Update: January 2013

As per usual, I have started to feel guilty about not posting on here. This time it might have a little something to do with my mom giving me a guilt trip about it. Just kidding Mom!!...sorta, but yeah. I guess I just feel like we don't really do all that much that warrants blog posting, and we don't have any babies to post about which seems like what pretty much everyone else I know blogs about. Sadly, I am not particularly clever or witty so I don't have any funny or interesting thoughts to entertain you with. So what then? Well I guess I'll just update you with some of the things we have been up to the last couple months!

January:

1. Ben and I both work in the youth program in our church, so one Saturday we got to go sledding with both the Young Men and Young Women. It was seriously so much fun! We got to the hill early enough that we had the whole place to ourselves for about an hour and a half. I had bought my first pair of snow pants for the occasion, and let me tell you..they are awesome!! They were overall snow pants, and I felt just like a lumberjack. I fell plenty of times and didn't get wet at all! Of course Ben had a great time, because he really is just a kid at heart and he loves spending time with the youth. Here we are:

Before crashing and burning multiple times!

Going down together..

And racing, because we turn everything into a competition. I won, btw.

Instagram pic!

2. As part of our Young Women's program, we had our New Beginnings in January (i.e. the kickstart to the new year, we introduce the new young women's theme...for those of you non-mormons, or mormon's who just forgot what that was.) Our New Beginnings this year was about accentuating our beauty through modesty. I had seen something on Pinterest (of course) where a woman made homemade fortune cookies and put fortunes in there with quotes about beauty. So I thought, I can bake...I can do this...yay me! Well, this was how they turned out:

 Pretty impressive, right? Haha, that was a serious #pinterestfail. At least the activity still turned out great!

Nothing else major went on in January, other than freezing our butts off because it was one of the coldest and snowiest winters we've had in a long time.

Coming Soon: February!

But for now, I need to go watch Tangled for the thousandth time.

Not too great...

Eek. My blog post once a week resolution is not going great, obviously. But I thought I would get one in now, and then I only missed a week! Neat!

This year (uh...last year) it was our turn to go to California for Christmas. It felt like we hadn't been there in forever, but really it had only been since August 2011, so a year and a half. But that is tooooo long to go without being in beautiful California and also WAY too long to go without Disneyland! Am I right?!

So we headed down on the 20th and we had my brother Taylor and his fiance Rachel with us as well. This was our first time meeting Rachel, so it was really fun having her with us on the drive and throughout the whole Christmas trip.

We were in California for about 10 days. We got to go to Disneyland (which was actually a little disappointing...more on that later) and spend time with family and friends, and watch a whole lot of movies. Ben and I, of course, had an amazing Christmas and couldn't help spoiling each other rotten! Here are a couple pictures of our Christmas time!!!

A lady had just given us fastpasses for Star Tours so we got to bypass a 75 min. wait!!

 This might be a good time to say that our two days at Disneyland were a bit disappointing because it was soooooo cold and SOOOO crowded, especially the 2nd day! Blech, it was awful!

Ok, but check out my highest score EVER on Astro Blasters! I found one of the secret spots!

We tried to get a couple pictures with the whole family because we weren't sure the next time we would all be seeing each other. It was a hilarious endeavor, and none of them came out great, but this is one of the best ones.

It was so nice to be with family and just relax for a week. I'm not sure when we'll be going back to California because of some changes going on with things back home...all good things, but it will certainly make things interesting for our future California trips!

Also, because our Disney days were so frustrating, I'm definitely planning a trip for as soon as possible. As soon as it's a for sure thing, I'll probably be keeping you all updated with the planning progress! Doesn't that sound nice? :)

Oh, and here is a tiny video I took on Christmas morning with a new little video camera Ben got me!

I'm obviously going to be the next Spielberg.

You say you want a RESOLUTION, well you know, We all want to change the World!

...I know the lyric is revolution, but I thought resolution fit in nicely, and well it is a new year! I know, I know, people make New Years resolutions and then break them within a couple weeks. I'm certainly guilty of that, yet we still feel the need to make more the next year.

So here are my new years resolutions for 2013:

- Lose Weight (Will this one ever leave my list?)

- Clean, Organize, and Create my Craft Room/Office (I'm really excited about this, and it NEEDS to happen badly)

- Blog once a week! (Aren't you all so excited to read more silly posts from me?)

- Take more pictures (To add to this blog, and to help me remember all the fun and crazy things Ben and I do this year)


Wish me luck!

I Love Monkeys...

... and t-shirts.  Now I just need to find more ways to combine the two.  Hmph.

Part Six: Disney World Trip Report

Okay, so our last day was kind of all mixed up because we had a lot of places we wanted to go. And there are not a ton of pictures to show for it. But here goes:

We started our day at Animal Kingdom, and this was one place I had not researched a ton..so we had a hard time getting going. We headed over to Kilimanjaro Safaris because I knew that that was the e-ticket ride that everyone else was going to be doing first thing.

This was so fun, and we really got to get up close to all of the animals. I took a bunch of pictures, but it's one of those things like, you've seen all of these animals before so why put all the pictures on here. But I will put the pictures I like the most.

Giraffes! They actually got even closer right after this!

Baby Elephant!!!!!!!! And look at the Mommy smiling, ADORABLE!

After the safari we went over to some other animal areas because it was supposed to have monkeys, but we barely saw any which was a little sad.

After that we headed over to Kali River Rapids because it was pretty hot out. Sadly, this was one of those water rides where you don't actually get very wet from the rapids, you get it from a giant geyser of water...which I think is way less fun. Nonetheless, we did get pretty soaked from the geyser!

His clothes are completely drenched if you can't tell.

Now that we were soaked, we went over to Expedition Everest which is the other big ride that everyone goes to at Animal Kingdom. It was so fun, and reminded me a lot of Matterhorn, but more roller-coaster-y.

Once we were done there, we didn't have too much else we wanted to see, and did have a lot of other places to go that day so we headed out of the park...plus it was nasty hot outside and we were over that.

The rest of our day was filled with shopping! We had been on the hunt for a Chip and Dale shirt that Ben loved, but we could not find it in his size. We headed over to Hollywood Studios where we had seen it, but no luck. While we were at Hollywood Studios we rode Star Wars a couple more times, and then it REALLY started raining. I mean, I have never seen so much rain in my life! We ran out of the park and headed back to our hotel to wait out the storm.

This is a heinous picture of both of us. But it captures how we were feeling after running in the downpour.

Okay, so this was a tiny little baby frog that was outside our door when we got back to our hotel during the storm. He was no bigger than my thumbnail. So cute I had to take a picture and share it with you!

Once the rain had stopped, we finished up our day with some shopping at Downtown Disney! We were so tired, and we had to be up for our flight in the morning, so we went back to the hotel, packed, and got ready to go home. :(

Part Seven will have a tiny bit about the trip, but will mostly be our impressions, likes, and dislikes!

Part Five: Disney World Trip Report

This was our 4th full day at the Walt Disney World Resort, and we were planned to spend the day at Epcot. Sadly, Ben woke up feeling even more sick so we spent the first half of the day hanging out in our hotel room. He felt awful, but ended up being a trooper and we headed out for Epcot in the afternoon.

We went in and mosied around a bit. Epcot seems really cool, but we were really out of it so we weren't really focused on what we were seeing. We rode the Nemo and Friends ride, and the Living with the Land. Living with the Land is pretty cool cause it shows all of the agriculture advances they are trying at WDW.

After that we ate lunch, and then rode Journey into Imagination with Figment. It was ridiculous, but we loved it! And we ended up having the song stuck in our heads ALL DAY! Which we didn't mind at all!

"Imagination. Imagination. A dream can be a dream come true, with  just that spark from me and you!!"

As we headed over to World Showcase, which is really why people go to Epcot, it started raining! So we had spent half our day in the hotel, and now when we were finally out it starts raining. :(

I like to be a creeper when getting pictures of my favorite characters! haha..

The CUTEST little old couple offered to take our picture. And then I decided I can't wait to go to Disney when Ben and I are cute and old.

We kept trudging through and tried to see as much as we could. Pretty much everyone else was huddled into all of the shops, so this might checking everything out pretty difficult. We ate some delicious treats - a sugar crepe (In France) and a cannoli (In Italy). We rode some weird rides in some of the land areas..the weirdest being in Norway! At the end you ride through an area that just had a bunch of oil rigs..oh, and their was something about trolls their too.

eww.

It started to rain harder and harder, but we didn't want to crap out too early. We ran from land to land, and then we ended up back at the front of the park. We rode Spaceship Earth INSIDE of the golf ball, and then decided to head back.

Can you tell how drenched I am?

 Although it wasn't the PERFECT Epcot day, we still had a ton of fun and were not disappointed as we headed back to our hotel.

Alright...Part Six is on it's way.

OH OH OH...AND I just remembered that on Sunday after Harry Potter, we went and watched Fantasmic at Hollywood Studios. I love Fanstasmic at Disneyland, so I was really excited. But I'm sorry, it was seriously awful! I hated almost every second of it. Partly because of the 25 min. show, about 15 minutes of that was devoted to Pocahontas! Seriously...POCAHONTAS!?!? No one likes that movie. Ugh...no wonder I forgot to write about it in the last post, I think I've been trying to block it from my mind.

Part Four: Disney World Trip Report

Lalala..so this is really for my mother at this point, because I'm sure anyone else reading my blog couldn't care less about a trip that Ben and I went on like 5 months ago. But I also want to have this down for my own memory purposes or else I think I will forget everything! So here it is...Part Four:

HARRY POTTER WORLD!!!

Or I guess you can call it by it's real name, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Ben and I were both pretty darn excited to go here! It's at Universal Studios Islands of Adventure, which is about 20 minutes away from the Walt Disney World Resort. Our tickets included a shuttle from our hotel to IOA and back so that was super handy. EXCEPT, Ben was feeling really sick that morning and we were running late and we almost missed our shuttle! Luckily, we ran and flagged the driver down right as he was pulling out of the driveway.

We headed straight over to Hogwarts Castle, because we knew it was the most popular ride and didn't want to have too much of a line. Well, we definitely lucked out... there was no line at all! We got there pretty early in the morning and it was Mother's Day, so we think that's why it wasn't busy at all. We walked right on the ride! This was SLIGHTLY disappointing because they have made the queue for that ride so cool, and we barely got to look at any of it. The queue, with no line at all, still takes you about 10 minutes to walk through the whole thing. I can't imagine waiting in line in that! ugh!

 So then we rode The Forbidden Journey inside the Castle, and let me tell you, it is probably my new all-time favorite ride!! It's so fun! It's like a mixture of Soarin' Over California, a classic-Disney dark ride, and and Matterhorn! haha. There was one spot that I didn't love alot though. It was a room with a ton of spiders that get up in your face and spit things on you... Luckily, that's exactly the section they take a picture of you!

I look like I'm having a lot of fun, right?

After the castle, we headed down to some shops. We rode the Dueling Dragons, which is a pretty standard roller coaster and after that we...drank...BUTTERBEER!!!!

I was pretty nervous about Butterbeer. I thought it was going to be just like cream soda, and I hate cream soda. But let me tell you, it is seriously one of the best tasting drinks I've ever had! So So So good! And the cream on top just makes it!

We loved it!

We walked around Honeydukes and Zonkos and I bought a Cauldron cake, cause who didn't always want to try a Cauldron cake every time they talked about it in the movies?!

Eating my Cauldron Cake!

Ben's new all-time favorite picture of me...

We left Harry Potter and went to some other areas of IOA, but then came back and at lunch at The Three Broomsticks...and then we drank more Butterbeer. Oh yes.

Inside the Three Broomsticks!

After lunch, we were both so tired, and Ben wasn't feeling well, so we decided to head home early around 1pm. We loved Wizarding World of Harry Potter, and I am really really excited they are putting one in at California's Universal Studios, because it is definitely something I want to do again!

Small note - if you aren't interested in riding all of the other rollercoasters at Universal Studios, and only want to do Harry Potter - don't plan to be there all day. Harry Potter World is relatively small, and can easily be done in half a day. Even with lines for the rides, I think we maybe would have only been there another hour and a half or so.

Full-Street View!

So we headed back to our resort, and just had a lazy day watching T.V. and relaxing in our hotel room! It was actually a really great day to recuperate half-way through our trip and get ready for the next few days!

Check out Part Five - Coming Soon!