Our Christmas

Christmas is such a fun time of year and we celebrated it over two weekends. The first weekend we traveled to Cambridge and had Christmas with my mom, Eric, Ryan and Matthew.

We did our Christmas traditions Saturday morning with stockings and cinnamon rolls! Oh how I love those cinnamon rolls :)

Later in the day we opened gifts, decorated sugar cookies and had a wonderful Christmas dinner.

On Sunday we went to church and Matthew was part of their Christmas service as one of the three wise men.

Now that we're in the real world, long weekends come far and in between so we thoroughly enjoyed the three and a half day weekend! We spent Christmas with my dad this year and had the Yorde family Christmas Eve at my dad's house this year!

The day after Christmas we started to make our way home but not before we had Christmas with the Carey's in Eau Claire. We had a nice lunch, opened gifts and then headed home from the long weekend.

We had an great Christmas this year and we hope everyone had a Merry Christmas as well!

Layout of the Week

Ever since I started getting into the digital scrapbooking, I've been following The Shabby Shoppe Blog and all of the kits I've purchased thus far have been from their shop. One of my favorite things about this company/site is that there is an inspiration gallery were you can post your layouts and view layouts that other users have made, for inspiration! Well, the team contributors for the shoppe take turns posting on the blog and every Monday they do a post called Layout of the Week where the contributor who is doing the post picks their favorite layout from the previous week. Well, one of my layouts just happened to get picked as Layout of the Week today! Check it out on their blog here or take a look at my previous post Template Challenge 7.

For anyone looking to get into digital scrapbooking, this is an awesome site to use! They have great products and some awesome tutorials.

2011 Calendar

I've created my first calendar using the calendar templates from The Shabby Shoppe. I haven't figured out where to print it yet...the slide show above only shows the top portion of the calendar, but the calendar also comes with digitally scrapped bottom pages in which you can add birthdays, anniversaries etc. Well that's the part I'm struggling with. Every site will let you use a picture of the top, but they all have their own pre-made bottoms...so if anyone knows a site where I can use my own picture for the top AND the bottom of a calendar, please let me know! For now, I will continue searching until I find somewhere to print it! :)

Here are the top pages from calendar.

Template Challenge #7

The Shabby Shoppe Blog does a scrapbook challenges and you can win a $25 gift card by making a page and then there are a couple of extra ways to enter, such as blogging about it :) So here is my blog post for an extra entry and this is the scrapbook page I made. Enjoy!

Halfway Point

I've officially made it to the halfway part of my CPCU journey! I passed test number four of eight on Wednesday and I couldn't be happier! Now that I don't have to study (for a little while) I can get back to my scrapbooking, learning how to use my new camera and whatever else I feel like!!

My free time won't be lasting long because I already signed up for my next test today which I'll have to take sometime between January 15th and March 15th. I'm thinking it's going to be more towards the March 15th part of the window so I can have a little extra free time :)

Personally Made Christmas Card

Since I've gotten into the digital scrapbooking, I decided to use one of my scrapbooking kits to make our Christmas Card this year. Made from scratch and personally created by me. I sent them out in the mail today so I guess it's safe to post it on here now :)

O Christmas Tree

This year we got our first real Christmas Tree! We've graduated from the artificial tree and ventured onto a real one. I really wanted to go to a tree farm and cut our own but we settled for a tree from the local Hyvee because there weren't any tree farms that close to Owatonna. Next year I'm going to do my research and find a tree farm around us so we can have the whole experience :)

We got the tree on Sunday but we didn't have time to decorate it until Tuesday night. It was funny to go through the ornaments and pick out the ones that Maple stole off the tree last year and used as a chew toy! We had to buy new lights because they were chewed through last year and a few of the ornaments went into the garbage instead of on the tree!

Hutch

My mom and step-dad got a new hutch for their house, so what does that mean for us? We got the old one! I think I posted about this in an earlier post from when my mom visited, but we brought home the top portion of the hutch at Thanksgiving and I've got a couple of pics of it. I'm having a hard time to decide what to fill the top part with, but it's got a few things in it so far :)

Pheasant Hunting

The day after Thanksgiving, Jeremy went pheasant hunting for the first time with my step-dad, little bro and Libby. They shot a total of four birds - Eric shot 1, Matthew shot 2 and Jeremy shot 1. All in all, a successful hunt!

Now Jeremy has a new hunting hobby to get into and will now be training to utilize her abilities as a bird hunting dog! Looks like we'll be purchasing a new shotgun in the near future thanks to my little bro and Eric ;) I am excited for Jeremy to start training Maple so we can see what she can do!

The boys before going hunting. Poor little Zoe didn't get to join in the fun!

Matthew with his black pheasant.

Jeremy with his first pheasant.

The boys with their birds.

Turkey Day

This year for Thanksgiving we went to my mom's to celebrate. The weather wasn't the greatest so we decided to wait and leave Thanksgiving morning. This was the best idea! The roads were clear and there wasn't even close to as much traffic as we would have had to drive through the night before.

We have so much to be thankful for this year. We've got a great home, great jobs, and amazing families and friends!

Matthew was in charge of cutting Tom the Turkey!

We're still at the "kids" table ;)

Family picture! It was so nice to see everyone!

Jeremy's Buck!

Jeremy went gun hunting in Wisconsin on Saturday and shot a nice 7 point buck! It would have been an 8 pointer except it was missing a brow tine from a fight it had been in. Either way, it's a nice buck! In comparison with all of this other racks, this is definetly the second largest. Not quit big enough to be mounted though. His biggest deer, which has been named "Blake," is on our basement wall and the agreement was that the next one to be mounted has to be bigger than Blake. Maybe next year babe :)

Maple didn't get hunting with him, she stayed home with me, but she did get the see the deer when he brought it home. It's always so funny to watch her react to different things and if either of us were to move the deer head around she wouldn't get close to it! Too funny.

Here are a few pictures of his deer and a scrapbook page I made with the pictures.

Here is his story of the hunt which I used for the scripting: It was around noon and two deer came into the swamp near Jeremy's stand. A doe came out of the swamp followed by a buck that was being blocked by a tree. As the doe began to walk away, the buck came closer allowing Jeremy to take a shot. He missed with the first two shots but the buck stopped in the brush allowing another him to take another shot. He knew he hit him them but he ran out and stopped in front of him. So he shot at him again but he took a few more steps so he shot one last time. Not knowing where or how good he had hit him, he watched him trot down and fall over in the water. He quickly climbed down and went over to where he watched it fall. When he got over there all he could see was horns and one hind quarter as the rest of the deer was submerged in water. After pulling the deer out, Jeremy was able to show off his 7 point buck!

maple's scrapbook

Now that I've gotten into the digital scrapbooking world I decided to make a scrapbook of Maple :) Here are the first three pages I've made so far.



Script: Maple was born on December 28th, 2008. We picked you out of the bunch on January 4th, 2009. We picked the best one in the littler!



Script: This was the second time we went to see our little pup Maple before we brought you home for good. You were the smalled one in the bunch and were so cute! Your eyes weren't open yet and your tail had just been docked. We should have known you’d be a feisty one when you wouldn't hold still for either of us! Little did you know four weeks later you’d be coming home with us!



Script: Maple you’re three weeks old and you’ve opened your eyes! You’re starting to walk around and explore. You’ll be coming home in three weeks to a house of your very own!

first snowfall

Although we had a few snowflakes a little while ago, I'm considering Saturday as the first official snowfall since it stuck! Maple had us up at like 7:00 in the morning so we took her out right away to play in the snow.

She's so funny when the grass is wet! She almost tip toes around until she's sure it's okay to run around in it. I was able to take a few pictures of her out there and made a scrapbook page of them too!

girls weekend

My mom came to visit and we had a long overdue girls weekend! Just the two of us plus Maple :) Friday night when my mom got to town we went and got manicures and pedicures, a must for any girls weekend ;) After that we picked up a pizza from Papa Murphy's and enjoyed that while watching some What Not to Wear on TLC!

Saturday morning we got up early to get on the road for a fun filled day of shopping on Albertville, MN at the Premium Outlet up there! For anyone who hasn't been there, it's the ultimate outlet store. I'm talking 100 stores. Seriously, my new favorite place to shop, it's a good thing it's about an hour and a half from our place so I won't be tempted to go there too often ;)

Before leaving for the day.

We spent hours there. I think about five hours or so to be exact. Mom did mostly shopping for kitchen wear between the Corelle Store, Kitchen Store, Le Creuset and Le Gourmet Chef. I got a couple of kitchen items but I did a little more clothing shopping. Mostly shoes. I got four pairs! My first pair of chucks for less than $20 and three pairs of Nine West dress shoes for work averaging about $30 a pair. Did I mention its an outlet mall which means great deals! I picked up a couple scarves and a shirt as well.

After shopping for a couple of hours we took a break and got some ice cream parfaits from the TCBY/Mrs Fields. They were delicious! I got a peanut parfait with fudge, nuts and peanuts and my mom had one with fudge, strawberries and M & M's.

Once we had visited all the stores on our list, we started to head back to Owatonna. We made a quick pit stop in Edina to visit my aunt, uncle and cousins. Neither my mom or I had seen them in a while and although it was a quick stop, it was great to see them! It's amazing how fast my little cousins are growing up. Sammy is almost taller than my mom now!

Being that we had been gone for quite some time we were in a hurry to get home to let poor Maple out of her kennel! She was such a trooper and did great. She wasn't in there too much longer than she is on a normal work day but she was very sad when we left her for the day. We finished the night off work Chinese food from Hyvee and a little Sex & The City 2. We were both pretty wiped from the day and only made it about half way through the movie (I finished it today though).

It was a great weekend and I'm so glad my mom and I were able to spend some time together, just the two of us :) Thanks so much for visiting!

On a side note, my mom got a new hutch which means I got the old one. It was a huge surprise for me! She'd been hoping to get a new hutch for some time but last time I asked about it, it sounded like she wouldn't be getting a new one anytime soon. Change of plans! They decided to get a new one and she did a great job of keeping it quiet from me, I had no clue she was bringing it along! She was only able to fit half of it in her vehicle, so we'll be bringing the top half home at Thanksgiving. I'll post pictures of it all set up once we've got it all together. Thanks again mom!

new scrapbook pages

So since this is like my 5th post with scrapbook pages out of my most recent posts, it's kinda of easy to see that I've really dived into this new hobby! I feel like I'm starting to get the hang of it but at the same time, I know there are so many more things that Photoshop can do that I'm just not utilizing yet. Maybe at some point I'll know all the tricks and fun things the program can do! Anyway, in the meantime, here are the most recent pages I've created.

Script: "My mom came to visit for the weekend and it was just us girls so we took full advantage! Friday night we got manicures and pedicures followed by Papa Murphy’s pizza. Saturday morning we got up and enjoyed pumpkin bagels at the bagel shop before hitting the road to go shopping in Albertville all day! We took a break from shopping to get some ice cream at a TCBY’s and made it home to enjoy some Chinese food. All in all, we had a great time shopping and splurged on some good food!"

Script: "My sister in law is getting married in January, so in her honor, we through a Football Themed Bachelorette party! She is an extreme football fan and the party was on Halloween Eve, so it was perfect! Even better was that with the help of her soon to be sister in law, we got her finance’s high school football jersey for her to wear! We had a group of twenty ranging from friends and family and we had a great time!"

Script: "Dinner on the last night of our honeymoon in Riviera Maya. December 2008."

trick or treat scrapbook challenge

I completed my second scrapbook page for a challenge on the Shabby Shoppe Blog and here it is! This challenge had a number of criteria you had to include in your page to entry the drawing for the winner. It's a random winner so I've got a chance! :)

our little devil

This year for Halloween we dressed our pup Maple up as a devil! Jeremy's parent's picked the costume up last year after the holiday for her.

She isn't a huge fan of having anything on her head and she was quite funny to watch as she was trying to get her head piece off. The cape however, didn't really bother her one bit! Maple was so tired out from the weekend that she slept on the couch with her cape on all night until we went to bed, too cute!

Action shot! I love this picture for some reason.

Jeremy and Maple.

Playing outside in her costume.