Oh Christmas Tree! {Two Years}

I wasn't into blogging much at all last year so I didn't post pictures of our Christmas tree. So I figured I would put some of those up before putting up pictures of this year's tree!

Enjoy one of my favorite non-traditional Christmas songs while you enjoy a little bit of a picture overload!! 

December 2010 

{Our first Christmas together}

Now on to this year's Christmas tree decorating adventures! 

I LOVE this time of year! :]

And I love our new camera! I am still not very good at taking pictures but Race is having tons of fun with it! {It was more for him than anything!} 

We have a couple of traditions for decorating our tree {and I know you all want to hear all about them so here goes!}:

1. We buy/make one new ornament per year. 

2. We always put the star on last. 

3. We always listen to Christmas music on the record player. 

&

4. We always take lots of pictures!

What are some of your Christmas-tree-decorating traditions?

And do you have a favorite ornament? 

P.S. I used MyMemories Scrapbook Software for all the collages above and you can still use the coupon code from this post to get some awesome deals! Check 'em out! 

Happy December Everyone!! 

Sierra Trading Post Coupons

Happy Halloween! {FHE edition}

Race and I usually stink at doing Family Home Evening. But this Monday we decided to get in the Halloween spirit and decorate our home! Race's family has a tradition to cut out ghosts and bats and hang them up around the house. We decided to carry on that tradition! So we got some supplies, invited some family over, ate some snacks, watched Hocus Pocus {which I had never seen before tonight!} and decorated our little apartment. It was a lot of fun and definitely something we'll be doing for years to come! Oh, and since I was getting all into the holiday spirit I made some fudge. I know fudge is a little more Christmas-y but it was delicious! Yay for the holidays that are coming up in the next few months! I love this time of year!!

30 Day Fun Challenge

Alexis of www.alexislaughs.com had the great idea to come up with thirty fun things to do for yourself over the next thirty days.

Here are my 30 things that I am going to do over the next thirty days:

1. Make a cute hair accessory for myself. 
2. Read a book outside.
3.  Take a nap. 
4. Read a book while taking a bubble bath. 
5. Paint my nails/toenails. 
6. Go on a walk around downtown Flagstaff. 
7. Write Race a love note {make it cute}
8. Wear an outfit I feel SEXY in! 
9. Stay up late to read in bed with Race. 
10. Make and eat a delicious dessert. 
11. Go see a romantic comedy in theatres. 
12. Go to Zumba at the new Rec Center with a friend. 
13. Finally use the wax lips Race and I bought on a date FOREVER ago. 
14. Take pictures of everything I do in a day .
15. Do my hair super cute {curled, fancy up-do, just anything other than my typical high ponytail/bun}
16. Plan a "fancy date" with my husband. 
17. Go star gazing. 
18. Take "First Day of School" pictures with Race. 
19. Stare at my gorgeous wedding ring and list {in my head} all the reasons I love Race. 
20. Make a skirt.
21. Wear the skirt I made. 
22. Plan and/or go on a group date with friends. 
23. Play tennis/racquetball with Race.
24. Wear my new swimsuit {$6 at Old Navy!}
25. Go on a bike ride. 
26. Get my hair trimmed or cut. 
27. Have my sister-in-law/best friend pluck and shape my eyebrows. 
28. Buy a new color of nailpolish. 
29. Play Michael Jackson: The Experience with Race. 
30. Make a smoothie. 

Some of these I stole from Alexis' blog. Lots of them I came up with on my own. All of them I am super excited to do.

You should definitely go over and check out Alexis' blog and then think of thirty fun things you can do to pamper yourself over the next thirty days! I think I might just have to make this thirty day thing a tradition. Every month? Haha. We'll see. :]

Wedding&Christmas Bells :]

My brother is officially married! :]

And Christmas was woooonderful.
So that's what I will be blogging about. Sorry I'm little slow.
We'll begin with the wedding!

On Saturday, December 19th, 2009 my brother,
Jonathon E.B. Olmstead was sealed for time and all eternity to
Jaclyn Anne Francois in the Mesa Temple!
It's crrrazy having brothers get married.
Crazy and exciting of course.
Here are some pictures of the beautiful wedding and reception
Here's the happy couple right outside the temple:
Here are the handsome groomsmen:And the bridesmaids :] :
And here is my ENTIRE FAMILY (all eleven children and two in-laws) at the reception:Daaaang good looking people. :]
I love my family and it was so wonderful to see
my brother get sealed in the temple.
Both of my brothers and both of my sister-in-laws are wonderful examples to me and
I am so grateful for them.
I can not wait to follow in their footsteps and get married in the House of the Lord.

So only a few days after the wedding came another wonderful thing...
CHRISTMAS! :]
My family does not have very many consistent Christmas traditions because my parents like to mix things up every year. Some of the traditions I can remember doing over the years are:

• The Twelve Days of Christmas (they tricked us into thinking someone else was doing it for us). It ended with delicious cinnamon rolls brought to us on Christmas morning by my little brother.
  
• Some years we go to the church and my mom plays the piano or organ and we sing the Christmas songs from the hymn book.
• One year we had Christmas on Thanksgiving (as a surprise) so that we could focus more on the real meaning of Christmas as it came about.
  
• We make gingerbread houses almost every year.
• And we of course always read the Christmas story out of Luke 2 in the Bible.

I am grateful for these traditions and for the different things that my parents have tried over the years. It keeps things new and I love that they always keep us kids focused on Christ and serving others during this season.

This year as we read the Christmas story and sang Christmas songs in our living room I was filled with an overwhelming love and gratitude for the wonderful family that I have been blessed with. I was able to hear stories about the lives of my grandparents and I was able to hear their testimonies of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I was able to see my parents and my siblings and some of my cousins and my aunt and uncle and my grandparents and feel the love that they have for me as well as the love that I have for each of them. Along with this I felt the love that my Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ have for me. This love cannot be captured in words or pictures but I did take some pictures of that night so that at least I can look back on them and remember. Maybe the love, warmth, and comfort will translate through somehow...

Here are my grandparents and one of my cousins:

More family (we sit on the stairs a lot since we never have enough couch space):And some more family (we are happier than we look...I promise. Haha):

Well, that's about it. The next day was Christmas and it was quite fun as always. Opening presents took FOREVER cause we have so many people and we open one present at a time starting from the youngest and going to the oldest but by the end I think we all cheated a little bit and opened presents in secret...I did at least. Oops. ;)

Oh, one more tradition that I have with my two sisters, Helena and Gelsey is that for the past four years we have gotten matching or at least similar pajamas every year that we wear to bed on Christmas Eve. So here is our picture from this year of us in our super comfy and warm FOOTIES! :]

Blast to the Past!

It all began with a pair of FOOTIE PAJAMAS!

The first pair belonged to my beautiful roommate Aubree Stradling.
This pair of footies became an inspiration in Apt. #96
(That's where I live by the way...I haven't updated in forever so no one knows that).
Because of this pair of footies my best friend Jasmine Storm Kvavle and I bought footies later followed by Aubree buying a new pair and gifting hers to Katie.
And FINALLY Rachel and Kylie bought their footies after some ultimate convincing
and secret telling. We are all officially converted to the comfort and warmth
of FOOTIES (AKA BLANKET SLEEPERS OR ONESIES)!
This is me, Katie, Aubree, and Jasmine in our FOOOOTIES! We don't have a picture
of all six of us just yet but we will soon enough!
So once you own a pair of footies you have every right to act like a five year old...
Only when you are wearing them of course. ;)
One of the things that I did when I was little was building forts with my brothers.
So, a few weekends ago when Knowlton and Helena came up to Flagstaff with Jasmine and I we decided to build a fort in my apartment.
This was after playing very many rounds of hide-and-go-seek in the dark!
This game is basically a way to scare your friends over and over again.
Jasmine is super fun to scare so Helena and I thoroughly enjoyed scaring her and hearing her scare herself as she searched for us with Knowlton.
And Knowlton did a good job scaring her. The best thing about this was when we turned the lights on she would be curled up into a ball on the floor.
If only I had a picture of that. But! I do have pictures of our beautiful fort! After making it we watched a movie in it. Gooood times!
Here are Jasmine and Knowlton (and Helena sleeping) after a lot of hard fort building work!

Here's Knowlton, Jazz, and I inside our fort and ready to watch a movie!!

Another thing that Knowlton, Helena, Jasmine and I did was put up and decorate a Christmas tree in our apartment. Jasmine and I saw a Christmas tree on sale for $25 dollars on Black Friday and we could not pass up the wonderful deal. And we wanted our apartment to feel a little more like home. So we bought a 6 foot tall Christmas Tree with lights included!! It looks amazing and we bought some ornaments to decorate it with. We each picked one ornament out and then made a show of putting them up while listening to Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree!

FINALS week was amazing! How often can you say that?!
Well, I can say that this week. It wasn't ALL good but well it was pretty amazing because...
We had one and a half SNOW DAYS! :]
The snow days came in perfect timing for me because they cancelled ALL of my finals.
I had a Monday final at 12:30 and they closed the school at NOON!
Then they closed the school for all of my Tuesday finals!
HOLY HECK how amazing is that?!
So here's some pictures of the snow and some of the fun that we had in it!
This is what I woke up to around 9:00 am on Monday morning. And it then continued to snow all day long.

This is what we woke up to on Tuesday morning. Beautiful white sparkling snow. :]
Rachel, Katie, and I went for a drive in the crrrazy blizzard with our friend Troy and then we jumped into huge piles of snow on the side of the road. This is me jumping into a HUGE pile of snow. I disappeared into it after. It was wonderful! Cold but wonderful :] Here are Katie and I with Troy :]Here are Katie and I in the fort that we built with our neighbors and Aubree. Pretty freaking sweet, huh?

The institute had a Christmas dinner and talent show on Tuesday night and my roommates and I decided to put a little skit together.
It is based off of an SNL skit. (Hopefully those links work...)
If not check out my facebook for our video at least.
Oh, did I forget to mention that we performed in our footies?! 'Cause we definitely did!

There is so much more that I would like to blog about so hopefully it will help me blog more often so I do not have to play catch up every time that I get on here. But anyway, I would like to end with some things that I am very grateful for as I near the end of this year:

• Amazing Roommates and Wonderful Friends
• My Wonderful Family
• The Scriptures
• Institute Classes/Teachers
• Wonderful Church Leadership
• The General Conference Ensign
• Footie Pajamas!
  
• Snow/Snow Days
  
• Warm Clothing
  
• The Power of Prayer
• Wool Coats
• Sleepovers with my Roommates
• Making Memories
• Learning at School
• My Patriarchal Blessing
• Technology (my camera, my laptop, my phone, the heater at our apartment, our electric piano, lights, etc.)
  
• The Sister Missionaries at our Institute (who make me want to go on a mission!)
  
• And so so so much more
  

And finally I would like to say that I am so grateful to be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
It brings joy to all aspects of my life and has helped me through good times and bad times.
I am especially grateful for the birth, atonement, death, and resurrection of
Jesus Christ. As the holiday season is here
I am reminded of this even more.
I hope that we can all take time to remember our
Savior this season and throughout the coming year and strive to become more like Him. The First Presidency of the church shared wonderful messages of our
Savior in the Christmas Devotional this season that everyone should take the time to listen to.
I am so grateful for the lessons that
I have learned this year and the many ways that my testimony has been strengthened.

P.S. Jasmine wanted me to share with the world that she bought a new pair of footie pajamas tonight. And here's a picture of her foot in them and me. :]By the way, Jazz's favorite color is green and her new footies are green with MONKEYS on them in case you can't tell. If only she had bought me an extra pair of footies as well...haha.