Road Trip to Jen's GRADUATION!

I hope all of you had a Merry Christmas and are enjoying your holiday break with family! I know I am :) I am also getting behind on blogging!

So to catch up, two weeks ago Mom, Dad, Trent, Amber, and I took a road trip up to Utah and Idaho for Jen's graduation from BYU-Idaho! We did a lot on this trip so be warned that this is a long post!

We stopped in Provo first for about a day and a half to see a bunch of family and friends there. It was so fun to be back and see some snow and feel some brisk air! I am definitely missing it down here in Arizona!

Wednesday (the 15th) was a full day! First I got to visit my favorite hairstylist Laura at the David Douglas Salon and get a haircut! She does an amazing job and I would recommend her to anyone in Provo looking for someone. Next we headed right over to Zupa's to have lunch with all of our cousins on my mom's side of the family. I was amazed that everyone could make it considering many of them were right in the middle of finals! Tiersha informed us it was National Cupcake Day so we took the opportunity to grab a cupcake from the Cocoa Bean. Unfortunately we didn't get a big picture at Zupa's (it was pretty hectic there) and then Josh and Tiersha couldn't stay for the Cocoa Bean, so they are not in our cute picture.

This picture cracks me up because Amy is a total loner on the other side of the table!

Later we met up with the Bennett's, cousins on my Dad's side of the family, at J-Dawgs for dinner. And I totally spaced getting a picture with them. Sorry guys! We took it easy the rest of the evening at Amy's apartment and watched "Oceans" (Amy's choice..haha).

The next morning, Thursday, I got to see my roommates from my freshman year at the Riviera. Rachel and Marissa met up with us at Kneader's for breakfast. We wish Jen could have been there to make us complete! It is always so fun to see them! We have such great memories together! Love you girls!

Before we got on the road to Idaho I stopped by campus to see Linda, my boss while I was working in the Church History department on campus. It was so great to see her and catch up for a little bit :)

The ride up to Idaho took longer than expected because we hit an hour of stop and go traffic. There was a huge accident with fire trucks and ambulances. A truck was completely tipped over. It made me so sad to think that someone's family was greatly affected that day :( PEOPLE, please be careful while you're driving.

Nonetheless, thankfully we made it to Idaho in safety and headed directly to Applebee's for dinner with the family.

Thane, my cousin, and his fiance, Shelby, were there who are getting married in just a few weeks! Trent and I cannot make it to their wedding :( so we gave them their wedding gift there. I should have gotten a picture of them opening their new waffle iron! I got one of us though :)

Best of luck with your big day guys! We'll be thinking of you!

Here is a whole group pic with my family, Gram, and Thane and Shelby :)

After dinner we got to go see Bree, Ivan, and their cute boy Alex and have brownies! Bree lived with my family for several months back in high school so we consider her kind of an adopted sister :) We also got to meet her sister Lindsey, who we had heard so much about! It was so fun to catch up!

Bree is the cute blonde, pregnant (you really can't tell in this picture!) one! We love you Bree :)

The next morning, Friday, we got to attend the dedication of the BYU-Idaho Center Auditorium (it is beautiful and HUGE!). It was a neat experience and we got to hear from Elder Bednar and Elder Nelson, as well as President Eyring who gave the dedicatory prayer.

Outside of the auditorium. Whoops, Gram blinked!

Jen walked later in the evening so we got to go to dinner first. We went into Idaho Falls to go to the Olive Garden there.

All of the girls (sisters)!

I stole some pictures from Jill (thanks Jill!) and Amy usually makes a face when Jill's camera comes up..haha.

With Jen after she walked!

The whole family!

Woohoo! Congratulations Jen!

Before we headed back down to Arizona we helped Jen pack up and move. She is officially out of Rexburg and moved back to Provo. She will be interning there with a wedding planner for the next few months! We are so excited for her and know that in the near future she will make an AMAZING wedding planner herself! She has such a good eye for detail and elegance :) Yay Jen! Love you mucho :)

I Made a New Pillow...

and it was super easy! We made it out of a placemat - an idea my mom got from a friend, Julie's, blog :)

To begin, all you need is a placemat that is made with two pieces of fabric sewn together, a seam ripper, and some polyester fiberfill.

My mom found this cute placemat at Target for $3.99 so this ended up being a really inexpensive and quick project :)

You simply use a seam ripper to pull the thread from one side of the placemat. You'll just need a hole big enough to fit your hand in.

Then, as I'm sure you can guess, you stuff your newly created pillow form with poly-fill.

And lastly you sew it all up. You can use a sewing machine or do it by hand. I just did it by hand. How easy it that?!

Loving my new Christmas pillow :)

Cheesy Potato Chowder

Isn't it the best to have a hot bowl of soup/chowder on a cold winter's night? Well it's not exactly cold down here in AZ, but Trent and I made this chowder last week and it hit the spot! The recipe is from eatbetteramerica.com and it is a "healthified" recipe. I have mentioned this concept in a previous post that you can find here.

It makes a lot (well there's just 2 of us) so you may want to half it or share with guests :) I'll direct you to Eat Better America to get the recipe. You can find it here. One of the reasons I love this website is because there are reviews and ratings for almost all of the recipes. I love to read the reviews to see how people may have tweaked the recipe.

Enjoy! And I'm a little behind on blogging so stay tuned over the next few days for a few more posts :)

Oh and I just have this picture because I wanted to show off our cute Christmas plate being displayed in our kitchen :)

Naked

Haha, don't worry, this isn't a dirty post!

I just love Naked fruit smoothies, in particular Mighty Mango. Anytime I'm not feeling so good, especially when I have a headache, I crave one of these.

Today I sent my sweet Trent out to get me one. Luckily he didn't have to go far - there's a grocery store, Fry's, right across the street :) But really, I swear these totally make me feel better! I don't know if it's all in my head or if it's all of the fruit packed in them!

This one has 1 1/4 mangoes, 1/2 orange, 1 3/4 apples, 1/3 banana, and a hint of lemon. Oh so good! They are a little pricey (about $4 for a 15 oz. bottle), so I rarely get them, but it's makes it that much more exciting when I do get one! If you haven't tried one of these you are missing out!

Such a happy scene!

*Spoiler alert for those who haven't seen (500) Days of Summer

I just posted this video to my Facebook profile, but I figured I'd put it here for anyone who doesn't really use Facebook. We watched (500) Days of Summer last night and I just love this scene :) How can you not feel happy watching this?? I love Joseph Gordon Leavitt's character in this movie. I kept telling Trent that his love for Summer is palpable. I can't help but feel sad that Tom doesn't end up with Summer in the end. But it's still such a good movie! Definitely one of my top favorites :)

Anyway, back to this scene. I've decided that from now on, if I'm ever feeling down, I can probably just watch this! Does it not make you want to jump up and dance with him?? If only everyone could always be this happy!

Deck the Halls!

We finished our Christmas decorating last week and I figured I'd put these pictures up for me to look back on.

Here Trent is putting the star on the tree. I realized after he did this that most people put their star on at the very end! We're just different I guess :)

This year, now that we're in Arizona near both of our parents, we got all of our ornaments from our parents. Both of us have a grandma that would give us an ornament every year. So our tree is kind of a hodge-podge of ornaments, but we think it ended up looking pretty nice! They are all totally different and it's fun to look at each of them :)

The final tree!

I changed out the fabric on my blessings board (which I wrote about last month) so now it's Christmasy :)

Here's the whole living room decked out :) It's so fun to have a mantel this year for our stockings. This is actually the first year we've gotten stockings b/c the last few years we came down here from Provo, so there wasn't really any point to have them since we weren't at our own place.

Hope everyone is happy and enjoys the holiday cheer over the next few weeks :)

Easy Black Bean Burritos

I made these burritos last night and they are definitely a fave of ours. And they are so EASY! The recipe is from the Colorado Collage Cookbook that Trent's aunt Tracy gave to us as a wedding gift. We have liked all of the recipes we've tried from it :)

You seriously just mince some garlic (if you want to use fresh garlic) and throw all of the ingredients in a saucepan for like five minutes and it's done!

You'll need:

1/2 teaspoon dried minced onion

1 teaspoon minced garlic

1 15-ounce can black beans, drained and rinsed

1 teaspoon ground coriander

1/2 cup sour cream

1/2 cup purchased salsa

4-8 7-inch flour tortillas

1 cup grated Monterey Jack cheese

In a large saucepan, combine onion, garlic, beans, coriander, sour cream, and salsa. Cook over medium heat, mashing beans with back of spoon, about 5 minutes or until thoroughly heated. Divide bean mixture among tortillas, sprinkle with cheese, roll up, and serve.

The final product! Their picture is a lot nicer :)

Delish! Enjoy!

Thanksgiving Week

We had such a wonderful Thanksgiving this past week. We have so much to be grateful for :) My mom's sister, Mimi, and her family (the Clark's) came from New York to celebrate with us. We were so happy to have them here in AZ! The older girls (Jen, Jill, Bryn, and Tori) stayed at our place and everyone else stayed at my parent's.

I didn't get too many pictures on my camera because when Jill's around she is constantly snapping away! I hate to have all of the same pictures as her so I let her take care of the picture taking :) If you want to see just about every detail of our Thanksgiving week, check out all of Jill's pictures on Facebook!

Here are my pictures starting from Thanksgiving. These first several are just kind of a funny progression :)

My family always jokes that when Trent married me he also married Jen!

Trent and I made a chocolate pudding kind of dessert called Lush. This was before we put the final whipped cream layer on. The recipe is from my cousin Michelle (I've put some of her recipes on my blog before).

I don't know who took this picture, but it's cute! Amber, my cousin, Tori, and Aunt Mimi in the background.

The beautiful Thanksgiving spread before we started eating.

Bird's eye view.

After we ate, we played a heated game of PRIZE, a Thanksgiving tradition we adopted from the Harrison's (Michelle's family) :)

After that we all took a walk around the neighborhood and threw the football around a little bit.

This picture cracks me up b/c everyone seems to be going in different directions!

The puppies were so happy :) They love walks!

Friday we did some Black Friday shopping, ate at Johnny Rockets for dinner and went to see the lights at the Mesa temple. While inside the Visitor's Center looking at all of the nativities we ran into Sister Fonbuena! She is a close friend that Trent, Jen, and I met at the Riviera in Provo my freshman year. It was so fun to see her and catch up a little bit! She heads home a few days after Christmas!

That evening us girls and Trent headed back to our place and watched "Step Up" and played Nerts (we played every night before bed!)

Saturday, Jen, Jill, and Bryn had to head back to Provo and Idaho :( The rest of us headed to Las Sendas for some "hiking". It turns out we just walked on a sidewalk most of the time, but it was a fun time! We took two bikes with us and took turns on them..haha.

I noticed this cactus along the way. How did they get that hat up there?!

Amber, my cousin, Paige, and myself.

This was our little bit of hiking! I'm kind of totally blocking Tori in this picture..haha.

After this we introduced the Clark's to Golden Spoon. I got the Pumpkin Pie flavor again! So good!

Sunday we just basically went to church and watched "How to Train Your Dragon" later in the evening. The Clark's headed home on Monday.

We loved seeing everyone during the break and were sad to see them go. Luckily we'll see them in 2 short weeks when we head up to Idaho for Jen's graduation :)

Sweet Tooth

I think my eyes seriously lit up like a child's when Trent walked in after home teaching a bit ago with these babies!

( And we had already each had one before I took this picture :) )

Haha, I have a serious sweet tooth! And I love cupcakes! They are just the perfect little size for me :)

I am 23!

I thought I'd do a quick post on my birthday. It's a little late, but I turned 23 last Wednesday, November 10. I had a wonderful day! Trent took me out to breakfast, instead of the standard dinner, because I had to work from 2-9. It was perfect though because going out to breakfast is one of my favorite things to do :)

We decided to try a place here in Gilbert called The Farmhouse. We had to laugh when we saw on their website that according to United Airlines it's among the top 25 things to do while in Arizona. What does that say about Arizona?? Anyway, we really enjoyed it and I'm sure we'll be back!

Unfortunately I don't have too many pictures from my day. I was teasing Trent that he was supposed to take them and that's why I don't have many.

There were a whole bunch of geese in the pond outside our apartment on our way to breakfast. They've been hanging out around here and it's kind of fun to have them..haha.
When we got back from breakfast I opened Trent's gifts to me and got to spend some time reading all of my Facebook messages and texts :) Thanks all! As I was getting ready to go to work my mom stopped by with some roses :) I didn't get a picture with her b/c I was in my bathrobe, but here's a picture of the roses later in the evening.

Several people told me they were sorry that I had to work from 2-9 on my birthday, but I didn't mind because I got to work with my cute coworker Kelsey! She's so fun, and pregnant :), and I just love chit chatting with her!

Trent usually brings dinner and eats with me in the mall when I'm working the evening shift so he brought fajitas. Oh, they were so tasty :) Later on my mom and Amber showed up with some gifts. I knew they'd do that..haha! I just opened them in the store. Don't worry, there weren't any customers around. It was fun to have them stop by! Again, no pictures :/

I got home around 9:15 and Trent had made me a chocolate cake. We didn't have quite enough candles from after we celebrated his birthday last month, so he just put in as many as we had.

23! haha

Trent sang, I made a wish, and blew out the candles :)

All in all I really did have a great, low key day, just the way I like it :) Wow, this post ended up being longer than I thought it would be!