Thanksgiving, a birthday, and Reptiles!

My boy and I,
We do lots of cool things together
Here are a few of them as of lately!

Thanksgiving with the Mickelsons!

Thanksgiving break went by WAY too fast:( However, we still had an amazing 4 days in Yakima, Washington. We made the LONG drive in 10 1/2 hours...including a 1 hour stop to eat and visit Michael's mission companion. That was nice. I think Michael and I really have the best families in the world! We had tons of fun with everyone. We ate, slept, played lots of golf on Playstation (I won most the time:), printed off wedding pictures, watched Matthew's amazing basketball skills, played lots of marbles with Sarah, saw Blindside, laughed and goofed around a lot, watched movies, talked, and got some new movies and windshield wipers. On Thanksgiving Day the Mickelson's have a tradition of going around and saying something they are thankful for. I really like this tradition. I spent most of the day thinking of how blessed I am. I am particularly grateful for meeting Michael, getting married in the temple for forever, and becoming a part of his family. I LOVE his family. I really don't think I could ask for a better one. On the way home, I told Michael that I wished we could have stayed there for 3 weeks and not have to worry about anything else. I wish they lived closer because I already miss them and I know Michael does too.

Look how beautiful Rachel is!

One of the funniest boys, I think he gets it from Michael

Michael's 23RD Birthday!

Sunday isn't a very fun day to have a birthday, so Michael decided that the night before we would go to Tucanos for dinner! Well....sadly I ruined that. I was sick with the flu. So Sunday (his birthday) we played and relaxed pretty much the whole day. It was really nice. Michael opened his presents from me...a scrapbook for mission pictures, gum (because he always steals mine), an i tunes card, AND the best gift of all a Terrelle Pryor Jersey! GO BUCKEYES! We made a chocolate cake, just chocolate, no sprinkles. Michael doesn't like sprinkles, I don't know why cause I think they are amazing. We went over to my parents house and had a little birthday party! My mom made Michael shrimp, rice, and beans. We had cake, and Michael blew out all his candles! And then he opened more presents! He got New Moon chocolate haha, money, a cool new uno game (I think I am more excited about that!), cards from the twins and Harrison that were covered in Go Ohio, and Buckeye stuff, and Transformers 2 in a special transformer guy case!
Now...Michael is a lucky guy...he got to celebrate his birthday again that following Saturday! We went to New Moon. I don't think Michael could have been more excited, he has had a countdown on face book for it for a LONG time. We loved it! I think we'll see it again soon:) We then went to Tucanos! Tucanos is AMAZING! We both ate a lot. Michael ate quail eggs...i don't know how i feel about that, I think i'd rather stick with the pineapple! I can't believe my boy is 23...he thinks that is old haha, I wonder what he will say 25 + years down the road:)

The REPTILE Show:

For a biology lab, Michael was assigned to go to a reptile show at the Bean Museum. It was fun...but I hate reptiles. I just think they are creepy. We learned a lot, or I guess I learned a lot. Michael already knows everything there is to know about reptiles. She let us touch a python, a giant iguana, and a turtle. The turtle was cute...I think I want one someday, but the others scared me to death. They have lots of animals at the Bean museum (mostly dead luckily!) My favorite was the elephant. I LOVE elephants...someday I want a baby one and I will name it Daisy and feed her peanuts and sugar cane all the time! Michael liked the Liger....and the grizzly bear. It was a cool Museum...the only thing that could have made it better is if they had "Shamoo" whales there:)

Michael and the Liger...he thought she was cool

Don't look at the lions, just the elephant. I want her...but a newborn baby version of her!

Happy Birthday to my sweetheart!

Tomorrow for many...(especially me) is a very special day. Tomorrow is the day..my boy was born! I don't really like to think what I would do or be without my boy, so instead I will focus on what makes him so unbelievably special and perfect.

-no one can make me laugh harder than he can
-he can go from wild and out of control to sweet and sensitive in a matter of seconds
-his eyes are gorgeous
-well actually more than just his eyes our gorgeous...I believe I married the most handsome man in the world
-he is incredibly smart, strong, loving, adorable, inspiring, is so good at taking care of me even when i act like a baby sometimes, he is respectful, helpful, always make me feel beautiful and special, his hands are just amazing
-my boy treats me like a queen....he makes me want to be better

I am pretty sure I could go on forever, so to sum it up, I will just say that he is MORE THAN JUST AMAZING! I really am the luckiest girl:) I love you Michael and Happy Birthday!

ONE YEAR AGO TODAY.....

Michael and I knew that the other existed.

As we were dating we decided to keep a journal together of all of our favorite/important memories. Below are both of our perspectives on this day! It is amazing what can happen in 1 year:)

My Perspective:
It was Election Day and I had been home for most of the night. Anyway I came back to the apartment carrying my laundry and when I walked into my apartment there were a bunch of people flopping around. My roommate Baylee introduced me to 3 boys: her cousin Jaden, her cousin's old mission companion Eric, and then Eric's roommate Michael. I don't remember a lot, I mostly remember being ticked that Obama had won. Although, I do remember looking at those 3 boys thinking that one of them was really cute!! Obviously that was Michael. Anyway that was the first time I ever saw him!

Michael's Perspective:
So we were sitting at our computers and Schell asks me if I want to go this election party at one of his ex-mission companions' cousin's apartment. I was like, "Um that sounds kind of gay..." but I didn't have anything else to do so I decided to go with him. We show up and I start scouting out the talent. None of the other girls really stood out to me so I decide to just buckle down and get ready for a solid waste of time. We'd been there for half an hour or so and this girl with dark skin and dark brown hair walked in. I'm not going to lie, I sat up taller in my chair. I looked over at Schell and he looked at me and we both nodded to each other and smiled. I was thinking in my head, "That's the most beautiful girl I have seen since I've been back, I guarantee you she's either from Spain or Italy." I was so pumped and I thought she was Spanish so much that I almost started talking to her in Spanish. Turns out it's a good thing I didn't because she doesn't know Spanish at all! I kept looking at her though because I felt a little tug deep inside and I didn't know what it meant. I remember thinking that nothing would ever happen with her because I didn't have anything to get me in the door as they say. Nothing to break the ice, get that initial conversation going. I couldn't keep my eyes off her though. I could tell there was so much to her, so much more than her skin tone or her nice butt (haha) or her big, soft brown eyes. She had a glow about her. I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I knew that I wanted to get to know Bella really well and I wanted to be special to her.

Our First Halloween!

I LOVE Halloween mostly because of the endless amounts of candy. However, this year I was especially excited to be celebrating Halloween with my sweet husband! We went to my aunt's Halloween party the day before Halloween, and decided to dress up as thing 1 and thing 2. My mom thought this was a perfect costume for us because we both are so mysterious and are always messing around. We had a lot of fun at the party, playing with all the little kids. One of our favorites is my 2 year old cousin Mathew. The funny thing about Mathew is that he literally is TERRIFIED of Michael. He freaks out whenever Michael even comes near him. So as you can imagine, Michael has a lot of fun with this! For example, Michael went upstairs to hide while I gained Mathews trust and then carried him upstairs to "play," but, when Mathew went to play in a little tunnel, Michael popped out! We find this so funny because all the other kids absolutely LOVE Michael. On Halloween day, we went over to my parent's house to carve pumpkins and then spend the rest of the night handing out candy and playing with the kids! We decided to be Edward and Bella. Luckily there wasn't really anything either of us had to do to dress up besides make Michael's face a little paler. I am excited about our new candy supply! It makes sitting through 3 hours of anatomy a bit more enjoyable:)

Our Costumes!

Mathew in his cute lion costume!

Carving our pumpkin!Our finished Pumpkin! The O stands for Ohio State:)Edward and Bella!

Too much sleep OR Not enough sleep?

Michael and I have noticed that being married is QUITE a bit different than being single. One of these major differences is what we do at night. Since we no longer have a social life other than each other of course:), and don't have to worry about staying up as late as we can together to prolong our goodnight goodbyes, our bodies have decided that they would like to sleep. Now, Michael and I don't just sleep the normal 5-6 hours a night a normal college student does...we sleep at least 8-10 and sometimes even 12 hours a night! We have found that the past month everytime we get to our apartment we immediately start feeling tired. We are wide a wake throughout the day, even in some of our boring long classes...but for some reason the second we step in our apartment and decided to cuddle for a few minutes we both end up fast asleep. At first we thought we were overly tired and trying to recuperate from our wedding and honeymoon, however now we think we might be getting too much sleep! On Tuesday night we got home from school at around 6:30. We ate dinner and then went to cuddle for a few minutes before we started our homework. Well within minutes we both were fast asleep and did not wake up until 7:30 am! We still don't know what is wrong with us....:) But I think we will just enjoy our evenings of cuddling and sleeping together for as long as we can.

The life of the newlyweds!

My boy and I have had a blast these past 2 months being married! We have developed some of our own traditions and habits that make every moment spent together an unforgettable one!
- Michael and I like to play the game "gotcha last." This is definitely a game one would think only little kids play, however, we both love it! For example every night/morning when we are brushing our teeth this game begins. I will hit him and he will hit me back. The funny thing about this game is that Michael kind of struggles haha. We'll just say he is a little slower than me:) It is an interesting game to play in our tiny apartment because there isn't a lot of places for us to run!
- Michael and I live off of about 5-6 different kinds of food. We almost always eat cereal for breakfast, either a turkey/roast beef sandwich, fruit snacks from Costco, granola bars, an apple, and some sort of cracker for lunch, and then for our favorite meal of the day...Dinner! Beans, rice (our favorite is Couscous) and fried eggs! Occasionally we will have spagetti, or a salad.
- We always make our bed together!
- We do EVERYTHING together! We wake up together...)even if the other person doesn't have to leave),we eat together, brush our teeth together, get ready for bed together, pack our lunches together. We pretty much are inseparatable. On Monday, Wednesday, Fridays when I am at work and Michael is at school he calls me after every class and sometimes comes and gets me from work so that I can go to his classes with him.
- We love Family Home Evenings! We take turns giving the spiritual thought and then have some sort of activity. Our most recent activity was going to target and picking out a game together. Michael wanted to pick out the game so as we were looking through the games...( a lot of games), my dear boy decided that he wanted to buy the Twilight movie game haha. I found this quite adorable.
-We love our new t.v given to us by my grandpa. We watch movies a couple times a week on it! Michael struggles with our movie collection since it mostly consists of my favorite chick flics!
-My boy absolutely LOVES music. He sings at the top of his lungs, and does the funniest dance moves to them. He is so fun to be around and always does the strangest things....which to me make me fall more and more in love.
-We get between 7-10 hours of sleep everynight, yet we are both still exhausted. Sometimes we will come home from school and work and lay on the bed and within minutes are both completely zonked. We don't know why we are always so tired...Michael seems to think we have an iron deficency.

The list could go on....but in short, I really do believe in a happily ever after. I couldn't be any happier with my boy. We still have a lot to learn and do,but we look forward to every moment we have together because each moment a memory is created that will never be forgotten.

My little Buckette

Well as you might suppose, Isabella and I love to spend time together and it doesn't really matter what we're doing, as long as it's with each other. It just so happens that one of my favorite things to do is watch Ohio St. football games, and, naturally, watching them with Isabella makes them 10 times better. I love sitting next to her on the couch, love it when she asks me questions about what happened, or how many yards to go until they get a first down, etc. I'm so lucky that she loves to watch football because she could have a hobby like shopping or something pathetic like that. So anyways last Saturday we went over to her house and we watched Ohio St play undefeated Wisconsin. The first half was pretty close with Ohio St. clinging to a 14-10 lead after returning an interception 89 yards for a touchdown and driving 88 yards towards the end of the half and scoring. Isabella and I were so excited! Oh, sorry but I almost left out our good friend Mountain Dew! We have been close to Mountain Dew for quite some time now ( I introduced Isabella to him shortly after I met her) and we gave him the honor of being our beverage of choice for the bride and groom at our wedding dinner toast. Well anyways, he comes with us to all the Ohio St. games that we watch on tv and on this particular occasion we both sat enjoying the stinging goodness of a Mountain Dew Voltage and a Code Red, which, if you don't already know, are both flavors of Mountain Dew. So as I had one arm around my beautiful wife dressed in red, and an ice-cold mountain dew in the other hand, and as we both sat watching Ohio St. destroy Wisconsin, I couldn't help but ask myself the question, "Could life really get any better?" And I can be sure that as long as Isabella is by my side, the answer will always be a resounding, "no". (Oh and by the way, Ohio St. did win 31-13. We will next see them in action against Penn St. on November 7.)

Our Magical Oven/Sleep talking husband!

So our teeny tiny apartment is actually quite cute and has turned out to have some interesting features or creatures in it! We have discovered that our oven is magical. You can cook anything in it from rolls to a casserole and it takes anywhere from 2-10 minutes depending on what it is haha. So....the other day Michael and I decided to make a chocolate cake. I put it in the oven and started doing dishes. After about 2 minutes, I checked it and it was still the batter so I continued scrubbing dishes. About 5 minutes later just as I was about finished, I started smelling cake so I opened up the oven and sure enough our wonderful cake was golden brown. I could hardly believe this so I stuck my fork in it and it came out completely clean. Turns out we made an amazingly good cake in around ten minutes haha. We are quite thrilled about our new discovery because time will no longer be an issue when deciding what to cook! So besides our magical oven, we have a cupboard that attracts ants. Sometimes I will open it up and find piles of ants just crawling around...nasty. But it gets worse...we have ear wigs. Probably in my top 5 creepest bug list. Sometimes we find them in our bed dead! Well besides our creepy bug problem, we love our cozy, cute apartment and of course our magical oven!

Now my dear husband has developed a particularly hilarious habit of talking when he is pretty much zonked out. He even laughs in his sleep which is so funny because he sounds like a drunk. So the other night, we were lying in bed and as far as i knew Michael was fast asleep. Well all of a sudden he randomly says, "I am sorry." And I said,"Um sorry for what?" and he goes, "I am thinking mean thoughts about you right now." I was like, "um that's sad, like what?" He replies, "I am not going to tell you because it isn't very nice." I said, "Just please tell me anyways." So he then goes on to call me a prostitute because apparently I like to go to dances with other guys haha. And then just 2 nights ago I asked him what treat he was going to bring me back from the bakery and he goes, " a pumpkin!" And I of course was like, "Um I don't think they have pumpkins at the bakery sweetheart, but maybe you could bring me home a pumpkin cookie." However, he still remained firm on the fact that they did have pumpkins at the bakery! Oh how I love my boy, he never ceases to make me laugh!

Newport Beach!

Michael and little Thomas have decided that they are buddies. Thomas absolutely loves Michael and it is so cute watching them play!

Michael learning how to skim board

We had the opportunity to drive down with my family to Newport Beach for 4 days! My grandpa rented some beach houses and my entire family came down! We drove down on Friday night and stayed in Mesquite, Nevada and then on Saturday drove the rest of the way to the beach! The car was chucked full and it was quite loud. I found it funny that Michael was just as loud as all the little kids. We had a blast boogie boarding, playing football in the sand, going on walks ect. Since our whale watch tour on our honeymoon, I have had an obsession with killer whales or "Shamu"Whales. I have dreamed about them pretty much every night. So of course I was on a constant lookout for whales. We had been in the ocean for about 1 minute when I spotted 2 fins going in and out of the water. I started freaking out and Michael looked and saw them too! I was positive that they were killer wales haha. But Michael told me that they didn't like living in such warm water, and that they didn't have the white spots and weren't nearly as big as killer whales are. So then I decided that they were humpback whales. Michael said they were too small, and were porpoises. As cute as porpoises are they are nothing compared to whales. So I think my story will sound better if I just pretend that I really did see whales! We went to breakfast on the pier. We decided to walk to it because I thought it would only be a ten minute walk...but apparently I underestimated and so our little breakfast adventure ended up being about 2 1/2 hours and only 20 minutes of that was actually eating breakfast haha! Michael also found a little buddy down there. My cousin Thomas is 3 years hold and pretty much loves Michael. I think the feeling is mutual because Michael told me that if our kids were as cute as Thomas we would be in good shape! The last little funny story of course is about my boy! He decided to play football in the sand with all the boys for quite a while. After finishing a long, hard game he announced to me that he isn't as young as he used to be haha. And that he was so sore. I found this funny since he is only 22 years old and shouldn't be getting sore joints quite yet (Actually my muscles were just a little tight. When it comes to joints and ligaments I'm as healthy as a stallion)! We had a lot of fun together and as a family! Sadly it went by a little too quickly:(

So first of all, Michael and I had a blast together watching the Buckeyes play....until they lost:( Oh well hopefully they will win next time! Second, Michael surprised me with a beautiful bouquet of gerber daisies! I can't really handle how much I love them! He is so flipping sweet. Turns out that the day he gave me flowers was actually our 1 month anniversary haha:) And third of all, I got accepted into the nursing program at Ameritech College. I start my classes on September 28, 2009 and will graduate sometime at the end of April 2011! I am really excited about this because I have always wanted to be a nurse.

The flowers Michael gave me!

Michael and I getting ready to watch the Ohio State game! Michael was way pumped about this!

Our Dating Days!

Cute little Sarah's Baptism in Yakima, Washington July 2009

Tubing at the cabin in Montana! July 2009

One of our engagement pictures! May 2009

Our camping trip with my family to Arches National Park

We are engaged! March 13, 2009

We got in a banana nutella fight!

Our first picture together!

Here are some of our favorite pictures while dating!

We got a blog!

After some serious begging, Michael said we could get a blog! (He thinks the whole idea of it is dumb haha, but I am sure he will grow to just love ours!). We are excited to keep everyone updated on what is going on in our crazy lives:)