One year of HAPPINESS

     Today (April 27th) marks our one year anniversary!!!! WAHOO!!! I can't believe it has been a year already. My how the time flies. It has been a wonderful year filled with ups and downs and sacrifices and memories were made. I wish I was really into scrapbooking and I would have picture record of everything in an organized place, but sadly all I have done is our honeymoon pictures hehe. Someone want to do it for me :)
Anyway, like I said it has been one mighty adventure. We were blessed with an offer on renting a cute old home and that has been so great. No wall neighbors to worry about and heaven knows we would've had complaints cause of noise by now if we were in an apartment. We love to be crazy and loud. There's definitely been some struggles of getting use to each other and understanding each others personalities but we're still figuring it out and loving every moment of it. We've been on many fun trips and gone on little adventures. We hope to be very active this summer with riding bikes, long boarding, hiking and camping. I'm just so happy to be married to my best friend who I love so much!!! I can't wait for more adventures, more wonderful years filled with love, and to eventually start a family.

Lady Antabellum

On January 24th I had the pleasure to take my cute sister and her friend to the Lady A concert. I bought the tickets for Allies Christmas present and we had a great time :) 

We got there pretty early so we had time to walk around and take a bunch of pre-show pictures

Jana Kramer was the first opener and she was really good. Then there was more wait time in-between the next opener.

Aaaaand then there's Kip Moore. . . As you can see, he was all lights. He just kinda stood there, played his guitar, and hid behind his lights. Obviously he wasn't my favorite. He had about 3 min of awesomeness when he sang "Pretty girl". I really like that song (see 2 pictures up from here)

Goblin Valley Camp Trip

     A few weeks ago Hawk and I enjoyed a mighty camping trip with good friends of ours, Bren and Tiffany. It was the beginning of March-ish and we lucked out on some good weather. Not too hot and not too cold. The evening was definitely chilly though. Good thing for camp fires! We went for 3 days and had a wonderful time. We did A LOT of hiking and climbing around. It really kicked my butt. WHOO! But they were fun hikes. 

   We spent most of our time climbing around in Goblin Valley. That's a state park which is like south east-ish from Salt Lake for like 3 hours. It's sort of by Moab. It's in the same general place on a map er something haha! It is definitely an interesting place. You never get bored when you're there. It felt like another planet! Such interesting little rock formation. Oh but it is a paradise for my dear Hawk. He LOVES climbing around and didn't waste anytime trying to see how high he could climb. There was even a fun little cave! 

   We also enjoyed a hike called Wild Horse Canyon. That's what majority of my pictures are of. It was a great hike filled with all sorts of adventures. It did last quite a long time though. There was a stretch of just flat road that was hard to get through after we had just climbed through the first half of the hike. That picture is depicted. Just look for the one that I'm not happy in haha. But it was a good hike. Lots of fun things to conquer. 

   It was a good camping trip of enjoying each others company and sharing many fun stories. Sadly it's been many weeks since this camping trip has happened so I don't remember specifics haha. Oh well. Long random posts can be boring right :P Well anyway. I hope you enjoy our pictures :)

 So at this point of the hike there was unsuspecting pools of (apparently) very cold water. Now turning back wasn't an option and I'm a woose with the cold so Hawk was my hero and carried me on his back. I'm not sure why he didn't take his boots off though

 our friends, Brent and Tiffany, made it through pretty good. What troopers!

 The 3 drying off their feet

 A lot of the hike was this fun zigg zaggy kinda stuff

 Now apparently this is the point where hikers turn around and go back. Well we decided to press forward and do the whole thing!

 

As a result of that decision, you get this picture

 aaaand more climbing

 

And this my friends, is Goblin Valley. Ya just have to go there to see what it's like

 

It makes for a beautiful sunset :)

The rocks there are sandy, slippery, and round, and would make it hard to jump from one rock to the other

 And here's the Goblin Valley cave. It's really hard to climb into

The Grand Weekend of Fun

     So this weekend was a good weekend filled with fun events. It first started with me getting work off early Friday night, (that was great), and so I drove home and got dressed up nice for the wonderful Mormon Tabernacle Christmas concert. The performance was grand and beautiful songs were sung. I wasn't familiar with either of the stars there but the gentleman supposedly is in Lord of the Rings and he is in the 3rd Indiana Jones (their Israelite friend who helps them find the cave er whatever). He told the story of how Charles Dickens came up with "The Christmas Carol". It was very good and had a good message. The woman that was there was a soprano operatic singer and she did a lovely job. Very good voice and sang beautiful songs. The dancing was fabulous too and the decorations was set up like old England. It was a fun experience and after the performance while making our way out of the building we walked right by Elder Dallin H. Oaks! Awesome!

     Saturday morning we decided to go skiing for the first time this season. We had a two for one day pass at snowbird. We decided at the end of the day that it's a more advanced mountain but we still had fun. It was pre-season so there wasn't as much snow and there were many icy spots. Let's just say that I fell way too much haha. Luckily the only injury I have is a small bruise on my shin when my ski hit it. I seriously thought I was going to break my leg or ankle a few times trying to catch myself while sliding down the hill. At one point both skis popped off my boots when I fell. But we enjoyed our time non the less. I just have a very sore body to show for it haha.

 Hawk is a grand skier

 Hawk is the dot on the far left

 

We had trouble standing next to each other. I kept sliding backwards haha 

     But our Saturday is not over yet! We hung-out in Salt Lake for we had the Forgotten Carols performance to go to that night! Oh how excited I was! I love the Forgotten Carols and Hawk had never seen it before. So we had dinner, walked around some stores, and drug our-selves to the show (for we were very tired, but still excited). So we enjoyed the lovely Michael McLean show and made our way home from the exhausting day. Hawk even realized something about the play that I never noticed (and I've seen it at least 5 times) that Uncle John is playing the role of John the Beloved. Crazy right! I should've caught it when he was Connie Lou was reading the little note he wrote her when it says "you really make me feel BELOVED" er however it goes. So that was really cool. The Forgotten Carols is such a wonderful Christmas show.

     Sunday then came and Hawk and I got to sleep in and enjoy just relaxing with each other. We didn't have to worry about planning a lesson (Hawk and I have been released as Sunday School teachers and I picked up the Beehive adviser calling) and we could enjoy the day. Hawk then let me know that he invited one of our friends over for dinner that night. . . WHAT?! I was happy to have friends over  but to be told last minute can be a little stressful. We decided on a meal and headed over to church. After church our friends came over and we had a lovely evening together. Hawk and his friend played video games while the wife and I made brownies. MMM! Brownies are so delicious!

And so that ended our Grand Weekend of Fun!

    

Christmas Tree Adventure

Last Thursday Hawk and I finally went out and got a REAL Christmas tree. I grew up with a fake tree and absolutely loved it. I love Christmas trees anyway but I wasn't sure about getting a real one. But Hawk grew up with a real tree and so I decided to try something new. Sadly there were no more tags to go cut one down so we went to a small local business in Centerville. It was a small lot so it didn't take long to look around. It was fun to walk around and see all the great looking trees. We found our cute little tree. It's about as tall as Hawk. The worker even did a bundle deal with a tree stand. 

As soon as we got home we put the tree in some warm water, turned on Christmas music, and started figuring out how to re-arrange our living room so we could display our tree in our window. We've done quite the maneuvering. It took a few minutes to figure it out but we moved things around and put the tree up. It was so exciting to see a little tree in our living room! I then ripped open our 2 boxes of lights and started stringing. BUT WE DIDN'T HAVE ENOUGH!!! We didn't have a star or ornaments either. So we hurried to Smiths, bought a new box of lights, a cute star for the top of our tree, and a few glass ball ornaments.

We came home again and finished trimming the tree! I was excited to hang every single ornament. I JUST LOVE CHRISTMAS!! The manger scene ornament is our first ornament and of course Hawk had to add his little touch to the tree. Once we were done we turned the lights out and saw our cute little tree glow with happiness :) I just can't wait to put presents under it for that finish look!

The weekend full of Quests

     So this last weekend was a pretty busy crazy one. Enough that I felt it blog worthy. Strap in reader for an adventurous read.
    It all started with one of my good friends, Adrianna, wedding dinner Friday night. It started at 6 and I had to get work off early. Since it was all the way in Sandy, I met up with Hawk in Salt Lake and I had to bring him dress clothes for the dinner. We got to the dinner at 6 but we still needed to change. Hawk for some reason took forever to change. So I was stressing that we were late. Well when we walked into the room of the dinner we find out that the brides parents weren't there yet. So that calmed me down a bit. But I was still stressing during the dinner cause I knew we had to leave early because my parents were in town with my little sisters and cousin and they only had Friday night to come over and see our house. So once we ate our food and said a few nice words we left the dinner and headed home. Mom  and dad came over and we had a splendid time showing off the house. Sadly they couldn't stay all night because we had yet another commitment that night. so at 10 I said my goodbyes to the fam (wishing they weren't leaving) and we headed over to our friends house, Jack and Katy. Sadly Jack and Katy were moving the next morning to Oregon. Neither Hawk and I are happy about this move because we have become great friends with this young couple. But Jack was offered a job that he couldn't resist. So we're happy for them. So we went over to their house to take their food that they had left over that they would have otherwise thrown away. Gladly we stuffed our fridge and freezer with their food and also filled our living room with their old school big screen TV that they gave to us. We said our sad and happy goodbyes to them and finally went back home to go to bed.
     The next morning was Adriannas wedding in the Draper temple at 10 am. We live in Bountiful and so it takes us about 40 min to get there. We get up and go and sadly it's a very cold cloudy snowy day for a wedding. We're suppose to get there at 9:30 and of course we were late (which added stress) and got into the temple with 5 min to spare before they called us up to the sealing room of the temple. The sealing was beautiful and am super happy for my friend. Well after the wedding I had plans to meet up with another friend for lunch. We set it up for noon and so we had a few minutes to spare. Just enough time that we decided to explore IKEA since neither of us had been there. Well what we didn't know was that there's a path that you can get very lost in. Which we did. Which made me stress cause we were then late for lunch. We finally got out and made it to lunch and it was really good to see my friend Jessica as I hadn't seen her for about 2 years. We enjoyed catching up with each other. We then had to say our goodbyes and hoped to see each other again before 2 years and Hawk and I headed up to Cottonwood Heights to look at some skis. We've been looking to get me some skis because we figured we'd go enough that it's worth getting me some. We finally got there and loved the skis so we bought them. Sadly the boots she had were to small. So we're still on the hunt for good boots. After we got the skis we decided to head over to a sports store and size my feet for the correct boot size. 24 to 24.5 is what we figured out. Hawks mom then texted us and needed Hawks help with something and so drove to Farmington to help. We were there till about 5:15 and we needed to be at Adriannas wedding reception at 6. We go home for a few minutes and then head on back to Salt Lake (more like Holladay) for the reception and make it just in time for the cutting of the cake and all the fun festivities. While driving to the reception I found some boots on KSL for a decent price but they were all the way in Herriman. That's about 30 min south of where we were at. Hawk and I debated for a second whether or not to go try 'em on and then we thought, what the heck. So we drove all the way there hoping these boots would fit. Guess what?! THEY DIDN'T FIT! They were a 24 too! So apparently the boot sizer at the sports store was not accurate. So to make the drive down there worth it we drove a few more minutes down to Cabela's. It was a good thing too as I needed to purchase Christmas gifts for Hawk there. After Cabela's we finally made it home for the night.
     So overall, after Friday and Saturday, we ended up driving all over the Salt Lake Valley using up over 200 miles. WHEW! It was a crazy weekend I tell ya. And we are still on the Quest for snow boots. We have a couple prospects tomorrow night that we have to travel far for. Wish us luck!

Blessing from Heavenly Father

     This week Hawks grandmother was admitted into the hospital. I'm not sure exactly what for but something to do with her blood platelets and she doesn't have any strength or energy. Well I was worried, not only because it was my husbands Grandmother but because she kind of reminds me of my Grandma Faye. My grandma died a few years ago and it was very sad for me. So anyway, last night we had the opportunity to go to the hospital and see her. All the family that could come was there to give Grandma Harker a blessing. It was so wonderful to see so many people there and although we may have been slightly crammed I wouldn't have it any other way. When I got up to her she was sitting there quietly as if concentrating on something. Maybe breathing or trying to ignore the pain. I don't know. But she still had somewhat of a smile on her face when she saw me. After a few minutes of visiting we finally got everyone in the room and first said a prayer to invite the spirit into that hospital room. The prayer was given by my Father-in-law and it was a most beautiful prayer. She was then anointed with oil, then received a blessing of healing and love. The blessing also was very beautiful. I bet you're wondering why I'm telling you all this. As obvious as what I'm about to say is, it still is something that I thought about and just had an overwhelming gratitude for. I've had a few chances to be around and get to know Hawks family. Some family members I know a little more than others and there were a few cousins there that I hadn't met. But it was just so wonderful to see them all come together for the same cause. To help give and support this blessing. And when every prayer was given, the spirit poured out and over-filled that room. Even though I somewhat know this family I was still able to feel the spirit. The Spirit is the same everywhere you go! No matter if you know the people or not, it is still the same! It was just an exciting thought that I had and am so grateful for the Gospel of Jesus Christ and for Hawk and his family for being worthy of the Priesthood to give these beautiful prayers and a blessing. Hawk stood in the circle and what a proud moment that was for me. I'm not sure if I portrayed very well what I was feeling and wanting to say but I hope you understand what I'm getting at. The Holy Spirit is an amazing thing and I absolutely love it! The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is the only true church on the earth today. I know of my own experience and by the power of the Holy Ghost that that is true. Have a good day everyone :)