Christmas, part one

Matt and I celebrated our first married Christmas together this past weekend (Christmas just the two of us). We spent most of the weekend just lounging and relaxing. Saturday night we exchanged a very small gift, kind of like Christmas Eve. I got him some licorice which he loves and he got me a 'mouthguard' thing for my little nalgene bottle which turned out to be too big since I have a small bottle, so we have to return it.

Sunday morning Matt went to church while I lazied around the apartment. When he got home I couldn't stand it anymore so we exchanged gifts. I got him a container of "Jack Daniels" coffee, some string pegs for his acoustic guitar, and the biggest gift was a new case for his Gretsch guitar. His Gretsch is one of his favorite guitars and he got it for a steal but without a case. So anytime we travel with it we have to be soo careful but now it has its very own case! I had to steal his guitar one night to take it to the music store to find a case and that was fun because all of the employees there were in awe of the awesome guitar :)

Matt got me a new water bottle for work (so I wouldn't spill on myself anymore!), the new Harry Potter book, and a big gift card for Ann Taylor Loft! So exciting since I don't go shopping anymore and I have been dying to go. I can't believe I actually get to go there and buy new clothes. We are going to go up to the Dawsonville outlets after Christmas to try to get the most of the gift card.

Sunday evening Matt cooked our delicious dinner of steak and grilled veggies (pictures at bottom). We also had some whole wheat french bread that I made with olive oil to dip in, and a bottle of Clos du Bois - yum!! We finished off the evening by driving around and looking at Christmas lights.

In other money saving news - we just went to Publix where I used my grocery game list to purchase $45 worth of groceries for $16! It included two large boxes of Bisquick, 5 boxes of gallon Ziploc bags, 4 cans of del monte veggies, two boxes of Betty Crocker potatoes, Domino sugar, and a huge thing of Maxwell House coffee. I think that's everything.

Tomorrow night will be spent with Matt's parents and John and Stephanie and then the next two days with all of the Moffitts for Christmas! We are very excited about seeing everyone and actually haven't seen John & Steph since our wedding day.

Oh and today we found out that the Harlans are having a baby GIRL!! So very excited for them :)

Hope everyone has a very Merry Christmas!

Matt cooking and smoking up the kitchen
Yum!
The bread I made was HUGE.. this is about half of it
Bread, olive oil & yummy wine - in our crystal :)

I need a sippy cup..

I guess lots has happened since my last post. Sunday was Christmas Music at church and it was amazing this year! This was only my second year seeing it but it gave me chills the whole time. It was especially fun seeing Matt and both of his parents up there. Afterwards we headed to Matt's aunt & uncle's house, along with his parents and some other friends of his aunt & uncle's that we had not met before. We had lots of cheese, crackers, bread and olive oil, and delicious barbecue that Matt's uncle smoked on his big green egg all morning. We were stuff by the time we left.

We originally had driven from home to Buckhead to Virginia Highlands, back to Buckhead and back home where we got ready for our next trip of the day. We got changed out of church clothes, got our twice baked mashed potatoes (I couldn't get them back in the skins) and headed out to Snellville for a potluck with some good friends. It was so much fun to see everyone who I don't get to see very often. The boys fried a turkey outside while the girls socialized and played with the 2 month old baby (so cute) and we also ate a ton of fried pickles thanks to Matt. It was such a fun night and I wish we could see everyone more often.

Ok then it was on to Monday, where nothing too exciting happened. Except we watched a Charlie Brown Christmas special and Matt fell asleep on the couch at 8:30 so we went to bed at 9, nice. Tuesday was a funny day at work, mostly because at 8:30am I spilled my cup of coffee all over myself. And then at 11:30am I spilled my cup of water all over myself. This tells you just how clumsy I am! Tuesday evening I headed to Meg's house to watch the Biggest Loser finale which is always exciting, and found out that the next "season" starts January 6th, great!

Now it's Wednesday and my brother is staying the night with us. Matt and I cooked a yummy lasagna and tonight we are watching the new Muppet Christmas, I love those guys. Hope you all are enjoying your week leading up to Christmas!

Theme of the week: food & babies

What a week! It has been a fun one. Of course I already told you I had Tuesday off, which always makes for a good week. Thursday I did a little more shopping and found some fun things at Target.. of course I bought more than I had planned on. Thursday night Matt's parents came over for dinner! We made a pot roast in the crock pot with carrots & potatoes along with lemon tarts for dessert. It was nice to finally invite them over when the apartment is all clean and it's the holidays :) Then we watched The Office and the episodes have been so good lately!

Last night Chrissy, Chad, Lindsey & Brian came over for chocolate fondue and a tradition we are now starting of exchanging ornaments at Christmas. Lindsey, Chrissy & I are all close friends from college and all three of us got married this year so we had a fun first married Christmas together. The fondue was delicious and Matt and I got two fun ornaments. We also played Apples to Apples which is of course the greatest game ever.

And also this week, in keeping with the theme in my life that everyone is pregnant, I found out that three more of my friends are having babies! I think the count is up to 9 right now.. kind of unbelievable. I will have more friends who have babies in 2009 than friends who got married in 2008.. didn't think it would happen so quickly. But I am very excited for everyone! I guess I will have to budget for a lot of baby presents this year.. can't resist buying those tiny, cute things.

Now it's Saturday and Matt is at choir practice this morning until noon. I went for a run and am going to start on my twice baked potatoes for the potluck I am going to tomorrow. Tomorrow is busy as well with Christmas music at our church, followed by bbq at Matt's uncle's house, followed by the potluck.. I'll post on all of that after the fact, hopefully with pictures.
Today looks like a nice, relaxing Saturday to spend with my husband.
So happy Saturday! :)

Flex Day: My favorite day of the week

Today is my flex day off of work. My company started letting us work a flex schedule about 2 or 3 months ago. It is basically a 9/80 schedule: you work 80 hours in 9 days and have one day off, over the span of a two week period. The only caveat is that we don't do flex time in a two week pay period when there is a holiday, so Christmas, New Years and MLK day will kill the next few weeks worth of flex time but we still have time off for the holidays. I LOVE having time off of work, so today is one of my favorite days.

My morning started with sleeping in until 8 and Matt left for his German final at 7:45. Around 9 I was about to take a shower when I noticed a big spider in the shower! (Not uncommon in our apartment). I had a lot of errands to run and didn't want to wait for Matt to get home to kill the spider, so I ran my errands unshowered. haha. I think the clean clothes, winter hat, and tiny amount of makeup made me decently presentable. I am winding down the end of my Christmas shopping with maybe only one or two more things left to buy, it feels good.

Matt came home after his final to have lunch with me and kill the spider of course. So now I'm all showered, the apartment is still clean (dishes & laundry this morning), and I have the rest of the day ahead of me to figure out what to do. I am getting my haircut later today which I am very excited about, it has been four months since the last cut. I think I will spend some of this afternoon working on photo books. I like to use the website www.picaboo.com to make photo books and Matt and I want to make one of our trip to San Francisco and one of our honeymoon. They can be time consuming and if I don't start soon I never will.

Happy Flex Day!

Our first Christmas tree!

Before I post about the Christmas tree, I wanted to post this photo of a sunrise at work this past week. I got off the elevator and turned to walk into work and this is what I saw (looking down 75S to downtown Atlanta with cloud cover - sorry it is blurry):

Anyway, on to the post. So far the things in life that have made me feel like an adult (hm, besides getting married, working, etc), are handing out candy to children on Halloween and having my very own, live Christmas tree. Last night Matt and I headed out to find a tree that would fit in our little apartment. We called Big John's to see if they had any short trees (Home Depot didn't) and they did so we headed over. We ended up picking the first tree that I saw that I liked which is 5 feet tall, a perfect fit. We put the tree in the trunk of my Civic (it fit, no need to tie it on top! except for the needles in the car now), and headed to Walmart to buy a tree stand and some lights. Followed by Trader Joe's for some yummy wine, cheese & bread.

We came home and got the tree set up and I put all of the lights on, 2 strands of colored lights. I grew up with colored lights but Matt wanted white lights. He let me do my thing and I think he still wishes they were white, oh well. It is nice to have such a short tree because I could decorate the whole thing without having to stand on a chair. I got out my little collection of ornaments and we placed those on the tree along with these little handmade bluebirds that Matt's mom made for our rehearsal dinner. We even had an angel to put on the top thanks to Matt's mom who was going to throw this one away! After we put up the tree we watched Elf and I even was awake until 10:45 which hasn't happened in a while on a Friday night! (tree pictures below)

Today has been "get things done" day. I set my alarm at 8 to get up and begin completely cleaning the apartment because we have a few guests coming over this week. We haven't had people over in a long time so you can imagine what the apartment looks like. I have also cooked a lot today - boiled and cut up 2lbs of chicken, made some bread dough, and am baking oatmeal butterscotch cookies right now (for potluck at church tomorrow). The goal for the potluck was for me to make a dessert I already had all of the ingredients for. Of course I didn't have butter. My wonderful husband headed over to Kroger and brought back 3 packages of butter :) Later I will make some pizza dough so we can have barbecue chicken pizza tonight. Busy, busy, busy. I feel productive though.

Oh! And a nice surprise was that while Matt and I were eating lunch our wedding album was delivered by the mailman to our door! It is so exciting to finally have this in our possession and it looks amazing. Our photographer was Rebecca Cipolla (www.rebeccacipollaphotography.com) and I would recommend her to everyone for photos. Especially if you need any sort of baby photos, she does the most amazing job, I know Matt and I will continue to use her for portraits in the future. I am surprised to receive this photo album today because she just had a baby on Tuesday. She either mailed this right before that or right after, quite a trooper.

Anyway, on to the tree pictures :)

Putting the tree in the stand.. the tree was almost too small for it!

Putting on the lights

All done!

Living room view of finished tree (almost clean room!)

Back to the routine

It has been a good week so far. Monday night I had a lot to get done and magically, it all got done! Including going running (hooray for winter running clothes) and eating a delicious dinner of salmon, wild rice, sugar snap peas and a bottle of wine from our visit to Clarkesville (by the way, the dinner cost all of about $2 to make and fed us each 2 or 3 times)! Last night I had a board meeting at the Wesley Foundation which is always good to go to. I was very involved there in college and now am able to contribute back by donations and being on the board which feels good. I also helped them out today with their natural gas and getting a lower rate for them to help with the budget (even if I did tell them to go with a competitor of my company.. oh well). Mary and I carpooled down there together = haven't seen her in a while so that was good, and we saved a little gas, good for the environment :)

Tonight Matt is at choir practice so I've been piddling around the apartment getting a few things done (dishes, clean out fridge, laundry, etc). I also prepped a meal for cooking tomorrow. We are going to Matt's mom's Christmas show tomorrow night. She is an elementary school music teacher so we are going to see the show and Matt is going to run the sound. Which leaves us almost no time for dinner. I thought it would be a good night to finally use my crock pot which has been in the closet for 4 months. I have some good crock pot recipe books so I found a recipe with ingredients that I had in the apartment and ended up making sloppy joes! Yum, I haven't had those in a loong time, and I've definitely never made them. The only problem is I halved the recipe and it will barely fill up the crock pot so I'm worried it might burn or something. But Matt will be home tomorrow and can keep an eye on it and start it around lunch time.

So nothing too exciting to report on. Oh and today I received in my email the proof for our wedding announcement which is running in this Sunday's edition of the Augusta Chronicle: