Merry Christmas From Miami

Jake and I know that there are only so many chances that we have in this life to enjoy a trip with just the two of us, so we decided to take advantage of that time by going on a cruise to the Bahamas for our anniversary and by spending Christmas in Miami.  I have to say that although I loved the warm weather and the sunny skies I found myself missing family and longing for home over the holidays.  Nothing quite tops visiting temple square to see the lights before Christmas in order for the Christmas feeling to settle in for me.  I guess I just can't help craving what I don't have at the moment sometimes. 

That being said, I think we managed to make the most of our trip.  How often can you say that you got a tan over Christmas by sitting on the beach??  We started out on our cruise and visited Key West, Nassau and Cococay before heading back to Miami for a couple of days before finally heading back home to Buffalo just in time for winter.  The "feels like 0 degrees" ain't no joke.  But enough lamenting, here are some highlights of our trip.

 

The Cruise: Aboard the ship, ready to take off!

The Cruise: Leaving Port Miami

The Cruise: Stop 1: Key West

To satisfy Jake's appreciation of Ernest Hemingway, we went on a tour of Hemingway's home in Key West.  Although I'm not a huge fan of the guy, the home was beautiful and I like learning about stuff and people, so I enjoyed it too.  A bonus is that we also got a pretty in-depth tour of the city of Key West and learned some interesting stories of some of the earlier inhabitants.  Although some of these stories are a little too gruesome to tell on the blog, I'll tell you about them sometime.

Eating some infamous key lime pie.  Jake chose the dipped in chocolate variety.

The Cruise: Stop 2: Nassau

Our second stop in the Bahamas was the island of Nassau.  As you can see we booked an excursion to snorkel.  My association with snorkeling involves snorkeling in Hanama Bay in Hawaii which entails taking a leisurely stroll from the beach into calm and protected water--whenever your ready, no rush.  This is naturally what I expected this time as well, so I wasn't sure why they were handing out our gear while we were still on our boat on the way to what I thought was a secluded beach.  It wasn't until the boat was anchored in the middle of a large body of water and we were told to jump that I realized that this snorkeling trip would be a little different.  Here I am trying to look happy about it.

And here I am after all was said and done...genuinely happy.

The Cruise: Stop 3: Cococay

Cococay is a privately owned island exclusive for Royal Carribean cruisers.  We spent the day doing some yoga out on the beach, laying out on the beach and walking around the island.  All in all a pretty relaxing day.  I don't really have any pictures, but just imagine white sandy beaches and crystal clear aqua water and you should get the idea ;-)

Miami

The rest of our trip we spent a couple of days in Miami to tour the city and explore the beaches.  Here are a few of our attempts at some "artistic" shots while we were there.  Gotta love the blue, sunny skies!

 It was a wonderful trip and I am so grateful that we had the opportunity to go and unwind and spend some time with each other after the craziness of December!  It was good to get away and have a break before another long semester!  I hope all of you enjoyed your Christmas as much as we did!

Thanksgiving Trip(s)

 This year for Thanksgiving we were fortunate enough to visit with both of our families.  Even though we had just a short trip to Colorado Springs for a couple of days and another short trip in Utah, it was nice to just be with the family and hang out.  Here are a couple of highlights from our tip... 

The weather in Colorado Springs was 65 degrees when we were there!  We attempted to take Liam and Cooper to the park, but we made it only about 5 min before Cooper had a break down over a sliver and Liam peed his pants.  I'm sure that when I am a parent I will think to ask kids if they have gone potty before we head out.

 Colby impressed me by trying squid.  Sick!

I got some early b-day presents from the fam.  As you can see Copper and Liam are super interested.

Thanksgiving feast #1 with the McDermott clan.  Thanks so much Taryn for hosting us!

The kiddo table.  I love how Liam is just hanging out like it's the cool thing to be at the kids table.

On our trip we got to visit with all the little nieces.

Grandpa with baby Harper.

 Jake with Baby Marli

Hangin out with Linds and Lucy.  Lucy is not really much of a baby anymore.

The way that Lucy was so intent on her coloring at the restaurant made me think that she is destined to be an artist like her mama.

If you can't tell, the onsie says: "I Love Uncle Jake."

Thanksgiving feast #2 with the Wilding clan.

Thanks again everyone for everything when we came to visit!  We love to be able to visit with family!

October

It's been awhile since I have posted anything on the blog.  October has been a busy month.  I was lucky enough to meet up with Jake's family in NYC for a couple of days.  Unfortunately, Jake couldn't come with us...darn Midterms.  I missed him dearly, but I also had a wonderful time.  I loved everything we did, but I must say that I was blown away by Lion King on Broadway.  It brought me back to my African Dancing days at Weber.  Good times.  The rest of the pics are some odds and ends of what we have been up to in October.

Here we are on the commuter train on our way to the Blaze.  The Blaze was an awesome event, which I believe is in the town of Salem outside of New York, with tons of lit carved pumpkins.  My camera couldn't do everything justice, so I didn't take any and therefore don't have any of my own pictures to document it, but just believe me when I say that it was really cool.

The famous chocolate cake sundae from Serendipity.  I was skeptical if this would be good.  Often times I find that the more you get of something at a restaurant, the worse it tastes, but that was NOT the case in this instance.  It was amazing.

Our walk across the Brooklyn bridge.  This was definitely cool.

The 911 monument. 

After seeing Lion King, us poor girls were a little tired and due to the fact that each of us were wearing heels, we didn't exactly like the idea of walking through the city to visit Carnegie deli, so we enjoyed a pleasant ride in a bike cart pulled along by this guy.

We are SO happy not be walking.

Tom didn't quite make it through all of this corned beef, but I was still pretty impressed.

So, after New York, the rest of the month was pretty low-key.  People in Buffalo seem to really love inflated lawn displays.  This is the most extravagant one I have seen yet.  The pictures really don't do it justice. 

...and here we are carving our pumpkins...

Jake is such a man that he is OK wearing pink cupcakes.

The finished product.  The one on the left is supposed to be a "Jake" pumpkin.

Happy Late Halloween everyone!  Hopefully, I'll get to posting our Thanksgiving before the end of December.

The Great Pumpkin Race

So, Jake and I have been a little down in the dumps lately because we came to the realization that we are just not active people anymore, so in order to overcome our little problem, Jake signed us up to run a 5K this Saturday.  I have become pretty soft, so when I woke up Saturday morning to wind and rain I was a little worried, but we pushed through and prevailed!

New Apartment!

Our apartment isn't exactly new anymore as we have been moved in for a couple of months now, it's just taken this long before we have been settled in enough that I could blog about it.  So, without further ado...here are 4 of the rooms!  The other 3 rooms are still too messy to take pictures of, but we will have those to a point that we can post them in a couple of months.

Introducing our new old table that we bought from Reimagine, my favorite furniture store in Buffalo and our Craig's list hutch find. 

The first day we got the hutch in the house I set it up with our dishes-a lot of which have been gifts from Jake. As I was congratulating myself on my handwork, I realized just how lucky I am to have a husband that let's me be so girly with my decorating style. 

 

New Glasses!

So, Jake's been Jones'n some new glasses for the past few months with good reason as he hadn't had his prescription updated for the past few years.  I can't decide which Jake I like best:

Urban, Thrifty, Grunge Jake

or

Sophisticated Jake

Truth to be told, I like Jake no mater what glasses he's wearing.