Thanksgiving Weekend......a little late

Thanksgiving was a very exciting time for us. We had a pretty big group staying with us and an even bigger one at Thanksgiving dinner. The excitement started Saturday night when T's parents showed up. We hung out for the rest of the week until his brother and sister-in-law showed up around midnight the night before Thanksgiving!

In preparation for Thanksgiving I made potato rolls (a Higginson family tradition) and a cheesecake recipe we got off the back of a Candy Cane Kiss bag (Candy Cane Kiss Cheesecake). I messed it up a little bit, but it still turned out great! On Thanksgiving day I had the opportunity to cook my first real Turkey (I had only previously made a Turkey Breast...not quite the same). We bought a roaster so we wouldn't have to use the oven for the turkey and would have room to cook everything else. It turned our really good, thanks to the help I received from my mother-in-law!

Later that afternoon T's Aunt, Uncle, and two of his cousins joined us at our new house for our first T & C Kruger family Thanksgiving! Everybody that attended brought or made lots of food! We had more than enough for all of us! Plus plenty for everyone to have for several days to come! I personally ate way too much! I don't know why I do that to myself. I think everyone really enjoyed the food and the company!

Tom's brother also brought his WII along with the country band game. I was happy he brought the country version, because I actually knew the songs. I've played these games before, but I never could sing with them because I didn't know the old rock and roll songs that are on those games. Country however is up my aisle. Everybody had a great time!

My New Table and Jake's Fun with a Wrapping Paper Roll!

As a lot of you already know, I was finally able to purchase a new kitchen table (or I should actually say, my husband purchased one for me with his hard worked overtime hours). I've been wanting a new table for a long time! Like most things involving our furniture choices, it took quite a while for us to come to a mutual decision. Sometimes we have very different tastes in furniture!

Jake loves to play! We discovered we can recycle our old empty Christmas Wrapping Rolls into toys for him. Here are some pictures of him thoroughly enjoying himself.

An Exciting Sunday at Church

We've been in our new house now for almost a 3 months now. This week we were finally read into our new ward! We just never gave them our information until recently. The awkward part about getting read into the ward was that we also gave a talk this week. So not only were we read into the ward, but we got to see everybody staring at us while it happened. Then we got to give our first talks in the ward. I gave mine on "the Ministry of Jesus Christ" and Tom gave his on the "Atonement". I think they went pretty well and through it I think we both learned some things. That's the way it's suppose to work huh?

Also that day we got new callings. Tom is the new 11-year old boy primary teacher and scout master (or something like that). He's very happy with this new calling. He was really hoping for something with scouting. My new calling I am less excited about. It is the activities chairman. I am not the most creative person, so this sounds kind of painful to me. I was on the enrichment board once and did not enjoy it. Luckily in this ward instead of doing a lot of different activities they just do a monthly pot-luck. This aught to be interesting......

Present Wrapping

First of all, you can thank my lovely sister Ashley for the beautiful scenery change on this blog! She's got the creativity gene inherited from my mother. I always look at stuff like this and would love it do it, but never get around to it. Thanks Ash!

Yesterday evening my new ward had our Christmas Enrichment activity! Tom decided while I was gone he would wrap a few of my presents! Lovely job huh
There actually were other packages he had fully wrapped under the tree, but I got a kick out of this one!

Painting

From the moment we moved into the house I wanted to repaint. Of course, I had no real world knowledge how expensive it would be. After Tom did the math on our house vs the cost of paint we decided with all the other little changes we were having to make right now, we could only afford to paint half of the house. We decided to start with the common areas of the kitchen, dining room, living room, and hallway. We also decided to paint the wood trim (because it was horrible). When the previous owners had painted (which in my opinion they decided to do to see the house) they were not very careful and got paint on the wood and cupboards along the edges. It seems to have been done in a hurry even though the pain was in pretty good condition and I liked the color. After many trip to Lowe's looking at their paint displays and many conversations about the color we wanted the trim and the dining room we finally made a decision. I had to do a little convincing for the color I wanted the dining room, but it turned out gorgeous and Tom really likes it too! We're really happy with how it turned out and I'll post some before and after pictures later. In the mean time here are some pictures while we were painting and the disaster our house became for a little under a month. Needless to say, I'm very happy to get my kitchen back and our lives kind of back to normal. All we have left to do it tack the trim back up in the hallway. Yeah!

My Review on V

Most of you probably know that I've a sci-fi freak! I like almost anything that is related to science fiction or fantasy. I do have my restrictions though. Anything with vampires, x-file type stuff, alien invasions are pretty much guaranteed to be found in my Netflix queue or as a book on my bedside table.

For those of you that read my sister A's blog, know that we were raised in a Sci-fi household. It was common to have our family bonding around the TV watching StarTrek, Star Wars, or V. I guess this is kind of an inherited obsession (from my Mom's side of the family mostly).

When I heard they were going to remake V, I wasn't sure how I felt. The old version of course was a bit corny and old fashioned, but I love it because I loved it back then. Plus, regardless of the bad special effects, I like the story and the meaning behind it. It shows what a civilization will do when threatened. It brings out both the best and the worst in people.

The difference between the old and new versions to me was very suttle. Same basic story, much better special effects, and some swapping in the sex of the characters. What used to be a girl character is now a guy character and vice versa. I'm still waiting to see whos going to play the crazy Diana chick character. There is more depth to the characters and there are some additional characters that weren't in the original.

I look forward to seeing where the show will lead and how it will either shadow the original or branch out and become it's own entity. This show has the potential of being really great or a total bust. Only time will tell!

Finally....pictures of our new house!!

This was us right after we signed our papers. We are in the picture with our mortgage lady and our real estate guy. They were both amazing!

This is the front of the house. The truck belongs to a friend of ours that came to help T do some heavy lifting because I'm a wimp! Thanks to everyone that has done that over the past month!

This is a view of the back of our house from our back yard! We love the deck and the backyard has a lot of possibilities!


Our backyard! As you can probably see, the fence needs a little work. We're trying to figure out who exactly owns the fence. Jake loves the backyard. You can see in the lower left hand corner where he's dug a little bit. We're trying to kick that habit. That's where I want to put a little garden anyways!


Our cool new BBQ. Tom loves it! We got it on sale along with a family donation! Thanks for the help, we've already used it!

Here's the dining room. We were given the table about a year ago. We're on the lookout for a bigger one!

Here's the kitchen! I actually love it, but we're planning on updating it in a few years! I was pleasantly surprised how much cupboard space and counter space there was! All my kitchen stuff actually fits now! The door leads to the garage (I didn't take a picture of that...sorry).

This is part of the living room (from the dining room).

The living room from the other direction. I love the windows in this house! Plus there are a lot of strange angles that are really cool.

Living room again!

Bedroom #1

Bedroom #2

Bedroom #3

Master Bath. There is also a walk-in closet to the left.

Entrance way. Absolutely love this!

Hallway

2nd Bathroom

Office/Gym??? The blanket on the floor is where Jake hangs out when I am working out. This is still and work in progress but people were asking for pictures. There's also a third bedroom that I didn't take pictures of. It's kind of a staging area for everything we don't know what to do with yet (mostly decorations).

Office/Gym #2

Well, I hope you all enjoyed the pictures. We're in the middle of painting right now, so I'll post more pictures later!

Coupons

For the past several years I've wanted to learn how to use coupons to save us money. This is something that completely confuses me. I just don't get it!

I've read articles, seen tv shows, & heard stories about how to use coupons. That still doesn't seem to help. We even got the newspaper for about a years while we lived in Salt Lake City thinking there would be coupons that I could learn how to use. Pretty much the only "coupon-like" things there were, were the weekly notices from the grocery stores. It wasn't coupons, it was just the weekly sales. I've heard stories about being able to double coupon things, but in order to have that work I need coupons. I'm not sure exactly what to do.

If any of you have any websites that could help me, or books, or anything like that please let me know!

My life right now.....

Our life recently has been pretty crazy! I'm starting to wish for the days when my most exciting activity was cleaning the house a looking for a job. Although, I guess I am still cleaning the house, but much more aggressively. We've been looking for a house for the past 3 or 4 months. We made an offer on two different houses and got them both (at different times of course). The first one was a short sale (that I have previously blogged about) and the one we eventually purchased. Our house was more expensive, but had several really nice features to it that I will talk about when I blog with the house pictures.

We signed on our house about 2 weeks ago and honestly the past 2 weeks have been a bit of a blur. We signed on Wednesday Sept 30th, had the carpets cleaned the next day, and moved in Sat Oct 3rd. The house was previously being rented to the previous owners daughter and family. She said she didn't find out we were signing on the house until the couple of days before and she thought she had another week to move and clean the house. Weird considering the date we signed the papers was the exact date that we had scheduled for over a month. Don't know if she was full of it or not, but the house was not clean! I'm still in the process of leaning out drawers an cupboards with cleanser and deep cleaning the bathrooms! Anybody know how to get stain out of a toilet bowl. Extreme non-cleaning is the only reason I can come up with for the state of some parts of the house. We've already started replacing some the things in the house. T's loving being Mr. Fix it!

The Monday after we moved into our house, we had our 5 year anniversary! Tom had told me previously my gift was the house he was getting me! I told him he's going to have a hard time doing better than that in the future! On Monday, we completely forgot about our anniversary. The only reason I remembered is I was making an appointment with my doctor and wrote it in my date book and it was marked! We spent that night and the next cleaning our old apartment! Very romantic I know, but we got almost all of our deposit back because of it!

I know some of you are waiting for pictures of our new house. I know we've been living here for 1 1/2 weeks, but we are still not fully unpacked yet. When that happens I will post pictures of our house with all our stuff in it. Of course it will not be decorated for a while. Still need to paint.

Fun in Utah

Tuesday morning we left for Utah. One of the things that made this trip kind of nice, was we listened to a book on tape for the whole trip. It was "The Host" by Stephanie Meyer. I was a huge fan of the twilight books and hope to eventually have all of them in hardback at some point. Shockingly though I have never read "The Host", although Mom did lend me her copy on the cruise in May. Have I read it yet....nope. All my new books have come out in the past 4 or so months. Now I really want to read it, because we weren't able to finish it on CD. It's going to have to wait until I finish a couple of books I have though. If I don't read them now, I go to the bottom of the hold list again and some of these books have around 30 holds. Yuck!!! Anyway regardless of what my Dad thought ,I loved it. Very entertaining (if at sometimes creepy) book.

Our first stop was Orem to see my baby brother B. He's going to school there in construction management. He seems to really be enjoying himself. He helped me buy myself new sunglasses and then we went back to his apartment and I got to meet 2 of his roommates and his friend C. It was a lot of fun, plus I got to drive in his cool car with the top down. I felt stylin'! He than gave me ride to S's new townhouse.

My friends S & T.J. both bought new townhomes a few months ago. I actually heard about it the first time while I was at one of our stops on our cruise. I've been wanting to fly down to see them since they bought the houses. I kept looking for a good deal on airlines but wasn't having much luck. Riding down with my parents gave me that opportunity because I only had to pay for a one way ticket. Both townhomes were absolutely amazing. I was also able to see the townhome of their cousin L. All 3 townhomes are in the same community and within walking distance from each other but are different floorplans. All of them had different floorplans and had definite nice things about each floorplan. I liked that L had a small living room and a small family room and her kitchen island. I liked T.J. big valted ceilings and extra windows. I liked S kitchen and huge laundry room and linen closet. Both T.J. and S had an unfinished basement as well. They are also brand new and have gas fireplaces. Nice places girls!

I was also able to visit my old job while I was there. It was really nice to see everyone. It really made me miss my job and the people I left behind. Like every job there were things that drove me crazy, but overall it was a great job! I was able to see almost everyone I wanted to there. The only person I really didn't have time to talk to very much (except in passing) was my boss. I'm very glad that I made time to go see everyone.

One day while T, S, & T.J. were all at work I was able to hang out with my mother-in-law. We also picked up my sister-in-law A, and we went to Olive Garden for lunch. It was so tasty! Soup, salad, and breadsticks. You have to love it! My mother-in-law M also bought us some delicious appetizers which I always enjoy! After lunch we did a little shopping and then were able to stop by and see my husbands grandma K and grandpa C. It was great seeing them! They are both sharp as a tack and a lot of fun to talk to. I really enjoyed the whole day!

S, T.J., & T all took Friday off so we could spend the day together before my flight that night. It was a great time. We all went and got pedicures, did a little shopping, and went to see the movie G. I. Joe. The pedicures were a lot of fun and I've really enjoyed having "pretty toes" (as the daughter of a friend recently told me). I wish I could get a pedicure more often, but the fun part of the experience was really just hanging out with my girlfriends both on Friday and for the rest of the visit. I really miss that! The movie was a lot of fun too! I'd wanted to see it. It was very exciting and fast moving. I told my husband that we definitely need to go see it. I think he'll really like it! It's kind of a guys show that girls will enjoy as well (as long as they like action flicks I guess).Thanks to everyone that gave up time to spend with me! I loved seeing all of you and hope I can repeat it again soon! I love you all!

My exciting 1 1/2 days in Idaho

I was lucky enough to see my brother and sisters recently when we went on our family cruise. However my little nieces and nephews were not part of that experience, so I hadn't seen them since I was home for my brother B's mission homecoming in November. I also hadn't seen my grandparents since I stopped through Boise on my way back to Utah after our trip to Oregan over a year ago. My grandpa H was recently put into an assisted living place and about a month ago was moved from the one in Boise to one in Idaho Falls so he could be closer to my Aunt M.

When I originally thought of hitching a ride to Utah with my parents on their way home, the plan was just to go through Boise and on the Utah. I hadn't made up my mind weather to do it or not because of some job application issues (for those of you that don't know, I've been looking for a job with no luck). However when my parents offered to drive through Boise than on through Idaho Falls so I could see all my grandparents along with both my sisters, brothers in laws, and all my nieces and nephews on the way to Salt Lake to see my girlfriends. it was too good of an opportunity to pass up.

So, after the week my parents spent with us I left with my parents on early Sunday to drive to Boise. While in Boise, I had the opportunity to see my grandpa's house (everyone is in the process of cleaning it out) and see my grandma & grandpa B. It was great to see them and we had a couple of hours of great conversation! I really enjoyed the time I got to spend with them and hope to do it again soon.

Monday morning we took off for Idaho Falls. We stopped at A's new pad. She's been renting a house from a friend of her's for a nickle. This is the first time I've had the opportunity to see it. It's a beautiful house and she's very lucky to be able to stay there for the deal she's paying for it. On the way to see grandpa h's new pad we stopped for lunch and once of my favorite Pizza places, Craigos. For you unfortunate souls that have never been there, it is an awesome sourdough pizza place. The only said thing is that they don't serve their delicious breadsticks they used to have when I was in college. This by the way, is a travesty! But they do have an amazing pizze/salad/pasta bar that makes my mouth water just talking about it! It was delicious!

When we got to grandpa h's place, we had the opportunity to sit and chat with him. He seems to be doing okay, but it's still a little sad. He's changed quite a lot from the energetic man he was a few years ago. He said kind of a funny thing while we were there. We asked him why he hadn't been hanging out downstairs and plaing BINGO with the others. He said simply, "I don't like BINGO". It made me chuckle and made total sense to me. Life has changed quite a lot for him in the past 7 or so years. I can't even imagine how it feels for him to have loss my grandma and my uncle brent all within a few years. That would be so hard! My heart goes out to him and I can't really blame him really if he would rather be with them than where he is. Although I would hate it if he wasn't here anymore.

Later that afternoon Mom, Dad, and I took off for T's house. I also hadn't seen her new house she had gotten. They recently bought a piece of property that had an old house and a double wide (?) on it. The house, they are hoping to refinish and use as a possible rental property. They are living in the other house. They are pretty happy with it and they have tons more room than they had in their previous 2 houses. S loves it and they got it for an amazing deal! We had dinner that night with A and K joining us and hanging out for the rest of the night. D wasn't able to join us because he had work, but I was happy I had the opportunity to see him for luch before he left for work. Anyway, it was a delicious dinner and we loved the company. For a couple of hours, the girls and grandkids hung out in one room while S and Dad hung out in the other room watching TV. I think the girls had more fun!!!!