Merry Christmas!! (belated)

I hope everyone had a great Christmas!!  We had a really awesome week in California! It flew by WAY too quickly, as it always does... But it was SO great to spend some good time with family and friends. Here are a few pictures from my time there (some were taken by me, and some by my amazing sister-in-law Amanda!):

Here are the kiddos!! That's Cassidy, Addison, AJ, and Elijah!

The whole gang on Christmas Eve! 

Here's me and McGee with Cassidy and Addison! 

My parents in their "ugly" (awesome) sweaters! 

Here's my aunt Rhoda and uncle Jim in their "ugly" (awesome) sweaters! They won 1st and 2nd place in the Ugly Sweater Contest.

We traveled back to Pennsylvania on Christmas Day, and that was quite an experience... I don't think we'll be doing that again. The airports were pretty insane, and there were SO MANY delays. We were happy to be together (for the first time!) on Christmas, but it wasn't exactly an enjoyable travel day. We ended up getting to McGee's parents' house at around 8:30pm (and we drove straight there from the airport! And we woke up at 3:30am in CA to head to the Sac Airport... so it was a long day). We had a lovely dinner when we arrived at McGee's parents' house (they do Cajun food every Christmas!), and then we opened up presents, and then left at about 11:30pm to drive home with Guinness. 

Last night we went to our favorite dive bar (I've mentioned it a few times on this blog...) because we found out that it's closing for good at the end of the month! The family that owns it has owned it for 65 years, and they've decided it's time to close. We're pretty sad about it because we've had some REALLY great times at that bar!  That's where we celebrated closing on our house, and we've had some fun get-togethers with friends there. Plus, they have THE BEST cheesesteaks... and they charge $1.50 for these tiny 9-ounce glasses of Yuengling. It's such a charming place. So last night McGee's whole family met us there, plus a bunch of McGee's friends too! It was a really fun night!  

Here's McGee sitting with his sisters and one of his cousins. And that's his aunt standing behind the table! 

Here's Timmy enjoying a cheesesteak! We all had one. 

Here's Timmy chatting with Nelson (McGee's friend that lives in Los Angeles! He was home for Christmas). 

Today were are EXHAUSTED, so we've mostly been sticking around the house. We've done grocery shopping and a trip to Home Depot, but aside from that we've just been home and we've worked on a few small projects. We're not excited to return to work tomorrow, but thank goodness this is a short week!!  We're planning on heading into Philly on New Year's Day again for the Mummer's Parade, but on New Year's Eve I think we'll stay home with Guinness and have a chill evening! I hope you all have a happy and safe New Year's Eve!! 

Winter?

The weather outside today is certainly NOT frightful... It's 70 degrees and kind of humid!  In mid-December?  Whaaaaat???  SUCH weird weather. We had some cold weather last week and the week before, so it has felt kinda like winter, but the last few days have been incredibly warm. So, we've been enjoying it and trying to spend a lot of time outside!  We ate breakfast in our screened patio room this morning, and we saw a few deer walking through our yard!  Guinness was very intrigued by them, but he didn't bark or anything.

Deer!!!  (it reminded me of "Squirrel!" in the movie Up)

We have had lots of fun decorating for Christmas!!  We decorated right after Thanksgiving was over, because we wanted as much time as possible to enjoy it while we were home.  I finally took some pictures of all of our decorations, so I'll post some here!!  

Here's our tree!  We have a Bumble as our tree-topper.

Here's a cool octopus ornament I got when we went to SF right before our wedding in June!  And then a Capitol Reef National Park ornament from our honeymoon. 

A few awesome ornaments we bought this year (Heat Miser and Snow Miser!!)

A pretty Bryce Canyon ornament from our honeymoon! 

Bumble!! We love that guy...

A fun "Happily Ever After" ornament that my parents got for us! It says 2015 on the back :)  

A fun pillow I picked out!! 

And a fun pillow that McGee picked out!!!  

Our fireplace mantel! We bought some really heavy-duty (they're iron!) stocking holders this year! Mine is the snowman with the tree stocking, and McGee's is the santa holder with the snowman stocking. And that is a light-up Bumble (we might be obsessed with him...). 

Some cute little birds, and a cool Christmas mason jar decoration that Lindsey made me!

A few random Christmas deocrations

Guinness didn't know what to think about the lights... He was half curious and half scared.

Here Guinness is looking out our front window! He loves to look out our window... 

Here's the windows above our garage! We have a candle decoration in one, and a Santa in the other

Here's a close-up of the Santa deocration! 

And here's the whole house! McGee did a GREAT job of hanging the lights!! They go all the way around our house, so you can see them from the road that leads to our house. 

That's most of our decorations!!  I can't believe Christmas is almost here!! I hope you're all doing really well and feeling excited for the holiday season!! 

Six Amazing Months

My amazing husband reminded me last night that as of today we've officially been married for 6 months!!  I can't believe it's been 6 months already!!  It has completely flown by, and it's been amazing :)  I love being married to Kevin, and he's the best husband ever. I sure did get lucky :)

This was literally the best day of my entire life :)  It was perfect. 

Thanksgiving

We had a pretty good Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving weekend!  Thanksgiving morning was nice and relaxing, and we made some cinnamon rolls and watched the Macy's parade (with calm weather... booooo), and then I made a few pies for our Thanksgiving dinner at McGee's parents' house. We headed over to McGee's family's house as soon as the last pie was done, and we brought Guinness with us. McGee's family had invited Guinness to join the celebration, because they love seeing him. Weeellllllllllll, that turned out to be a huge mistake. Guinness was SUCH a pain all night!  He was whining and barking and going crazy while we had him contained (with baby gates) in the other room while we were all trying to eat in the dining room. It was SO annoying, and it was really stressful and embarrassing for me and McGee because we couldn't get him to behave and be quiet. So, the dinner was DELICIOUS, but we barely got to enjoy it because of our poorly behaved dog. He's darn lucky he's so cute.... But we will not be bringing him to any more Thanksgiving dinners, that's for sure.

I thought I'd take some pictures of some of our Thanksgiving decorations though!  One of them is new, and it's a craft that Lindsey purchased for me the weekend that I went to visit her. She got one for each of us to paint, and they each had our last name initial in them! We didn't end up having time to paint them at her house that weekend, so I took my turkey home with me and painted it!

Here's the turkey I painted!  It doesn't stand on its own (I'm going to have to find a way to hang it...), so I just propped it in a basket for this year. 

And here's all of our Thanksgiving decorations!  Definitely not as many as Halloween... haha

And this weekend McGee and I went to check out a hutch for our dining room that we found on Craigslist! The address was right in the neighborhood where we used to rent a house. We loved the hutch, so we bought it and took it home. But, before we took it home we stopped at our favorite bar that was right down the street from our old rental house, and they have THE BEST cheesesteaks that they cook up on a flattop right behind the bar. It's a dive bar, and we love it and miss it (it's a long drive from our house now!). I took a few pictures of the fun Christmas decorations that they had up in the bar. We had a great time hanging out there before we drove our hutch home. 

Here's the big moose head in the bar that we love and miss!  They have such delicious cheesesteaks... 

And here's our new hutch in our dining room!  We're going to put all of our beer glasses and wine glasses in the top area, and then our booze is going to go down below! 

For the rest of our weekend, we did a lot of Christmas stuff and we also raked and bagged a LOT of leaves!  The yardwork wasn't very fun but it was SUPER necessary, and the Christmas stuff was fun! We got the Christmas lights up on our house, and we also went to get our Christmas tree and we decorated it! We still have a bit more decorating to do, but I'll try to take some pictures in the next few days and post them!  I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving!!