Christmas

We spent Christmas break in sunny southern California with Josh's family. It was such a nice change compared to the freezing, snowy Utah. Josh and I slept in a lot, (napped too), read, and enjoyed being around all our family. It was so nice having all of Josh's siblings there. We also played games quite a bit. A nightly game of Killer Bunnies was common. One game of Killer Bunnies was particularly intense and lasted a couple hours or so. We had to have an intermission during it! Ticket to Ride was another favorite game to play. In addition to that, we went to movies (Twilight and Marley and Me), had some delicious Golden Spoon, shopped, played Wii, went to wedding receptions, and did a lot of hanging out and talking.

Josh's family opens their presents on Christmas Eve (now that all their kids are grown) because they are all in much better and happier moods (compared to being woken up early). Plus no one minds having their pictures taken since they are all already showered and dressed. I was quite opposed to this at first. I didn't think it would be Christmas-like without waking up early to open your presents. But, I admit, I did enjoy the nighttime present opening and being able to sleep in late on Christmas day. We got a ton of great presents such as the Twilight pajamas (we're wearing them in the picture above). Wendy (Josh's mom) got all of the kids Twilight pajamas. They were all different with the different sayings on the shirts but had similar flannel bottoms.

We also took some family pictures at Sears a few days after Christmas. They turned out really well and it didn't take as long as I thought it would with all 12 of us, including an 8-month old baby. Here are a few of them.
We had a wonderful 2-week break!!! The best was hanging out with family!

Thanksgiving Break at Disneyland!

Over Thanksgiving break we took the chance to go to Disneyland. We went on black friday, so a lot of people were out shopping and it was relatively uncrowded. Below are the pictures we took while we were there.

This one is me right before I pulled the sword out of the stone.

Jenna was not as successful, maybe she didn't have the same focused concentration on her face. she is cute though.


This is while we were waiting in line for the sweetest ride at Disneyland. Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. In this ride you steal a car with Mr. Toad. Get drunk. drive through a bunch of explosives and finally go to hell. it is so much fun. unfortunately the ride broke down while we were on it and we had to walk through the second half as we were escorted out.
This is in front of the giant Christmas tree that they had up. The park was all decked out of its halls with Christmas decorations.

Here you can see how the castle was decorated with snow and what not. we had one of the professional disney photographers take this one. thats why its at such a good angle and all.
They had real reindeer and a real pluto with reindeer antlers.
Jenna steered Tarzan's tree house to safety. Thank goodness I had her around. (we had so much extra time that, yes, we went up the tree house too and its not even a ride)

This is a sweet pic of the haunted mansion. Notice that this was about one hour after the park opened and there was not another soul on the streets yet. The haunted mansion was also decorated and completely different with the decorations of the nightmare before christmas.

Halloween

This is actually the night after halloween. We got together with a few friends and ate and played some games. Jenna and I rocked everyone at scatagories. Jenna traced our card costumes and then we colored them together. We then watched a scary movie and I (Josh) would have had trouble sleeping that night if I hadn't knocked myself out with some nyquil.


We used the carving kit that my mom sent us to follow a pattern and carve a sweet pumpkin. it was kinda hard but worth it in the end. Until we accidentally left the pumpkin by the heater one night and it completely filled up with black mold and got all soft. It was a serious biohazard for a while there.
This was us after carving our first pumpkin.
Ours is the skull and crossbones. The ghost is our friend jenni's and the flamingo is our friend becca's.
This was the second pumpkin we carved after our first pumpkin succumbed to the forces of fungi.