Where are you Christmas?!

So, I can't believe it's been a month since I've last posted. Well over a month. So I'm finally going to try and get back on top of it. This post may be a little long, but here is some of what I missed putting up over the last month.












It gets so cold in Rexburg, I didn't think you could believe this one unless you saw it. This is the metal plate thing that is at the bottom of our door on the inside of the house. Some mornings we wake up and it is frosted over all the way into our house! Ahhh, Way too cold here!
We did go home for Christmas to beautiful Washington! We loved it! There was so much snow there, neither of us could remember when we had gotten that much snow. It must have been elementary school last time we had snow like that! We had so much fun! Here are some of the fun pics and videos we took.

Joseph going down the driveway!














This is us one night after a long day of playing in the snow! The tree behind us completely iced over. The snow just piled up a little in this picture, but normally the branches were completely ice. It was so pretty. Also in the pic, the snow as so high that the lights were completely covered and made just colored circles in the snow. It was pretty fun to see. The lights are on little stands off the ground so when they were covered we knew for sure we had a lot of snow. Tons of people that had lights up around their yard had the same thing happen to them. As we drove around looking at houses and lights, it was really fun to just see the trail of lights in the snow. It was a beautiful Christmas!

Christmas is Coming!

Since about the middle of Novemeber Joe and I have had a Christmas itch. It is one of our favorite times of the year, plus we get to go home for about 2 weeks so we get really excited about that. However, we've had a hard time really getting into it this year despite the fact that we had started playing christmas music before Thanksgiving. We considered decorating our apt, but decided we didn't really have the decorations, and since we weren't going to be here anyways, we might as well not worry about it. But we were really missing out on all the Christmas spirit. Joe had started to ask for a tree, but because of the reasons mentioned above we decided not to get one. While I was talking to a lady at work about it she mentioned she had an extra fake tree that her family wasn't using and she wouldn't mind lending it to me for the next few weeks. I was so excited! So without telling Joseph I got the tree from her one day, made a quick trip to the store for some ornaments and lights and set it up before Joe got home from school one day. He loved it! We both feel like it's finally time for Christmas!

Saturday, knowing Joseph wouldn't have any school for a week we decided to celebrate by having some fun with our friends Kelly and Tyler. (Plus after the cougars lost we needed some serious cheering up.) We started by going bowling and had a great time! We hadn't been for awhile and Joe really wanted to. The first game went by fast and Joe won of course. He impressed us all by throwing some really great curve balls!
We played a second game like all great bowlers do and Joe tried to keep up his great power ball throws and amazing pin action, but it was not enough. His pin spray was nothing compared to my strikes and I beat him!!! I think it was the first time ever, what a victory! So, not quite feeling like we had our fulfilled our gaming urge, and because going out with a loss was not sitting well with Joseph we decided to go play some board games and make root beer floats!
We started off by playing candy land a few times. We made a rule that when you landed on the same space as someone else you knocked them back to the beginning of the board. It made things a little more interesting than just waiting to see if you pulled a gumdrop. It was pretty funny. Then we played Jenga a few times. I'm pretty sure I lost the most as Jenga, but we learned a fun new way to take the blocks out of the stack! It was pretty hilarious. Kelly showed us how to do it and then when Joseph tried, unexpectedly, he almost hit her. They come out pretty fast so we were glad it missed her and laughed pretty hard at how well it worked. I have another attempt on video. You can tell it started to hurt his fingers. Not a move for the fragile fingered.

Caramel Apples!!!

Sunday night we tried to make some caramel apples with some friends. The recipe that was used for the caramel was homemade and looked delicious. It even tasted delicious, but it ended up being pretty hard so we didn't actually eat much of the apples. Afterwards, Joe and I were still in the mood for some caramel apples, it seemed like such a good end of fall/beginning of winter snack. So Monday we went to the store to get some apples and caramels to make dessert. It was a little funny since we forgot to get popsicle sticks at the store. We just used butter knives to stab the apples and dip them, but they wouldn't fit in the shelf in our fridge so we had to repeatedly take the knives out to cool the dip and then re-stab them to dip them in the next layer. They turned out amazing though. We did two layers of caramel, and then one each of white and milk chocolate. YUMMY!!!!
We're going to make some more apples with our friends again this Sunday and we can't wait! We'll get a chance to put some different toppings on our apples this time. Plus we can play games that require more than two people while they are cooling. Yay! (The apples looked much better than this pictures shows, maybe it I can figure out how to get decent lighting, they'll look as good as they tasted!!)