Christmas Day

We had a very nice Christmas this year. Between the advent calendar keeping us busy with fun activities and being on vacation for about 3 weeks, its been extremely relaxing. Mike and I have been able to go running in nice weather in the mornings and the time before Christmas was spent doing lots of shopping and baking. Now that its over we're spending most of our time relaxing and taking little trips to do fun things around here.

Before:

After:

I'm excited because a lot of the stuff Mike and I got was stuff we will both use and can both benefit from and it was stuff we needed. 

Then we had the traditional Williams family Christmas breakfast of coffee cake.....mmmm so good. Seriously its homemade and its so bad for you but its delicious. We spent the rest of the day enjoying spending time together (movies, going for a long walk, reading books, face timing Mike's family ) and just relaxing until it was time for a yummy Christmas dinner. I feel like we had a great Christmas and that we did a great job balancing the fun and spiritual side of Christmas. We did all of our fun traditions but we also spent time remembering Christ and his birth since he is the reason for the season.

Merry Christmas to all!!

A Special Day

I always feel so bad that Mike's birthday is at Christmas time. It always seems like it doesn't get quite the attention that it deserves. I love birthdays and I love making someone's day special for them. So each year since we've been together for his birthday I try really hard to completely set Christmas aside for that one day and make it all about Mike.

We started the day with a special breakfast and one of Mike's favorite things to eat. In his family they traditionally have this on Christmas morning but since my family wasn't entirely thrilled with giving up our tradition of coffee cake on Christmas, we compromised and did it on Mike's birthday. If you can't tell, its waffles with strawberries and ice cream on top. It was delicious and amazing! Mike had eggnog with his as well :) I think my family ended up enjoying it for the most part....I know I did.

Then Mike decided he wanted to go play miniature golf as Frankie's Fun Park.We all did well but Mike got 4 hole in one's :)

Mike chose Applebee's for his special birthday dinner. After a delicious dinner, we went back to my parent's house and opened presents and just relaxed for the evening. I hope you had a great birthday sweetie! I love you!

Do You See What I See?

Yup, that's right, it's a baby!!

Mike and I are excited to announce we are expecting our first baby next year! Right now I'm 15 weeks along which puts my due date at June 14 ,2014. We are so excited to expand our family! Its been a crazy couple of months in our house and we're so happy that all of our fertility treatments finally worked. For those of you wondering, yes this is an IUI baby so not a normal conception but we already couldn't love our baby more! (I'll post more about our fertility journey later)

We've known we were pregnant since October 4th when we were 4 weeks pregnant. We got to hear the heartbeat for the first time at 6 weeks and it was amazing to be able to hear it and see it. We got to see our baby again at 9 weeks and hear the heartbeat again. Since we had to go through IUI to get pregnant we've gotten to have lots and lots of ultrasounds that other people don't get and we've gotten to see our baby a lot more than normal which is fine with me. If I could I would have an ultrasound every day just so I could hear and see my little baby whenever I wanted. Our most recent ultrasound (pictured above) was at 12 1/2 weeks along. We'll get to find out the gender in about 8 weeks.

This was how we told our parents :) We surprised my parents by showing up at the house and gave them this cookie cake. They were so excited! Enjoy the pictures!

Hi everybody! Can't wait to meet you!

PS: Thank you to all of the people who have known and kept our secret and a special thank you to the people who supported us during the fertility stuff and were extra patient with me. It was a small group of people but you have no idea how important each of you were both directly and indirectly.

Cookies!

One of the best parts of Christmas is all of the baking that we get to do. I love baking cookies and then taking them all to other people! Its fun to do nice things for other people and hopefully make Christmas a little happier for them. This year we started baking a little later than usual. We made about 100 cookies- sugar, snicker doodle and peanut butter with Hershey kisses. I know that may not seem like a lot but it was pretty impressive when we got them all done in less than 2 hours. We're efficient.

Unfortunately, a few of the cookies broke ;) So we just had to eat them but the good news is that they have been tested so we know they taste good. Now since all of the cookies are to be given away, we must make more for us to eat :)

Lastly, my family is strange and by family I mean my brother Joshua but he does make us smile and laugh a lot.

This was his 'answer the door for the UPS man outfit'. I think the UPS guy got a good laugh out of it. I know we did :)

Festival of Lights 2013

I love going to the festival of lights! This is my favorite Christmas activity and for me its just not Christmas if I don't get to go. I have about a million of the same pictures but I really don't care. I love driving around and seeing the lights, we always go around twice and its fun to get out and walk around too. The lights were much brighter this year since they had replaced a lot of the lights with new LED ones. It was really pretty and a fun night! Enjoy the pictures :)

Merry Christmas!

Gingerbread House!

On day 9 of our advent calendar Mike and I finally got to do one of my favorite activities! We built a gingerbread house! I haven't gotten to build many of these in my life (in fact this may have been the second or third one) but I really enjoy making them and Mike really enjoys eating them :) So I bought one of the kits and we got to work.

Once we got it to stand and the frosting had hardened we could start the fun part- decorating! I was so worried it was going to fall over, frosting doesn't make the best foundation. Luckily we didn't have any problems. We had a lot of fun decorating the house and I think it turned out to be pretty cute. We are definitely not master gingerbread house decorators but I was very happy with it and Mike said it was very tasty.

I tried to plan things for us to do that were fun but also things that were spiritual to help us remember the true reason we celebrate Christmas. I found a talk given by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland in 1976. You can read the talk here, http://www.lds.org/ensign/1977/12/maybe-christmas-doesnt-come-from-a-store. We're really enjoying our advent calendar this year and the month of December! 

Happy Thanksgiving

This year Mike and I celebrated Thanksgiving in Charleston with my family. It was great to enjoy the break down there and get out of town. I've never been so excited to leave home and go somewhere else. We started our Thanksgiving with the huff and puff before you stuff. This is a tradition in Mike's family that I really like and we do it whether we're with his family or not. This year we walked a couple miles around the neighborhood. It was a bit chilly starting out but once we got going it felt great and we loved being in the sunshine. I forgot the camera so Mike got this with his phone.

After the walk we set about making dinner, or rather finishing what we didn't already have done. We put the turkey in to cook and since the bread was done and the pies were done we just had the potatoes, stuffing, deviled eggs (just for Mike and I), broccoli salad and my olives. Mike and I made the broccoli salad (we cheated a little and bought broccoli that was already cut up) and the deviled eggs. Then once the 13 lb turkey was just about done we started boiling the sweet potatoes and regular potatoes. I decided to be in charge of making the potatoes which is strange because I don't like sweet potatoes at all (I mean if they are so good why do you have to cover them in marshmallows?) and I'm not a huge fan of whipped potatoes which is how my parents like them (I prefer mashed) but I wanted to help. I'm told the sweet potatoes were good and the others well good just not how I like to eat them. 

So finally the turkey was done. It took longer than expected so we were very hungry by dinner since we'd been trying to save our appetites for Thanksgiving dinner.  It was worth it though because it was delicious. (Although we noticed after dinner that we had completely forgotten to cook the corn..oh well sorry Josh)

The turkey was tasty but a pain to carve

We had pumpkin and apple pie for dessert but I didn't get any pictures of those. We opted to stay home this year instead of going shopping. Honestly the deals weren't good enough to get me out of the house. We had a very nice relaxing weekend with family though and spent a lot of time focusing on our blessings which are too numerous to mention. Now its hard to believe we'll be back down in just 2 weeks to celebrate Christmas :) I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!