Christmas Wonderland

Every year, my parents add more and more to their ever growing collection of Christmas decorations. These decorations are stored in 30 gallon plastic bins. These bins are stored in a small basement closet underneath the house in our play room. These bins must be carefully removed from this closet, carried up 2 stairways and through 2 narrow hallways where they are stacked on top of one another. There they are unpacked one by one. I guess I didn't realize how not normal this was until I helped Evan's family put up their decorations this year. It literally took them 3 hours to put up BOTH the inside decorations and outside. It takes us 6 hours to only put up the inside. Here is a picture of most of the bins stacked together. Remember, this is only the inside decorations and ornaments. I will post pictures of the final products once everything has been put in its proper place. Here is also a picture of Evan resting after helping bring some of the bins upstairs. Once everything is said and done though, I do enjoy going to my parents house and walking into their personal Christmas Wonderland.

The stockings were hung...

.... and the stockings were hung, on the island bar with care..... well it's not as good as a chimney, but it'll work. :)

Can you believe I found these at the Target dollar bin!? They were $2.50 each. I'm thinking about going back and getting some for our future kids. Evan says I better buy at least 6 more then. HAHA! A friend from work embroidered them with our names for me. I just can't wait for the holidays!!!

OUR NEW BABY!!!!!!!!!!!

We have a new addition to our family!!! We would like to introduce you to our new SUV! We are the proud owners of a 2008 Chevy Equinox Sport. We were planning on waiting until January, but we have been looking at used cars on the internet and found one that met everything on our checklist. It is rare to find a sport edition. It is silver with black leather interior. It has a 6 disk CD changer, heated seats, remote start engine, sunroof, auxiliary MP3 input jack, and lots of leg room in the back seat! It was a great experience overall. Our sales guy was awesome and because we knew what we wanted going in, it only took us 3 hours from start to finish ( it took over 9 hours to buy my Corolla). Anyway, here are the pictures of our car from the dealer's website. We will take more later.

HaPpY HaLlOwEeN

Happy Halloween! Evan and I had a hard time deciding what to be this year. We wanted to be 2 things that went together. Last weekend, we had a coworkers Halloween party to go to. I had class untill 3pm and the party started at 7pm. So after class, we went to look for costumes and couldn't find anything we liked. Finally we stopped by Target and Evan just loved the gorilla costume. So we were thinking that I could be Ann Darrow from King Kong and that I could just find a Marilyn Monroe type dress. Well, that wouldn't be too appropriate to wear to school, so we had to think of something else. I remembered seeing a banana costume at Target but this Target didn't have one. We called 5 Targets in the area and only 1 Target had 1 banana costume left. So we rushed over there, changed into our costumes quickly at our apartment and headed to the party. Yesterday, we were able to wear our costumes to school. We were a hit! Evan decided he would pretend to follow me into the cafeteria during both breakfast and lunch and chase me around the cafeteria. It was pretty funny. Our computer tech teacher even caught it on camera. The kids came up to me after school and said how worried they were that he was going to eat me. HAHA! One of my kids said several times, with bulging eyes, "I'M GONNA EAT YOU!" It was funny at first and then got a little creepy haha. Anyway, we hope all of you have a wonderful Halloween full of lots of treats and a few tricks!

Love at First Sight

Our visit to the State Fair this year was so much fun! We decided to do something we haven't done there before, and test drive some cars. Well, that was a mistake because we are now in love. Let us introduce you to our new love affair. The 2010 Chevy Equinox. Can you believe this SUV gets better gas mileage than my Corolla!?! Evan and I have been discussing whether or not to fix the car he has just paid off (it shakes pretty hard after you get over 60mph) or just to get more money for trading it in sooner than later. We will see this beauty on the road and both of us will just get so excited. Its like we are 2 little kids waiting for Santa to arrive. We have told ourselves that we need to wait, but each day feels like agony. Our goal is to save up money the next few months and buy a used Equinox in January. We just can't get over the new one though. It was love at first sight.

Wedding Present

Evan's friends, John and Kelsi Gagnon, surprised us with a wedding present this weekend while we were in Oklahoma. We just love it!!!! I want to find out how to make stuff like this ...and the clock we got too.

State Fair!!!

I can not tell you how excited we are for the STATE FAIR OF TEXAS!!! This is a major tradition with my family. I need to start exercising more now because I just can't resist all of the good fair food. If you have never been, it really is a treat! Fortunately, teachers in Texas get free fair tickets! We highly recommend going. Here is a picture of us at last year's state fair.