Wedding Buffet

Ok, so this is a story mostly about this happy couple. Chris' youngest sister Britany got married to a great guy named Dan in the Bountiful temple on March 18th. They came all the way here from school at K State (Kansas that is) to be married close to both their families. Dan is from Provo and the Nelson/Bennett clan mostly lives in the Salt Lake Valley. I'm so happy for them and the new adventure they can embark on together. It's great to have a partner to share your triumphs and disappointments with, especially one who you know is committed to your relationship beyond just this life.




So enough of that mushy stuff. Here's where me and Chris come in. When Britany got engaged, she asked us if we could help with her reception food. Knowing us for the awesome cooks we are and that we catered our own wedding, she made an excellent choice :)

We were also itching to give the catering business a try since we may want to do it for a living someday. So we started to plan and this is what we came up with.




The menu consisted of chicken salad sandwiches on french bread,pork egg rolls with sweet & sour sauce as well as sweet chilli sauce,
chocolate covered strawberries in milk and white chocolate, a meat and cheese tray with a variety of rolls and mini cheese cakes in 3 flavors. I know, kind of a weird combo, but that's what they wanted.

It was A LOT of food and we planned on everyone being a lot hungrier than they turned out to be so we ended up having to send a lot of food home with extended family members.



These little jewels were the best and hardest thing we made. I spent the better part of the day dipping these and then trying to find places to put them all. Thank goodness for our new pantry or we would have had strawberries all over the place!






Here is the cake. I wish i could take credit for it, but this piece of art was created by my sister-in-law Melissa. She is amazing as you can see. She even made all the calla lilly flowers - OUT OF SUGAR!

Too bad she's moving to California or she could make you some sugar flowers :) The woman even makes her own fondant and the cake inside was great too. I'm working on a slice right now - yum, chocolatly . . . .





And here is the happy couple feeding the cake to eachother. It was very disappointing, no cake smashing at all. They just laughed the whole time like it was the funniest thing in the world.

I'm so happy for you two, enjoy eachother!

Welcome to Our New Home!

Here' s the home tour for our new apartment. Try not to judge too much, i haven't unpacked everything or hung anything up yet. Someday when you come to visit us, you will be amazed at the awesomeness of the decorating :)



This is out living room as seen from the kitchen. The door in the back is technically supposed to be our front door, but the way the apartment building is set up has people coming in through our kitchen. The laptop is set up as our TV at the moment. Cable is so expensive, we're experimenting with not having regular tv.






This is our laundry area and my pride and joy Washer and Dryer. I've run several loads and it's been a dream come true. The cabinets above are super great too because it holds all our laundry and cleaning supplies









Here is our fabulous pantry. Now we have a place to put all our weird kitchen appliances like the food processor and pop corn maker that were cluttering up our counter at our last place. There's also room for the food storage- it's out of the way but easy to access :)








This is the kitchen. We've got lots of cupboards and and drawers, but out fridge is a little old school. As in it needs to be defrosted every so often because ice builds up. Oh goody, i can hardly wait to do it.




This is our master bedroom. We got creative with our "dresser" and used two cheap-o bookshelves with baskets to hold all out non-hang up clothes. So basically we got a 6 drawer dresser for $50 which was a better price than actual dressers at the D.I.





The closets here are huge compared to our last place. I finally have a place for my shoes other than in a big 'ol pile on the floor.







And finally here is our second bedroom. You probably can't tell, but I've actually put some of this stuff away. Once it all gets put away, thrown away or set aside for a yard sale, this will be our craft/computer/guest room. I'm hoping this will become a reality by April - here's hoping :)


We have a bathroom too, but it's not super photogenic. We did make an upgrade to the shower though. We have really low water pressure and it kind of just dribbled on our heads, so we installed a low flow head like they have in hotels and now the water shoots all the way to the back of the shower :)



Come and visit us some day, but call first so i can get things tidied up! We can play dance dance revolution untill our ankles fall off :)

Moving day, moving day, hey baby hey

The title references an old episode of Full House when Uncle Jesse moves from the main house to the newly finished attic. Michelle sings this little song as the whole family helps him move his stuff upstairs. I kept singing it to myself all last week while I was packing stuff. Anyway . . .

Whew! What a weekend it's been. We moved from our old, tiny one bedroom apartment to our new spacious 2 bedroom apartment this weekend. I never would have thought we could fit so much stuff into such a small place, but i guess all the cupboards and drawers helped us stash a lot of junk.

During the week last week i packed up a lot of the loose stuff and emptied out all the closets and furniture i could. I made a small dent and then i reached maximum packing burnout. It's where you see stuff that needs to get packed into boxes, but all you do is wander around looking at everything and wondering what to do next. Thankfully my mom and dad came Friday morning to help, or we never would have got it all done. We also had the help of our very buff home teacher who helped with all the heavy lifting - Thanks Patrick!

Saturday we spent cleaning the old place - again the apartment was like 600 square feet and it took about 8 hours to clean it. Chris had to leave part way through to wait for the cable guy at our new place, so my good friend Hilary came to save the day. Chris came back to help finish up and finally about 5:30 we were done. We had a $495 deposit and we better get every cent of that back because that place was SPOTLESS!

Sunday was interesting getting ready for church. I chose my outfit based on the most comfortable shoes i could wear with it and then i had to try to find said shoes, the dress and my shirt in all the bags of clothes we hadn't unpacked yet. Eventually i found everything i needed and we actually made it to church on time :) Sunday dinner was less than wonderful because i hadn't been grocery shopping because i was so tired Saturday so we had frozen burritos, left over fried chicken and other random things. My mom used to call that the Sunday Lunch Buffet. On the up side, Chris and I got the kitchen stuff put away so we can have better food to eat this week, once i buy some :)

I think living in this new place is going to be super great. I like it a lot so far and I think I'll like it even more once the unpacking is totally complete. I've set a goal to have it all done by the end of march. I think that's totally doable as long as I unpack 3 or 4 boxes a night. I'll put up some pics as soon as I find my camera :)

No more

Last night was a milestone in my life. I did something that I'll hopefully never have to do again. I went to the laundromat for the final time. Hooooorrrrrrraaaaayyyyyyy!!!!!!!!

Chris and I are moving into our new apartment this weekend and I will be the proud owner of a new washer and a new to me dryer. Now instead of taking a whole evening lugging big bags full of clothes back and forth to the laundromat where i can be stared at and chatted up by weirdos, I can now wash clothes in privacy of my own home whenever i want. And there are a minimum number of weirdos living with me :)