The best of 2012 in photos

Goodbye 2012!!

Hello 2013!!!

Happy New Year!

Christmas recap

Christmas eve we ate pizza and wings and opened presents over at Branden's parents house. No pics-- but we got spoiled with lots of good stuff! 

Christmas morning we woke up early (too early for us) and opened our stockings from "Santa" ;)

I gave-- I mean, Santa gave Branden a hunting themed stocking. 

He even got a little riffle that is actually a lighter!

Gotta love the gag gifts :)

After we saw what Santa brought us we opened our gifts from each other.

I love buying Christmas gifts/any gifts for Branden. 

It's the best to see if I can surprise him! 

--Random icicle the almost killed me before we went to Branden's parents for some delicious breakfast burritos!! Yummm! 

After breakfast we went to Branden's grandpas for a few hours and then we were off to my moms to open gifts and have dinner with my family. 

Ash and Casey with the baby gifts from Gma and Gpa Petersen. 

Next Christmas we will have a little baby nephew to love on!

We had a great Christmas and were very blessed to spend it with most of our family. 

Hope everyone had a good Christmas and has a happy New Year!

Twas the week before Christmas

Here I stand in line at the post office yesterday. 

There were 13 people in front of me (doesn't look like much but trust me)

and by the time I was at the front of the line there were 20 people behind me. 

Everyone with packages they were most likely sending off to someone they love for Christmas. 

Me? I had 1 Christmas card going to Japan, which ended up only needing one normal stamp. 

Who would have guessed? 

6 more days, people! 6 days!! 

I'm getting super excited for Christmas.

Yay!

What's with the stache, you might ask?

Basically I don't even know.
He doesn't want to shave it though.

Besides the fact that I really hate the mustache I just have to say, especially on nights like tonight, I am so happy this hunka burnin mustache love married me.

I just kinda really really like him.

:)

Hooray for the weekend!

Here are my plans for the weekend......

Finish Christmas shopping and wrapping all of our gifts so that our living room no longer looks like Santa's workshop! 

At least it's a fun mess. 

Ho ho ho!

Have a very merry weekend everyone!

Wrap it up!

This weekend Branden and I did some Christmas shopping. 

We didn't actually get a whole lot of shopping done unfortunately but I did get a couple of the gifts I bought on Black Friday wrapped and put under our tree.

Usually I will wrap all of the gifts in fun red wrapping paper. 

This year I decided (thanks to some pinsperation-- Pinterest inspiration) that I wanted to wrap everything in brown paper with red and white twine. 

I am in love with the way they turned out!! 

I found these cute gift tags on Pinterest. 

Click here to download! 

After I put the gifts under the tree I took Branden to see what he thought. 

He said "It's just brown paper" 

He obviously doesn't realize what is in style these days. 

He told me he was wrapping mine in newspaper, which I told him is also pretty "in" right now. 

Basically under our tree is gonna be looking goooood. 

Is anyone else doing something different with their wrapping?? 

Or are you strictly wrapping paper type people??

A thankful weekend

I had the best Thanksgiving/days after Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving day we spent an hour or so hanging out at my moms house and then went to Branden's parents to enjoy our turkey and potatoes :) 

(Can we talk about how craptastic these cellphone photos are?)

After enjoying a lovely feast we went home and napped....

Later that night Branden decided to go watch football (woooo!) and clearly I didn't want to join in so I went out to my moms for a little game night. 

A few of us decided to venture out to Wal-mart with all the crazy folks.

We just wanted a new board game, k? 

We ended up buying 2 of thee best. games. ever. 

Have you guys played Quelf? 

I kid you not, this game is freaking hilarious. 

And Headbandz. 

Just by looking at this pic you know this game will be fun. 

I'm a chicken, Ashley is Harry Potter, and Jaylen is a gorilla. 

Playing this with our grandma proved to be quite the challenge. 

Pretty amusing though :)

Some other things that happened this weekend--

Had a craft night and made this cute Christmas decoration...

I made some chocolate chip cookies....

Put up our tree (and it barely fit in our basement)....

Bought some Christmas presents and tried to wrap them extra cute (idea from Pinterest obvi) but it did not turn out exactly as I hoped....

Added some holiday decor to our living room....

How cute are these little Christmas trees??

Branden saw them and said "those are not trees, those are cones"

Wahhhhh! Whatever. I love. 

P.S. I even convinced Branden to hang up Christmas lights on our house!! 

Big thanks to his dad for helping :)

SOOOOO EXCITED FOR CHRISTMAS!!

What about you?!

Thankful

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!

Today and always I am thankful for...

Branden.

He is my best friend and I am so happy that he is my husband.

I am so so thankful for him and everything he does for me.

My family. 

Every single one the them. 

I am lucky to have such amazing people in my life.

My health and the health of my loved ones.

Our home.

Our jobs.

Our cars.

Our freedom. 

Food. 

Love. 

Life. 

All of my amazing friends.

A warm bed to sleep in at night. 

A nice hot shower.

Church.

Movies.

Date nights.

Christmas.

EVERYTHING!!!

Basically I am very blessed and so thankful for everything I have. 

I know the list could go on and on but I will leave it there. 

I hope everyone counts their blessings today and tells the people they love, how much they love them. 

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

It should be noted...

Branden and I sleep on a queen sized bed (much to his dismay).

We have a king size in our guest bedroom but it literally will not fit in our room. 

Not to mention it is stuck in the basement for the rest of time. 

So anyway... occasionally in the summer we will sleep downstairs because our house gets dang hot. Well summer is over (obviously) and we are back in our actual room.

Every night Branden starts complaining about how bad he hates the bed in our room. 

He seems to think that our bed is too small and that I am a bed hog. 

I just wanted to share this photo as proof that I most certainly am not the bed hog. 

Glad I cleared that up :]

A random post for a Friday

Happy Friday friends!

I don't know about you but Friday always puts me in a good mood.

Even though this morning we woke up to snow. 

If you know me, you know I hate snow.

But guess what? Not today! 

Weirdly enough my hatred of snow is growing less and less. 

I mostly just hate driving in it. 

So, as long as the roads are free of snow, I guess I can deal. 

Yesterday while stopped at an intersection I saw this...

You guys--- I am seriously not a dog person. At all. 

And this just cracked me up. 

This lady had two little dogs climbing all over her while she was driving. 

Like, right up in her face. 

The things I will never understand....

We decided to be obese and go to Denny's for dinner the other day. 

I think Denny's is a love or hate kind of place. 

And gross as it may be, we love it.

((Gross as in it doesn't seem like the cleanest place ever))

Anyway, we pigged out and it was amazeeeee. 

So there is some randomness for your Friday. 

Hope everyone has a fabulous weekend!

A near death experience

So let me tell ya about a near death experience we almost had. 

About a month ago I made the cutest sign to hang above our bed. The sign probably only weighs like 3 pounds so I thought it would be safe to velcro it to the wall. 

Sunday morning we woke up considerably earlier than usual (most likely because of daylight savings or possibly just a miracle). When I came home from church later that afternoon this is what I saw....

Ya... let's just say I don't wanna know what would have happened if it would have fallen while we were sleeping. Good stuff. 

The end. 

November? Say what?!

I cannot believe that it is already November. 

I am so excited for all of the holidays!!

Halloween was pretty fun. 

Last year we didn't get any trick-or-treaters 

so I didn't buy any candy this year.

Well what do ya know... we got like 20 this year!

Luckily I had some extra candy hiding in our kitchen. 

We didn't have any parties or anything fun to go to and since we don't have any kiddies we just got to hang out at home. 

We did have a fun night though, ordering Papa Kelsey's, and watching the X Factor. 

Speaking of the X Factor-- has anyone else been watching?? 

I love Emblem 3 but my favorite has got to be Tate Stevens.

He is one of the country singers and he is just the sweetest guy EVER!

Back to Halloween-- 

I am sad to have to take down my Halloween decorations, but excited to start decorating for Thanksgiving, and before you know it.... CHRISTMAS! 

It is so soon!! YAYY!

I hope you all enjoyed Halloween!!

P.s. Does anyone else hate it when holiday's land on a week day? It just makes the rest of the week that much worse. Speaking of... Christmas is on a Tuesday this year. A flippin Tuesday. Who wants to go back to work for 3 more days after Christmas? I surely do not. It's madness. 

My husbandless weekend

My least favorite time of the year is here.

Hunting season. 

Besides the fact that I don't really care for hunting, the real reason I don't like it is because one or two weekends out of the year I lose my husband. 

I realize one or two weekends out of the year is nothing. 

But still... I don't love it. 

I had 3 whole days all to myself and here is how I spent them...

Friday night my friend Jessica and I decided to be spontaneous and drive down to Utah and go to Frightmares at Lagoon. 

I've never been to Frightmares but it was a lot of fun! 

They have people dressed up to scare you everywhere. 

I didn't realize that until a guy jumped out at us with a chain saw hahaha 

it was great. 

One of the funnest things we did while we were there was walk through this "fun house"

It was a trip, to say the least. 

The worst part of the trip was the drive home.... 

It was soooo long, we got lost, we were in stand still traffic because of construction (does Utah ever not have construction?), we had to drive in the middle of nowhere and almost hit one or two deer... We finally made it home around 1:45am!! 

It was definitely worth the drive though. We had lots of fun. 

Saturday I went to Super Saturday with my mom, grandma, and Jaylen. 

We did two crafts...

and I got lots of spray paint on my hands.

Not the first time that has happened haha. 

Here are the finished products....

Not the cutest things I've ever made... But they were only a few dollars each and it was fun being able to spend the morning with my family. 

The morning before Branden left we couldn't find my keys anywhere. Long story short, they were in the road and had been ran over a few times in the middle of the night. 

Well when they got ran over it broke my "clicker" (idk if that's the word but you know what I mean)

Saturday I went down to Honda to see how much it would cost to get a new one.

$75!!! SERIOUSLY?? Well I guess I'll just have to use my keys from now on. Wahh...

Sunday night finally arrived and lookie who is home :) 

Missed that face. 

The end. 

It seems that I have an obsession with taking pictures from this angle...

Anyway-- This was basically my weekend. 

I went to the doctor on Friday night because I was feeling sickish (what I thought was possibly a sinus infection). So, the doc prescribed me some antibiotics and this lovely nasal spray (gross), well ever since I went to the doctor and have been using the medicine I feel worse than I did before. It's awesome. Except not really. 

I caught up on my Vampire Diaries episode for the week... Does anyone else hate watching a TV series week by week? I would much rather be able to watch them back to back. Such a dilemma. Speaking of watching back to back, I finished the entire final season of Desperate Housewives this weekend. I obviously was very productive... 

What about you? Was your weekend as fun as mine?? 

Lately...

....it is beginning to be freezing outside

so quick morning runs to Double Shot are a must...

....I hosted Bunko at my house on Monday and made some delish

Better Than Sex Cake

I also made Taco Soup. Two surprisingly successful dishes (thanks to my mom for her recipes), because I normally am not great when it comes to cooking!

This is my favorite room in our house....

I'm kind of obsessed with that wall. Would it be overboard to say I want

to paint every room in chevron? Because I do. 

See those cute frames up there?? I bought those babies from DI and spray painted them.

$1 for each frame... bargain. 

I am kind of spray paint happy...

Did you know that spray paint is super sticky and does not just wash right off?

Ya me neither. 

What a pain.

I finally hung up the two canvases I made....

This wasn't the look I was going for in the beginning, but it works. 

So that's that. 

Lastly-- Let's talk about these slipper socks Branden got me for our anniversary. 

Besides the fact that they are huge, I love these things. 

They keep my feet stylish and warm.

Not to mention I think those are bats on them... and seeing as it is Halloween this month, they are very appropriate :)

So that's what has been going on lately with us (mostly me) ;]