Merry Christmas/Happy New Year!

I thought I would start with a few Christmas pictures that I managed to take.

Case and Tuck on Christmas morning at my parent's house. We stay there Christmas Eve and then get up to head to Casey's parent's house first thing that morning and then we head back to my house. We go back and forth a little but we're lucky that they're only about 5 minutes apart.




All of us in our pjs and ready to go.



Casey and Tuck at his parent's house. Tuck does like us despite his poses in these pictures.



My mother-in-law and father-in-law on Christmas morning :)



Then we headed back to my house to open presents with my family. That's my mom, dad, Casey, my sister, and my brother-in-law and Lil is in the middle somewhere.



I managed to get this picture as Casey was opening his blu-ray player. I told him we weren't getting one for awhile.. and I lied :)



Miss Lillian who was more interested in bubble wrap and opening other people's presents. We got her the turtleneck and little wool skirt she is wearing. She did have a better understanding of things this year so that was fun to experience and we even got to do a craft with her on Christmas Eve. It's actually the same one that Heather posted about a few days ago but we didn't get any pictures b/c we were all covered in paint.



For New Years we ended up having people over at the last minute and ordering pizza for a pajama party... what better way to ring in the New Year!

All of the girls rocking our pjs. Our husbands/significant others were there but I realized I didn't get any pictures of them or me and Casey. Hm.



But I did manage to get a picture of me with one of the boys, of course.


I took a look at my blog to see what I was doing this time last year and what my resolutions were. I thought I wrote a big list of resolutions but it turns out it was just to make bigger progress on an issue that tends to sneak up on my life. I'm proud to say that I only ever make progress on said issue so I can say that I kicked that resolution in the face BAH BAH.

I also saw irony in the form of garlic knots. I haven't made them in awhile and it turns out that the last time I made them was around this time last year and what do you know, we had garlic knots tonight. That wasn't really relevant to anything, but there it is.

It's weird to look back and see that I was really curious about what 2009 was going to bring b/c 2008 was such a hectic year. We didn't really have a hectic year honestly. We purchased our first home together and that will be the biggest and fondest memory that I have of this year but otherwise it was just a year of working on our home and honestly just enjoying being married and hanging out with each other and our family and friends. It really was a calm and content year.

Sooo... resolutions for this year.

1. Continue enjoying this content feeling that I have with my life, my marriage, and our home.

2. Continue to make this home our own by making a dent in some of the home improvement projects that we have on our list.

3. Travel more! We didn't do any traveling at all in 2008. We didn't have much time off from the wedding and then it was into save mode for the home and then afterwards for all of the fun little stuff that pops up when you have a home (like a snow shovel when there's 18 inches of snow outside).

I think all of these are obtainable goals and I really do try to set 'resolutions' that can be met. Weight loss is never on there but I do always kick myself around the first to get back into shape. It's not that I let myself go over the course of the year, it's that I let myself go during the months of November/December. I have carrots and cauliflower pre-packaged for snacks this week and Cooking Light oatmeal in tupperware for breakfast every morning. No more of the binging on fun food for weeks at a time. It's back to just the weekends for that.

I should make a resolution to blog more but I know how sporadic I am and I know that if I don't have a lot going on then I don't blog so we'll see how interesting my life is. The hoseband and I are attending a tiling class next Saturday to attempt redoing our guest bathroom so I'm sure there will be posts once we get started on that.

I hope everyone had a great holiday and a good New Year!


Oh! Oh! Oh!

I forgot to introduce you to someone.

She's real pretty isn't she. She's just something special. My husband thought I needed one for Christmas after asking for the past 2 years and he was right! I made the above mentioned garlic knots with her today and I've also made chocolate chip cookies and a birthday cake so far.

Ok, that's all now.

Why Hello Again

I'm embarrassed that the last time I posted was Halloween and now Christmas is less than a week away. I guess you must know by now that I go in spurts. Sometimes I get a wild hair in my butt and blog frequently for weeks at a time and sometimes you'll see me blog about Halloween and then Valentine's Day. If you stick around you must be used to this so that at least comforts me.

I'm doing a ton of baking and more activities that I could blog about, so I really have no excuse. This past week we had dinner for Casey's Birthday on Wednesday with his parents and we had sleepover guests (my family) on his actual birthday on Thursday. I'm doing a lot of baking/cooking for Holiday parties and pot lucks and I'm about to gear up for my annual Holiday baking. I don't know if I'll actually get around to blogging these recipes but I'll link the recipes which is kind of close.

Sea Salt Truffles
Gingerbread Cookies
Peanut butter Blossoms
and Fudge (I use the recipe on the back of the marshmallow fluff I think)

I actually made Heather's Santa Surprise cookies last night b/c I was snowed in and I have a ton of baking supplies right now. I don't know if there's much I need to catch you up on. We've been preparing for the holidays, going to plays, parades, looking at Christmas lights, watching Christmas movies, shopping, wrapping, decorating... and we're having such a good time doing it in our first home.

In case you're not from this area, we do have a ton of snow outside right now! We've been home-bound since noon on Friday so I guess I have no excuse to not put up a catch-up blog post. Casey and I are surely spending a lot of quality time together right now if anything else haha! I made crack dip that I was going to make for a party on Friday night and we munched off of that and leftover food from his birthday party and played the new Mario game for Wii which is so much fun if you don't have it! If you're like me and have an Xbox or PS3 husband you'll appreciate a game that you can both play together. Yesterday I became acquainted with my new BFF the huge shopvac we got on Black Friday and literally went around and sucked up everything I could find in the house. We did laundry, cleaned a little bit, put a ham in the crockpot, watched Christmas movies and rented Four Christmases.

Here's some snow pictures. This was Friday night right when it started. I loved the way our LED lights looked underneath the snow.



This was our neighborhood last night. There was a lot of snow, but even more fell over night.


I don't think we'l be able to see our lights now. This was Saturday morning.


I opened the sliding door and Sookie and Tuck both took a big leap into a snow drift and disappeared. I dug him out and her (she's not even supposed to go outside and has never tried before then). She figured out she could walk on top of it if she ran really fast. You can see that when she's walking on top of it she's almost in line with the seat of our patio chairs.


Casey digging Tuck a potty circle. That's our gigantic holly tree in the background.



Here's our deck again. Check out the mountains in the background.







Yes, Sookie is still here. She even made it into our Christmas card picture this year. This might be her last appearance seeing as how she wanted to pretend to be a dead corpse in the pictures. Nothing says Merry Christmas like a dead cat!










Tuck does love here though, so we keep her around :) I seriously don't remember kittens being this hard to control. Maybe Tuck was easier b/c he was short and was never a chewer. I didn't have trouble keeping him out of things (and I still don't). I do have to watch out for her jumping on things as she currently swings from my roman blinds. I swear her water bottle gets refilled twice a day.








She makes me do crazy things like sling all of my sheers over the top of the curtain rods (in the background). Mom asked me if that was a style I was going for. Yes, if the style involves keeping her from swinging like Tarzan from sheer to sheer.








Merry Christmas!

Happy Halloween!

In case you don't remember, we take pumpkin carving pretty serious around here. This year we actually had a stoop to put pumpkins on so we decided to fill it out. The other side didn't turn out as well in pictures but Casey carved another pumpkin on the other side and I painted a white pumpkin with our house # (not very well, but it got painted). I might try to take a picture tomorrow during the day if I remember. I'm sure you can probably tell who did the face and who did the transformers pumpkin, but just in case you can't, I did the face. We're pretty excited about our first year in our house at Halloween and getting to hand out candy. We would get a handful of trick or treaters at the apartment but nothing overly exciting. Our neighbors have already warned us to come prepared with lots of candy. We live in a pretty family friendly cul de sac and there are a ton of kids in the surrounding neighborhoods, so I'm pretty excited.




I wanted to add these two pictures that I took with my phone. They're shots I snapped on my lunch break behind our house (that's our driveway in the picture). We have a gorgeous shelf of mountains behind our home that provide a great view from our deck. I was so excited to see the colors change and you can kind of see it in these pictures.

I can't wait until they're covered in snow, but I won't get ahead of myself. Everyone have a safe and Happy Halloween!

Valentine's Day continued...

Lilies are such a nice Valentine's Day gift but from now on I will be cutting the stamen/pollen whatever it's called out of the middle of it. I turned around to find Tuck's face completely dusted on Saturday.

::sigh::

I tried using a wet cloth to wipe it off, but making it wet just seemed to turn it into a homemade dye. We ended up breaking down and giving him a bath. Our Valentine's Day was off to a good start.

We had Lillian here with us for part of the morning.

She tried to make Tuck feel better about his yellow face and spent some time with him in his crate.

The bath seemed to make it better. Here's a picture of him sitting at my feet while I blog. You can barely see the yellow on his nose now. He just looks like he got some lovely yellow highlights

Aside from the stamen incident we had a really good Valentine's Day. After we gave him a bath we got ready and went to dinner. I got a steak with a demi glace sauce and Casey got a bleu cheese steak over top of garlic smashed potatoes. We grabbed some coffee and then came back to the house and watched some movies. I also made some mascarpone cheese brownies (YUM and I'm going to post the recipe after this post).

All in all it was a good Valentine's Day. We don't normally do anything over the top. We just usually go grab some dinner. I gave Casey a giftcard to Dick's and he gave me some bath stuff along with my lilies. We both had the day off today and we went to a movie and relaxed for most of the day. We went and looked at a house that we really really like that is a foreclosure (I'm pretty sure). We've been looking at it for the past week and we sent an e-mail to our realtor requesting that we see it. I hope that we end up liking the inside and I'll keep you posted if we decide to make an offer.

There's one more thing I have to add... I placed an order for one of these last night in bronze =)

My computer lasted me well through college but a couple of incidents have made it kind of a pain to use lately, mainly that it won't run off of battery at all. They shipped a free printer with it too and I think that ships out tomorrow. I ordered the laptop off of the HP site to save some money, but that means that it won't ship out until the 24th since they have to build it to my specifications. I still can't wait to have a new computer!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Most people hate this holiday and think that you don't need one special day to show someone that you love them. I'm a big goob and I see absolutely nothing wrong with sitting a day aside for this, b/c unfortunately we get so caught up in life and rushing around that we may not always make the time for each other that we should. If this is one day that people decide to go out or sit at home and have dinner together and just enjoy each others company then I'm all for it =)

My parents intended to go out to dinner for their Valentine's Day dinner last night, but somehow Lillian came along for the ride so we went with them to help with her so that they could enjoy dinner. It was nice to see my parents and it was interesting to try to occupy a baby in a restaurant. At one point mom was laughing at Casey trying to hold her while I tried to get lasagna in her mouth without losing the lasagna and stabbing her with the fork. We have a long way to go with figuring out babies :-\



I also had a little surprise at work yesterday. Every year I tell Casey not to get flowers and every year he sends them anyway and I always enjoy them =) This year I tried to point out that we would be at home together all day so sending flowers would be pointless and to save his money. He took it upon himself to send them to work on Friday and it definitely caught me off guard but it was a really nice gesture. Sorry for the crappy cell phone pick but here they are on my desk at work.

I'm not much of a roses girl, but I absolutely love lilies =) Casey is still asleep, but I'm going to make breakfast whenever he gets up and then we're just going to hang out until dinner tonight. He made reservations earlier this week (he's really on the ball this year!) and we'll head out to dinner and possibly go see a movie. He told me we could see the Shopaholic movie if I wanted to, but I don't know if I'll submit him to that or not haha.

I'm actually going to make mascarpone brownies with ganache today too and I'll post the recipe later. I really wanted a more 'gourmet' recipe for today and I've never worked with mascarpone cheese before so we'll see how it goes! I'll post pictures later.

Everyone enjoy their day and just enjoy being married/in love/engaged/dating/smitten with someone for today =)

Happy New Year! (a day late)

I hope you all had a good New Year. We ended up going over to a friend's house and watching the ball drop. I'm glad we didn't go too far from home b/c it was entirely too cold!

I can't complain about 2008, it was actually a great year for us. We got married, we got to go to Hawaii, we got Tuck, my niece was born, and we both were lucky enough to have jobs and keep them during a sucky economy. I can't wait to see what 2009 brings us. I can probably assume it's going to be much calmer than 2008, but I may be proven wrong. As far as resolutions... I've made a couple of personal ones and I really hope I'm able to follow through with those. I know my life as a whole would greatly improve if I can accomplish my goals. I won't really mention my resolution, but just pray that I can conquer some personal issues and I'll be glad to share my progress once I get started with my 'attack plan'. I probaly sound really suspiscious right now haha.

Casey and I both got a 4 day weekend so I'm pretty excited about that. We took our tree down yesterday and exchanged ornaments with another couple (Kara & Brandon) and Mason (their dog) and Tuck exchanged presents. We decided to exchange ornaments just as another way to save money and I kind of like the tradition. I love adding ornaments to our collection and I love the one they got us! It's a JMU boy and girl snowman. Aren't they cute?

I made an appointment for shaggy dog to get groomed at 12:30. We plan to go see Marley and Me and maybe do a little shopping while we're waiting on him. I really hope it doesn't take them long to groom Tuck b/c he developed a little anxiety about being left after we got him neutered. I've tried taking him in the car to a lot of fun places lately so that he won't always associate the car with taking him to bad places. I feel like he's just now getting used to it and now we're dropping him off to do something that I know he hates. Why do the things that are good for your dog (personal hygiene and the vet) have to be such traumatic experiences for dog and owner? I think with a dog you can't really say "Hey, I'm taking you to get groomed, but you're starting to get matted and you'll be so much cooler with your hair trimmed and you'll be able to see really good." Oh well, I was hoping that by doing it today, he would forgive me b/c we have a four day weekend with him and he still has the rest of today and the weekend with us to make up for it =) He's laying in the spot where our Christmas tree used to be chewing on his toy that Mason got him right now.

I'll post later to let you know how the movie was if we go and also to post pictures of my clean cut little buddy. I can tell he's ready to get a hair cut when he's little paws get long and his feet start to look like the Grinchs' haha. I guess I should go take a shower or something seeing as how it's almost noon and we have to leave at noon. Hope everyone had a great New Year and good luck with those resolutions if you made them!

Christmas- Come and Gone!

I hope everyone had a good Christmas! We had a really good Christmas this year and I didn't feel hardly any Christmas stress. I finished my shopping early and I took the day before Christmas Eve off to do all of my baking. I had the rest of the week off with Casey and we ended up staying with my parents until Saturday. Casey's family is only 5 minutes away and we're really lucky to have both of our families so close. It's so easy to go back and forth and we don't have to make a decision about who we see for Christmas due to traveling, we have everyone in one nice compact little town, literally =) We do have to travel in, but our 45 minute drive is nothing compared to the traveling so many people do around the holidays.

Tuck had a greeeat time. Going from being in an apartment and his thrill being watching the cars from our balcony, he was more than happy to have free run on all of my parents land and the option to chase THREE cats and to watch horses and ducks and get visits from his cousin Maddy (my sister's dog).

He was ready to square off with a cat on Christmas early. He loved getting up early and my dad usually got up with him and would let him run around for a little bit outside. Casey thoroughly enjoyed not having to get up at 6 or 7am in the morning to let him out. Thanks Dad =)



Poor Olivia... She could find solitude in the Christmas tree for the most part until Tuck would spot her.



Sporting his new rain coat from grandma and grandpa. We will get use out of this!

Lillian wide eyed on Christmas morning =)

Opening her Mozart Cube from Casey and me. We also got her the cute outfit she's wearing and a couple of others and a Busy Ball Popper (I may have had just a little bit more fun with that than she did). I wasn't really sure how to shop for a baby, but it was pretty fun to read reviews and see what other moms thought and of course testing out the product.

I think I realized half way through the day that she was more interested in bows than the actual presents. That's ok.

Meet Black Betty. She was my present from Casey and I love her. He's a good husband (for that and soo many other reasons). He also got me Animal Crossing for Wii (go ahead, call me a 5 year old, but that game is fun!), a couple of DVDs, some kitchen stuff, and giftcards. I would say that we were both very blessed this year.

I'm so thankful to have families that we are both able to visit on a holidays, and for the first time this year, a husband too =) Granted this was our 8th Christmas, but it was still nice to do one as husband and wife.

I'm slacking on the cooking stuff lately. I think I baked and cooked myself out over Christmas. I didn't even begin to capture everything in my blog, but needless to say I might be slacking on the cooking related posts. Although I did make chicken casserole tonight (mix 1 lb. of shredded chicken, a can of cream of celery and cream of chicken soup together, top with stove top and moisten the stove top with chicken broth. Bake at 350 degrees until warm). There's a recipe to tide you over! Hah. It's easy and Casey loves it... that works for me.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Oreo Truffles

I've seen this recipe floating around and it seems like almost everyone has either made these or at least tried them, except me. I don't really need anymore holiday candy (I have peanutbutter blossoms and two huge pans of fudge in the kitchen) but I was curious. These are GOOD. They are also very rich, so I think the 1/4 of one I had will sustain me for the next week. I've seen variations of this recipe, but I ended up using Vicki's recipe over at Vicki's Healthy Eats and Sinful Treats.

1 lb of Oreos

8 oz. of cream cheese, room temperature

1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

1 lb of milk chocolate (I used chocolate bark)

1/2 lb of white chocolate (I used white chocolate bark)

Grind cookies to a fine powder in food processor.

Blend cream cheese, cookie powder, and vanilla together with a mixer.

Roll into small balls and place on a cookie sheet lined with wax paper. Insert a toothpick into the middle of each ball and freeze until firm.

Dip balls into melted chocolate and remove toothpicks. Drizzle with white chocolate and decorate while still soft. Refrigerate until hardened.

Thankful

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving! Sorry for the lack of blog updates. The holidays are slowly sneaking up on me and we've been busy this week preparing for Thanksgiving. I decided to undertake the bird this year for some reason, and it actually turned out pretty good. Word to the wise, almost every single turkey that is frozen is already pre-basted even though it won't say so on the turkey anywhere. Pre-basted turkeys are not supposed to be brined. I brined mine for a shorter amount of time. It turned out juicy, but the whole time I had this huge fear that this big 23 lb salty bird was going to give everyone high blood pressure as an early Christmas present. I also made deviled eggs, pumpkin rolls, sweet potato casserole, and mashed potatoes. I enjoy cooking obviously, so I didn't mind at all. The food was good and I have a ton of leftovers leering at me from my refrigerator. I actually just had a piece of pumpkin roll for breakfast and I feel no shame.

I think that everyone, regardless of what you have going on this time of the year, should really think about what you're thankful for. I know I tend to think about all the things in my life that could be better, or that need working on, or if only I didn't have this to deal with etc.. You realize what a good position you are in life when you think about all of the positives. I have a huge list of things in my life that I couldn't begin to be thankful enough for. I have a savior that loves me unconditionally regardless of my mistakes. I have a loving husband that I'm thankful for every single day that I get out of bed. I have a family that I enjoy seeing and that I look forward to seeing on the holidays. I feel sorry for those people that dread the holidays b/c of their family. I don't consider myself unlucky that I was horribly homesick when I went away to college. I consider myself lucky that I have a familiy that I'm lucky enough to miss instead of the people who were glad to be getting away from home. I have an awesome puppy that loves me and shakes because he is so happy to see me everyday when I get home =) I'm thankful that I *do* have a job right now in this awful economy. I'm thankful that I have a home to go to everyday and that Casey and I never have to go without. There are so many things that I listed above that sooo many people don't have. It's nice to look at what you do have instead of constantly looking at what the person beside you has that you don't.

Well that ended up being a little more long-winded than I expected. I guess I could post some pictures from my holiday. I didn't take as many as I would've liked, but I tried to remember to take them when I could!

In attendance of our family dinner was: me, casey, mom, dad, my sister, her husband, my aunt and uncle, my grandma, my sister's lab (Maddy), Tuck, 3 cats, and Lillian.

This is my mom with her brother and his wife

My sister and her family

Miss Lillian

My turkey!

The inside

It's kind of blurry, but you can see Tuck, Maddy, and one of the cats swarming the dinner table

Me and Casey

These aren't from Thanksgiving but they were on my camera

I was on the phone one day after work and Casey decided to throw all of the baskets of laundry on top of me. This is why things don't get accomplished in my house if I'm not supervising ;)