Monterey

Will and I celebrated our 3rd anniversary by going to Monterey last weekend. It was nice to go see new sites and relax for the weekend.
On Saturday, we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium...it was so cool to see the jelly fish there. I don't think I'd ever seen any in person before, and they were so bright and neon looking in the dark rooms. It was fun walking through Cannery Row, seeing all of the shops and places to eat downtown. Neither of us like seafood though, so we chose a place called Willy's Smokehouse for lunch (partly because of the name!) and an Italian place called "The Loose Noodle" for dinner. They were both really good! We also went to Carmel and walked down past a lot of shops and really nice houses to get down to the beach.




On Sunday, we went on a whale watching trip. Luckly, with the combination of taking dramamine and the water being really calm that day, we didn't get really sick on the boat! After a couple hours on the boat, we had only seen a couple small groups of dolphins and two whales, which were moving along really slowly. Even though it was neat to see, it wasn't quite as exciting as what we'd expected....but then things got more exciting as we came across hundreds of dolphins (3 different types) all swimming together, close to the boat! It was so cool...it's too bad that I couldn't have gotten some good pictures (the motion of the boat along with the dolphins movement was making it hard for my camera to focus very well). Then I was so excited to get all of these dolphins on the video camera, that I filmed them a little fast and crazy! It was so cool though, because these dolphins were more exciting, some of them spinning and jumping out of the water!

After the long whale watching trip, we headed back to the beach to grab a bag of sand to take home. We are making it a tradition to collect sand from each anniversary trip, and save it to remind us of where we went. When we booked our honeymoon through a travel agent, she gave us a little glass container with a "honeymoon" label on it and explained that it was to hold sand from each of the places we stopped on our trip. We thought that was a really neat idea, and I'm glad that she helped us start a tradition.

It's hard to believe that 3 whole years have gone by since our wedding!...

After doing a lot of projects inside the house, we decided it was time to change the look of our front yard by putting in new planters. We got tired of trying to deal with our old ones that were overgrown with weeds...so we tore them out, and made new ones. Then we put all new plants and bark in. It was a lot of work, but really changed the look of the front yard!

Another House Project

We finally found some tile we liked for our bathroom, and installed it this weekend. It was our first time tiling, but we are happy with how it turned out :) Next, we are going to be working on putting in new planters in the front yard (once the weather is nice enough to work outside). Here are some pictures of the bathroom.


This last picture is what the bathroom looked like when we bought our house

Happy New Year!

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Years with their family and friends! This was our first Christmas in our new house. It was nice to be able to celebrate the holidays in our own home this year. It was fun decorating the house and thinking about how many more holiday memories we will have in our home.
January 2nd was the anniversary of the day we got the keys to our house, and this time last year we were busy painting and getting our house ready to move into. It is crazy how fast the first year went by!

Thanksgiving

Will and I spent Thanksgiving at my parents' house. Here are some pics



Me and Eric with our little cousins Aftyn and Arden

Arden loves playing video games

My mom with Moose...he's even cuter in person :)

Me, Will and Tootsie...with her big ear covering my face!

Family picture

Bishop's Pumpkin Farm

Here are some pictures of our trip to Bishop's with Will's family last weekend.

The pitter patter of little feet...

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No, it's not what you're thinking! It's actually the pitter patter of little paws! We have a new addition to our family, and it's a cute little white cat. A couple weeks ago, a cat showed up at my parents restaurant at night and was so skiny that my mom decided to feed it. She was just going to feed it and send it on it's way, but it was so friendly that she called us to come and look at it. It was so starving that it ate 3 whole hot dogs (there was no cat food around). After taking her home, feeding her, and keeping her in the house during the nights, she has decided that this is her home. We decided to name her Keali. Here are a couple pictures of her in her favorite spot of the house.