s a quick rundown of things we did:

-Mike’s mom and I went to the salon to get our hair and nails done.

-Mike, his dad, and his brothers were first in line at Best Buy for Black Friday. They spent the night and that morning, they bought all they could get their hands on.

-We ate a lot of turkey, potatoes, green bean casserole, fudge, and Chex mix.

-We spent a day in Boston at the museum of science to see the Harry Potter exhibit. We also ate some tasty desserts at a place called Finale.

-We saw A Christmas Carol in 3D.

-We played (and dominated) Beatles Rock Band.

And now, pictures.

Way to be awesome, kiddo

This is our son. He aspires to be Batman. He is already practicing his karate moves inside of me. I feel one day the world will be safer and cooler with him in it. Just so you know, the only thing we added was the yellow outline. He really truly is dressed up as Batman in there.

All Hallows’ Eve

Ghouls, goblins, and boring humans alike! Last night was the wonderful celebration of All Hallows’ Eve, the most daunting, bloodcurdling night of the year. (On a side note, what does curdled blood look like?)

We hosted our second annual BEST HALLOWEEN PARTY EVER! After our Clue themed party of last year we decided that it would be a crime not to have another amazing shindig. So, like last year, I decided to go overboard with decorations to spookify the apartment. I’m especially a fan of the spider webs you can buy; they last FOREVER and don’t break the bank.

Last year we did a pot luck, but this year we thought it would be a nice change to have us prepare all the food and then exploit our friends by having them help pay for it. We thought we had gone a bit overboard on the food, but good thing because honestly I don’t think they’d eaten all week.

This year we went with a Cops and Robbers, or Good Guy  Bad Guy theme. We had all sorts of costumes: ninjas, forensic scientists, cops, robbers, mafia members, flapper girls, and even Mr. Monk and Natalie decided to come. Nichelle and I went for the classic cops and robbers look, which Nichelle pulled off exceptionally well (it makes me wonder a bit about her past). It was a great party filled with fun and games. Nichelle and I made up special Halloween and theme related lists for Scattergories which seemed to go quite well. It was a great party and we were glad that so many of our friends could come. It’s a little sad that we won’t be able to have a similar party next year seeing as we have no idea where we’ll even be living, but I’m sure we’ll make new friends who will think we’re weird.

The Pumpkin King

First of all, to make sure you’re reading this with the right voice in your head, this is Mike not Nichelle. Yes, yes, I apparently am still a part of this blog despite the pastel color scheme. As you may or may not know, Halloween is one of my favorite holidays and I tend to go a bit overboard each year, at least in terms of how much we should be able to afford.

A few days ago I was at the grocery store and finally bought two good sized pumpkins. Nichelle has been making me wait a few weeks now, and good thing because they were only 19 cents a pound! Not too shabby! We’ll be carving those soon enough. Earlier today I needed to go to the grocery store and what did I see? Pumpkins for only 9 cents a pound! (This was at Macey’s for all those in Provo.) Since I was there alone there was no stopping me from procuring a 25 pound pumpkin and taking it home.

While Nichelle was at work I had the pleasure of gutting the beast and smoothing out the interior. As a side note, a really nice tool for the inside of a pumpkin is the spoon-type thing that comes with a rice cooker (see below).

Another tip I came up with today. You know how pumpkin stems have all those little prickly things on them? Well, I just grabbed a small piece of sand paper and rubbed it down! Now it’s smooth as a baby’s bottom.

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Nichelle found a good stencil online and we decided to carve it up tonight. Nichelle traced the stencil onto the pumpkin via poking little holes through the paper with a push pin. Afterward I got to go through and cut it all out. Being a larger pumpkin there was a very thick flesh to the pumpkin which made it fairly difficult to get through. But after not much time, and no bodily harm, we had a mighty fine lookin’ Jack-o-lantern!

Chicken Parm

Mike made some amazing chicken parmesan for us last week. It was very very good. He’s really a good cook. Not only was the chicken made from scratch, but the sauce also. As much as I love chicken parm, the sauce was my favorite part of the meal. I was glad we had plenty of leftovers because we’ve been using it for a week now. It’s great!

The portion size looks huge in that plate. Don’t judge us. Neither of us actually had that big of a chicken breast. It just looked better that way for presentation purposes.

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

…for Mike at least. He absolutely loves Halloween. And for that reason, I’m sending out an early October Halloween greeting to everyone out there in cyberworld.

May this card urge you to be excited, be very excited, for the upcoming holiday.

Growing

I hit twelve weeks this week in my pregnancy! Almost out of the first trimester! I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am to be almost done with these first few months. Anyway, I figured I’d give you an update on my growing belly.

That was me four weeks ago.

And here I am now.

Okay, so not much of a change. Just a bit of a pot belly. And that could have less to do with baby and more to do with my (over)eating habits. But that’s about all we have to update now. We heard the heartbeat again at our last appointment and everything looks like it is going to continue to go smoothly!

My Eggo is Preggo!

Okay, I know we’ve been horrible at updating our blog lately, but there is a good reason why! As soon as we got home from Disney World we found out that I’m pregnant! We are so excited! I already had my first doctor’s appointment and we got to see the little lima bean inside of there and hear its heartbeat. Technology nowadays is pretty crazy. My parents barely got to have an ultrasound of me. Anyway, now that the secret is out, we’ll be better at posting (I hope). Here’s the baby’s first picture (it’s the lima bean looking thing inside the black bigger lima bean looking thing.) I’m due on April 22nd which means that graduation and my baby will come the same week. It’ll be a great adventure!

Disney World!

We got back about a week ago from a fantastic trip to Disney World. There are a ton of pictures and I don’t want to overwhelm you, but we just had a great time.

One of our favorite rides was Toy Story Midway Mania. It is brand new as of last year and so the line is always crazy long. But with our fantastic fast pass skills and arriving at the park on time, we got to ride the ride four times during out trip. Amazing. It’s a 3D shooting game. Fun fun fun.

Mike and I bought a lot of Disney’s new collectibles. They are called Vinylmations. Basically they are little Mickey figurines painted with different things from the parks. They are fun to buy because they come in a box and then a bag and you have no idea which one you are getting until you open them. In the set we were buying there are twelve different guys. We now have almost all of them and we only got two duplicates the whole time we were there!

I bought a little black book of Disney World before we went that had a lot of cool information on it. Then I went online to find lots more information about Disney World, including little secrets. This was one of the little secrets we were looking forward to. It is a speeder bike! A lot of people either don’t see it or don’t sit on it (because they think it is display only) but thanks to my incredible book, we sat on it. Actually, the book helped us a ton during the whole trip.

We got to see the actual stone table from The Chronicles of Narnia. Overall, this little walk through thing was kind of disappointing, but it was cool to see the table. So, I guess it was worth it.

Mike got to give Buzz Lightyear bunny ears. When my siblings asked why he did that, he responded, “How many times do you get to give Buzz bunny ears?!”

It was really hot and humid. I bought some fans at Target before we left (which Mike wasn’t sure about whether or not was necessary). They ended up being life savers.

This is me and Mike on Mike’s favorite ride: Expedition Everest. It actually is really cool. You go up a hill and start careening down and then you see that the track in front of you has been tore up by a Yeti. And luckily you stop just in time. Then you start going backwards (a different way than the way you just came). Then the ride stops and you see the shadow of the Yeti tearing up the track behind you. So then you go frontwards and finally get to the end of the ride (after some great drops and twists).

Okay, that’s enough pictures for now. I’ll probably tell you some more about our wonderful trip later.

Shakes

Of course while we were in Bear Lake we had to stop by Hometown Drive In for some shakes. The first time around Mike got cookie dough and I got twix. They were okay, but very vanilla-y. So the next time around Mike got reeses and I got oreo and they were delicious.

The Wasp Killer

When we got to my grandma’s property at Bear Lake, we realized there were a lot of wasps. So Mike got the wasp spray and started his killing rampage. I don’t know exactly how many nests we killed, but it sure was a lot. We didn’t see any wasps for the rest of the trip, so it was really nice that they all died.