Mesa Temple Christmas Lights

We were asked to be garden hosts at the Mesa Temple Christmas Lights the other night. Basically that means we wore little nametags, carried a walkie-talkie (we were very official!) and walked around the grounds for 3 hours in case we were needed for anything (lost children, burnt out light strands, etc).

It was a lot of fun and we took tons of pictures (which I am sorry to say, I didn't change settings on my camera so the lights didn't really show well, oh well, live and learn). The only "adventure" we had was that I somehow got a bad case of the hiccoughs (or hiccups, whichever you prefer) and it was kind of embarrassing...mine can get pretty loud.

Have a wonderful holiday season and Merry Christmas!!

Happy Thanksgiving!

We hope that you had a great Thanksgiving! We are so grateful for all the blessings in our life and feel that we have much more than we deserve. We constantly marvel at the wonderful things that come our way in life! Also, I feel so lucky that I have the BEST husband out there (sorry, ladies!)!!!

We enjoyed being able to sleep in and have nothing on the agenda but to cook, eat and sleep! We had our dinner over at Leticia and Martin's (Jean's sister and her husband) house and then half fell asleep/half watched a movie. (This picture also includes a good family friend, Dina, who has known Jean's family for years. And I am not sure what Martin is doing...)

So, in an effort to please everyone we decided to cook a ham and a turkey...and yes, both of these large meats were to feed only five people! The priests/laurels in our ward do a fundraiser every year where they cook turkeys and roasts for Thanksgiving. They dig a large hole in the ground, season and wrap the meat in tin foil and cook it over night so come Thanksgiving morning around 10 or 11 you have a perfectly prepared turkey. Now I want to cook my turkey that way every year! And my chef of a husband prepared a delicious orange glazed ham, hopefully I can get him to recreate it another time!

We are jumping on the bandwagon.....

Our life is not that exciting at the moment, but we do want a way to keep everyone updated while we are in Brazil, so why not a blog? Isn't this the best form of mass email anyway? For those of you who don't know yet, we get to spend all of January in Brazil, and we can't wait!! I have been wanting to go for quite some time now (years!) and Jean is excited to be home again.

We have some fun plans of what we are going to do there, so stay tuned for some great stories and pictures. In the meantime, here is a quick year-in-review! We met in June of 2006 and this picture was taken on our first date by my standards and our second date by Jean's...But if you want to debate the matter, we can both quote general authorities....



Regardless of what our first date was, Jean instantly fell for me and began pursuing me. =) Our "courtship" was tons of fun. Finally, I had found the man to marry!

So, at the risk of turning into a Mormon stereotype, we were engaged somewhat quickly (which brings up another debate on who actually asked first...).

To announce our engagement to our parents, we emailed the picture of my hand and then called asking them to open their email.

This picture is one of many engagement photo rejects...but I guess we can still use it for something! =)

We were married in the Mesa Arizona Temple on December 16, 2006.

We then went to the Grand Canyon for our honeymoon!








We got tickets to go to April 2007 General Conference and it was fun to show Jean around Utah.

I know this is a long post, but considering it covers over a year, I think I am doing okay. There was more I wanted to add, but I am tired of blogging for the moment....