Birthday Fun!

Shelby had a birthday this week! He had a Chemistry exam the next day so we kept it pretty low key since he needed to study most of the day. I made Shelby brunch after his morning class and sang him Happy Birthday over a pile of french toast. :) We both studied and Shelby went to work for a few hours that afternoon. After work Shelby's parent came over and brought him his favorite chicken patties from Costco. He loves his chicken patties! We went to Sizzler for dinner. We had coupons for all you can eat Shrimp but apparently they were old (although they had no expiration date-whatever.) Note to self: if you get coupons from Sizzler in the mail use them within at least a week or else they'll be old...We ended up getting steak and salad bar instead.

For one of Shelby's presents I gave him a slinky. Inside the slinky I put a piece of paper stating that he had money to put towards a GPS running watch (similar to a Garmin.) Shelby got online that night and promptly found a great deal. He is anxiously awaiting for his birthday present to arrive!

Also within the last few weeks we got our new sectional! We love it and are enjoying not having to sit on the floor anymore! :)

Spring is slowly arriving in our neck of the woods. We planted some bulbs that will hopefully come up in a few months as well as this nice little flower (I think it's a primrose...) Sadly, just like typical Idaho weather, our flower froze one night! There are still a few buds on it that are coming and we are trying to keep the little plant alive despite the rough start it had.

We are excited for this warm weather to stick around consistently so we can get some more apartment gardening going!

July can't come soon enough!

Today has been full of catching up on laundry, grocery shopping, and life since I worked all weekend. I am always grateful for days off, especially after working several 12 hour shifts in a row! I'm also grateful for Shelby and that he puts up with the Sundays that I end up having to work. Yesterday after church he put away all of our winter/snowman/Valentine day decorations and put up our Spring ones...it was cute and nice to come home to bright, happy decorations. :) Anyways, on to even cuter things- I am getting excited for the summer to come! Especially July. Mostly because we will finally get to meet this little guy!

Briggs is our newest nephew and the first grandchild for my family. My sister and her husband live in Virginia while he is going to Dental School. Briggs was born in December in Virginia and the most we have seen of him is over facetime. He is a little cutie and I can't wait to hold him and see Lindsey and Brenen in action as parents. I wish that plane tickets weren't so darn expensive or else I would just fly myself out there. We are grateful for technology so that we can facetime, skype, see pictures, and videos of Briggs while Lindsey and Brenen are off on their Virginia adventure. :) I can already tell though that it is going to be a great Despain family reunion this summer!!!

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Lately...

So, let's face it-I don't even know if very many people read this blog but it is our family's journal. I am working on being better about taking pictures and updating more often so that we can have all of our memories recorded. So for those of you who do follow our blog-if you haven't seen a post in a while bug me about it! :) Here are some images of life lately:

Shelby made me a candy gram for Valentine's Day. It was so cute and all the candy is eaten! We love our sugar around here! I also gave Shelby some candy and treats. We are all sugared out for the next little while...or we should be at least. :) I worked on Valentine's Day and Shelby was crazy busy with school and preparing for multiple exams for that next week so we didn't get to do much on actual Valentine's Day. I made some Valentine's muddy buddies which we gave to some friends and our family members-even though some of the treats were delivered as a late Valentine's gift. This past weekend we finally had some time to go on a date to Hands On, a local pottery shop. We picked out some pottery and painted it together-we did the same thing last Valentine's Day and we are planning on making it a tradition!

President's Day weekend we made a quick trip to Middleton to visit my family. It was a quick trip but we were able to spend some much needed time with my parent's and Cameron and Lila. Shelby also got an early birthday present. Almost everyone in the Despain and Price families have owned a pair of these crocheted slippers. Shelby's were specially made with Utah Jazz colors since the Jazz are his favorite team!

We sold our sectional this past weekend...kind of. It is a ridiculous story of how we got rid of it-ask one of us if you're interested...anyways, we got rid of it and found a sectional that we liked. We didn't realize that the particular sectional we wanted had a 2-3 week delivery time. So needless to say, this is what our living room looks like right now:

We do still have our chair to lounge in but the floor is also getting lots of love! Can't wait for our new sectional to arrive!!!

And last but not least, I painted some letters for our room. They didn't turn out quite like I had envisioned-spray paint is not my friend. I'm working on getting them rearranged so they can look a little cuter. For now though it adds bright happy colors to our bedroom. Shelby is in the thick of school and I start my RN to BSN(Bachelor's) on March 1st. The thought of full time work plus full time school makes me a little nervous but I am confident that the sacrifices that we are making now will be worth it in the long run. We are so blessed with the opportunities we have been given! Until next time-be good out there!

Family Motto

The first few months after we got married we threw around ideas for a family motto. I love the idea of having some type of saying or scripture that describes what your family is all about and I wanted our family to have one! Shelby and I dug up scriptures and quotes. During one of our discussions about a family motto this scripture came up: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you." Matthew 6:33. We decided that this would be our family motto. I have always loved this scripture and have found it to be so true throughout my life. It perfectly describes how we want out family to be. We want to always seek God first because as we put God first all other things will fall into their proper place or drop out of our lives. Seeking God includes loving, serving, working, respecting, obeying commandments, etc... It includes everything that we want our family to do and become. We finally have our family motto hanging on our wall to remind us each day of the kind of people that we are trying to be. I'm so glad we finally have our motto hanging on our wall!

Christmas Break

Shelby's Christmas Break is officially over since school started this past week. It went fast but I think that we were both ready to get back to our normal schedule. For our first Christmas as a married couple, I ended up having to work...such is life as a nurse. Thank goodness Shelby's parents live close by so he didn't have to spend the day alone and we were still able to do some fun things since I had Christmas Eve off!

As soon as we got back from our Thanksgiving trip to San Diego we unpacked and immediately pulled out the Christmas decorations and got our apartment all decked out for the holidays!

As we were decorating we realized that we didn't really have any stockings that we could use for Santa to fill. A few weeks later we made it to the store and picked out some stockings and decorated them...they turned out pretty good if we say so ourselves!

We had a fun double date with Amy and Jesse and the little baby that will hopefully come out to meet us next month! :) We went to our favorite Panda Express and then decorated gingerbread houses together. It was super fun and we ate enough sugar to last us for a while...although Shelby says that he could have eaten a lot more sugar and still have room for more. :)

Here is our completed gingerbread house!

On Christmas Eve we had breakfast casserole since we wouldn't be able to have a nice breakfast together on Christmas. I experimented with my crockpot and cooked breakfast casserole in it overnight. Our house smelled yummy when we woke up and I think it is definitely a tradition we will continue! We were going to go to the Planetarium that afternoon but we decided the prices weren't the best so we ended up picking a random movie to go to. We picked Frozen, which neither of us had really heard about-we loved it and decided to buy it when it comes out. Turns out a week or so after we saw it, it has become this huge trend...whatever though we still like it even though we hate feeling like we're following the crowd... Christmas Eve night we went to Wayne and Christie's for dinner along with Grandma Ricks. It was fun to spend some time with them. We also opened our presents from them. Among the gifts were our favorites Studio C and Nutella. We've spent at least three hours over the break watching Studio C while I worked on craft projects!

After spending time with Shelby's parents we came home and read Luke 2 and sang a few Christmas songs around our little keyboard.

The next morning bright and early, I headed to work. I was determined to have a good attitude about working on Christmas and tried my best to remember that I was doing what Jesus Christ spent his life doing-serving others and healing the sick. Hopefully I was able to make a difference in the lives of my patients-especially since they didn't necessarily want to spend Christmas Day at the hospital either. While I was at work Shelby made Christmas dinner so we were able to have a nice Christmas dinner that evening. Since we hadn't opened our gifts to each other yet, we ran upstairs, change into our pajamas, and went back downstairs and opened presents-so it kind of seemed like Christmas morning since we were in our pajamas. :)

These are the bloomers our Christmas tree got for Christmas!

Thanks to Santa, we have lots of nerf gun wars at our house now. :)

I had a few days off in a row shortly after Christmas so we were able to go spend some time with my family. We went to Pine Top for a few days for some sledding and snow mobiling. It was fun to see cousins that we don't get to see very often. That Sunday also was conveniently Curtis's long awaited homecoming! He was supposed to be home at the beginning of December but due to government issues in the Philippines he didn't make it home until a few days before Christmas. We were so glad to see him healthy and safe at home...with a cute accent! We also spent lots of time that weekend with the Price's looking at Christmas lights and visiting. We were really sad that we couldn't stay for the New Year's celebrations also, but we I had to return to work on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.

For those of you who watch Studio C-we found Lobster Bisque at Jakers! Shelby was so excited to try it and it didn't taste bad-very similar to Clam Chowder.

You can tell that school is in full swing now as evidenced by ice cream being in our freezer now-it's Shelby's coping mechanism. We're grateful for breaks and getting to spend time with each other! Here's to another semester full of lots of ice cream and good grades!

Thanksgiving in San Diego

For Thanksgiving this year we went to sunny California! We are so grateful to Shelby's parent's for taking us along! It was nice to get out of cold Idaho for a the week. Our first stop in California was Palm Springs at Wendell's house. We soaked in the hot tubs and ate lots at a few buffets there. We had an adventure getting ID'd at a breakfast buffet! After stopping in Palm Springs we drove on to San Diego where we spent lots of time with Shana and Rowdy and Travis and Katy and their kiddos. We ventured to Coronado Island on Monday and got our toes wet in the water and played on the beach for a while before going to Travis and Katy's for dinner. We thought that the water would be cold but it wasn't too bad!

On Tuesday we went to SeaWorld. It was so pretty with Christmas trees and lights since it was the beginning of the holiday season. The shows were so fun to watch and we even got soaked watching the Shamu show since the nieces and nephews decided the splash zone would be a great place to sit! :) This picture shows how close we were.

Wednesday was an adventure with squeezing in Knott's Berry Farms and The Lion King on broadway. I loved the Lion King and wish we had the chance to go to musicals like this more often. It was super fun!

On Thanksgiving we ate dinner at Travis and Katy's then went to Coronado Island where Shana and Rowdy had rented a beach house. We played in the ocean, roasted smores, and hung out on the beach.

Here we are after sitting in the soak zone at SeaWorld. Who knew we would get that wet!

We loved California and the fun we had there! It was nice to spend time with family that we don't get to see very often!