A Royal Thanksgiving

This year we headed up to Royal City to spend Thanksgiving with Mark's family in Washington. We had a whole week to relax, and not only did we have a delicious Thanksgiving feast complete with more food than an entire army could eat, but we also had fun shooting clay pigeons (although I wasn't as lucky as I was last year), playing with nieces and nephews, getting up EARLY for black Friday shopping (okay, so really that was just the girls...Mark would never get up that early to shop), playing BUNCO, and going to Addie's baby blessing. I always look forward to going up to Royal because it's so fun being with the Andersons, and this trip was certainly no exception. Thanks everyone for a great Thanksgiving!!

Enjoy the photos, courtesy of my father-in-law Ardean (I really need to do better with taking pictures...) Oh, and aren't our nieces and nephews adorable??

Halloween

I know, I know, I'm more than a week late, but I figure it's better late than never! We had a really fun time celebrating Halloween this year, here a just a couple of highlights:

• Carving pumpkins and making caramel apples with Meg and Sam, and Ams and Andrew
• The Halloween parade at the elementary school where I work with all of my special ed kids, so fun as always
• And of course, the annual Allen party with all of my Dad's family. This year was even MORE exciting than usual because Mark and I won runners up for best costume! I don't know if it was so much that our costumes were that great as much as it was the fact that we looked like total dorks. Oh well, either way it paid off..
  

One of My Favorite Things:

Fall leaves. We went on a bike ride up Provo Canyon last Saturday and it was so fun to finally have a chance to enjoy the beautiful leaves before they're gone.

tis the season....

football season that is. I always thought that I liked watching football, and that I could safely categorize myself as one of those girls who understood the game and enjoyed watching it. But then I married Mark. And suddenly, my eyes were opened.

There is an ongoing debate in the Anderson household that inevitably comes every year around the beginning of September:
My Opinion: (which is obviously the accurate one, right?)
Once football season starts, that is all we watch. 2, 3, 4 games a day, NFL teams, College teams, teams we have never heard of, teams we couldn't care less about. And thanks to blessed ESPN, we can even watch up to three games at a time! Like I said, I like football, but seriously? All day every day. It IS possible to have too much of a good thing.
Mark's Opinion: He feels seriously deprived of his football-viewing experience. He thinks that an adequate week should include not only Sunday and Monday night football, but Friday and Saturday (and sometimes Thursday) college games, AND daily sportscenter recaps, just in case we miss something crucial. For this reason (because we may miss out on a game or two....okay so I may forbid him from watching a game or two), he doesn't think we come even close to watching the amount of games that should be watched, and thus the bleak realities of living with a girl are settling in.

In short, I feel like we watch waaay too much football, and mark feels like we don't watch nearly enough.
Still, I feel justified in my opinion. If it sounds like I am over-exaggerating, quiz me. Want to talk about the Oregon State- USC upset? No problem. How BYU is ranked in the top ten for the first time since 1996? Old news. Brett Favre's record-breaking 6 touchdown passes last week against the Cardinals? I'm telling you....I know it all. And I don't say that to brag I promise, I wish I didn't know what I know. But that's the inevitable consequence of being married to a football addict.

*As a sidenote, Mark wanted it to be known that he does NOT watch football on Sunday, which, to be fair, is mostly true :)

In other sports news:
We went and saw the new rugby movie Forever Strong. We both liked it, and would recommend it. It definitely took Mark back to the glory days, and reliving his 2 year rugby experience with BYU has made him reconsider his decision to go into retirement.

Good ol' Bar J

Thanks to Ardean and Gordon we managed to get front row seats

Mark's cousin got married in Idaho this weekend, so his family decided to make a mini vacation out of it and visit Jackson Hole. And, as everyone knows, no trip to Jackson is complete without a trip to the Bar J. It was so much fun getting to spend time with Mark's parents, Sarah and Tyson, Grandpa, and Gordon and Jackie's family enjoying some country cookin' and a very entertaining show. Thank you Anderson family for a great weekend!

Anniversary Festivities

To celebrate our arrival at one year of wedded bliss, I surprised Mark with tickets to the Jack Johnson concert--which was perfect since Mark is arguably the biggest JJ fan alive, and we had an amazing time. Mark surprised me with a weekend "getaway" including shopping and dinner in Salt Lake, relaxing at the condo on Pineview Lake, trip to Logan and the temple where we got married, fancy Italian meal which I of course managed to spill all over my dress, and even blueberry pancakes in bed. I'm loving this marriage thing, and it just keeps getting better and better :) Unfortunately I didn't have the camera on the actual anniversary, but we did get a couple of shots of the concert:

Little red dot on the stage= Jack. He definitely knows how to put on a good show!

Hitchcock in the Park

I love Hitchcock movies. So, needless to say, when Mark discovered that a park in Orem was playing a Hitchcock classic "The Birds," I was very excited, especially since I had never seen it before. So we packed some blankets and pillows in the car, stashed some treats in my purse, and headed out to the park. It was so much fun! Right before the movie started they released a bunch of birds that circled around the park for the whole movie. At first I thought it was a cool idea, good for ambiance, but as the movie progressed and I became more and more horrified, the squawking birds began to freak me out. If any of you have ever seen the movie then you know what I'm talking about. Only Hitchcock could accomplish the feat of turning birds into scary nightmare-inducing predators....

Current Anderson Obsessions:

Any kind you name it: SVU, Criminal Intent, we love them all.

Frozen Yogurt favs include FroYo, Costco, and of course Maverick (don't judge until you've tried it....sooooo good I promise)

Since we both share an affinity for cooking, we love finding new recipes to broaden our culinary horizons-- latest experiment: wild alaskan salmon fillet courtesy of the one and only Bobby Flay

And finally, announcing the most current obsession to plague the Anderson residence: the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. We can't get enough.

Gone Country.

Well, for the weekend at least. One of the partners of the business Mark works at invited a few people from the company to spend the weekend at his lavish ranch a few miles past Heber. I have never been to a ranch before (shocking, I know), and so I didn't really know what to expect. Mark on the other hand was completely in his element. We went fishing, where I caught my first fish ever...a whopping 8 or so inches long, horseback riding, four-wheeling, and just had fun getting to know Mark's co-workers. It was very fun and quite relaxing, and of course Mark loved it-- I guess the rancher was right: "you can take the boy out of the country but you can never take the country out of the boy...."

Horseback riding was a lot of fun, this was my horse Beau. Mark was assigned to a much more difficult horse because of his previous riding experience, but he held his own

The quaint ranch home that we had all to ourselves

Birthday Date

Since we were in Lake Powell for my REAL birthday, Mark and I decided to fake a little and just pretend that July 23 was on Saturday this year. In my birthday card from Mark I had received an impressively designed "gift certificate" good for one day up in Park City, so on Saturday we drove up there and went straight to the Alpine Slide. You would think that since I have lived in Utah for so long that I would have done all of these Park City things already, but I haven't, and it was so much fun! The slide was okay-ish, a little slow maybe, but the new downhill roller-coaster was way fun. After that we went to the outlets and shopped around for a while, and topped the day off eating at a really nice restaurant on main street. I think it was probably the best birthday date ever...22 is definitely looking really good so far!

Lake Powell

Ok, so Lake Powell is one of the greatest places on earth. It is so fun getting on a houseboat and jet-skiing, wake surfing, water skiing, wakeboarding, tubing, and just laying out in the sun for days on end. Because I haven't had much of a chance to see the sun this summer I think I might have taken the whole "laying out" thing a little too far though....I'm pretty much as orange as an oompa loompa, it's not cute, and it's pretty painful, but I'm still holding out for a tan so we'll see.  The sunburn was well worth it though, it was so fun we can't wait to go back.

Wake surfing: a new family fav.  Mark is the resident expert pro at it too, although I am steadily catching up to him, so it won't be long until he has some serious competition

 

That is me working my magic on a slalom ski...haha okay so really I'm not THAT good, but once again, it won't be long now until I'm a pro....

Mark catching some SERIOUS air on the wakeboard :) Very impressive.

Crossing the Border

Mark and I just got back from an amazing family vacation in Central America.........it was so much fun! We have been pretty spoiled the past couple of months first in Washington with Mark's family and then on this trip with my fam, so I only hope that it isn't too hard for us to adjust to the reality of settling back down into a normal, routine life again :)

Here are a few pics:

Our first night was spent in Mexico City.....as showcased in this picture not only by the enchiladas, but also by the Mexican flag toothpick in Mark's mouth....

The ruins in Palenque, Mexico and the waterfall close by where we went swimming

Howler monkeys. I was so surprised how small they were after hearing them...the sound made me feel like I was in Jurassic Park or something, it was crazy.

Zip-lining!!! SO much fun. 

Some of the many ruins at Tikal in Guatemala

We spent one day in Honduras and visited Copan

Boat cruise across Lake Atitlan

All in all it was definitely an amazing adventure, and we had a blast!

But it's also really good to be home.......and to be able to eat lettuce, tomatoes, or any other non-peeled, non-cooked fruit or vegetable that my heart desires