A Surprise Visitor!

Rachel has written a lot of the blogs lately... I thought I'd do this one. Anyway, Today we had a surprise! My cousin Dane gave us a call around 9ish in the morn telling us that he was planning on flying to St. George today, but that it was to hot down there. So he thought to travel up here to Rexburg with his buddy Heber. So, up they flew. Rachel and I took some time off work and school to go get them and we had lunch at Great Harvest (great sandwiches!). We drove them around Rexburg, showed them the sites. After about 5 minutes of driving, we were done. Back to the airport we went. Dane-dogg and Heber showed us their dinky plane that they flew up in. Seriously, it was the craziest thing. Dane AND Heber fitting in this thing! Rachel just decided that the plane reminds her of Loopin' Louie. Check the pictures out.

We love our cousin, Dane!

We never blogged about what we did for our Independence Day (ID4) Weekend. I will report on this as well! We went down and did almost the exact same thing as last year. It was a little bit of a Deja Vu. We went on a hike at this lake up in the mountains above Murray. Last year we hiked from the lake in the background of the next picture, to a lake called Lake Solitude. This year we went to a different lake on a seperate trail.

Here's the lake we hiked to. Twin Lakes.

We took a very similar picture here last year... we thought we'd do it again for old time's sake.

Lastly, we had a ward BBQ and we were asked to bring a desert. Always determined to wow, we decided to make a watermelon cake (Doesn't taste like watermelon). We'd been looking for a cool summertime cake/dessert. This one was a good start to us being Pros! Super easy. White cake mix with red dye, chocolate chips in a pie pan. Then frost with colored frostings and put chocolate chip seeds on top! Those are gumdrops on the rind section. It was a hit and it got eaten before we left.

We love our Nation!

6 Months

Today we celebrated 6 months of being married! At the bottom of this post, we added the slideshow we showed on our wedding day, plus the wedding pictures we added to the end. It's pretty long, so feel free not to watch it all! :)

To celebrate our 6-Monthaversary, we treated ourselves to a 4" memory foam topper for our bed! Our mattress was pretty hard, but it's so much more comfortable now. We love it!


We decided to each document some of our thoughts after our first 6 months. *(Will probably be cheesy!!)

Rachel- I am so happy every day to be married to my favorite person. People have said that marriage is hard at first because of all the adjustments, but for us, everything just fit into place. (We probably argued way more when we were dating than we do now! :)) Everything feels so much more natural than it did when we were dating, then engaged, and living with roommates. We've made our home together. Since we made our eternal commitments, our love has grown stronger every day. I have the most loving, supportive, hard-working (and attractive) husband. We make each other laugh all the time and can talk for hours about anything. Rob really is my best friend and I couldn't be happier with our life together.

Rob- Married life is really the absolute best ever! First off, Rachel is the best companion that anyone could ever ask for. She is so supportive of me and my endeavors. We're perfect roommates for each other for a few reasons... I'll name two. Our sleep habits are the same, and we are both tidy people. Seriously though, we "liked" our roommates from before, but Rachel is a billion times better than them (No offense guys). Rachel and I have hundreds of little similarities. We're on the same wavelength (FM) and we have fun together. Silly Example: We enjoy looking at the texturing of our ceilings and identifying shapes. True Example: We miss each other all day long... sometimes we don't even see each other until night time because of school or work. Anyway, the point is, I love my Rach and I'm totally happy forever.

Update

We haven't given a basic update in a while, so here's what we've been up to:

School- Rob has a pretty hard semester with 17 credits including Organic Chem, Pre-med Physics, and Bio 200, but he is somehow managing to do well in all of his classes. After this semester ends in July, he is planning to apply to chiropractic schools for next fall. We are hoping to move around October or November of 2010 (depending on which school he gets into).

Work- I am so happy every day for what a perfect job I have. Now that all the kids are out of school for the summer, my schedule is more flexible and I can work more during the mornings and day rather than after-school hours. I have been able to get in a lot of extra hours too. I lucked out with having the cutest kids and I have fun with them every day.

Church- We teach Gospel Doctrine in our ward every other week. It has been fun. We also had the opportunity this last week to clean the temple with some members of our ward. Cleaning time was 10pm to midnight and it was exhausting, but it really made us appreciate how perfectly clean the temple is every day and those volunteers who work there every night. It was a good experience.

Other than that, not much has been going on. We are waiting for summer to finally hit Rexburg so we can do fun summer things (we have had rain and thunderstorms almost every day lately!). And we are always ready for visitors if anyone wants to come see us! :)

What made us laugh today

Why are these so hilarious right now?! Even when we can only understand like 40% of what they are saying. There are more too if you want to youtube search them . . . in case you think they are as funny as we do. Hope you enjoy!

Memorial Day Weekend in SLC

Rachel and I decided to spend the weekend with her parents, since I had a 4 day weekend. There were a bunch of happenings that were noteworthy. First Rachel's sister Liz came up with her kids and we all went to this Aquarium. Sorry, no pictures! We forgot our camera. But, it was pretty cool. They even had an Anaconda!!! It was a little one though, only like 8-9 feet... or something like that. We have a picture of one below.
They had a presentation of the animals and we learned some interesting facts about the animals. Most of them I knew, but there were one or two surprises:

• Scorpions glow under UV light. No one knows why either.
• Snakes are cold blooded, which means that they are the temperature of their environment. That's why they like to bask in the sun!
• Cockroaches can get up to 3 inches long. They are very important in the decomposition of waste worldwide.
• Alligators float vertically when their heads are barely on the surface of the water. This way, they can use their powerful tail to propel themselves out of the water to bite the head of those unsuspecting antelope!

Well, it was pretty cool. We got to touch some of the animals too. The snake was very warm and fleshy. The cockroach was hard like a plate. They didn't let us touch the scorpion though... wonder why?

Rachel and I went down to Lindon later on Saturday to attend my cousin Justin's wedding reception. Justin and Jiyon looked very happy together. They had really cute pictures of when he proposed. It was good to see cousins Cynthia and Charity. Also, my cousin Jared came down from Rexburg to go to the reception. Now that we know where Jared lives, we may just have to visit every so often. It was spectacular!

On Sunday Kathy, Liz, Rachel and I went to Music and the Spoken Word. It was really packed! We had really bad seating in the very front left behind pillars and equipment, but the performance was still really good. The United States Navy Band accompanied the Choir for the performance and had a few numbers of their own. It was really good.

We had ribs for dinner on Sunday night...

Monday, Rachel and I went to Ikea and bought some small things that we wanted for the kitchen. I helped Phil put together a pontoon that he got for fishing. We might have the opportunity to go fishing in the two pontoons at Bear Lake, 4th of July weekend. I'm excited for it.

We finished up our day going to the theater and watching Angels and Demons! It was really good! I really liked it. Rachel hasn't seen The Davinci Code yet though. We'll probably watch it sometime soon.

That pretty much sums up our weekend. Sorry for not having any pictures, we'll try to be less lame next time.

Finally!!!

There are a few things that Rachel and I like about Rexburg. Each of them are associated with summertime, but this is the most important! We have been waiting for this day since we moved here... Snoasis is finally open!!!
For those of you who have never been to Snoasis before, Snoasis makes the worlds most delicious snow cones. Here is a sample picture of a "Malibu Barbie." I wish it was a scratch and taste. Anyway, you can get a variety of sizes with your choice of flavors, or they have pre-formulated ideas... such as the "Malibu Barbie" (Red Raspberry mixed with Pink Champagne). There are some delicious add-ons, such as a layer of vanilla ice cream on the bottom or cream drizzled over the top. Rachel's Malibu Barbie has both! Today's choice for me was Strawberry, Red Raspberry and Lime with ice cream on the bottom! The reason that the ice cream is a great addition? Because on a hot summer day, the shaved ice and sugary goodness melts to the bottom and creates a most delectable ice cream flavor! We were super excited to go on this the opening day! Rachel is very pretty, especially with those snow cones in her hands! We love Snoasis!

Weekend Festivities

Well, we have lots to blog about! The last weekend has been filled with blessings, excitement, and a little bit of luck. First of all, we found out on Thursday that we are getting Pell Grants! We are so grateful. When we first got married, we were denied financial aid because it asked for our income info from 2007 . . . when Rob wasn't in school yet and worked full time . . . so our income was too high. But, we petitioned for them to use our 2008 info instead, and once they saw how dirt poor we really were, they approved it! We are so glad, because we were really worried about coming up with another semester of tuition by next week!

Rob finished his last finals of the semester on Thursday, and on Friday morning we went to Salt Lake to spend Easter weekend with my parents. It was such a good weekend. Of course it was filled with tons of delicious food and of course we ate way too much!

My mom's annual bunny cake that we still insist upon as adults

Also this year, we made homemade chocolate/marshmallow eggs! (We used Nestle's crunch bars for the chocolate). They were good!

To top it all off, the Easter Bunny came!!

When we got there on Friday, we spent the afternoon at Cabella's. We love that store! We spent hours looking at all the taxidermied animals and exhibits and even played a shooting game. Rob and I tied. Anyway, the highlight for Rob was the little treasure pictured below. Petro Carbo. Rob has been looking for this stuff for years! He got it for his dad a few years ago and he really liked it . . . but for some reason they have not been able to find it anywhere since. So Rob was shocked to find the stuff, and bought some.

So, on to our shopping spree! Let me first say that this shopping spree had nothing to do with our financial aid happiness. While the financial aid was a huge weight off our shoulders, we immediately budgeted every penny of it to bills, savings, and of course school expenses. So, we weren't planning to do that much shopping in Salt Lake except to spend some last gift cards we had for Target and Costco.

On our way out the door Friday morning, I suddenly remembered something. I had almost an entire year's supply of contact lenses that I got last year, but never used because my eyes were always dry, and then I got Lasik, so the contacts were just stored. I thought, "We'll probably go to Costco in Salt Lake. Maybe we can sell them back." It was an afterthought, but we had time to grab them. We took them to Costco and ended up getting a surprisingly excellent amount of cash! Since this money was unexpected, and every penny of our finances was already budgeted, we decided to have fun with it and treated ourselves to a mini shopping spree! By "shopping spree" we don't mean we blew it all . . . every single thing we bought was something we have been wanting or needing for a long time, and was practical . . . but it felt so good to buy things for ourselves after being so tight with money since we've been married. Anyway, on to our purchases!

#1: Our first tent! It's a 4 man. We love it, and we got a great deal. It was from Costco. The Coleman Rogue 4.

#2: Two new night stands! We have been wanting night stands that match our bed for a long time and these were super cheap at Ikea. (They are actually supposed to be living room end tables, but they are small enough and we think they look fine!)

#3: Can we just say that we love Ikea?! We had time to just browse the store and it's our favorite now. We decided that we'd better get a coffee table too! It was also cheap.
#4: We spent our Target gift cards on tools and flashlights, which we have been needing. Here are a few of them below. One other thing we had kind of been wanting was a spice rack, but we decided instead to spend our remaining Target money on individual spices . . . the ones we will actually use!

#5: With our remaining cash, I got a new pair of jeans (badly needed) and Rob got a new Razor Scooter! He had one at the beginning of this year and he loved having it to ride on campus, but it broke. I told him he could get a new one if we got financial aid . . . although it ended up coming out of the "free" contact money instead!

We really feel good about our purchases. And just when we thought the weekend couldn't get better, the following occurred: Before Easter dinner, my feet were hurting and I was complaining to Rob that I don't have any shoes with arch support and that my only tennis shoes were falling apart. He told me that maybe it would be a good idea to invest in some new ones, but I, of course, was back to tightwad mode. So we ate a delicious turkey dinner and had Katie's friend Cheri and her family over. At the end of dinner, Cheri said, "Hey, Kim (a neighbor and also a friend of Reuben's) has a huge bag of nice used running shoes she is giving to DI. Do you guys need any?" We were shocked. We ran over and tried them on and amazingly, the sizes were perfect and I ended up with 2 great pairs! They are in good condition too! We are so happy. Happy Easter to us!!

Finally, on Sunday evening I "graduated." You see, I graduated in December and they didn't have a ceremony then. They mailed me my diploma and I have the option to walk in the ceremony this month. I decided not to make the trip just to walk, since I have a job now and since my mom won't be in town anyway. So we decided to just take pictures with my diploma. Katie's friend Cheri also just graduated and let me wear her cap and gown to make it more official! So here are my graduation pictures!

My two greatest accomplishments: degree and husband!