Happy Holidays

Christmas is just 2 days away. I finished the last of our Christmas shopping last night and am thrilled to have a somewhat quiet and low key holiday this year. Rather than spending extravagantly, we have kept Christmas rather simple:

Rather than shopping for friends, extended family, coworkers, and neighbors, we have made a significant donation to The Road Home in honor of our loved ones. The Road Home is a private non-profit social service agency that assists individuals and families experiencing homelessness in Salt Lake County and along the Wasatch Front. Their mission is to help people step out of homelessness and back into our community. Especially during the holiday season, I reflect more frequently upon our many blessings and am often grateful that we have enough (shelter, food, necessities). If you too would like to donate or would like more information about The Road Home, you can visit their website here.

We are not doing much shopping for each other this year. Rather, we have planned a trip to New York to be gone over the new year. Rodd has never been and it has been several years for me so we are very much looking forward to a get away before the semester starts up again for me and things get crazy again! This is how we prefer to do Christmas, free of 'stuff' and full of memories! I will try to post daily of our adventures and I'm sure Rodd will be posting about all of the wonderful food! We are just a little bit excited. :)

We get back from NY and I start school again within a matter of days... How time flies.

We are so grateful for all that we have been blessed with: wonderful friends and family (including our 2 ADORABLE cats: Belle and Achilles), health, safety, opportunities, education and learning, experiences, and each other.

Happy Holidays!

Fourth of July Festivities

Provo Parade - At our usual spot!





BBQ at our house!

Master Griller!

Don't let the hard candy shell fool you... He's a softy.

Rodd went inside to lay down because he was feeling sick. Grey and Nick came inside and were playing the piano for him so that he would feel better and sleep. :)

Then Nick wanted to be like Rodd and sleep so he made himself a bed.

Fireworks and Hanging with Our Neighbors, the Bodines!



The Forth of July is our favorite holiday. :) We just love it and love being patriotic... All year round, actually. But it's fun to really concentrate my love for this country.

More pictures to come.

Mother's Day BBQ

We thought we'd throw a BBQ on Sunday, May 10th for Mother's Day for those who don't really have plans. Nothing crazy, just some people hanging out. It's bring you're own meat and a side to share (if you can... RSVP for details).
We'll have some grills out along with some tables and chairs... We thought after, for whoever is interested, we could take a little nature walk and enjoy our lovely springy surroundings.

Anyone and everyone is welcome! Let me know if you are interested.

(I love you Mom! You're great!)

Easter Festivities

There was a lot going on around Easter time. Luckily we got to enjoy most of it. Here are some fun pictures from the Hofheins Family celebration... Actually, these were all taken from my phone due to my unpreparedness. Better quality than I expected. :)
I actually do have more pictures here of the kids, but I'll have to get them off of my phone and repost... :)

Christmas With The Jefferies

Growing up, my family always slept in as long as they could on Christmas Day. When you smelt Breakfast Burritos, around 11am, it was time to get up. We would take our time eating, help clean up, etc... then finally decide, around 1-2pm that it was time to sit down and open presents. We would each take a turn and open one present at a time (There were 7 of us, so you can imagine how long this could take... ). Opening presents was usually followed by a Christmas Day movie at the theaters. This was the Hermansen tradition. The past 2 years that Rodd and I have opened our presents together at our house, Rodd has been so excited that we've opened presents EARLY! (at 8am) We are used to waking up at 6am, so we had been laying in bed trying to sleep in for some time. Given the opportunity to sleep in, we have to take advantage of it. Plus, we do not have children, so 8am on Christmas morning seems SO early to me. But I guess this is the Rodd and Ashley Jefferies tradition. :)

Santa filled our stockings! Rodd was afraid that he would know how to get in the house or know were we lived, so I had to remind him of the movie 'The Santa Claus' so that we could go to bed.

We each got a Threadless T-shirt from Santa... Wow, how does he always know what we want. It's still a mystery to me.. Rodd REALLY loved his. :)

We both look tired... you can tell. We had a late night at the Jefferies' house celebrating Christmas Eve. I don't have pictures of that right now, facebook is having a meltdown. But more soon to come!

The Hunt for the Perfect Halloween Costume

I have my voting sticker on! I actually wore my costume to work and to the last day of early voting! It was a lot of fun.

We had decided last week on Rodd's half birthday that we were going to be a grandma and grandpa for Halloween, thanks to the D.I. That night I got a gray curly hair wig. We went to D.I. on Thursday to pick out our costumes between Cory Mon's concert and Weekly Basketball. It was so much fun!

Well, initially we had gone with the idea in mind that we were just going to be a grandma and grandpa... Until we started picking out his clothes and said, "This is something my dad would wear." Wow. That's when the light bulb went on. This is what he came up with.

It was a lot of fun for us, unfortunately the family didn't get to see it, so we knew we had to take a lot of pictures. I had already picked out my costume when we had decided on this, but I think it works for a Nancy-Pants. But I will admit, Rodd's version of Kent is a little scary! Some of these pictures look just like him, I can hardly believe it, especially from a distance. We took this picture especially for the siblings... Rodd knew you would appreciate it. :)

All in all, we did have a great Halloween. We ordered some Chinese and read our book in between trick-or-treaters. I heard a advertisement on the radio for Smith's Marketplace that gave me the idea to put out a bowl of potatoes for the kids to take and see their reaction, then someone else swoops in with a bowl of candy and saves the day. It sounded fun so we busted out the potatoes. Pretty funny, most kids wouldn't have it... they looked at me like, 'okay, joke's over. Where's my candy.' We had a lot of Hispanic kids with their moms come by. We actually have a lot of Hispanics in our neighborhood, plus there is an apartment complex at the end of our street. With one bunch of hispanic kids that came by, Rodd pulled out the potatoes and the candy and said, "Here you go! But you can only choose one..." They laughed. All of the girls took candy, but three of the boys took potatoes! One of the kids turned to his mom and said, "Look Mom! Papas Fritas!" We asked him if he was serious and he said, "Yeah! I have plenty of candy!" What???? Just another reason why we love the hispanic culture.

We hope that everyone had a fun Halloween!
Fun and relaxing for us... :)

Ward Chili Cook Off and Glenn Beck Show

I had seen a sign up for the Ward Chili Cook-Off come around in Primary and noticed that no one had yet signed up to bring chili... So I signed up thinking that, like our last ward, they were going to need chili. Last year we were one of 4 pots of chili for the whole ward... yeah. So I signed up to bring a recipe that we got from our good friends, the Mecham's. There must have been 30 pots of chili there! Good for our ward! They are so supportive of ward activities. There is usually a really good turn out... the more the merrier. :)

Well, our chili didn't get an award, but it was one of the few to completely finished! That's good enough for me... ( Thanks Audrey!)

Here are some of our wonderful Judges... :)

We didn't get to dress up because we were going straight to UVU after the dinner, but we did get a couple of pictures.

Rodd won tickets to the Glenn Beck Show from KNRS Talk Radio on his 1/2 birthday for tonight. We went there after filling ourselves with Chili. We did miss out on the trunk-or-treat though. So many sweet costumes in our ward... we even had some girls go as Nacho Libre. We really loved hearing Glenn Beck talk. He's pretty awesome. We went to hear him speak at the Freedom Festival on the 4th of July at the Marriott Center and loved him there too. It was definitely a fun treat. I'm just glad Rodd wanted me to come with him! He's a sweetheart.

Glenn Beck's conversion story, "An Unlikely Mormon" is such a cool story, you can actually see bits of it here.

Life has gotten so busy and so crazy that it seems like we're always going straight from one thing to another until we crash til the morning and do it all over again! Crazy... but we're getting to do a lot of fun stuff and we're enjoying life. That's what it's about, right?