Happy Thanksgiving!!

 Five days off of work was definitely something to be thankful for!  Nate had some homework, but he managed to still have fun this weekend.

Thanksgiving morning Nate and my brother-in-law played in the stake Turkey Bowl.    Nate had some good plays but got hit in the eye by the football in the first game, and lost his contact, so he got to wear glasses the whole weekend.  Doesn't he look intelligent?

My seven-year-old nephew took this picture.  That could be why we look like giants :)

We spent Thanksgiving day at my aunt and uncle's home with my sister and her family and one of my cousins and his family.  There were 16 of us total.  It was a lot of fun and the food was amazing!

Aren't these little candy turkeys so cute?

On Friday my aunt and uncle were nice enough to drive Nate and I down to the South Padre Island to watch the Basketball Tournament and let us stay with them down there.  We got there on Friday night in just enough time to watch BYU play Florida.  The game was really close- BYU ended up winning in a double overtime.  The cool thing about the arena they played in was that it only held 200 people, but there were probably only a hundred people there each game and so you were sitting in real chairs, not bleachers and had a great view.  After the game we got to shake the coach's hand and tell the players good job.  The game on Saturday was against St. Mary's and it was close, we only won by one, but thankfully we didn't have overtime again.

Friday we got to go to the beach.  They had these electric looking jelly fish all over the beach.  Luckily no one got stung.  The water was cold, but not as cold as I thought it might be.  We waded in to our ankles-I guess we are not big risk takers.

This Thanksgiving season always makes us reflect on all of our blessings, and we truly are grateful to have such loving family and friends!  Hope everyone had a great day!

Apartment

So I guess I can finally post some pictures of our apartment, now that we have lived here three months!

First, the before shots.  Our first day here, after spending three days in the car.  Here is a small sample of what we came home too:

Basically a lot of chaos.  I remember spending an hour or two looking for sheets, towels and our shower curtain.  Things I will remember to label better next time we move.  It was definitely a little overwhelming, and I think it took me about three weeks to go through every box, but now it looks like this:

The reason for the blanket over the window is that we have really bright lights outside of our window making it hard to sleep at night and we were too cheap to buy curtains, thus the blanket technique.  It's worked pretty well so far.

We had Young Women in Excellence on Wednesday this week.  It was really sweet because they brought flowers for me, the young women's president and the personal progress advisor because we are all switching wards.  It was fun to have one last combined activity.  Our Young Women are really amazing.  We have four laurels, who are probably some of the only members in their high school. Each of the four is very talented, one is the yearbook editor, one was homecoming queen, one is on the basketball team, and the other is star of their high school play, Cinderella.  In addition they all play the piano, sing etc.  And they all have really strong testimonies.  We really have a good group of young women.

Thursday night was enrichment.  I took the wife of one Nate's friends in his program.  It was all about keeping Christmas meaningful and economical.  It was fun and got me ready for Christmas.  In fact we put up our Christmas decorations last night.  We have quite a few because we got married in December.

This Friday Nate took me to Harry Potter-great movie.  We can't wait for the next one!  And he took me to a midnight yell :)  It was the last one of the season and we were already up late because of the movie.  I thought it was fun, but Nate probably has decided one is enough.  That's about all for this week, we can't wait for Thanksgiving (and a break from school and work)!

Welcome Home Elder Louder

So the highlight of our weekend was being able to meet/see Jason!  I have been hearing about him for almost two years now (he left on his mission in November, and Nate and I started dating in January), but had yet to meet him.  When we heard that he had a three hour layover in Dallas we were excited to be able to see him!

We started getting worried Saturday that we were going to miss him.  We got a late start, our first two attempts to get out of College Station were blocked by police cars, and then I started heading to the wrong direction on the freeway.  Halfway there we almost ran out of gas, and so pulled over at the first stop the GPS told us would have a gas station.  It turns out, that it was closed and we drove by another closed gas station until we finally got to a gas station, where we realized we "stood out", especially since we were dressed up for the temple.  There was even a sign on the barred door of the gas station that said, "Remove hoods before coming inside."  I was glad when we made it out of there.  We also hit some bad traffic once we got into downtown Dallas, but we finally did make it to the airport.  It ended up being okay that we were later then we planned for, because it took Jason awhile to go through customs.

Once we got there we realized that the Dallas airport is a lot bigger than we expected, and we had set up ambiguous plans to meet "at the airport".  So we were really hoping that Jason had written down our phone numbers, which he had, and so we were able to meet up with him.

This was supposed to be as Jason stepped off of the shuttle, but Nate had just bitten into a candy bar, so we made Jason recreate it.

We decided not to make Jason take too many pictures, but I couldn't resist getting one of the brothers.  

After our quick trip to the airport we headed to the Dallas temple.  Living in College Station you have to be creative about when you go to the temple.  We both felt the importance of being able to go and that we needed to be there.  There are a lot of blessings to be gained from going to the temple.

I had to work last Saturday, but that meant that I got Friday off, and so I headed down to Houston to celebrate my nephew Zach's 7th birthday!  I forgot my camera so I don't have any pictures to post, but I had a lot of fun.  I got to go to the zoo during the day with my two youngest nephews, and then at night Zach chose ribs for his birthday dinner and for his dessert he wanted chocolate chip pumpkin bread.  A very adventurous seven year old!  Since I spent the night, that means that on Saturday I was in Houston, College Station, Dallas, then back to College Station.  I spent a total of 10 hours in the car this weekend! But it was worth it.

In other sad news, our boundaries got realigned in our ward, and Nate and I are now in the College Station 1st ward, which means that I no longer get to work with my Beehives :(  All of them are staying in the 2nd ward, but I will hopefully pass them in the halls now and then.  It is mostly just younger college aged students like us that got switched from our ward to the 1st ward.  We are wondering if it is going to be another student type ward.  I hope not, because I really like being in a family ward.  The good news is, now we will get to know even more people in the area, and some of our friends got moved with us so it will be fun.