Happy V-Day!

As you probably know, I love celebrating things, and I also love making sugar cookies (they really go hand in hand) and February has given me the opportunity to do that more than once! Bryan and I had a fun time watching the Super Bowl with his family, and they encourage my sugar cookie obsession, so I decide to make my first ever batch of Super Bowl sugar cookies! I don't have any other pictures from the night, but I was pretty proud of these so I thought I'd share them: 

If you can't tell, those are supposed to be Giants and Patriots helmets (I simplified the Patriots logo, don't be too disappointed). 

I also made some Valentine's sugar cookies (they are always my favorite to decorate) and here is a little taste of that for you: 

Anyway, Bryan and I both have had a pretty busy week, so we decided to celebrate Valentine's on the Saturday before. It was a great idea because we got to spend almost the whole day together and with our busy lives that is a rare occurrence! The day started out with some pink, heart shaped, chocolate chip pancakes! They aren't perfect but it's the thought that counts right :)

Here is our breakfast spread, complete with the other thing our day started out with: Presents!

Here is Bryan with is V-day gift, I got him the Steve Jobs biography. Here he is imitating the man himself:

And Bryan got me some beautiful flowers:

Saturday night Bryan took me out for a date that ended up being a lot more that we bargained for (in a good way). It started out with dinner at this little pizza place downtown. It was New York style and it was so good! We will definitely be returning.

After dinner we walked a couple blocks to the Gallivan Center for some outdoor ice skating. This is something that I've wanted to do since we were dating and we just never got around to it, so I was pretty excited for it. First surprise of the night was the weather. It was so warm out that we really didn't need coats and gloves, so that made for some fun skating. Anyway, when we got to the rink there were TONS of people there, which we thought was weird. We went in to rent our skates and they told us that it was a free skating night. Who knew?! So we didn't have to pay to skate, but we did have to fight for rink space. But it was still a lot of fun.

It was such a cute little rink, I really want to go back sometime when it's not so crowded. If you haven't been then you need to get on that! Here's a pic of our free skates:

The third surprise of the night was this funny DJ. I can't remember his name but he was there playing a free show. He incorporated all of these funny movie/youtube clips into the songs. He was pretty entertaining to watch. So after we were tired of skating we went over to have a little listen. Which brings us to the last surprise of the night....

While we were enjoying the music, out of no where these fireworks started to shoot up right behind him?! What?! There was randomly a 5 minute firework show, and a good one at that! Haha, we thought it was so crazy/random, but so much fun. I love me some fireworks. And it has already put me in the summer frame of mind! 

So there you have it. Our crazy Valentine's date. It turns out that they were celebrating the anniversary of the Salt Lake olympics and it just happened to coincide with our evening plans. So it was a pretty fun night and I thought I'd share it with you. I hope you all had fun celebrating the holiday of love!

Home for Christmas

Well we just returned home from our trip to Kansas!! We enjoyed the long Holiday there with friends and family and endless fun. But the most exciting part of the trip was that Taylor got home from his mission to Mexico!!! We were all so excited about this! Sarah and I spent the entire day before making signs and decorating his room and making sure that it would be an exciting day for him. Here are a few of our pieces of art that we had in the lawn for him to see. A lot of our signs were inside jokes with the fam, so you may find them confusing, haha. 

We had tons of signs at the airport, and we also decided to dress up with sombreros and maracas and mustaches, just to make Taylor feel comfortable :) We not only gave taylor the welcome of a lifetime, but I'm pretty sure that everyone else getting off that plane appreciated us too. Anyway, here he is fresh off the mission:

Taylor got home a few days before Christmas, so we promptly started our Christmas traditions. One of my favorite parts of Christmas is decorating cookies with the family. So here we all our doing our best to one-up each other with our creativity:

Here are a few of my masterpieces; A sexy lady and her cholo man friend, ready for a night on the town: 

Mom with her one eyed, one armed pirate gingerbear. She really worked with what she was given on this one:

We even had a contest to see who decorated the best cookie. And to keep it fair we had seth as the Judge. Here are all the entries starting at the top: Nick submitted his Antwon Dodsen cookie, mom went with her pirate, Alan and his mitten, Dad went with his creative star, Sarah submitted her beach babe, Taylor went with his missionary, I submitted Rudolph, and Bryan went with a red tree. 

And the winning order was: Taylor, Sarah, Mom, Alan, Bryan, Dad, Me, Nick. Seth is a fan of the color green, haha. Bryan was proud that he beat me, and Alan was beaming with his fourth place cookie.

Christmas eve and Christmas morning were so much fun with Seth. It was fun to see how excited he was for Santa to come. And it was fun being around the whole family. Here is our Christmas morning spread:

I was surprised that we got all those stockings on the fireplace! We really should have taken a picture of what the living room looked like after opening all the presents. We needed 4 trash bags to pick up all the wrapping paper! After opening presents we ate a yummy breakfast and headed off to Church. And Christmas night we decided to head to downtown Kansas City and look at all the pretty Christmas lights. Bryan and I had the privilege of riding with Seth and he was a hoot. He thought the lights were fun and we had a blast singing Christmas songs together. He wanted me to take a picture of him and for some reason this was the pose he chose: 

As you can see it was a fun trip and we didn't want it to end. I feel so blessed to have spent Christmas with my entire family and I hope that we will all be together again soon. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas as well!