thanksgiving!!!!!

turkey day!!!

this year for thanksgiving we traveled to sunny san deigo!!!! it was fantastic! james sister was kind enough to let us camp out at their lovely home and we had a fabulous time. the drive down was an adventure in itself. who knew that the last two hours would be the worst time ever spent in a car! but thanks to two bags of peanut butter m&m's we made it and it ended up being worth the long, long, very boring uncomfortable ride.

thanksgiving was delicious and thanks to the loudest but one of the cutest alarm clocks ever, (our niece jane does not know what quiet is), we didn't miss one minute of our day. we watched the parade, made super cute christmas crafts, went for walks up some of the steepest hills (made me feel even fatter) and chillaxed! the turkey dinner was divine, brett did an awesome job and taught us a wonderful trick. cook the turkey upside down so all the juices run to the breast making every piece of meat moist and delicious! we were lacking in cranberry sauce but I guess I can forgive the harman's this one little mishap. fortunately it didn't ruin my thanksgiving Ü!. the food was so good and so filling that no one could even head back for seconds! but thankfully that's why everyone loves left overs.

our other activities included going to the beach! it was great! james and scott got their grove on and rented surf boards and wet suits! they looked pretty awesome and thought they were even cooler. they were both pretty worn out by the end of the day. I don't think they realized how much muscle the sport takes, or how heavy the boards are. they had a few pretty sweet wipe outs! but said it was all worth it. hopefully when we see scott again he'll be a pro, james still needs a little practice. The seagulls the beach our not your average bird, and as soon as we broke out the snacks for lunch we were surrounded. It felt like we were being interrogated by the cia and throwing things at them didn't shake their nerve to leave us the heck alone. they just bought their time watching our every move and sure enough when hannah turned around to grab her drink, a lame wad seagal swooped down in the fasted seagull karate action ever snatched up her sandwich and took off! if you had blinked you would have missed it! of course this lead to all sorts of hysteria! hannah bawled, jane cried and I screamed! it was the funniest thing ever.

after the beach we went out for an awesome meal, you know it's good when brett's sugar levels hit the roof! all the good stuff is awful for you but it was definitely worth it! so so good! dare i say better then thanksgiving..... no, no I don't dare. it's like comparing apples to oranges! we also traveled to the San Diego temple! so beautiful, all the lights were strung on the tree, but weren't turned on! boo. we were a little saddened by that but I guess we have our own lights to see at home.

we had an awesome time, from the hilarious rounds of apples to apples (the cards for that game really do have sharp corners!), to a blunder with sugar for our sugar cookies (hannah's cornucopia was wonderful Ü) that turned out even better with less sugar! and an exciting shopping excursion on black friday all summed up with a wonderful baby blessing (sam really did have the cutest outfit ever! he must have a really super aunt with great taste....wink wink) !!!! so very much to be thankful for.

Happy Halloween !!!!!!

The Autumn winds have come and gone and so have the spooky moments of all hallows eve! But I think my heart is ready for a little relaxation because i've had more then my fair share of spooks this month! Bring on the turkey!
We started october off with a boo! and went to the This is the Place Park and toured their haunted village! being the lame history nerd in the group I thought this would be a nice semi spooky stroll around the ancient homes and listening to ghost stories about the dead pioneers who forgot to track on with the rest of the dead when they gave up the ghost millennia ago! but no! this was not semi spook at all this was full throttle shriek!!!!! I've never been so terrified. I was movin and shakin and twirling every which way to get james to protect me, but he's really not so hot at it. And while everyone else was laughing their guts out at my terrified manner, I was really and truly on the verge of tinkling in my pants! now that would of been a halloween horror! what kind of 25 year old pees their pants out of fright???! The worst came when we went entered the butchers home, the strobe lights were blinking and my heart was a sinking! I was pretty scared, and it was a larger house so booking to the exit wasn't as easy at one would think. anyway, this butcher took to my hysteria and would not leave me the heck alone! not only do he keep jumping out at me around every corner, he followed me out of the house! and when I had a spell of dry heaving over the smell of cow manure outside the barn and was really thinking I was going to lose my innards, he still would not leave me alone. If I saw someone convulsing in vomiting motions that would scare me to move away, but he kept going strong. I finally managed to reach safety at the next house when all the sudden to my horror he's back! that moron was having so much fun with me that he decided it was worth leaving his post and having one last scare! I'm glad I made someones halloween better because he really shook mine up! poor james got the worst of it i'm afraid, because in my terror I graped his finger, looped him around and pulled! yowzers! james finger was all bruised and swollen, i'm pretty sure it's not broken, but definitely sprained! Just a little proof of the hell I was put through I think.

My favorite part of Halloween!!!

if I had a child, she would look like this and
most definitely wear a pig costume!!!

we wrapped up halloween with two spectacular pumpkin carving parties. james really out did himself this year and won both go arounds with the coolest pumpkin. I did alright. it was really fun. we even went and picked our pumpkins from pumpkin patch! totally awesome, rows and rows of pumpkins, makes choosing kind of hard, but all the better when you pick the perfect pattern to go with it!
this halloween has been spectacular, we'll wrap it up with a few more treats and get ready to sleep it all off come turkey time! gobble gobble!!!

California!!!

Our California Adventure!!!!

California here we come!! we decided to take a short weekend trip over labor day weekend and visit the sunny skies of california. we were long overdue for a new adventure, and we sure got what we were looking for. after a very long drive (I don't mix very well with cars and when I'm in one past my limit strange symptoms start to occur, such as: annoyance, utterance of vulgar words, and barfing. short of kicking and screaming i'm really no more pleasant then a three year old. it's hell for all involved.) at very late and awkward hours and coasting on gas fumes more then once we made it! horray! califonia was a golden ticket to a couple days of freedom and pleasure, the trip was perfect minus the part where we almost got eaten alive in our sleep!!!!!!!!
our plan was to stay in the marriott but since we are all low on extra fun spending funds we decided to stay at roadway inn for 70 bucks a night!!! so we get there and it looks fine, nothing worse then we've stayed in before, nothing better either- but all the same we were there to go to disneyland not be in a hotel all day. The rooms were decent and clean enough. The toilet did have a sign that warned us to only flush once and if clogged go and get maintenance immediately, but other then that all was good. as long as i kept my flip flops on at all time and at all costs and slept on my own blankets there would be nothing to fear. or so i thought.....

we immediately went to the beach when we got there so we hurried and unpacked and changed to head out. we had a lovely time at the beach, took some nice photos and headed back to the hotel around 10. we were all tired and in a hurry to go to sleep because we wanted to get to the disneyland's gates right when they opened. i was the first to shower and climb into a bed that was nicely protected from germs and hair by my blankies, when I saw it! There crawling through my sheets like the king of the world was a tiny little red bug! of course I notified all males of the intruder and was immediately told to stop freaking out and there was nothing to fear and to knock it off and be grateful for my 70 dollar hotel room! so we all went to bed after that without another thought, until.....

We'd all fallen asleep when cassie's (my cousin) husband dane jumps out of bed and yells "son of a bleep!" and james and i sit up and are like "what is wrong with dane, does he have terrets?" so cassie asks him what the junk he's all about and that is when he tells us something is biting his neck!!!!!! Cassie hurry and flips on the light next to the bed and (if you have a weak stomach do not read this next part, I shiver just thinking about it!) as soon as the light went on we watched hundreds of little black bugs (and some red ones!!) just scatter off our their pillows and sheets!! i've never seen so many bugs or something so disgusting in my life. The beds were infested with bed bugs!!!!! disgusting! so of course they push back the mattress and sure enough there are just thousand and thousands of bugs scurrying everywhere. the black ones were just little tiny specks, if you saw only one you wouldn't have been able to tell it was a bug or even noticed it, but seeing that many all at once you can't but help notice it. And sure enough in the mounds of black specks are numerous red bugs that I had found and showed everyone and was told to stop being a germaphobe worry wart! so obviously we aren't going to stay there one more second and we have to get out of there as quickly as possible. but cassie's family is still snoozing in the other room and we have to tell and show them what happened. so we go in to tell them, but cassie doesn't want her sister lindsay to find out because lindsay has a four month old baby and she will wig out if she finds out her baby is sleeping in a bug infested bed. But when we wake up her parents lindsay over heard and jumps up only to see one of the red bed bugs crawling down her little babies face!!!!! so lindsay just starts freaking out! just bawling and going into hysteria, like any mother should an all of us wanted to do. We go get the manager on duty to look at our room, he comes and see's that we aren't lying! they're all in a panic and embarrassed at what happened. so we're all packing up to leave and find a new hotel when the manager comes back and tells us we can just move to the next room over because they've checked it and there are no bugs! yea right! we will not be sleeping in this bug infested motel, let alone the bug infested bed! james kindly declined his offer and we left after getting a full refund. But it wasn't over yet!
Haydn and dane (cassie and lindsay's husbands) had gone down to marriott to get us a room and sure enough as they were standing in the hotel lobby haydn feels something bite his skin and he looks down and there on his stomach is a bed bug!!!! aaaahhhh!!!!! that means that we are all completely infested. there are bugs galore crawling over our skin, hair and clothes. that means that we can't go and sleep in our new clean beds with our infested pajamas, and we can't bring our infested luggage (i forgot to mention not only do bed bugs get in beds, they also live in the carpet) into our new clean rooms!!! therefore we have to wash everything before we can go back to our normal state of minds. so we go into the laundry room and of course all their washers and dryers are full! who in their right mind would be doing laundry at this hour unless they were infested with bed bugs!!! so we try and find a walmart to get the detergent and lysol because we have to fumigate everything!!! we have to track down a security guard to let us in the arcade room to change our bills into quarters. oh it was such the ordeal so we start laundry about 1:30 in the morning!!! and we have to wash everything, clothes that we haven't even worn have to be washed because all of our luggage had been left open on the hotel floor so the bugs have crawled into our suitcases and infested every piece of clothing and cloth they could get into. at one point we thought we were being a little over protective and thought maybe we should take it down a notch and that is when i saw another bed bug crawl out of the bag that had been with us all day!!! this bag hadn't been in the hotel, it had only been in the room since we got home from the beach and in a mere couple of hours of being on the floor it had gotten infested!! after that we kept finding them, on shirts, hats, in luggage all over. when we would pull the clothes out of the laundry we would find more bugs that had died during the wash fall out of our clothes!!! it was crazy!!!! as a result of finding all these bugs in our luggage and bags we ended up having to throw a lot of things away! our pillows had to be chucked, the babies diapers had to be thrown away (and you know how expensive they are!) everything, everything we couldn't wash was gone. it was so ridiculous. forty dollars on laundry later and at 4 in the morning we finally all went to sleep. we had to stay up because our last batch of laundry was the clothes we were wearing, our pj's. and we had to be so careful when we were changing out of our dirty clothes in the bathroom. when cassie's parents were changing their clothes they found two more bugs. i'm not exaggerating when I tell you we were completely covered in bugs. it was so gross!!
Now you know all about our California Adventure! you should always check your bed no matter where you are sleeping!!!!!! it was ridiculous. if dane hadn't woken up when he got bit we would of brought them home with us because they were embedded in everything!!! no more cheap hotels for us and unfortuneately my germaphobia just reached higher levels. beware!!!
Other then this sick little spell bugs taking over our lives the trip was really fun. The rides were awesome, the weather was perfect, the food delicious one of our more fun vacations and we learned a lot too, so just beware next time you go out of town or else you could be carrying home a few thousand visitors with you!!!

the hike...

as summer is winding down we are winding up! it seems it has come and gone in a flash and we only have cheezy wedding invitations to show for it. boring!!!! we decided to make the most out of our last week of summer and go for a hike. But first I must mention that we are both way out of shape and you might even say i'm on the hefty side of life right now, the pants are cutting off the air supply. That being said james picked to hike to dounut falls. maybe he had sugar on the brain when he chose that but we set out to work some muscle. unfortunately james inner eagle wasn't turned on and all the skills he learned as a scout have left him because he took us up the completely wrong canyon. after searching and winding up milcreek desperately looking for dounut falls he realized his mistake. so we had to pick one near by and we chose dog lake! woof woof! well since time had gotten away from us it was a little chilly and mckay was the only one that came prepared. hurray mckay! he had the water, the backpack and the sweatshirt. I guess his inner eagle is still in tune with him. mountains are cold, hikes are long and you should always be prepared, I do believe that's the boy scout motto! so off we went straight up!!! it was killer. I was huffing and puffing with my bum a burnin'! mckay was lagging and james long legs just kept pushing him up the mountain. 2 miles up and we made it in an hour. i don't know if that's good or bad. but we made it and took some really awesome pictures along the way. I might add that mckay has quite the sense of humor and was making us laugh the whole way up. dog lake was spectacular let me tell you. it looked more like and oversized pool. we left just in the nick of time and after 40 minutes slipping and sliding down the trail we made it out of the canyon before it closed. next time we'll have to be more prepared and bring a flashlight. all in all it was much more fun then any wedding!

Gary Indiana

We're Invited....The first of many of our dental applications have returned and with it came awesome news! James has been invited to Indiana University for an interview!!! hip hip horray! while this doesn't mean we've been accepted it does mean we're one step closer to convincing them we should!! haha! While we're just hoping to get into any of the schools, this one has its benefits because its tuition costs are much lower! we're always happy about saving money! His interview is in october so we'll have until then to come up of a list of reasons why they should let us go there! Until then we'll just wait for more news from other schools and keep hoping for the best!

For This is Halloween!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My favorite holiday is halloween!!!! it's spooktastic!, the smells, crisp air, tons of candy it's just the best!!! so imagine my thrill when james aunt jill (also a halloween fanatic) showed me her awesome new halloween decoration for the year!!! what could be better then drinking spooky, eyeball punch out of a pumpkin bowl!!!!! I was a bit envious but as all my envious desires usually go, knew this was something I'd have to wait for when money is a constant in my bank account! But I guess the ghouls and ghost of halloween over heard my plight because just as I was gushing over the greatness of this bowl james grandma over heard my delight and excitment and told me I could have hers!!! I was shocked, and not wanting to be the snooty granddaughter in law i decided to gratefully decline the offer. How could I take something so great from such a great lady. But she insisted and told me I better now leave without taking it home with me. she was watching me to closely for me to refuse again, so I decided to take her up on the generous offer! I guess I'll be having one of the greatest halloween parties this year all because of this fabulous gift, that reflects the wonderfulness of halloween!!!!!!!!!!!

four eyes!!!!

well my days of being a nerd are over! I've finally graduated to contacts! wahoo!!! it only took three years, but I've finally decided to become a grown up and say ta ta to being a four eyed geek! enough with smudges, sweaty nose, crooked lenses etc. I've now joined the round of weirdo's that enjoy touching their eyeball and leaving a foreign object inbetween it's lashes. I'm sure i've just opened the door for more comical adventures to occur but I'm game because I no longer have to wear my sunglasses on top of my glasses when driving! oh the possibilites, if only they could make my face not look so fat!!!!!!

star wars returns....

They came!!! hurray! james birthday gift arrived today, only more then a week late, but we weren't really counting. But they were worth the wait and james was just as excited as he would have been had they arrived on his birthday! they are pretty awesome, and truly vintage!!!

What's DAT????

James took his DAT (Dental Academics Test) in june! he practically studied his lights out and pulled out just as much hair! Its definitely nice to have this proportion of the dental school years done and out of the way. kind of a stressful start, but a good one. My mom was nice enough to make this awesome sign for james the day of his test! my mom is pretty clever and never misses an opportunity to make an awesome sign (she even cut out the picture's of the teeth from a magazine she was reading at her last dental appointment and saved them just for the sign! always planning ahead) we were able to get our applications in and so far all 13 of the schools we have applied to have asked us for a secondary application (which also means they would like more mula! there's always two sides to everything). We're thinking this is a good sign, and we'll find out later this fall or early next year where we'll be headed to live out the next four years of our life!!!! it's a gamble and so far we've yet to narrow down or have our heart set on any place!

help me Obi-wan Kenobi... you're my only hope

happy birthday james!!!
James turned 25 today! old!!! and to celebrate I bought him absolutely nothing! ha! Really, i'm lying, well sort of. james is a hard one to shop for and his wish list only allowed room for one item...his new iphone, but since he had to buy this gift for himself I thought i'd surprise him with a little trickery! knowing james to be the true inner star wars geek I found an awesome sheet set in Pottery Barn Kids! so I gave in just a little and decided to buy him the pillowcases! (lucky for me, they didn't make the sheets big enough for our king bed! phew) well the the gift came, and after a fishy tale of making james believe I had really bought the items for his nephew (also a star wars fan) I convinced him that the package wasn't for him. But the plan was folly because when I went to wrap the gift the eve before his birthday i ripped open the package to find.....TWO FLOWER POWER FITTED CRIB SHEETS! what the junk?!? after rechecking the invoice, package, order confirmation etc. it was a proven fact that PB Kids had indeed screwed up my order big time. the force, I would say, was not with them! (ha james star wars humor is rubbing off!) so needless to say the one gift blew up like the death star and james was more surprised with the flower power girl sheets I had for him. I'm not sure how to take this experience, james thinks it's a sign that our first born will be a girl and PB kids has taken it upon itself to get me ready for the future! i guess we'll have to name her Leia if that's the case!!!!

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