St. Patrick's Day

I bet you're all thinking, "Wow, I'm glad Natalie doesn't cook for me on St. Patrick's Day. Poor Jon." Also, ignore the messy counter in the background. It's not always like that.
I realize this isn't my most attractive picture. Please don't judge me when I'm not wearing makeup.


For St. Patrick's Day, I decided to make a dinner and color it with green food coloring. I know it's not very original and it looks terrible but it tasted good.

Scottish Fantasy by Bruch!

This is me after performing the Scottish Fantasy with the Rexburg Tabernacle Orchestra. I've been playing with the orchestra since high school and last year Brother Barrus asked me to solo with them. I was incredibly excited and scared! I had never played a solo with an actual orchestra so it was new for me but I was grateful to Brother Barrus for trusting me to do it. Normally I'm a violist but I had recently started playing around again on the violin(I tried it a little in high school) when he asked me to play with them. Learning a concerto on an instrument I wasn't as familiar with really pushed me but I loved it and it was a great learning experience for me.(For those of you who saw these pictures before, I figured out how to turn them the right way. Good for me.)

Our sleeping buddy!

Since Jon works the graveyard shift, he sleeps while I'm at work and I sleep while he's at work. Abby has become our cuddle buddy to sleep with. She doesn't seem to mind at all.


I don't know if Jon appreciates me putting pictures of him on here while he's asleep but he's too nice to tell me not to. At least he's not drooling...

Meet the newest addition to our family! No, it's not a baby...at least not a human one.

This is our newest member of the family. She is a mini schnauzer and her name is Abby. She's still in that young puppy stage where she likes to chew everything up-including our power cords, which hasn't made Jon very happy. All she has to do is look at us with her cute face and all is forgiven...most of the time. She's brought a little new responsibility into our lives and we love it.



She looks a little sad in this picture but what could I expect? We had just taken her away from her old owners and little puppy brothers and sisters. It only took her about a week to get completely warmed up to us.

Home!

Our first little house! Not only is it ours, and has a yard, but it also has more room. Our first apartment had one room and that was not enough space for us. Both of us have a hard time getting rid of things so our stuff combined takes up a lot of room. Now we have plenty of room! For now...

New Year's Eve!

We spent New Years with Jon's parents. The power went out around 11:30ish so we lit some candles, drank some champagne(non-alcholic of course) and chatted around the dinner table.

Our first Christmas! Well, our first Christmas as a married couple. :)

Our first Christmas in our first apartment! Since both of our families live here, it's a little hard around holidays to decide what to do. In order to see everybody, we got up at 6:00 am to do our own little Christmas celebration, then went to Jon's house around 8:00 and then out to my paren'ts house by 11:00. It felt like we got 3 Christmases and I'm not complaining!

My claim to fame...or something like that.

Yes, I played back up for David Archuleta. Yes, it was awesome. And yes, he is really young...and short.

Meet Mac

Jon's first Mac. He swore he would never get one but after becoming a computer science major, he couldn't help it. I don't think he'll ever go back. I had to put it on here because he was soo excited to get it. He couldn't even wait till we got home so he met me at work to open it.

Lagoon!

Lagoon! Oh how I love road trips. Lyndsee, Derek, Jon and I decided it was time to go to Lagoon, so we went. It was hard getting it planned so I believe we went in September, right before it closed. Once again, it was kind of cold. It was warm all week, except Saturday. I think I have bad luck. Either way, it was still fun and I still went on my favorite ride, Rattlesnake Rapids, and got soaked. We paid for it after because it was later in the day and we never really got dry after that. I tried to be daring and go on most of the rides but Lyndsee and Derek took the prize for guts. I don't even remember the name of the new ride they have but I refused to go on it so Lyndsee and Derek went on it and Jon stayed with me. I think me and Jon were motion sick from a ride we had gone on earlier, so at least we had an excuse.

The Honeymoon!

For our honeymoon we went to San Diego, California! Jon knew I wanted to go somewhere warm but when we went, it happened to be an extra cold week for San Diego. The temperature was somewhere in the fifties and low sixties but the day we left it went back up to being in the seventies. Despite the weather, we had a lot of fun. Cold and all. While we were there we went to Sea World(I love that place), the San Diego Zoo, Legoland and a "sea excursion." The sea excursion consisted of us going around the bay and looking at the war ships there and interesting buildings and things.



Here's the last day of our trip in California. We got up early so that we would have time to go on the sea excursion before we had to be to the airport. Jon and I both love boats so we thought it would be fun to go but it was freezing outside. Especially once we got going and with the wind...freezing. My favorite part was seeing the sea lions lying around on the boards but it was also interesting to see the ships that have been and are being used in the wars.

You can never get too many pictures sitting next to expensive cars...

Jon wanted me to add to his "car section." He also corrected me that the lego car is a volvo. Anyway, here's some more pictures of nice cars.
The man who owned this car was crazy. He built in a drinking fountain, shower, stove, pop dispenser, and ironing board in it. I know it has more but I can't remember now but I remember thinking that he had thought of everything.

A flower field! Apparently it's only in bloom for about 2 weeks of the year. We passed it on the way back from Legoland and decided to stop. The fields go on for quite a ways.

Seahorses have to sleep too...

I just thought this was worth putting on. We read that a seahorse has to eat every few minutes since their stomach is soo small. This one hadn't eaten for a little while so it just fell asleep...or died. Either way, we thought it was funny.

Legoland

Next day was Legoland! We were excited to go but once we got there we realized it wasn't exactly what we had thought. I think we were the only married couple there without a little kid. Needless to stay, we didn't stay very long. However, their little aquarium section was kind of cool. And of course, Jon thought the big lego statue of a BMW was worth taking a picture of.

This street is just down from the zoo. I add the motorcycle picture because we went to a museum along that street that was dedicated to motorcycles and cars. I think that was one of the highlights for Jon. He has a picture in front pretty much every car in the museum. I had dragged him to a couple gardens earlier so I can't really say much.

San Diego Zoo!

These pictures are from the San Diego Zoo. The panda bear was at the top of our list of animals to see but when we got there, the line was literally a couple hours long. We might have thought that it was worth the wait if it hadn't started raining. I don't think we could have had much worse luck with weather in California, but we still loved the zoo and saw plenty of other animals. Including the koala bears, which were one of my favorites.



I loved this garden in the zoo.

Sorry this picture isn't very focused on the koala. I wanted to hold them!

. This bird was crazy. He literally tried to attack us for about 10 min.