Chef Willie

A few days ago I came home from work to Willie cooking a delicious dinner! He went grocery shopping earlier this week and got some pork chops. Willie wanted to find a really good recipe and try it out. So, he googled and read up all about barbequeing pork chops and made THE BEST dinner ever!

It really tasted like it came from a restaurant. He brinned the pork chops and made a delicious marinade, and then cooked them in the barbeque behind our apartment building.

We had them with baked potatos and green beans. I didn't get a picture of the finished product, but it was really so good. By far the best homemade food we've had yet. Thanks Willie! :)

Our Honeymoon--Part 2

So, here is the rest of our honeymoon finally! Being on the ship on our cruise was really nice in a lot of ways. We loved being able to relax so much, and there were fun things to do. We both agree that the ports were the most fun part, though. We went to Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, and Cabo San Lucas.

This was in the taxi in our first port, Puerto Vallarta. We got completely ripped off with this taxi ride! Willie had gone somewhere, and this taxi driver came up to talk to me while I was waiting. We chatted while Willie was gone, and then when we got back we went to get in the taxi and he told us a price that was three times what the internet had told us to expect! I didn't feel comfortable negotiating with him though because he'd been so "nice" to me before. Willie told me this was probably just so he could rip us off, but I couldn't do it. It was our first port, too. I got better later. It's a shame Willie wasn't the one who spoke Spanish though, because I was no good at negotiating prices.

Something that I really wanted to do on our cruise was snorkel. We went snorkeling at Puerto Vallarta because that was the port we had the most time at. It was a little ghetto and they didn't even have flippers for us to use, but I was happy and it was so fun.

Our boat driver

After we went snorkeling, our boat driver showed us a good place to get tacos.

Willie watching the world cup while he ate

After lunch, we walked around Puerto Vallarta. There was this cool walkway along the coast with lots of different statues and art.

Our next port was Mazatlan. It was my favorite!! The water was wonderful and warm, and there was a lot of fun stuff to see. When we got off we caught a taxi (they were these golf cart open taxis, I loved them), and went to the beach and spent most of the day there. We swam and built sand castles, and it was so fun!!


After the beach, we headed over to diver's point. We would have had no idea about this place, but my mom had printed something off about all of the ports for us before we left...thanks Mom!! There was this high cliff thing that the divers would get on and dive in between these rocks. It was so nerve wracking and cool to watch! Check it out. Sorry it's sideways...is there a way to flip it around?

After we watched them dive, Willie hiked up to where they were diving from. It was so scary to watch! There were no railings, and it was really high up. I went to where they had railings, and then stopped. After that, we got a taxi to take us back to the ship. We asked the taxi driver if on the way he would give us a quick tour of Mazatlan. He was seriously the best. We paid him hardly anything extra and he took us all around. He spent so much time with us. He always offered to let us get out and have him take a picture of us, and explained what each place was. He even sang us a song at one place! Willie and I liked him so much that when we bought our souvenir from the cruise, our first Christmas ornament, we got a little Mexican guy that kinda looked like him haha.

Here are a couple pictures from our tour:

Our taxi driver insisted we get a picture pretending to drive his taxi

They had stars on the floor with famous people's names from Puerto Vallarta. This is where our driver sang us a song.

Our final port was Cabo San Lucas. We only had a little bit of time there, but it was Willie's favorite. It was beautiful, and I loved it. Not my favorite for swimming though. The water was a lot colder than the other ports, and the sand was kind of rough on my feet. Willie really liked the rocks though, and wanted to climb them. I think he wished he was there with his brothers and guy friends so they could hike them. I think this because he kept talking about coming back with them and their wives, so that all of us wives could stay on the beach (what I was wanting to do when he told me about this future trip), while the boys hiked :)

We went on a glass bottom boat ride around Cabo. At the end it dropped us off at Lover's Beach.

We saw Sea Lions on our boat ride!!

We had to take little boats back to our cruise ship. The driver let everyone sitting up front drive it for a bit. It was pretty fun!

After our cruise, on the way back to Mesquite, we drove right through San Bernadino, where Willie served his mission. Willie was able to show me around a bit, which was really cool. This was one of the apartments he lived in!

We stayed in Mesquite, rented another red box movie, had pizza, and drove back to Utah the next day. It was so hard to come back to real life. We loved our honeymoon!

Family in Town!

We have been so lucky to be able to have so much family in town lately! First, my parents and my grandma came to provo for Emily's graduation. We were so happy to be able to see Emily graduate and spend time with family. Doesn't she look great?! Go Emily!



After Emily's graduation my parents went to Mesquite to spend some time at their future retirement home. Last weekend Willie and I, and Joe and Emily, drove down to there to visit and celebrate Ron's birthday with them. It was such a fun trip! We arrived late Friday night. Saturday morning the men went golfing while the girls slept in, had breakfast, and watched The Next Food Network Star.


Ron's brother and his wife flew in for the day and we all had lunch together and visited when the guys got back from golfing. Later that night we did presents, and then went to the Tuachan in St. George to see Tarzan. It was so fun!!! I love going to plays, especially musicals. It was in this really cool outdoor theater and had cool special effects. One of the best was when the stage flooded when Tarzan's parents' ship got destroyed and they were floating through the wilderness. I was also thrilled to hear that they are going to put on The Little Mermaid next year. Yay! I really want to go.

One of the fun things about Tuachan is that after the play you can go meet the actors and take pictures with them. Willie, my mom, and I went around and met some of them.

This guy played Tarzan's best friend, Turk (Terk? I don't know).

These guys were really funny. They were extremely in character, and still acting like apes. They put both of our arms around them. After we took our pictures, I saw one of them chasing a little kid around and grunting.

A couple of days after our Mesquite trip, one of Willie's sister's, Marcie, flew into town for a couple of weeks! It's been so fun hanging out with her. And, she is here for a week and a half more. Yay! We love having family in town!! :)

Changing Time

This month has been full of a lot of changes for Willie and I! A lot of my family and friends know that changes can be stressful for me. I used to be worse than I am now. Old roommates (ahem Jenna) will remember me getting a little sad at the end of each semester just because it meant something was ending and changing. Even classes that I wasn't too fond of...still sad they were ending. Weird, I know. I've gotten better about this throughout the years, and more able to look at change as a positive thing. But, they do still stress me out sometimes. Even when they are good.

That being said, these past few changes have been great ones! First off, Willie and I moved into our own place! Willie's parents were so nice to let us stay at their house for about a month and a half while we figured out where we were going to live. We finally decided (with a little help from Willie's brother and his wife :) ) to move to....Wymount!

Wymount is BYU's student family housing. I was a little hesitant, but I must admit I love it so far. I would love it if for only the fact that Willie and I now have our OWN APARTMENT! It is so exciting and fun!! That's not the only reason I love it, though. I am so excited to be living right by Robbie and Kelli! And, the apartment has a pretty good layout (even if it is lacking in storage space...and ac...and a dishwasher), and the few people that I have met in our ward so far seem nice. I'm pretty happy with our decision. Our apartment is still cluttered with a million boxes that I have banged up my poor feet on bunches of times, and is lacking majorly with some important things (like trash cans, shower curtains, silverware...little things like that). But, Willie's mom has spent a lot of time helping me decorate and unpack, and slowly but surely our little apartment is coming along. Overall, good change!

The second big change in my life is that I quit my job!! That was a pretty nerve-wracking decision for me. After one of Willie's family friends encouraged me at our wedding, I decided that I wanted to take classes this year so that I can hopefully participate in the Alternate Route to Licensure program to get certified to teach in Utah. Besides the fact that I wasn't a huge fan of my job at the time, I got home way late every night and had a huge commute. Taking classes and staying there seemed like it would be pretty hard.

So, I took a leap of faith (after lots of encouragement from my mom, Willie, and the lady in the main office at my work who I cried to about how much I wanted to quit one day...kind of embarrassing), and quit without a job lined up. AH! That was scary for me. But, everything has worked out great. My last day of my job was today, and I start my new job tomorrow at Odyssey Charter School! I worked there my first year out of college, and loved it. I will be working as an instructor in either a first grade or kindergarten classroom. I will be helping out in the classroom, and helping teach different small groups within the classroom. I'm a little nervous (please refer to paragraph one of this post), but am excited to start tomorrow!

I'm so happy with all of the changes that have taken place. It is nice to have things fall into place so well!

Our Honeymoon--Part 1

For our honeymoon we went on a Carnival Cruise to the Mexican Riviera. It was the best! We'd both never been on a cruise, and it was so fun. I know with time we'll forget the details and where all the pictures were taken, so I want to make sure to write it all down. So, here it is.

After our wedding we made a stop at JCW's, then went to the Marriott at Thanksgiving Point. The next morning we ate at I HOP for breakfast, then started our drive down to Mesquite. Even though we had two long driving days, they were so nice because we just got to talk and enjoy being with each other after all of the wedding and school craziness of the past few weeks.
Willie has pretty sensitive eyes, and they were killing him the day after our wedding because he wore his contacts for so long that day. He couldn't even look into the light they were so bad. It was sad. So, we stopped at Walmart and bought 3 different kinds of eye drops for him, and I drove us down to Mesquite. I didn't want to wash off our" Just Married" decorations just yet because they were so cute and fun! Willie was embarrassed though to be driving in the decorated car while I drove us around. It was pretty funny.

Anyway, that night we stayed in my parents' house in Mesquite (they were not there). We rented a red box, and had Japanese take out for dinner. We decided to rent 2010 (or 2012? I don't remember what it was called) for Willie, and ended up with one of those fake movies that red box tricks you with. It was pretty entertaining because it was SO bad.

The next day we began our drive to California bright and early. I was so nervous about missing our cruise! We made it in time though.

This is on one of our first days at sea.

This was our first formal night in the dining room. The food was sooo good. We got an appetizer, entree, and desert every night. YUM.

The waiter brought us a special desert (on top of the warm chocolate melting cake we had both already eaten :) ) with candles in it and sang "Happy Honeymoon" to us to the tune of Happy Birthday.

After the formal dinner, we went to see one of the shows. It was fun, we're glad we went, but we didn't go to any of the other ones.

Groovin' at a party on one of the decks one night.

One of our favorite things to do at night was watch movies at this big screen theater. Normally it was much less crowded with reclining pool chairs that you could stretch out on and watch the movie. We'd get pizza and blankets, and it was so fun!

Something I really liked about our cruise was the towel animals!!! These two were my favorite.

The cleaning lady put Willie's sunglasses on this one.

This guy was probably my favorite. I'm not sure what he is...but I just think it's so funny how he's leaning up against our pillow and sticking his bum out. I think our towel lady had a sense of humor.

Those are some of my favorite memories from our ship!

This Week...

I was going to post about our wedding today, but I got overwhelmed trying to pick just a few pictures to put up, and the uploader deleted all of the pictures I had selected. So, I ended up abandoning that post and putting pictures on facebook instead. Maybe I will do a wedding post some other time. I decided instead to post about some of our current likes and things we've been doing this week. This week has been pretty relaxing, and it's been great! We've been watching a lot of these two shows:
(Man, Woman, Wild on the Discovery Channel)

I've been wanting to find a TV show for us to watch together forever, and it's finally happened! We have two!! These past couple weeks I discovered that I love Glee. I finally got Willie to watch it with me, and it's been a hit (meaning that he will watch it with me and somewhat enjoy it). We watched Without A Trace the other night, which is a crime/FBI show that I like, and Willie said he prefers Glee to that! I am thrilled.


The other show, Man, Woman, Wild, is a survival show on the Discovery Channel. Normally I'm not a huge fan of those, but this one is about a guy and his wife trying to survive, and it's very entertaining. They put themselves in pretend situations where they are stranded in the wilderness (so far the Amazon and Africa) and show what they would do. It's so fun to have two shows we both enjoy watching together.

We've also been eating a lot of these:

Or really, I should be more specific...I have been eating a lot of these and Willie has been coming with me to get them. There is a snow cone shack down the road from Willie's parents' house, and it is sooo good! I have never liked snow cones very much, but these are delicious. They have so many flavors, and you can even get cream and/or ice cream with them. Amazing! Maybe this is not new to others, but I haven't had a snow cone since I was a little kid, and they sure did not have those options then. We even walked there one night last week, which was really fun. It was nice to feel like I was getting some excercise to cancel out my snowcone, even if my legs did feel like they were gonna give out by the time we made it home (it's at least a 40 minute round trip).

The last thing we did that I was super happy about this week was go back to the gym! I love this class, and have missed it.
Zumba is really one of the only ways I can work out and stay motivated. I tend to get pretty bored on the treadmill, bike, etc., and now that I've tried Zumba, other excercise classes pale in comparison. With all of the wedding craziness, I hadn't gone in over a month. It felt really good to go back.

Anyway, there are some of the highlights of our week!

We Have A Blog!!

We have a blog! Yay! I must confess I have been excited to make a blog for Willie and I for quite some time now.

Today was our one month anniversary. Since it is a Sunday, we were not able to go out and do anything. So, we decided to make our first attempt at really cooking and make ourselves a good meal to have together at home. I'm not much of a cook. Our meals so far have mostly consisted of hamburgers and hot dogs, quesadillas, cereal, pasta, or chicken nugget salad. And Willie has made quite a few of those. We decided to try out our new crock pots, and picked a recipe from an awesome cookbook we got at our wedding.


We decided to make Spicy Italian Chicken. It seemed both simple and delicious. All we needed to do was chop up an onion and put that in with the chicken, Italian dressing, and some spices and then let it cook. We put frozen chicken in a bag with Italian dressing to thaw in the fridge overnight last night, and thought it would be easy to just throw everything in the crock pot in the morning.

Well, last night we were out late because we saw "Inception" with our friends Megan and Josh. So fun! I wasn't totally into the movie, but they all loved it, and it was a lot of fun to hang out with them. We didn't get home until around 12:30 though, and consequently ended up sleeping in quite a bit this morning and were running around trying to get ready to go to church on time. Miraculously I was ready before Willie, so I ended up trying to get all of our food ready for our dinner. It didn't go quite as planned.

When I went to the fridge, the chicken was all still frozen! What?! I thought that it would have been thawed after sitting in there for ten hours. Apparently not. So, I looked it up and saw that I would need to cook it for an additional 4 hours (on top of the 4 it would have already taken to cook). We decided we still wanted it and would just have a late dinner.

I proceeded to put the rest of the food in the crock pot, neglecting to notice that I was supposed to have sprayed the bowl that it cooks in first, so we had to take everything back out and do that. Then, I realized that I was supposed to have stirred all of the spices, dressing, and onions first and then add chicken instead of adding the chicken and then dumping teaspoons full of random spices all over it. Oh well, we were already way late by this point and just left. I am a little nervous about the food, but when we came home it smelled so good, so I'm hoping it works out! I won't know until about eight o'clock when we can finally eat it, but we will see!



Oh yeah, we decided to make some rice to go along with our chicken. Here are our two crock pots happily cooking along next to each other.

Even if it ends up being disgusting, it is exciting to attempt to make real food for us to eat, and has been a lovely one month!