Christmas present AND FUTURE!!!

It is very much true! :)

MERRY CHRISTMAS 

(from the 3 of us)!

questions I've asked myself today...

Why do I make faces like this for pictures? Especially at my bridal shower!!! Honestly.

Why did I ever change my hair from THIS----->

                                                                         <----To this? WHY??? haha feel free to laugh

And more importantly, why did I go rock climbing immediately after donating my plasma??? haha. And this was while I was at BYU-I and clearly smart....guess I lost the smarts in the yellow water part of my blood!

And lastly, why does my wardrobe contain more t-shirts from D.I. than pretty shirts? (every outfit in all of these pictures from this post today are from D.I.). I blog-stalked a lot today and found a girls blog who said she only buys clothes that she is absolutely in love love with. And guess what- she always looks cute! So that is my new goal: throw away the clothes I'm not in love with and start finding good deals on loveable clothes that will make my wardrobe ROCKIN instead of lacking! ha.  So D.I. still isn't out, I just need to be more decisive and organized with my "cheap" purchases.

Also, I will grow my hair out again, and find the natural color I tried to hide from.

numbers

1-husband that I love more than all the presents on Christmas morning
2-feet that I love to have rubbed
3-hours that it took to deep clean our bedroom and bathroom yesterday
4-Christmas trees in our home
5-stockings hanging in our room
6-siblings that I wish could all be home for christmas
7-shock tarts that i just ate in the last 30 seconds.
8-times 2 = 16, the number of months we have been married
9-visits to frozen yogurt stores during thanksgiving break
10- fingers that scratch Steven Daniels back every 10 minutes :)
AND
20-Days left 'til Christmas EVE!!!

Washington Wonderland

Thanksgiving was in Washington this year and we were able to be there for 9 days! 

We had A LOT of fun, and A LOT of SNOW! 

Here's a photo album of our adventures....

The beautiful Thanksgiving dinner
(the meal wasn't actually done at this point, the kids just decided to eat "Hook" style). haha

The celery sticks that were eaten before the meal. My bad!

Met the newest member of the family. Welcome Rick!



Dancing after church. We went to Steven Daniels ward growing up.

Went to the Columbia River Temple with Vern and Nicole

We celebrated birthdays with each of us having our own cake/pie.

Games, Games, Games! Mainly Monopoly this year.

Snow, ice, sledding, shoveling, fro yo, and all things cold this Thanksgiving







We saw a lot of stinkin Lincoln



Bird watching and a lot of picture taking

The birthday boy!

Marisa the beautiful! She let me straighten her hair.


We certainly enjoyed sleeping in on this trip! (So did Michael).

Thanks Radfords for a great vacation.

Remember?

Remember how I don't have to work until next NEXT monday?
Remember how I get to spend Thanksgiving in Washington?
Remember how I don't have to put braces on anyone for 11 days?
Remember how I love Steven Daniel? (And how he doesn't have to do homework for 11 days).
Well I remember.
And I'm VERY thankful. We are taking a much needed vacay from school and work and we will get to spend day and night together. I sure love those days.
Happy Thanksgiving (eve, eve, eve, eve, eve, eve).

p.s Christensen Fam-you will be missed dearly. And I know you will miss me even more. But you will get through this hard time. You can call or text if you feel the need to hear from your fave red head!

shhhh

This is what we accidentally did last night for FHE

.....and dan wants credit for makin the tree stand....

he's so tough and manly! ha

'Moosography'

....hahaha...

I'm not even going to pretentd that we look good! We struggled with our costumes this year because we had so many options of what to be. (Orphan Annie and Daddy Warbucks, Marge and Homer, Mario and Princess Peach, Orthodontist and nerd, Bonnie and Clyde, etc). Time caught right up with us and I still hadn't made any costumes. So our last resort was to dress up as things that we love!! haha Which is why I am a Moose (a Christmas moose) and Steven Daniel is a Wildlife photographer! ha. I think we're pretty believable and we sure had a lot of fun!

I made the hooves out of plastic cups, the antlers out of cardboard and the body out of literally 7 layers of sweatshirts and vests. Dan already had his outfit, just added one of my Dads old hats!

Our pumpkin that desperately needs braces.

Family party at my moms house! What cute/scarry kiddos

Max looking at my strange antlers! sooo cute!!!

Don't worry, I already have next years costumes picked out. And you WON'T be disappointed! :)

What I learned from school...

So Dan and I got to talkin' a few weeks ago and we realized that we have NEVER had a class together. I graduated too soon I suppose (Bachelors degree in 5 years-yes, that was years not semesters)! I quickly sorted out my options and ruled out enrollment due to; homework, cost, my job, too many credits, and quite frankly, desire.

Simlple. I'll just go to school with him for a day and call it good.

So last Friday I went to classes with him...and loved it! We went to Accounting, library time on the 1st floor, Graphic Design, and then a work out in the Hart. I sure loved being back on campus and pretending to be a student again. I even took my backpack with me to fit in. But something interesting happened in one hour of class time that NEVER happened in my whole 5 years at BYUI. I found out what I wanted to do when I grow up.

Design fabric. I know its something Iwill never be able to do, but oh how I love color. Oh how I love funky and vintage and pattern and all things plaid! :) It makes sense that my favorite part about blogging is designing the header and my favorite part about sewing is the fabric. In fact I could buy yards and yards of fabric and not even make anything. Really I could, I can prove it. If only I would have found out this love BEFORE I graduated.

Ah well, ya live ya learn. Atleast at my job I get to pick out funky colors for people to put on their braces. It's kinda the same! :)

FHE or FME?

Family Home Evening has quickly turned into Family Maverick Evening.

Monday Maverick Melanie should be my new name. Feel free to shorten my amazingly awesome alias alliteration to M3.

It takes about 16 minutes round-trip to drive to Maverick from our house, which is plenty of time for our FME lesson. We do simple activities from our Newlywed FHE book and truly enjoy our drive together while talking about real grown up stuff and wishing one day we would actually act like real grown ups. The drive home is much more enjoyable because I have my GIANT "small" cup of FROZEN YOGURT and Dan has his GIANT"giant" soda! Come home and watch Castle. Yes, I'd say FME has become quite succesful!

Happy Birthday Estevan

HAPPY BIRTHDAY WEEK STEVEN DANIEL

I'm glad your birthday was on a Thursday this year. I'm also glad that it was on the first day of school. And on a full day of work. And on a day that we had church meetings until 9. Why would I be glad that your birthday fell on such a day? So that we could celebrate it Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and also the following Wednesday! What a fun week! I made you a card with all the good words written in it, so here I'll just say:

Your hair is brown and so are your eyes

you sing and dance and tell me I'm your prize

You're as tall as a door and smart as a whip

The shirt you wear has a grizzly on it

Your nice and sweet and cute and tough

And made of all that good Radford stuff.

You joke so much it makes me chuckle

I especially liked our cowboy pictures with the buckle

Your number one husband i believe thats true

you make me feel like I'm the best there is for you.

Hope 26 is the best birthday yet

if it's not then I guess it's time for me to fret

I love you trillions you sexy man of mine

Being with you has been awful mighty fine!

Side note: I think I may have come close to perfecting the horrible cursed PIE!

Brigadoon/Phelps Lake

Yes, you've heard me say it before, but we L.O.V.E Jackson! The last time we went we took my beautiful mother along. She had this secret hidden place for us to discover. She used to work at "this place" when she was 18ish and wanted to hike to the same places she used to way waay back then. :) One problem. It doesn't exist anymore! The cabins, the beach house, the bridge, the homes, the road....They are all gone! We hiked high. We hiked low. We hiked all around trying to find it-atleast 6 miles of wandering. Luckily the BEAUTIFUL scenery more than made up for all that walking. We decided that my mom was living in Brigadoon and that we can only return in 100 years. Thanks mom for showing us Phelps lake! We will definitely be returning!

Be jealous!

We have had so many fun adventures and traveled so much while Dan has been out of school! Oh how we hate to see our 7 week break go!

Good news though, Dan planned a 'surprise day date' for me last weekend and it was perfect! We started out at Mesa Falls. (The date we never had because I kept ditching him every time he asked me to go when we were dating haha). la la la, change of subject :) but Steven Daniel packed and made us a picnic (I even got an 'I LOVE YOU MEL' on my sandwich). Could he be any cuter??? Straight from Mesa we headed to Yellowstone again, one of our FAVORITE places!!! We were in awe of all the beauties we kept discovering ....................especially.............the.......... GRZZLY BEAR! And I'm not talking about the type of bears that Dan thinks he sees, (what we know as dogs haha) but this is a real life GRIZZLY BEAR!!! And that is the part that you are suppose to be jealous of! You jealous? :) It walked RIGHT in front of us, we're talking like, less than 15 ft away. I had such weak legs! Luckily we were still in our car, we were about to get out to start hiking down to the lower falls of the Grand Canyon, but were stopped by the bear walking out of the forrest towards our trail. Our timing was perfect!!! It was as if Daniel paid that bear to walk past us as part of the date! We got the O.K. from the ranger that it was safe to hike and so we did. It was beautiful and we wanted to tell everyone we passed that we just saw a grizzly bear and they didn't! haha. But this was by far our most animal packed jellystone trip ever! We stayed there 'til sunset and then ate in West Yellowstone at our new favorite pizza place, 'Wild West.' We had so much fun spending the ENTIRE day together. We played 20 questions the whole time and laughed the whole time! I love being married and I love steven daniel. Oh, and he loves me too! :) Thanks a whole heap for the best 'SURPRISE DAY DATE' ever!! and to the grizzly bear, thanks for not disappointing!

Okay, so that is our wonderful Grizzly bear. Now here is where our date began.

Mesa Falls.

Our picnic

The photographer and his assistant

Then it was off to Yellowstone. These bottom 2 pictures were actually taken the week before our date when we went to the Playmill with my work. We saw Beauty and the Beast and then ate at Wild West! oh it was perfect!

And some of our animal sightings

What a perfect day and I sincerely hope you are all jealous! :)