~Craft Night~

So my beautiful friend Rachelle invited me to a craft night a couple months ago put together by this amazing lady in the valley. Her name is Mandy Schiess and she has a blog called On The Avenue. (www.ontheavenuelogan.blogspot.com) The craft night was so much fun and our projects turned out so stinking cute!! Since then, Rachelle and I have been to two more. The last one being last night. So far I've made 7 adorable projects (if I do say so myself) and I LOVE them! And of course I'm going to keep going!

There are a bunch of things that I love about these craft nights.

1. Everything is put together for you. Mandy and her husband have everything cut up and put into kits. They have the paint, mod podge, sanders, everything there so you just buy what you want to do and put it all together there. I love love this because a lot of the time I'll start something at home then I will never get around to finishing it. This way I'm just there for a few hours and I get to take home all made projects for my home.

2. Mandy is so great! She has such an awesome personality and is there to help you out with anything and everything. She and her husband also run all big nail and staple guns and sanders so that you can get bigger, cuter, put together projects that I wouldn't be able to do at home.

3. A lot of people go and do the projects so you can get ideas from the different ways people are doing their own things. This has helped me out a lot because sometimes I have a hard time getting my own creative juices to flow.

4. The prices for the projects are super reasonable. Like I said I just love being able to have a finished project to take home!

5. They do a drawing every time! The first night I won a free haircut from Valhalla. Last night they told us they're going to start doing bigger things as well like furniture (that they make and have all made of course) and other decorations. Last night they had an awesome decorative chair and welcome post for outside. I am so jealous of the people that won those. :) Maybe next time.

If you wanna come to the craft nights, I've been inviting everyone I know that I think would be interested in it. Her blog for the craft nights iswww.supersaturdayswithontheavenue.blogspot.com. The next craft night is at the end of August and she's got a whole bunch of Halloween crafts to do. I am very excited for a couple of them. Also, if you go on to good ole Facebook you can find her page there.

From our first craft night. My super cute Watermelon Welcome sign. It's what I tell people when they're trying to find my house. "It's the one with the big watermelon on it!"

My Lazy Days of Summer Blocks (also from the first night). I almost didn't do these because the picture she had they had a white background. But then when we got there she had brown paint, which of course immediately made everything better. For me anyways.

God Bless America! These are from the second craft night we went to. At first I had painted all my blocks blue and Rachelle had painted all of hers red. Then we saw that a couple other people had painted their blocks every other color. Ugh it's one of those times where we should have watched other people first. :) So Rachelle and I just switched every one of our blocks so that we could have it that way too.

I seriously LOVE these!! They're humongous so it took some rearranging to get them all to fit on my shelf. But I love them.

And finally, from last night. We made a bunch of fall stuff. I had zero fall stuff so I was pretty excited.

A cute birdhouse that I almost didn't make but decided to anyway.

My favorite from last night was this beadboard with sunflowers! I love love love it! I am proud of myself for taking a "risk" and distressing the inside with white instead of leaving it just brown, but I'm really glad I did. I love how it turned out.

Here is a picture of mine and Rachelle's boards. She did her's red with a brown distress over white. I like how they both turned out. :)

~ Bear Lake Weekend ~

Shane and Rachelle and me and Jared wanted to do this last summer and ended up not doing it. So this year we managed to get it together and go! Shane has some family that owns a cabin at Bear Lake and they managed to reserve it for us to use over the 24th of July weekend. It was so much fun! The cabin itself was really nice and is on a part of the beach that's private. That made it even better since it was a holiday weekend and for some reason a million people go to Bear Lake on the holidays. We hardly had to deal with other people at all.

Once we finally found where it was (it took us forever!) we went and spent a little bit of time on the beach since it was a little later in the day when we got there. Shane's sister and cousin were there with us too and we went back to the cabin/house! and made some burgers for dinner. Afterwards we went outside and watched the fireworks going off all around the lake and talked about the show 1,000 Ways to Die. Which sounds really horrible, but for the most part it really should be called 1,000 Ways Some Really Stupid People Have Died. When we went back in we watched Red Riding Hood which Shane and Rachelle had got from Netflix . . . not gonna lie. It was a horrible, horrible movie. But at least it's something we can laugh about. What a dumb movie though. Seriously. I'm sorry if there's anyone who um liked it. :)

The cabin itself was really nice. On the third story of the house they had a game room where we got to play some ping pong and air hockey. I think Jared was being nice to me when we played ping pong, but still! I won 1 out of 3 games. And that is something I am definitely proud of. Ha ha!

Sunday, Jared and I made french toast and scrambled eggs for breakfast after watching GI Joe in the morning. Afterwards, we made it back out on to the lake. The water was so cold! It took a lot of coercing on Jared's part to get me all the way into the water. Although, I wasn't as bad as Rachelle. :) They had found a couple of tubes in the garage where we were staying and it was hilarious watching Shane and Jared trying to stand on top of them.

I am seriously the biggest dummy. For lunch we were supposed to bring our own sandwich supplies and I forgot our Miracle Whip. Now, I refuse with all my heart and soul to put Mayo in my mouth. Gross. Gross. Gross. So I was a little upset about that. So I had resigned myself to a plain sandwich when I opened the turkey I bought and realized . . . it's the wrong kind. It was the gross kind. Ha ha! So feeling a little bitter, I grilled myself some cheese sandwiches and pouted while we watched Couples Retreat. Not as funny a movie as I thought it was going to be. In fact, it was really pretty slow. Oh well!

Later we grabbed some milkshakes and fries (what would a trip to Bear Lake be without getting a shake!?) Spent a little more time together and made it home. Despite my sandwich failure, it was an awesome weekend!

Playing games and waiting for dinner.

Getting the canopy set up.

The place next door to the milkshakes was an antique store. Of course we had to stop and get a picture.

Standing on the balcony looking out on the beach in the morning.

3 Years Down (Eternity to Go)!

We just celebrated our third anniversary! I cannot believe how fast time goes by! It's crazy! We decided to keep it fairly simple this year and went and spent the day at Lagoon. While we were there we had a bit of a surprise when we saw my youngest sister Heidi there with one of her friends and their family. She is so sweet. She came running up to us while we were sitting in a ride to wish us a happy anniversary. I love that girl!

By far one of the best rides ever at Lagoon! Love Wicked!

Afterwards, we went to the theater in Ogden to watch Super 8. We love going to the theater in Ogden (and Salt Lake) for the pure and simple, beautiful reason that you get reserved seats and we don't have to wait in any lines! We really liked Super 8 and that's one that will probably end up on our movie shelf. By the way. Has anyone tried the D-Box seats at the theater there in Ogden? What it is, is the seats themselves move with the movie. Kind of like a Disney World type thing. We just did the sample they have sitting there where you by your tickets and I think it would be so fun to try out for a whole movie! So when we do I'll let y'all know if it's worth it.

It was a great day! But I love any day that I get to spend with Jared. Yup. I think I'll keep him.

Grad School Here I Come!

So after a very long, very stressful year of studying for the GRE, writing a letter of intent (painful to say the least), taking the GRE (Ugh. That is all.) . . . I am in! I'll be starting grad school this fall!

This is what I felt like when I found out that I got in!

I've decided to go into School Psychology EdS. and (hopefully) School Counseling as well. I'm actually really excited and scared at the same time. Just the idea of finally getting closer to being done with school . . . and into real life, real job, etc. It seems a little overwhelming if I think about it too much.

My program will be 3 years long with 2 years of classes and my third year will be a full paid internship. I've heard rumor that after I get my EdS, if I go to the U it's just one more year and I can get my PhD . . . Now if that's true it's definitely something I will look into. But we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. Until then . . . YAY!! I'M IN!!

~ Our Weekend Getaway! ~

Jared and I decided we needed some time away from everything for a weekend. Just take some to reconnect a little bit away from family, friends, work . . . and just spend time together. So we booked a room at La Quinta in Salt Lake and headed down. For dinner we stopped at Outback Steakhouse in Layton which we'd only been to once before. It is soo yummy! Jared is in love with their baked potatoes. They are probably so horrible for you but they are delicious!

The next day we decided to head over to Hogle Zoo. Which I've never been to any other time than summer so going in March was a little chilly. I guess they're building an entire new section at one end of the zoo. So they didn't have the polar bears or penguins since they're going to be moving them into the new section. We're gonna have to go back when they get it done! We ended up spending three hours there anyway and had a lot of fun.

Finally, we ended our day by going and spending a little bit of time at the Clark Planetarium. We were too late to make any of the good films they have there so we just walked around looking at all their displays and pictures. We also spent almost an hour trying to defeat Level 4 on the games they have by the planet display. We were bound and determined! In the end, we were finally successful. Our reward . . . a picture of space. :) So worth it!

By far one of our favorite parts about the zoo were the all the tigers. They are so huge and so beautiful! We loved them.

We were lucky enough to be able to watch these two in a big race! The little one, who we were cheering for, won!

My other most favorite part was the elephants. They were so cute! We watched them for almost a half hour because the zoo had the radio blasting and all three elephants were dancing in time to the music. It was so awesome!

Meet Mr. Grumpy Pants. He did not move or blink I swear for like 15 minutes. Even with all the little kids smashed up against his window, nothing fazed him.

I think Jared might be a little bigger than the natives who made these little dwellings were. I'm just glad he didn't get stuck.

This is Jared's "determined" face.

And of course . . . our amazing reward. :)