Winter Break FUN

I didn't take very many pictures at Christmas, because I have bad habit of forgetting my camera. But I did get some pictures from my mom.

Between Christmas and New Years, my brother had his open house at my parents house. Aren't they such a cute couple?

During the several days that Ben and I were at my parents house for the holidays, we played dance revolution (I think thats what its called) on my brother's Wii. I had a lot fun doing it, even though I'm not very good! My family and I were finally able to convince Ben to do it, but only after he saw everyone else do it, :-). Each song has 4 levels, the hardest level is extremely hard that we would have 4 people play on one pad (1 person per direction), look at the 3rd picture down. On the 4th picture below, my nephew would love to "help" me by sneaking a few steps (look at the boy in red sweats with his foot on the pad :-D).

My dad loves doing puzzles, so we make sure that he gets a puzzle every year for Christmas. We love helping do the puzzle, sometimes there's 5 or 6 people helping! This was one of our many activities on New Years' Eve.

Here's Ben and I at New Years! I love all of our holidays' firsts as a married couple, and I'm looking forward to the rest of them.

Things were a little crazy in the house if we let all 3 dogs in the house (2 of my brothers each have one,Sampson the German Shepherd/Husky and Jules is pit bull/lab, and Ben and I have Brewster. Especially when we have treats for them, look at them being good for a split second!

It was so much fun to hang out with my new sister-in-law, Angelina! Especially since they live so far awar in St. Louis. Here we are with our "step-dogs" :-D.

Ben and I love it when we get to see my nephews and nieces, we always have so much fun with them! Here's Ben and Abigail, they love to tickle/tease each other.

And here's one of favorite reasons to get together with family... to play games. Usually my family gets so into it, that once someone is laughing so hard until they're crying, literally... we all start crying, haha!

Duck Hunting (from Dec 1st, 2007)

I finally found my camera (how sad is that, that I lose my camera for a month?)!

Ben and I went duck hunting and camping a month ago, and it was such a fun experience! We went with some of Ben's friends from Flagstaff (the McReynolds). This was my first hunting experience, and it was all and nothing like I thought it would be.

We went to the Havasu National Wildlife Refuge (Topock Marsh near Needles, CA).

View Larger Map

We drove up there on Nov 30th, and the drive there was extremely long for two reasons: we still had to pick up some supplies and pick up our license and duck hunting stamp. It also took a long time because it was the weekend of best rain storm of the year, so traffic was bad and there were some flooded areas on the way there.
Here’s a wash that actually washed out the road with a foot or so of mud.

We finally got to the campsite, that Ben’s friends were already at, close to 1 AM (after going to wrong campsite… its hard to find the right place in the dark, especially if you never been there). It was really cold that night, since it was raining while we were trying to sleep. We had to wake up at 4:30 in the morning to go make the drawing (everyone who wanted to hunt had to draw to find out which blind we were sitting in). I didn’t take any pictures of our camping site, but here are a couple of pictures of the blind we had on the first day.

This is where we sit and wait for the ducks to fly by so we can shoot at them.

Since we had just got the huge rain storm, it was soo muddy, that Joe McReynolds daughter, Ariel, had too much fun in the mud.

All together (both days that we went), we got about 20-25 ducks. Joe put on his waders and had to go out into the water to get the ducks. Here are the ducks we got on the first day. The second day, the mud in the water was not solid enough for us to retrieve the ducks. Ben would just sink deep into the mud each time he took a step.

Here are some pictures of me, while I was in the blind.

Ben and I had a lot fun, despite of a few frustrations (i.e. we were missing a stamp on our license, so we had to drive all the way into town to get the 2nd stamp before we could go into the blind). We were happy to go home, relax, crawl into our warm bed, and go to sleep.

My brother's wedding

On November 17th, my brother Chad got married to Angelina in California. Ben and I got to go and be with all of my family in Napa Valley. I've never to been to Napa, so it was a lot of fun to visit and see all the vineyards and wineries.

I was one of the bridesmaids and here is a picture of the bridal party.

(Me, Angelina's 2 sisters, Angelina, Chad, Ryan, Eric, Chad)

Then we went to San Francisco for half of a day, visited Fisherman's Wharf. Ben and I want to go back and visit again and see more of San Francisco. But while we were there, we got to our faces sketched. We were going to do a character one, but decided to do the serious one (which is more pricey).

What do you think?

7 Random Things About Me

1. I have tetanophobia (fear of lockjaw). Every time I yawn or open my mouth wide, my jaw pops when I close my mouth. It doesn’t hurt, but I’m scared that one of these times I won’t be able to pop my mouth closed!

2. Back in April (right after Ben and I got engaged), we hiked the Grand Canyon with his family. We went on the South Kaibab trail to Phantom ranch, which descends 4,820 feet in total, although we actually traveled about 7 miles down. 7 miles doesn’t sound so bad, but since it pretty steep most of the way, it was difficult! Going up (after spending a couple of nights down there) of course was harder than going down, especially since I was sore from the days before.

3. I was going through all my pictures and childhood stuff, and I came across my 2nd grade journal that I kept for my class. I died laughing after reading it all. One of the things that I would do is repeat all my sentences at least once or twice, for example, I would write: “I like my brothers. I love my brothers. My brothers like me. My brothers love me!”

4. I am late to work 5 – 10 minutes every day. It doesn’t matter if I say that I’m going to leave 5 minutes earlier so I’m on time and don’t, or I actually do leave 5 minutes earlier and I get stuck in traffic. My supervisor isn’t fond of it :-[]. I heard a quote a couple of weeks ago that say basically this: “The more in hurry you get, the more behind you get.” I hate that its so true!

5. I hate returning items to stores, especially Target! And for this, Target unfortunately will not be getting my business for a while. I’m sure most of you know about receiving wedding gifts and unfortunately having to return a few things (whether its because you got duplicate gifts, or you change your mind about certain items, or you simple don’t like the gift.). Well, Target decides to change their mind about how they’re accepting returned items. Apparently, if its over $20 and you don’t have a gift receipt (which most of my gifts did not come with one), you cannot return it, not even for store credit!

6. After I got engaged to Ben, my two older unmarried brothers (I have 3 brothers total), got engaged within 4 months. All three of us, when all said and done, will be married within a year (my poor parents! Although they don’t have to do much for my brothers).

7. Whenever someone ask me about my favorite book/movie/music/etc, I completely forget about what I read/watch/listen so it takes me like 5 minutes to answer (but most of the times I don’t/can’t answer).

I tag all my blog friends:

Becky (you've already done it)

Camille

Erin

Kelly

Kelsie D

Kelsie O

Laura

Meredith

My Photographer - Jana Miller

This is just a quick blog to say that my professional photographer posted some of my wedding pictures on her website:

http://photographybyjana.blogspot.com/search/label/Wedding (take a look!)

Her first wedding was for my sister-in-law (Erin, Ben's sister), which is towards the bottom of the page from the link above.

She was awesome! She worked well with Ben and I, she asked what we wanted and was able to work with it. I think she took some great shots and also put very nice effects on some of them. I definitely recommend her to anyone that needs a photographer!