Merry Christmas!

I had such big plans... but then my Chronic Fatigue decided to step in and show me who was boss this week. I had our Christmas cards all designed but there's just not much of a chance I'll get them sent this year so I decided to share them with you all here! You can click on each image to make them big enough to read. We hope you have the best Christmas Season!

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Kirtland

My parents live about 20 minutes from the Kirtland temple. We went so often growing up that I'm pretty sure we could each give the tour on our own. I love Kirtland and feel like the things that happened their in early church history are part of me, since I spent all my childhood building the kingdom they gave so much to develop.

Every time Doug has come to Ohio (quite a few times now) sometime has come up so that he couldn't get into the temple tour. This time, it was unexpectedly closed when we drove up for the tour the morning before we flew out of Ohio. Instead we went down to the stone quarry, which is my favorite Kirtland site.

It's just a little park two miles ahead of the Kirtland temple, where the Saints spent hours upon hours chiseling out the rock for the temple. No tour guides, not even signs to tell you how to get there or which path to take to see where they worked to get stone to build the temple. The Kirtland temple was such a blessing and so wonderful that we often forget to think of anything other than the finished product.

I love the stone quarry because it is forgotten and yet it still stands there clearly marked with the work the Saints put into it. It is a constant reminder that two miles down the road from each blessing there must first be a stone quarry.

Happy Thanksgiving! (one day late)

Since we were in NYC for all of Thanksgiving, we celebrated the big meal on Friday. The house we rented was great- two kitchens, to living rooms, seven bedrooms, a game room complete with table tennis and pool... but no dining room. I think eating on the ping pong table was a better idea anyway. The grand kids decorated with turkey place mats for each person- even baby Luke who is just 3 months old.

Statue of Liberty

Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

Thanksgiving Morning we all arose in the wee hours of the morning and made the two hour drive from the house we'd rented into the NYC. We got there an hour before the parade started- just in time to be about 30 rows back (luckily they have big balloons in the parade, right?) Lucky for us we found this great spot for the last half hour of the parade where we could see about everything. Until then, Doug's shoulders got a work out propping our nieces and nephews up into window sills and building ledges so they could see.

Even though we couldn't see much at first- the parade was so great. The roads on the city had been blocked off so the traffic and noise had transformed into excitement and holiday spirit. Everyone we were crowded around was so nice, and it was fun to see how everyone around would give up their spot to let a kid see the parade a little better.





My favorite part was after the parade when the streets were still blocked off and we got to walk around with all the people and not worry about the traffic. We took the kids to go play in Central Park and helped ourselves to some delicious New York hot dogs complete with sauerkraut and sweet onion sauce.

Family Reunion

Most of our family traditions died away by the time I really got old enough to realize they were a tradition. My mom used to make us matching pajamas every year to wear on Christmas Eve/ Christmas morning. We'd make this Christmas cookie train... or something. I think we might have eaten a car every day before Christmas or something from it. If you talk to my older siblings these were a big deal, but by the time I came around they kinda stopped. I'm not really sure way. We really only have one tradition now, and it only started about 6 or so years ago.

Each time my whole family gets together we get a pinata. Only one rule- You can launch something at it, blow it up, light it on fire, etc- you just can't actually swing and hit it with something (like a bat or stick etc). It's pretty funny- I feel like each year we try less and less to destroy the pinata. We have way too much fun watching what everyone came up with- it would be sad to destroy it to early! My personal favorite is to watch the little kids who are now old enough to think of ideas on their own.
one year old Issac throwing a football at it.

Smashing a it with pies


Jaron (my eight year old nephew) thought of the fantastic idea of getting on a sled and being slung toward the pinata with a giant rubber band.



We tried a new thing this year as well.- a talent show inspired by the movie Dan in Real Life. Featured in our show was a mini American Idol show complete with judges done by Marika's family, a dance by my brother Nathan and his four year old daughter, a sqeaking/humming/something musical number by Andrew and Lauren (what would you call that?) and sharing of some fresh, homemade mozzarella cheese made by Doug and me. (yep, we learned how to make homemade cheese. Aren't we so cool?)

First Day in New York City

My brother Andrew and his wife Lauren came up from Columbus to see us at my parents house. We all drove out to the house we'd rented in Pennsylvania for our family reunion and then took advantage of the extra day we had before everyone got there and headed up to New York City for a day. I just love the city. All the people and cultures and excitement and public transportation (the world would just be a better place if we could all just use public transportation, in my opinion). We spent the morning seeing some sites- Times Square, Central Park, the M&M store (ok, that last one isn't so much a site to see in NYC, but we went anyway).

We met up with my sister Marika and her family at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where I literally spent hours entranced by the beauty of fine art.

We wrapped up the day by visiting FAO Shwartz (a huge toy store that happens to be the home of the huge piano featured on the movie 'BIG') and a trip to Little Italy for some New York Pizza.

Visit to Ohio

We just got back from a long trip East. It's good to be home, but I have to admit the first few days back in Utah are always kinda sad for me. It was just such a great trip and so good to see family! Maybe it's better that I live far away- I end up appreciating every detail while I'm there.

We went out for a family vacation over the Thanksgiving break, but I was able to go early to spend some time in Ohio with my parents. It was so great. I'm the youngest child and spent my last two years at home all alone with my parents. I've found that's one of my favorite things to go back to- a big, quiet, empty house to lounge around in and work on lots of projects. Here are a couple of my favorite things that we did while I was there.

For as long as I can remember my dad has tried to raise pheasants. He'd order the eggs and get all the warming lamps and everything, but nothing seemed to work. This time we ordered the chicks already hatched (they were shipped to him in a box, which I think is just crazy) and has had better luck. By the time I got there he had 6 full grown, beautiful birds in the back yard. He made our old jungle gym into a cage for them so they have plenty of room to fly around and perch on our old monkey bars. I could stare at those birds all day- they really are so pretty.

Another great night was when my mom and I went to an exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art. They had rooms full of work done by Lalique, Tiffany, and Fabergé. All three dimensional works that I'd studied all through college but had never really seen in real life. Let me tell you, the real things were SO much more amazing than the pictures. Wow.

Doug came out the Saturday before Thanksgiving. As much as I love hanging out with just my parents- I have to admit it I liked it a lot better after he came!

Hair Cut Talk

My hair grows fast. I mean, not crazy fast or anything- but fast enough that everyone is always observing my change in hair styles and commenting on how fast my hair grows. I've always used this as the excuse to why I've kept my hair so long for so many years. After all, 6 inches of growth on long hair is hardly noticeable but 6 inches of growth on a short cut would make me look horribly unkempt. Keeping it long was just cheaper and easier. But that's not the whole reason. In fact, it's not even most of the reason.

If there is one thing in the world that makes me horrifically uncomfortable it's hair cut talk.

'So....... you go to school?' 'No, I finished a little while ago' 'Oh.....are you married' 'Yep' 'Where'd you meet him' 'He was my brother's roommate' 'Oh... that's fun...' < ......pause........> '........Yep........ '

By this time she is exactly 1 1/2 mins through a 45 min. hair cut and we already know enough about each other to know that we have absolutely nothing to talk about for the next 43 1/2 minutes. Then the worst is when you go back. You both already know you have nothing to talk about, but you gotta get your hair cut. So then the stylist sits you down and starts having a conversation literally over your head with the stylist next to her about something you feel completely uncomfortable even listening to. I really can't think of another situation where it would be ok for two people to stand up, sit someone down between them, and then chat for an hour.

So basically I really like to put off getting my hair cut. I can go a LONG time before I feel the need to go through that again.

A few months ago I was looking at my hair-which had gotten REALLY long and needed to be cut- and realized it was almost long enough to donate to Locks of Love. I was really excited. Not only did it give me an excuse to put off getting my hair cut for a few more months (it had to grow just a little bit more) I got to do something good for someone that I never thought I'd have the discipline to do. (If I'd actually planned to grow my hair that long it would have felt like FOREVER. Waking up one day and realizing that it was long enough was pretty nice)

Then we bought our house and got so busy that I never got around to getting it cut. My hair got SO long. Longer than it's ever been. It was nice- I was able to donate 11 inches instead of just the 10 I'd planned on. Check out how long it was-


Here's the new look (with the hair that I get to send in the mail- something I'd never really thought of doing before...) I'm pretty excited. I can put off cutting my hair for a while now and if people ask I can just say I'm trying to grow it out!

Happy Halloween!!!

I've been thinking a lot lately about enjoying every day more. It seems so easy to let months or even years slip by just waiting for things to change or wishing that they hadn't. I can't tell you how many times I've started a sentence with something like 'Back when I lived in Ohio we used to..." or "When I finally fully recover from this stupid South American disease we can...". I think everybody does it- it's just such an easy way to think. So about a month ago I decided to change. Or at least try. I took a little personal inventory of all the things that make me enjoy life and decided to make a specific plan to put them into action. Here's part of the list

-celebrating holidays (even little ones)
-being around people
-cooking amazing food
-sharing that amazing food with people who OOO and AHHH over it
-decorating my house

This past month my plan of action was to plan a Halloween party which would, of course, involve all of the things in the above list. It's been great! This month has been so full of moving and remodeling and being sick and all sorts of things that would normally make me think- 'wow, I can't wait until October is over so that we'll be done with all this!'. But instead I've seriously had so much fun every day thinking about how to decorate a table with the things I found in boxes as I unpacked, using my sick time in bed reading all sorts of recipes and then day dreaming about Halloween Dinner menus while I scrubbed walls and ovens to ready our apartment for the new renters. It's really been such a great month!

So that was my crazy idea for the month, and here are the results! (I spent all month planning this, so every detail was really exciting to me... I guess that's why I'm including SO many pictures!)

I painted this for our screen door. I just cracked myself up every time the doorbell rang and I got to stick my face through Frankenstein's head to see who it was.



We invited all of our Christensen cousins over for dinner and a movie. All the while we took turns handing out candy to Trick or Treaters.


I was so proud of myself when I thought of putting water balloons in vases!

Dinner started with a Frankenstein Cheese ball, followed with Butternut Squash soup (served out of a pumpkin!), biscuits (cut with a pumpkin cookie cutter) and a salad with pear, bacon and sweet onion topped with toasted curry pumpkin seeds and a honey dijon vinaigrette dressing with roasted garlic and sunflower seeds. All of it was completely made from scratch, including the salad dressing. Yum. I'm loving the having the leftovers sitting around today!



After dinner we watched 'Corpse Bride', sipped a warm vanilla almond drink, and ate caramel apples (with homemade caramel of course). It was such a great night and so fun to be with the cousins all together! I can definitely say that I loved living every minute of October!

We Won!

I believe I've recently explained my love for free things. Anything that is free is immediately more enjoyable to me. I think the only thing I could love more than a free thing is a free thing that I won. The fact that it's free AND no one else gets it makes its coolness factor go way up to me.

As I walked in the door on Friday afternoon, Doug told me that KSL Radio was throwing a tailgate party just down the street from us that included $3 steak dinners. A $3 steak dinner isn't free, but it sure is close, so we left immediately. We found a parking lot full of people enjoying their cheap steak dinners, along with a number of free, delicious items (fresh scones, hot chocolate, apples with caramel dip and much more) Doug Wright (a talk radio show host from KSL who Doug and I listen to a lot) was there making announcements and giving out prizes. I entered our name half heartedly since there were so many entries.

So the evening went on, some people got little prizes like T shirts and such. They announced that they'd start the drawings for the big prizes- BYU football tickets for the game next day- and the first name they drew was Doug! It was so exciting! I was so sad that I didn't have my camera to get a picture of him up on stage with Doug Wright handing him his prize and making him give a Cougar cheer in front of everyone.

Unfortunately Doug has been sick all week and by the time we got home he knew he'd be too sick to use the tickets the next day... after checking to see if some friends/family wanted them (it was too late notice for everybody) we ended up selling them on Craigslist and going out to lunch with the money we got for them. A much more fun option, in my opinion (I'm still a little footballed out from... well... my life)

Thanks for lunch KSL!

A Real Oven

I've loved to cook since I was little. Whenever my mom was in the kitchen I'd be there beside her to learn what she was doing. When she wasn't in the kitchen I'd be reading her cook books cover to cover like a novel (a habit I still very much enjoy). When I learned of the existence of an Easy Bake Oven, I was thrilled. Cooking and toys all rolled into one. I begged for one for I don't know how many Christmases. My mom always told me I could just use her oven, but I was convinced that wasn't good enough. I wanted the Easy Bake oven with the tiny pans and just add water mixes.

So, after years of begging I finally got one for Christmas. I was thrilled. Until I tried to cook something. Turns out my mom was right. Our oven did in fact work better than this box that cooked cake batter with a light bulb. I think I used it a few times, but eventually realized the superiority of a real oven.

I had forgotten about this experience until about a month ago. Doug and I set a goal to start eating healthier. I'd been on the lookout for some good, healthy food for a while and came upon the Jenny Craig website's recipe collection. It's full of these delicious recipes that are low calorie/ low fat- and a bunch of them fall into the '30 min. meal' category.

So, with a new goal set and the recipes to put it into action, I set off. The only problem was the fact that this all started just as we moved into the basement apartment of our house.

We knew when we moved in that the oven in the basement apartment was broken, but we just hadn't had time to get it fixed. And then after enough time had passed we decided we'd put our oven fixing money towards a brand new, nicer oven. So then, of course, we had to wait for the upstairs renters to move out so we could move upstairs, take the old, working oven to the downstairs apartment and put the new oven upstairs in our new home.

So there I was, with so much cooking anticipation and no oven to cook in. I refused to be stopped.

We received a toaster oven for our wedding and everybody kept telling me that they're great to have because you can use them as a toaster AND an oven. I decided to try my hand at this toaster oven thing.

First I tried some chicken rolls... which I cooked in the toaster oven on what that dial said was well over 400 degrees... when they were still cold in the center after TWO HOURS I gave up and used the microwave...

Next came vegetable lasagna, which was also heated in the toaster oven for over an hour and then finished in the microwave.

Day after day I as I prepared mini pans of food to put into my mini oven that had about the heating power of a light bulb (actually, some days I wondered if it'd be faster if I just threw a chicken breast on one of our lamps...) I was reminded of that lesson I learned when I was little. Real ovens are a good thing.

I think I did finally figure out how to get the toaster oven to cook things. Here's the secret (at least this is the only way I could figure out how to make it work) Take the baking time for a normal oven and double it, and add about 50 degrees to the baking temperature. Now here's the real trick- if, after you double the baking time, the number is more than 15 minutes- the item will actually never finish cooking in a toaster oven.

This past Tuesday they delivered our new oven. I baked something in it that very day. I'm so excited to leave our toaster oven to it's normal use of making toast.

Moving. . . Again

Jessica and I are moving again! For the last month Jess and I have been fixing up and living in the basement apartment of our new house. Last night the couple that was living upstairs moved out. For the next two weeks we are going to have the entire house to ourselves. Beginning in November we will live upstairs and we will rent out the basement apartment to a nice newlywed couple.

We are SO excited to move upstairs. Don't get me wrong, the basement apartment is a ton better than the apartment we were living in for the first year of our marriage. Living in a real house is really awesome though.

We (especially Jessica) have been giddy thinking about paint colors and all the customizations and improvements we want to do. Here are some pictures:

This is a picture of the front of the house:

This is what you see as you walk in the front door:

This is the living room:

Another view of the living room:

Jessica pondering paint (in the kitchen/dining area):

Still pondering:

This is the bathroom:

This is the garage. We have lofty plans to put our cars in here:

This house has approximately 1000 closets, I have taken pictures of a select few of them for all you (closet) lovers out there:

So there it is. We are really excited. After spending a month in our basement apartment wondering what our house really looked like (since we had only seen the upstairs a few times) it was really exciting to open up the door between the house and the basement apartment. It was like we passed through a portal to another world. A world with magic machines that wash your dishes for you and enormous rooms with giant doors where snow and ice don't need to be constantly scraped from your car every morning.

We like our new world.