Thanksgiving Weekend

We had an awesome Thanksgiving weekend in Preston this year. We mostly hung out at Aunt Becky's playing card games and board games and eating delicious food. My family took Brian on his first trip to cut down a real Christmas tree (a long-standing family tradition) and Preston put on their annual Festival of Lights complete with fireworks and a lighted parade.

I just love Shan SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH!

And this? I have no idea what she's doing...

Our New House Before & After

Well we finally did it!! We got in our house on October 20, 2011! We've been working our guts out getting it cleaned, painted, and fixed up. Brian and his dad have been doing all the big heavy work and I've done most of the painting and decorating. We're so excited about it still. We just walk around going, "Look at our cool house." "Remember how we have this awesome house??" We're silly but it's been so fun and exciting. So here are some of the pictures. As you can see, we have 2 guest bedrooms so that's an open invitation and we're expecting some visitors!!!!

This is our living room right in the front door. It's one big room that continues through the dining room and kitchen so it's nice. Here's the before...

And this is the after....

This is our kitchen before...

And after a lot of scrapping, cleaning and washing..here's the kitchen after.

Our bedroom was painted an olive green color with a ton of cream colored paint sloppily painted over it. I think they were going for a 'textured' look but it just looked terrible. So we had our work cut out for us. Really...it looked bad.

So this is the after!! We love it! Brian put the chair rail up just the other day and it made it look so good! He's in the process of building a custom headboard and it looks good too.

Then we took an ordinary basement and made it...

...into a sweet theater room!! (You know you wanna come visit...!)

So this is one of our guest bedrooms before and after.

And this is the second guest bedroom before and after.

This is the laundry room/storage room...it scares me. Something about concrete rooms in a basement is creepy. lol too bad we have to do laundry so I have to go in. lol

Oh...and this is just a bonus. :-)

We have one more bedroom that's just an office/storage and the yard still needs some work but we're lovin' it. It's kept me very busy so I've been glad not to have a job yet.

Circus!

It's been a tradition for the last couple of years to go to the Ringling Bros. circus that comes to Salt Lake with Shan and Jake. This year tickets were expensive and it didn't end up being a good weekend to meet up with Shan and Jake. So we had decided not to go and I've got to admit, I was a little disappointed. Brian had been in a 4-man golf tournment with work on Friday and they came in 2nd place. They got to choose from a lot of good prizes and he picked free tickets to the circus for Saturday night!! When Preston saw how excited he was about it he took back the golf stuff he'd picked and grabbed the other set of circus tickets. So they invited some friends and took Logan and we invited Gina and AJ to go. Maybe it's cheesy but we LOVE it.

Gina and AJ were able to come with us-happy birthday to AJ. We talked it up a lot so I hope everyone had fun....

The circus!!

Even Logan had fun. He really liked the music and lights.

My Birthday

This is the best picture I have because all of the other ones were blurry but Kai was helping me out with blowing the candles out. And the tradition stands to celebrate birthdays with Grandpa Nelson. :)

This picture is a little dramatic looking. lol I'd actually like to use the word, dashing.

Las Vegas

We went to Las Vegas for our first anniversary trip. Jared and Amy gave us tickets they had to a mentalist show there, which was totally awesome. It was the first time either of us had gone and we stayed in the Circus Circus hotel. Of course it had casinos but it had some good restuarants and a whole amusment park! They also had circus acrobatics every hour and a whole floor with carnival games. Needless to say, we were highly entertained.

Vegas At Night

We only wandered out at night to see the water show at the Bellagio. It was pretty amazing. Much better in real life than on tv.

We watched the water show at the Bellagio. It's pretty amazing.

This jellyfish tank was sweet. Much better if I'm not standing in front of it, blocking the view. :)

This is the tunnel fish tank we got to walk under. It was sooo cool. Cross that one off my bucket list. :)

This was the awesome shark exhibit. It was a huge tank and had tons of different fish in it.

St. George Family Vacation

Wayne and Debbie rented a house in St. George this year for their family vacations. It had tons of rooms and bathrooms so every family could have their own which was super nice. It had an indoor pool and an outdoor pool so the girls and kids took full advantage of that everyday while the boys golfed. Super relaxing and we all had fun. Kellyn is having Uncle Brian read a book to her.