College Basketball games

We have been having some fun and cheap dates by going to college basketball games. We got some free tickets for Cheneys basketball game because I am now EWU alumni, and we've been watching games at NIC (in Coeur d'Alene), because Justin's friend from Snow college played a couple of games there. Did you know that like a Zamboni, there is a Gym-boni? Here's a picture of it below. It's a little blurry, maybe because it was so fast :) It's not as cool as a Zamboni...but it's close.

We went with our friends DJ and Melissa to this game, and had a lot of fun on our group date. We went with Marv, Pam, and Zach this game, and it was a lot of fun too! At one of the games, NIC was tied with the other team and there was only 1.5 seconds left in the game. The ball was thrown in to NIC at the side opposite of their basket and the player shot from the opposite free throw line and made it as the buzzer went off. It was amazing! and we were all there to witness it! It was played all over the news and if you looked really really really close, you could kind of see us standing and cheering in the background. Practically famous ;) Camera 1 Camera 2

Did I mention that Zach came with us . . . well he's in this picture with us.

Stephanie's birthday

Since you can easily make up new traditions as newlyweds, I decided to come up with a great birthday tradition. This idea was inspired by the fact that my birthday was coming soon. So, the tradition is that the birthday person can choose everything they want to do and eat on that day, and the other person has to go along with it. So, on my birthday we slept in, ate fruity pebbles, went to a ham radio class from 9-2 (that was not really my choice, but an obligation for our calling as stake emergency communication specialists for the bishops storehouse), bought a children's book at Barnes and Noble (called Llama Llama Red Pajama, it's excellent!), ate dinner at Hu Hot, watched the movie, August Rush, and played soccer (we won our game). It was the perfect birthday (minus the ham radio class), and Justin was so supportive and sweet the entire day. I am excited to come up with some more traditions for our family, but I am a little nervous about what Justin will come up with on his birthday, (he has a bigger imagination than I do ;). `

SNOW!

"The winter storm that has paralyzed Spokane set a record for the amount of snow dumped in a 24- hour period. The National Weather Service recorded 17 inches of snow at Spokane International Airport in the 24 hours that ended at 4 a.m., 4 inches more than the record of 13 inches set in 1984 - records have been kept since 1881. More than 3 inches of additional snow had fallen on the city since 4 a.m., driving the total to more than 20 inches." On Thursday morning there was so much snow that I couldn't make it to work, and school was cancelled for Justin. It was fun being snowed in for one day, but we were soon ready for the snow to be gone.

One nice thing about renting is that we never had to shovel anything off of our sidewalk or driveway because our manager did, but we didn't get out of shoveling snow off of our cars!!!

Christmas

We decided to carry on Justin's family tradition by buying each other a Christmas ornament every year. The ornament would represent something memorable that happened during the year.

My ornament to Justin was two precious moments ice skating together, since that is one of our favorite activities to do together, and we spent quite a few dates ice skating and getting to know one another better.
Justin gave me an ornament representing our wedding along with the date we were sealed. It was really sweet that he personalized it. We both loved our ornaments, and buying and exchanging them was one of our Christmas highlights. We needed somewhere to put our new ornaments, but we thought that getting a real Christmas tree is a lot of work and buying one cost a lot of money, so we settled for this dollar store tree. It was perfect! Whatever ornaments couldn't fit on the tree, sat around the tree. We spent Thanksgiving with the Butterfields and Christmas with the Wagners. We are so blessed to be apart of two wonderful families!

It's been a while. . .

So it's been a while since we last posted, and we have heard that many of you look at our page hoping that something exciting has happened to us besides a Halloween party. We have also had someone question how our marriage was going because nothing new has been posted, but Justin's response to that was, "things are going really well!. . . that's why we haven't posted." We haven't really gotten in to blogging yet, but for all of our friends and family, we will attempt to catch you up since Halloween.