Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Date Night

Belated Merry Christmas to you all! Hope you had a wonderful holiday! We spent last weekend with Taylor's family and had such a great time. We don't get to see his extended family very much so it's always nice to spend time with them.

Well, tonight Taylor and I went and did something we don't do very often... We went on a date! John David and Julia (Taylor's brother and SIL) got us a "night out" for Christmas and we had such a good time.



We decided to go eat at Red Lobster! I always like when we go to RL or Outback because Taylor, for some reason, likes to share meals at these places and then we get an appetizer. It's just the right amount of food! We went for the Surf and Turf tonight and it was delicious. I love snow crab legs and Red Lobster's are yummy!


We had planned on going to see a movie after, but dinner ended up taking longer than planned so we went and got ice cream instead. Even though it's 15 degrees outside! Thanks Julia and John David!

Monday, December 20, 2010

Wrapping Presents

So, I have just about finished our Christmas shopping and have most of the presents wrapped! I know this may sound silly, but I am not a good wrapper and since it is our first Christmas I look time wrapping and I tried really hard to make our presents look nice! Haha. I even took the time to put ribbon on them :) I never realized how long it takes to wrap presents since my mom was always the one to do it.


Here is a picture of the tree with all the presents under it!

Also, last weekend we went to Wichita to see my friend Caitlin get married but I didn't take any pictures cause our camera was dead! But I will post pictures once my friends post the ones they took on Facebook! Haha. We hope you all had a nice weekend and can't wait to see many of you this weekend! :)

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

My Best Friend's Wedding

So in the last week... my best friend got married, I met a celebrity in an airport, Taylor has almost finished his first semester of grad school, we got our first Christmas present, and we may have lost most of our free cable! Ha. Here is quick update on each one...

My best friend Jessica got married on Saturday, so on Wednesday I left for Tulsa to spend time with her and be a part of all the festivities! It was such a fun time and her wedding was so beautiful. Here is the beautiful bride!


Here is the bow bouquet I made for Jess to use during the rehearsal. Since I'm not a very crafty person, I really thought this turned out cute!


Here is my family in front of the beautiful fireplace they had at the wedding venue! I absolutely loved all the Christmas decoration Jess had at the wedding. It was like a Winter Wonderland!


And just so we have a record of this... here is a picture of my parents dancing! Ha. This never happens!


While I was on my way back to Champaign, I got to meet Laurie Smith while waiting in DFW! I was so excited when I saw her waiting at her gate. In case you don't know, Laurie was a designer on the show Trading Spaces. She was always my favorite and I used to tell my mom that if we went on Trading Space, I would want Laurie to decorate my room! She was soooo sweet and asked me questions about myself, my family, and wished me a Merry Christmas. It was really cool!


We also got an early Christmas present from The Massey's! Now we have a first Christmas ornament and isn't it so cute?! My mom gave it to me while I was home and I just love it! Thank you Massey family :)


And finally... sadly... I think we may have lost our free cable. We knew this day would come someday! We still are able to pick up local stations and a few other channels, but for the most part, we don't have cable anymore! It's really not that big of a deal because we didn't watch a lot of the channels we picked up, but I have to admit I will miss TLC and ESPN a little! Ha. Guess we will have to find a new place to watch the Sugar Bowl!


Hope you all have a great rest of the week!

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Winter Wonderland

So this is what we woke up to this morning....


We had heard that it was supposed to snow overnight, but we did not expect this! Taylor thinks we probably got about 6 inches.


We decided to make a trip to Walmart this afternoon and see how the roads were. Here is Taylor being sweet and cleaning off my car. What you don't see is that he had just hit me with a VERY large snowball... Ha!


While we were out, we decided to make a quick trip to Hobby Lobby and pick out a new ornament for our tree! Taylor's family has a tradition where they pick an ornament out each year that represents an important event from that year. Here is the ornament we ended up with...


Since a major event this year was us moving to Illinois, we thought the corn was a good representation of that! We are also going to find something that represents Taylor starting graduate school, but he didn't see anything today, so we are still looking. We need to get a first Christmas/marriage ornament but all the ornaments had really creepy looking faces so we passed on buying one of those today as well! :)


Now we are just hanging around the house so I decided to try and bake some cookies. Taylor loves his Moggie's sugar cookies so I attempted to make a batch of them. Mine didn't quite turn out as pretty and yummy as hers, but Taylor still said they were good!


Ok, now off to cook dinner. We are making Poppyseed Chicken which I am excited about, but I feel like I've been in the kitchen and washing dishes all day! ha. Hope you are having a nice weekend! We are really excited to see many of you soon :)

Friday, December 3, 2010

Oh Christmas Tree!


So last night we had Laine, Andrew, and Keith over to put up our Christmas tree and make homemade donuts! The donuts were delicious and I really like our tree! We don't have a ton of ornaments right now but I found some red ribbon and bought a big bow for the top so I think it looks pretty festive :) And I really like our stockings. I love stockings that look like they have been knitted, so I found these at TJ Maxx and got a really good deal!


Here is the tree all lit up! I love the way a Christmas tree lights up a room at night My dad always puts our tree on a timer so that it is turned on when you get home at night. It just makes me happy to see Christmas lights!


And here is our mistletoe! The Massey's got this for me last year at Christmas and I think it's so pretty. Well, hope y'all had a good week! We are just planning on relaxing this weekend because starting next week, we have something to do every weekend until Jan. 8th! But we will be traveling for exciting things so it's ok :) Have a good weekend!