Wedding Plans

I figured I should maybe write something on here about wedding plans.  All things considered that is probably the HUGE thing happening in our lives right now!  After going around to a bunch of different locations around the Salt Lake area and after going to a few bridal shows we found the perfect place to have our wedding.  I love it!  It is called the INN on the Creek.  It is a really cool place and has a great ambiance.  Shortly After finding this place we found my dress.  I actually had found two dresses that i really liked but one had no sleves and the other didnt have a train.  So we went into Alysses Bridal in the mall and they had one that was pretty much the combination of the two!  I was so happy.  I get to pick it up this monday!  We have the cake and cupcakes ordered and flowers are all ready to go.  I wanted to use white calla lilies and a light green hydrangea.  OH my colors are kind of a pastel lime green,  a really bright pastel blue, and dark chocolate brown.   We got our engagement pictures done last weekend.  Dustyn, Jace's brother in law is doing the photography for us.  He is so good, I love what he can do with a camera!  I will post some of them here as soon as I get them.  The Announcements are going out today!  Yay!  The only thing I was stressed about is finally taken care of!  We are going to go get our pass ports taken care of today and our marriage license as well.  I cant wait for our honeymoon!  We are going on a 7 day mexican rivera cruise!  It will be so much fun!  Neither one of us have every been on a cruise before, we are both way excited!  I had two bridal showers one up here in Utah that Jace's sisters and mom threw for me.  It was alot of fun.  I got to get to know some of his aunts a little bit better.  It was also a little embarassing as well.  I had to take a rose and pull each petal of it off and for each petal I had to give a reason that I loved Jace.  For those of you who know me you know that I hate attention being on me and also hate equally as much talking about my feelings.  My head tends to go blank when put on the spot like that :), but it was still alot of fun and they put alot of work into it!   Then I had the shower down in California.  My moms good friend Elizabeth threw it for me.  It was so nice and a ton of fun!  I got to see old friends and catch up with a lot of people that I had lost contact with.  Once we got back from California (we didnt want to come back, the weather was so nice.  I didnt realize how much I missed that place till we went back) my mom and I have been non stop getting the last things we need for the wedding and reception.  I think we finally have it all.  Jace and I went and chopped down a quaky aspen tree for our center pieces yesterday.  Now it is all just a matter of putting it all together. 

What's for dinner... (jan 26th)

So Jace and I decided that we were going to make dinner one night.  We went to the store and were wondering around trying to figure out what to make.  I think we had decided that we were going to do steak with salad and asparagus but then as we continued to wander we decided to throw some shrimp in there too.  As we were walking away from the seafood area Jace saw this...

 

He was instantly in heaven, I was totally grossed out!  I have never had crab and by the looks of the dang things I never really wanted to try one.  Have you ever really looked at a crab?  I mean really looked at one.  Unfortunately for me I am the investigatory type.  I have to pull and poke and look at every since part of that dang thing.  I dont know why I am this way... I think it could be some type of sickness.  Those little suckers are (as my dad would put it) uglier than a whole 10 miles of muddy road! The top half of them are bad enough with their funky little eyes and creepy mouths and their claws and their legs ew yuk!  But then if you flip them over they are hairy!!!  EW SICK!  I had no idea that they were hairy.  And to top it all off remember I live in Utah.  Utah equals no ocean which makes me question the freshness of any kind of sea food!  Anyway so needless to say we bought on and brought it home for what now had turned into not just a nice little dinner but a frekin free for all gorge fest!  Now I have never had or prepared crab before so i had no clue what the heck to do with it, so I looked to Jace and asked if he knew what to do with it and of course he said no and then proceded to throw it into a pot of boiling water.  So once it was all cooked we sat down he ripped the legs off and we ate those which werent bad except the texture.  For those of you that dont know I am a texture freak, if it has any kind of mucousy texture or mushy at all I generally will gag and not be able to eat it.  This little crabby of ours was a little on the mushy side, but I toughed through it. 
 

Now the eating of the legs was fine ...went pretty smootly, however Jace thought there was more meat than just the legs ... that is when the myhem started.  There was stabbing, poking, proding, oozing, gaging.  It was not pretty.  The problem, was we didnt know how to get into the dang shell!  So we kind of destroyed the poor little sucker! 
 

Once we were sufficiantly grossed out we decided to call it quits on the crab.  Or so I thought Jace had the lovely idea to look it up on the internet as to how to get into the rest of the crab.  Once we had step by step instructions it was pretty easy to get into.  But after what we just did to the thing and seeing all that nasty stuff ooz out I really had no need to eat any more, I did force my self to try a little but more.  It wasnt terrible, but I think I have had my crab fix for a while!

 

 I think the next time we do the crab thing it will have to be at the crab shack, red lobster, or somewhere in California where it is nice and fresh!  Anyway it was a good experiance and we had tons of fun!

New Years eve and Day

We spent New Years Eve and Day with Jace's  family.  We had a ton of fun. We hung out, played with the kids, made some pretty dang good food, played all kinds of games, and rang in the new year!

I dont know if everyone was able to check it out, but new year's eve there was an awesome moon.  It is called the first moon or a blue moon it was really cool looking ..

 

We played this game called quelf that night ...  if you have never played it or even heard of it let me tell you it is pretty dang fun and funny but you have to be willing to make a total idiot out of yourself.  Anyway I got this rule card that said I had to put the quelf box under my shirt and keep it there the entire game, that was just one of the many wonderful things you get to do so you should all go out and buy it right now, play it, feel it, love it!   

 

I think we were all up till about 3 in the morning just messing around and having a good time.  We woke up at about 630 am new years day so we could go ice fishing.  That was a first for me and let me tell you I was very nervous about it.  Just as I would start to get somewhat comfortable being on the ice like that I would hear the ice crack or the snow would melt off the top of the ice and you could see all the cracks through the ice.  Other than being a little scared at first it was pretty fun. Kamie and I started out in the ice tent, it was so dang cold out there.  I am a total wuss when it comes to the cold but still!

 

I had a few bites out there and actually caught one.  The dang thing pretty much jumped out of the hole and just about slapped in the face. I screamed ... it was pretty funny.  I think everyone that went caught at least one fish.  Some of the fishies werent the biggest but like mine but it was still fun to catch them and throw them back. 

 

So new year's day was spent in the middle of a frozen lake, and yes that is right I am wearing a camo snow suit!  Who would have thought that that would ever happen. Ha Ha Ha.  Oh yeah and if any one is wondering about Gabby the Cabage Patch doll well I can't tell you about her right now, but I will in a year or so ha ha.  Just know that she will be making appearances ever so often.

Christmas Day and a few days after

 After watching the kids open all their presents and having breakfast we headed up to my parents house in Midway.  As we were leaving we noticed the frost all over everything it looked soo pretty ...

 P.S. have I ever told you how much I love it up there.  It is so nice up there and I love their house.  When ever I go up there it feels like the house that I grew up in.  I am sad they moved out of the house I grew up in, but I do love them being so close.  So anyway we headed up there for a couple of days.  It was fun to spend time with my brothers and family.  My parents live right down the street from this road called wildlife road.  They call it that because there is an entire heard of Bull Elk just chillin out there all the time.  Jace loves that road we sit there with glasses looking at them everytime we go up there for at least 20 min sometimes more.  We got to test out my new glasses too and they work pretty dang great!

 While we were up there we goofed around pretty much the entire time. We opened presents with everyone which was fun, mom really liked her gift and so did dad.  I think mom hated my dads gift but whatever hahah. All the kids pitched in and got dad a metal detecter and mom a customized photograph of the Los Angeles Temple.  We went shopping in Park City.  While we were shopping Jace found the worlds biggest pair of Columbia ... he tried them on and they were amazing! We went over to this resort there in town that had these really cool ice castle thingies.  As soon as it gets cold enough this place turns on these sprinklers and has them going all winter and as these mounds of ice get bigger the sprinklers get taller, once they get tall enough the workers carve a few of them out so you can walk through them.  It is pretty dang cool!

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This year Christmas was pretty dang AMAZING!  It was filled with fun and I could not have asked for anything more to make it any better.  I love our families they are great and make everything so much fun!

Christmas Eve

Christmas came super quick!  I was so excited for it though!  It was our first Christmas together and had pretty much gone all out on things for Jace!  I couldn't wait for him to open his gifts.  We both did way way way too much but hey it was our first one so i think we both wanted it to kind of be over the top.  The entire time we had been dating I had been paying attention when we would go shopping or just walking through stores to see what the things were that he really wanted but wouldnt buy for himself that way I could spoil him and apparently he had been doing the same thing with me so not cool! hahha Jace and I celebrated our christmas a day early so we could do our own thing and then spend the 24th with his family and the 25th with mine.  It was pretty fun!  However the morning of the 23rd wasnt so much fun for me.  I had a dentist appointment to get a root canal done so i went in at about 10 had my face drilled off and then came out with a face looking like this...

 

Jace got a pretty good laugh out of my dead face looking at it now it was pretty funny, but then it was sore and I had a huge headache!  After that lovely beginning to the day the rest of it was pretty dang good.  We hung around for a while then headed over to Gma and Gpa Dotson's house to play games with some of the other family.  After that Jace and I left so we could finish up wrapping the present we had gotten for our families and to do our Christmas together.  It was alot of fun just spending time together just him and I. 

After we got to spend a little time together just the two of us we headed over to his parents house for christmas eve.  It was alot of fun.  Sadly Jace had to work in the morning.  We hung out all day and played with the kids.  Helped cook a big dinner that was sooo good!  We had a huge fajita bar mmm yum!  They are Jace's favorite thing to eat.  By the time he was finished eating he looked like he was about 6 months pregnant and for those of you who know Jace and how skinny the kid is his belly was huge!  I wish I wish I would have taken a picture of it.  The kids were all allowed to open up two presents.  It was so much fun to see how excited they were for Christmas and for Santa to come.  It made me remember how excited we used to get as kids.  Once they were all in bed the rest of us exchanged our gifts.  Jace's mom gave me a mirror that her dad, Jace's Grandpa Teeples had made by hand.  He had made these mirrors for all the girls in the family.  It was so special that she gave that too me and is something I will treasure forever.  Jace had one more suprise gift for me, he had already done too much.  I think he wrapped that thing in about 10 different boxes each one wrapped inside the other one.  When I finially got to the end I was so suprised that there wasnt another box.  There were so many I was beginning to think that all he did was wrap a bunch of boxes up as a joke.  Once I finally got to the end he has gotten me this camera that I had been looking at for about 3 month but could never justify buying!

The next morning we all got up at about 6 am to watch the kids have a field day in the living room. It was pretty funny to watch them rip into one present look at it say "COOOOOL!"  then throw it aside only to shed the next one to pieces and do the same thing.  We were all laughing pretty hard.  All in all it was a great Christmas Eve!