Christmas Card 2015

Merry Christmas from our little family to yours! We hope you are all enjoying your holiday season. We were blessed to have another great year! Here is an update:

We spent my birthday celebrating in Las Vegas. We always enjoy walking up and down the strip and checking out the Bellagio fountains. Matt also took me to Cirque de Soleil-Mystere. It was such an incredible show!

In February, we were in Nebraska to celebrate my cousin Mariah's gorgeous wedding.

Our friends, Joel and Jess came to visit us over Spring Break. We surprised Jess with her first visit to the Grand Canyon.

Matt began a new job in March as a financial advisor with a small, independent firm. In April, we headed back to Vegas with his new co-workers for a conference. 

In May, we were back in Nebraska celebrating Jadyn's high school graduation. 

We took our annual trip to San Diego over Memorial Day. This year we stayed directly across from the beach. As always, we had a wonderful time! 

We added a small, open patio to our backyard. Once that was finished we met all our neighbors by inviting them over for a few pool parties. 

July took us back to Nebraska to celebrate our dear friends, Patrick and Angela's wedding. It was such a beautiful day!!

Jadyn and her friend Sheridan came back with us to Phoenix to spend a week. They kept us busy!!

October marked one year in our first house. We have been working on a few other small projects.

We kicked off our holiday celebrations by Thanksgiving with some very sweet friends. We hosted our first Christmas party as well. We are now back in the Midwest to celebrate Nolan's college graduation which will mesh into Christmas.

We hope you all had a wonderful 2015! Enjoy time with your loved ones this holiday season. Happy New Year!!

Matthew 1:21

She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. 

 

Christmas continues

Greetings, friends! We are now enjoying our Christmas in the Midwest, but I thought I would update all the rest of our Christmas festivities from Arizona! One evening we headed to look at Christmas lights near our house. In Arizona, we look at lights with Bahama Buck's sno cones instead of hot chocolate! 

 

Some of our dear friends brought flowers as a hostess gift during our Christmas party, and I am so impressed how good they still look!

Last Friday we went to The Living Christmas Tree at Ahwatukee Baptist. The entire median along the main road in Ahwatukee is filled with trees covered in lights. I know these pictures are terrible, but it was so gorgeous!!

It kept going on forever and ever!

The show was the perfect way to get us into the holiday spirit!

We also headed to go look at more lights. This was our favorite house of the night!

Saturday morning Matt and I had our own little Christmas and opened presents from each other.

Saturday night was our Christmas party with the company I see older kids through. We headed out to an amazing dinner and Las Noches de Las Luminarias at the Desert Botanical Gardens. The entire path was lit from luminaries. There were a few telescopes out and several bands found throughout the grounds.

There was one section designed from fiber optic lights and water bottles.

Here is our happy group!

They also has changing light fiber optics that went up an entire side of the mountain. It was so pretty!

Sunday afternoon our neighbors invited us and another set of neighbors over for a few rounds of bags. Matt was pretty good, and it was fun to see them all one more time before we left!

Sunday night we continued our tradition of looking at the lights at the Mormon Temple with our friends, Brooke and Ryan. They recently became foster parents so it was really fun to see their new baby girl!

The lights were so beautiful!! It actually seemed a little cold over the weekend, but I think it helped us prepare for our trip back to Nebraska! Merry Christmas!

Christmas Party and More Celebrating

We are all about Christmas over here! The Christmas cards are out! Our letter will be posted soon!

There is a list online that shows all of the good places to look at lights in the valley. I noticed one of my client's live in a neighborhood with a recommended house to check out. I made sure I drove by it this past week.

All of the houses around this one are totally dark! I'm not sure if you can tell, but they even decorated inside their house with special window boxes!!

Over the weekend, we celebrated with a Christmas party inviting our friends and co-workers. We had such a fun time! I kind of already feel like Christmas is over which makes it more exciting because we still have a few more weeks to celebrate!!

We had all kinds of food!! Lots of Christmas goodies!

For once, I took a few pictures!! 

We played some games; Headbanz is always a great party game!

We also played a few reindeer games! I found this questionnaire on another blog, and it was kind of fun. We wrote down our own answers as well as what we thought our spouse would say. It was entertaining to hear everyone's responses!

I also read about this next game on yet another blog. Matt explained the rules several times!

We played girls vs. guys so here there were getting ready to run! 

Each member ran down to Matt or myself, blew up a balloon and then stuffed it into the pantyhose we were each holding. It was much harder than I was expecting! Everyone went through twice, then the holder (me) put the "antlers" on my head while the whole team sang "Rudolph, the red-nose reindeer". (Yes I realize this picture is totally embarrassing so you are welcome!)

I saw a couple iphones out and filming, but those do not need to be shared! It was pretty embarrassing, but I think everyone had fun! We ended the night with a game of Things. We hope everyone had a great time! I asked a couple of our neighbors to come over on Sunday to help us eat some of the leftover food!! We will be eating Christmas cookies for months!

Sunday night, Matt and I went to go look at some Christmas lights. First we checked out downtown Chandler including the tumbleweed tree.

I had heard about a place not too far from us called Cherry Lane. We decided to check it out this year. It was intense! There were people selling hot chocolate and some carolers. There were so many cars!!

You can walk or drive so we decided to walk through. 

This house had a spot for a photo-op.

It was such a unique place. Every house was decorated in their own theme! This rocking reindeer was HUGE!

One house was having a bon fire on the front walk while their backyard was open to walk through. It told the whole story of Jesus, and I could tell it took A LOT of work!

They also had a train ride available for all the children!

I hope you are all enjoying this very special time of year! Check back again soon for our Christmas letter!

Christmas Decor

Hi friends, it's Show and Tell Tuesday! I am linking up today to share my Christmas decorations with you! So for all of my regular readers, you can click on the link and go take a look at many other beautiful homes decorated for the holiday season. If you are here from the link up-welcome! This is such a fun time of year!! I thought I would start on the outside and work our way in :)
We bought new lights this year because last year we bought them on Black Friday at 5 am and got the wrong color. We came home and put them up right away and didn't realize until that night they were not the ones we wanted... :( So we dealt with them last year but got the ones we wanted this year!







I also made a new wreath because, why not?!?

Welcome to our little place! Come on in; it will be fun, I promise!

The tree is basically the same as last year, but we recently put up this shelf on our wall which made a perfect little makeshift mantle for our stockings this year.

I found lots of cute printable sayings online that I printed off this year. It's so fun!

A new piece of furniture to decorate=the perfect reason to buy new Christmas decor!

This year on Black Friday we bought another tree, this one we put in the kitchen. I said maybe we will buy a tree on Black Friday every year!! Matt didn't think so...

I also moved our little nativity scene to the kitchen and put our advent calendar next to it.

I also ran over to my grandparents and "borrowed" a few items since they will not be here until after Christmas including one set of trees out front and the floral arrangement in the middle of the table. :) 

We used the lights we put on the house last year to decorate the back yard! I tell you what, we are getting fancy!! ;) It was fun to have them on during our Christmas party over the weekend which I will post about later this week!

That's all for today. Hope you enjoyed the tour. Enjoy your time with your loved ones this season!!