Loving Our New Start

Salt Lake Living, Week One: Done. Successfully done I might add. For a small farm town girl, I sure am loving this city.

Early on in the week we headed to the temple here in Salt Lake. I love how beautiful the city is at night, especially the temple.

I spent a lot of time at home working on schoolwork, but the rest of the time I probably could have been found at either Trolley Square or Trader Joe's. There is a big Whole Foods store in Trolley Square and they have a ton of delicious looking ice creams. I have been resisting the temptation to try one of these, but I don't know if I can resist much longer.

I guess I can't really complain about not having yummy treats because we got to go to Gourmandise Friday night.

Can you say YUM? 

And, what was the occasion, you may ask? 

The Irene's came into town! I cannot tell you how excited I was for this to happen. 

Of course we had to get every possible combination of pictures.

After our treat trip we played games until the late hours of the night and then first thing in the morning (after breakfast of course, most important meal of the day) we went to the temple. I was obviously extremely happy to be there, hence the scrunch-nose smile.

For lunch we went to Blue Lemon as requested by the Irene's. They are 3 for 3 in great restaurant requests. I trust them.

Hannah and Garrett had never been to Trolley Square so we walked on over there. I think it took us a total of three minutes or so to get there. Are we spoiled? I think so! We spent a whopping .25 each on "Gourmet Gumballs." The sprinkle one was super cute, but I wouldn't suggest it for its taste.

Or its bubble blowing capabilities. Ok, maybe that was just me.

And what is hanging out with the Irene's without some sort of sporting event? It was so much fun, but it made me realize that as I get older, my feminine characteristics are becoming more prominent. Before the first period even started, two guys threw off their helmets and gloves and started fighting and I didn't like seeing them punching each other in the head. A few years ago I would have thought that was the most exciting part of the game. And it was exciting, but I felt sad that they wanted to punch each other. Weird. I know.

On a more normal note, have I said how much I love that we live so close to family!? 

The Utah Grizzlies won and I think we will be coming back for more. I am pretty sure Hockey is my second favorite sport to watch. I think the Irene's liked it too, seeing as how the goodbye note they left us said, "#GOGRIZZLIES." 

If you ask me, we had a pretty darn good weekend. Now to watch the college football National Championship for family night. Who are you rooting for? Oregon or Ohio State?

Want An Idea to Help Cut Your Grocery Budget?

Guess who officially started their lives in Salt Lake? We did! Yay. The day after we got back from Christmas break, Jon's brother and sister in law invited us to go sledding with them. It was our niece's very first time sledding and she loved it. I have the best in laws and I am so excited to be living so close to these three.

Jon sure loves his nieces! 

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Living in downtown Salt Lake means rent is not very cheap. We are so blessed to be able to live right next to Jon's work and to be so close to a lot of really cool places (like Trolley Square), but it also means that we have to make some alterations to our budget. One of those alterations that we decided to make is to decrease our grocery budget. Do you want to uncover your inner creative juices? Lower your grocery budget.

I decided to start out by trying crockpot freezer meals. The first thing that I had to do is find recipes that could easily be thrown into zip lock bags, frozen, and tossed into a crockpot at some point. 

Then I created a shopping list and tried to estimate the cost of all of the ingredients. The goal was to be at or under $150 for half of the months worth of freezer meals. I used 11 recipes and each recipe serves between 4-8 people, which means plenty of left overs for lunches and such. 

Jon and I went shopping for everything over the weekend. We took a little more time than usual to calculate the estimated price to make sure we stayed under budget. We shopped at Sam's Club for all of the bulk and Smith's for the produce.

After school and some job hunting today I got started prepping the gallon freezer bags. I had already written out the ingredients for each recipe on their own individual bags so it was easy to look at the bag and see what needed to be put inside of it. The most important thing to have is a knife and cutting board, but I also used a few bowls, measuring cups and a nice slicer thing.

I cut everything up by recipe instead of cutting all of the veggies and meat at once. It was easier for me to do it this way, but you can cut up all of the veggies and such before bagging.

I got lucky when Jon came home (it was his first day at his new job! You should congratulate him) and convinced me to take a break and go running with him and I got even luckier when he offered to help cut meat and veggies after.

We have an awesome slicer tool thing that I love (since I finally figured out how to use it today)! It is really sharp and Jon was so speedy slicing away that he sliced his thumb. I was going to post a picture but I figured some people would rather not see blood on a post about food.

After Jon got his owie I finished everything up solo. 

Tip for any of you who are wanting to do freezer meals- Make sure you empty your freezer before hand or that you have a big freezer, because these bags will take up a good amount of space. 

It feels so good to know that we saved a lot of money, stayed within half of our monthly grocery budget, and will have quick and easy dinner prep. It takes time to prep everything but I am sure that when I throw a bag in the crockpot tomorrow and have several meals ready a few hours later, it will all feel worth it.

Jon will probably be glad that we won't be having beef and vegetable soup for dinner every night.

If anybody has any low budget meal planning, let me know! 

Christmas Recap and a Happy New Year

The Holidays are most people's favorite time of year. And for good reason. My number one reason for loving the holidays is: Holiday time=family time! I love my family. Being married, we trade off holidays between families. This year we had Thanksgiving with the Jacobs, which means Christmas was in sweet home Colorado with the Harris family (my mommy, daddy, and siblings). I wish we could just be with our whole family all of the time, but Colorado and California are pretty far away, so we make do.

Buckle up! This is a long post, but how else do I fit in two weeks of goodness?

Our Christmas break in Colorado started with a family run in the morning. It was more like a "Jon and my brothers run and Katrina will catch up later" type of run. Then we did some push-ups of course.

One of our Christmas Eve traditions is to make all kinds of goodies and deliver them to people at night. Chocolate covered cherry mice are a must! So cute and fun to make. Don't mind my creeper brother in the background (he is actually not that creepy).

I love that my husband is so good at baking and cooking! He is the man and the woman of the house... I know, I need to step it up.

One of my favorite things about my mom's Christmas decorations is these stockings. My Grandma Harris made them for all of her kids and grandkids before she passed away. 

I have always been partial to my grandma's stockings so I chose to follow a similar pattern for the stockings that I made for Jon and I. I still have to sew a boarder on them. I will do it some day.

(This picture is from my Instagram)

Speaking of homemade things, my mom made these little wooden snowmen for my Grandma Harris years ago. The set included snowmen for every member of the extended family at the time. After my grandma passed away my aunt gave all of the snowmen to my mom. With the extra, my mom was able to add Jon, some of my younger siblings, and Meghan (my brother's new fiancée! Yay!) to the snowman family collection.

One of the best things about having siblings 14 years younger than me is that Santa still comes in full force. It is so fun to line up youngest to oldest and walk out to see what Santa brought each year. We were extremely blessed this Christmas.

Sorry for the blurry picture, but you can see the matching Christmas jammies that I made this year. Remember my "Christmas project"? They turned out, but lets just say I will definitely need more practice on making them fit everyone.

The weather was abnormally warm in Colorado for the first few days so we took advantage of it and played some Spikeball! Everyone is addicted. Sorry, not sorry.

Christmas time always makes me extra grateful for so many things. One of the things that I was feeling extra grateful for this year is the relationship that Jon has with my brothers. Not all of them are pictured here, but you can get a pretty good idea from the pictures that I did get.

Treyton (the baby of the family) is obviously the one that demands Jon's attention the most, but Chayden (my 182 lb. younger brother) gets his fair share too.

. . .

It's hard not to start the New Year with a positive outlook after having such a great reminder of all of the things we are blessed with. I am excited for what 2015 has in store for Jon and I.

Graduation and "Couple Friends"

I cannot believe it is already December 22nd! FYI Jon and I are in Colorado, which means...

Jon graduated! I am so proud of him and all that he has accomplished. He is one of the hardest working men I know and I am pretty darn lucky to be married to him. 

Jon definitely made a difference at Brigham Young University Idaho and I am confident that he will continue to make a difference in the world!

With finals and moving and everything that was going on, Jon's dad was nice enough to help us move in. He was planning on just helping us move into our apt. in Salt Lake, but Tuesday morning he decided to make the drive to Rexburg to be there when Jon received the Gordon B. Hinkley Communicator Award (another proud wife moment for me). I cannot tell you how grateful we were to have him there and for all of his help moving into our new apt. Thanks to him we were able to move in and get set up in record time. 

Pictures of the new place will come later. :) 

Moving to Salt Lake has been very bitter, sweet for Jon and I. Rexburg was pretty good to us over the years (after all, it is where we fell madly in love). Over the past few months we have made some of THE best friends.  When you are married it can be hard to find "couple friends" because the wives have to like the wives and husbands have to like the husbands and there are just more needs that need to be met. That probably seems confusing, but if you are married then you know exactly what I mean. 

We definitely scored in the "couple friends" area, which is great, but it makes it harder to move to a new place. Luckily we already have like three get-togethers planned. 

You might be wondering where the actual graduation pictures are, but there aren't any. Because four days without seeing our friends feels like too long, so we decided to take a trip to Lander, WY instead. Snowmobiling and hanging with cool people totally beats a long graduation ceremony! Garrett's family is from Lander and they were brave enough to house all of us for a couple of days. Such a great family! While we were in Lander, the Irene's prepared a Crab Boil for us. I am not a big sea food person, but this was de-to-the-licious!

This picture doesn't do justice to the whole experience but it does do a good job of describing Tyler's personality. There were a few rules to this Crab Boil and one of them was that we could only use our hands. It was fun to just put our dippings on the table and eat everything with our fingers. I felt like a little kid again! I knew Jon was loving it when I could hear moaning next to me and had to dodge crab shrapnel flying from his side of the table. 

On Friday we went snowmobiling! Prepare yourself for a lot of pictures. We had so much fun and I can't help but share it with you!

I know it looks like I'm a pro, but I was really just a snowboard transporter. I had never snowboarded in my life until that day and even then, most of the time I just hung out at the bottom of the hill with Hannah. She makes sitting in the snow fun!

When I finally did try to snow board I was almost instantly hooked. My first "run" (I say "run" because it was probably only a 50 yard ride) I stayed up the whole time and could not stop smiling.  Don't make fun of my awkward form. It was first time and no one was there to give me tips.

The second time they took me up to the top of the hill on the snowmobile since climbing up took too much energy. The smile was gone pretty quickly when I face planted. Luckily it was fresh, soft powder so other than a freezing face, I was not in any pain and ready to get up and try again. It was a lot steeper this time and after a few tumbles I was still pretty set on learning how to snowboard. I'm hooked.

It's kind of funny how you can't tell what gender a person is when they are layered in thick, baggy clothing. 

I love that our husbands are all such good friends. I just wish that baby Elle was feeling better so that Madeline could have joined us. She is such a great mom and sacrificed a day of snowmobiling with us to stay in Lander and take care of little Elle. 

Isn't Jon a hottie? ;)

I know almost two years of marriage doesn't exactly qualify me to be giving marital advice, but if it did, I would strongly advise everyone to find good "couple friends" to hang out with. It makes all the difference in the world to have other people who are in a similar situation as you and who you can laugh with.  I can't wait until Jan. 9th when our "couple friends" come visit us in Salt Lake (yes, I am counting down the days!) 

I hope everyone is having fun with all of the holiday festivities. Merry Christmas to all!