Kelly and Sara visit and 80's DANCE

Trav and I had fun week last week, his good friend from high school Kelly and his girlfriend Sara came out to stay with us for few days......as I am writing this I am realizing that we didn't get any pictures :(. We had a great time though. We spent a lot of time walking around and eating out which in my opinion are some of the best things to do in NY. Kelly and Sara were able to go to a concert, Thievery Corporation, which they loved and a comedy show as well. They also introduced us to some other friends they have that live here in the city. They are in a band called HIGHBENCH and they were in a studio rehearsing on Friday night so we were able to go watch them. It was our own mini concert and they were great. Not the best picture but it is all I had!!!


On Saturday night our ward had an 80's DANCE!!!! Trav and I are on the activities committee so we helped plan and it turned out great.....we had over 60 people and pretty much everybody dressed up, it was so fun and hilarious to see people in their costumes :).

Breanne, ME and Katie

Pretty much everyone at the dance!

Trav

On a side note......who is excited for THE BACHELOR tonight!!!!!!! Oh boy the suspense is killing me :)

No more Thanksgiving......

I have had enough complaints about updating my blog so here is the readers digest version of the last few months :). Brace yourselves....

DECEMBER--

December in NY is awesome you can really get in the Christmas spirit with all the decorations, shopping and cold weather. We were able to do a few fun things prior to leaving. We walked through Central Park on a snowy night it was really beautiful and we got some fun pictures. Trav and I also were able to spend a couple of nights in some really neat hotel/condos in midtown. An old client of Trav's gave us a few free nights and the places were amazing....I could totally live in one of them :)

Trav and I were in SLC for a MONTH I know it was a long time, but it went by pretty fast surprisingly. We were able to spend some good time with family and friends. It was so fun to be around all of our cute nieces and nephews again they get so big when you don't see them for a while. We had family parties, new years parties, lunches with friends and a few cabin trips. Oh and Trav had a birthday he is 31!!!!

JANUARY--

We came back to NY and it was actually really good. It made me realize how fast our time here has gone and how much I still want to do. ---side note Susan Surandon was on our flight!!!!

A couple of days after we got back was the Presidential Inauguration. One thing I really love about this city is that when something major is going on there are huge crowds of people all across the city watching or celebrating or whatever. So we went over to campus to see what was going on and of course a huge crowd was watching outside on the big screen. It was great.

I had never been to the Natural History Museum so Trav and I decided to go. It was pretty cool, they have a lot of really neat exhibits and a lot of animals :), which I never could figure out if they were real stuffed animals or fake.

FEBRUARY--

The month of love times 2. So this is the month of Valentine's Day of course but Trav and I also have an anniversary on the 3rd so we had a lot of fun! It was my year to plan our anniversary so I surprised Trav with a little night on the town. I had a few destinations with a card or note at each place taking us to the next activity. So we first went to dinner at a yummy restaurant called Rosa Mexicana they have delicious guacamole....yum yum. Being on a student budget I had to be a little creative. So the next stop was Barnes and Noble we spent 30-40 minutes in the humor section reading jokes to each other. The funniest ones were the "your mama's so fat" ones, they were hilarious. Stop number three was the movie theater, since it was our anniversary I chose a sappy love story, we saw Last Chance Harvey. It was a cute show. And to top the evening off we went to Cafe Lalo and had chocolate fondue for two. We had so much fun spending the evening together just the two of us, I had fun surprising Trav and he loved being surprised. Happy 4th anniversary to us :).

Well the weekend after our celebration was Valentine's Day. Katie, Marylynn and I decided it would be fun to do something fun for the boys the day before Vday so Katie made up a little poem that we left for them in Scott and Marylynn's decorated apartment. We had their favorite treats there along with hearts galore. They met us down at this really great italian restaurant. After dinner we had another note card giving the boys some options of things to do. Bowling was their first choice but the wait time to get a lane was ridiculous so we went to plan B which was you guessed it another movie. We LOVE movies apparently . We saw Push. It was ok not great just ok.

On actual Vday Trav and I wanted to be pretty low key and stay in since we knew it would be crazy busy at restaurants. We went up near the Hudson River and watched the sunset. It was really pretty and then we came back home and made a very delicious dinner. It was a brown sugar and mustard salmon first time we made it and it turned out great.

Talk show number number 3. Katie got tickets to go the the Rachael Ray show and who did she take???? ME. It was so much fun, the set was really colorful and bright and Salma Hayek was on the show so that was a big plus :). We get to go to Martha Stewart in a few weeks...

Last week Katie and I decided to get out of the city so we took a two hour bus ride to Philadelphia. I had never been there before so I was excited to explore a new city. It was fun, a little different than what I expected, but it was good. We just hung out downtown and saw the historical sites and then went up to see the University of Pennsylvania which was beautiful.

That pretty much sums up our last few months! Here are the pictures......

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!

Connecticut

As I mentioned Trav's parents were in town for a conference for Ben's work. It was a builders conference and Trav and I were able to take the train to Connecticut for the day to do a home tour with Ben and Deb. Unfortunately we didn't take very many pictures, but these houses were really amazing. There was a lot of neat woodwork throughout, kitchens the size of our apartment, sitting rooms off all the bedrooms, seperate closets for just shoes, huge garages with ridiculous cars, butler kitchens, two story librarys, etc. Let's just say they were amazing. I really bummed I don't have more pictures. But thanks Ben and Deb for letting us tag a long! Oh and Connecticut was beautiful I was amazed at how pretty all the streets were and all of the huge trees with the leaves changing it is like in the movies.

Weclome to Miami!

So we just got back from a week long vacation within a vacation......so well deserved right? No not really but we had a good time! Travis had a conference in Miami for school and since he had a few extra days off class we decided to make a vacation out of it. Of course Jeff and Katie came too, so while the boys went to boring conferences ;) the girls went to the beach. And when I say went to the beach I mean walked out the back door of the condo and went to the beach EVERYDAY! We were really lucky, we found a condo that was newly remodeled and literally right off the water. We booked it on homeaway.com this is my new favorite website to book condos for when we go out of town. You can get really great deals on things and so far with the places I have booked they have been awesome. Now for a plug for Trav's parents condo in Kauai they have it listed on homeaway so check it out, we went with some friends last year and it was a lot of fun. Let me know if you are interested so I can get you the friends and family discount!!!

Other than the beach in Miami we drove and walked around the city and South Beach, ate yummy food, went to a Halloween extravaganza, downtown in one of the main shopping plaza there were hundreds of people dressed up in costume, it was crazy. Katie and I saw HSM3, and yes I know I am 26, but it was fun! We also went to Michael's Crafts, we can't find any craft stores in the city so we had to take advantage of the chance we had to go get scrapbook paper for a little project we are working on. I am all rested up and now have a little color to my skin, it was a fun trip but is also fun to be back in the city to finish watching the leaves change.

The beach out our back door!

South Beach in the evening. And no I am not pregnant it is just the shirt!

Trav striking a pose

This was pretty funny these girls came to the beach to take some pictures, the were crawling in the sand and jumping in the waves :)

The Big Apple with Ben and Deb

A few weeks ago Trav's parents came to town for a conference and we were lucky enough to have them stay with us for a few days. It was a lot of fun to have family out here. It was Ben and Deb's first time to NY so we were able to see a lot of fun things, in fact most things Trav and I hadn't done or seen yet.

We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset it was really beautiful and I was really surprised that there were so many people, it was pretty crowded.

Ben, Deb and I went to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. It was really neat we did the audio tours and it tells you so much about the history. It was fun to go to Ellis Island, Deb had ancestors come through there at the turn of the century and we were able to find their name on the wall. The Statue of Liberty was really cool too it is huge her index finger is eight feet long!

One of my favorite things that we did while they were here was go to see Wicked. I hadn't seen that play yet but knew it was a must while we were out here. I am so glad we did it was an amazing play and definitely recommended.

We were able to go to the Frick Museum, Rockefeller Plaza, the top of the Empire State Building, Grant's Tomb, Times Square, the Flat Iron building, Macy's the largest department store in the world, we stopped by Canal Street, Soho, Little Italy. Wow we did and saw a lot, needless to say Ben and Deb wore me out I needed a day to recuperate! We had so much fun and can't wait for more visitors!