Thanksgiving

Wow I can't believe Thanksgiving has already come and gone. It was such a great experience this year! Katie and I made our Thanksgiving feast and Everything was delicious. We were able to put a make shift table and chairs together and a serving table too. It was Katie, Jeff, Trav, me and another friend of the boys from their program. It was weird to be away from family, it makes you appreciate them and all the work that goes into cooking so much more!

It is amazing to me to reflect on this time of year and realize how truly blessed I am and how much I have to be thankful for. Sometimes it is easy to loose sight of those things when life is busy or stressful.

We were able to go to some friend's place that live right were the parade passed, it was awesome. See below for some pictures of Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and our FEAST!!!


WEEKEND IN DC
After our great Thanksgiving we were able to go down to DC for a few days. It was great! We hopped on a bus on the way down, $25 and four hours later we were there. We had a great hotel right near the capital. Let me just say DC is sooooo clean. The subways there are really really nice. Of course I am comparing it NY where the subways are disgusting. There is also a lot to do there, lots and lots of museums and history. And the great thing about it was that pretty much everything is FREE and on a student budget that is AWESOME. So we were able to go on a tour of the Capitol, Air and Space Museum, Holocaust Museum, Arlington Cemetery, watched the changing of the guards, Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument and reflecting pool, White house, Ford Theater, Vietnam Memorial, WWII Memorial, and I know I am probably missing a few things. All and all it was really fun.......except the ride home, we made the mistake of taking a CHINATOWN to CHINATOWN bus. It was not a very nice bus and it was stinky, not only that the driver was terrible and we were all nauseous from the ride, the ride that was 6 1/2 hours!!!!!


Thanksgiving!!!

DC

Rick and Brittany come to VISIT!!!

I know, I know I have been terrible at blogging the last couple of weeks, but I am getting on it today! Just to update you New York has been awesome, Christmas time marks the half way point, which when we came out here was the only thing I was looking forward to. But now that we are half way I am kind of sad. The time has gone by so fast, it really has been so much fun. The city is getting decked out with Christmas trees, lights and decorations, it is so fun to see it all.

Other than that Trav is still really enjoying school. He is super busy right now as he is in the middle of finals, so I probably won't see him much this week, but we will have a month in Salt Lake to hang out with family and friends, I am excited!

Two weeks ago Rick and Brittany Mason came to NY to visit. We seriously had so much fun, it was great to have friends out here! We were able to do a lot of fun things and they were able to see Christmas in NY in the making so that was great too! Here are a few of the fun things we did.....

Brittany and I were able to go to FAO Schwartz and play on the giant piano, that was a first for both of us!!!


We went to Rockefeller, Saks and Macys to see all of the Christmas decor going up. We saw the New Years Eve ball in Macy's it is really cool!



One of my favorite things was when Brittany and I went to Canal street....we literally went into just about every little shop we passed, we were down there for hours, it was a lot of fun. It was the first time that I was able to spend some time down there looking, because there were no boys :).

We also did Little Italy, Wall Street, Ground Zero, Times Square, St. Patricks Cathedral (we saw a wedding there), Central Park, Grant's Tomb and the Brooklyn Bridge....

Another really cool thing we were able to do is attend our Stake Conference, Elder Holland was in town so he spoke at the conference. It was such a good talk and testimony that he shared. It was neat to see him speak in a setting other than General Conference because you could see by the tone of his voice how passionate he is about the Gospel. Elder Holland talked a lot about the trials in life we will go through and that it may be easy to fall away from what you believe, but that it is so important to stay close to God so you can get through whatever it is that you are going through. Another thing he said was that "everything is going to be ok". As simple as that sounds it was so comforting to hear an apostle of God tell you that "everything is going to be ok". Sometimes I worry and stress about things that are beyond my control, well not just sometimes, ALWAYS. But I am working on knowing that if I do all that I can in whatever circumstance is that I don't need to put myself through the torment of not thinking I am doing enough.

All in all we had such a great time with Rick and Brittany, thanks for coming out guys!