I'm back.

It's time to play catch up!

We had a wonderful Christmas with both of our families. I was able to hand make a lot of gifts this year and I loved it. I learned new skills and I felt like it was a bit more meaningful to have spent so much time personalizing for the people I love. Ammon and I started a new tradition as well. We decided on "gifts for Christ", which were actually just things we felt we needed to work on to be better. We wrote these things down and wrapped them to keep under the tree for all of December. On Christmas eve we opened the gift and read our "gifts" and discussed. I loved it and I'm excited to do this each year and as our family grows.

 (I also hand-made gift wrap with grocery sacks and potato stamps. Ha!)

 Necklace charms. They were meant to be for my sister and her BFF who moved to Texas. 

(I don't know why my hand is awkwardly in the picture. Pardon me.)

My personal fave. The cardboard Bambi. It took the longest but yielded the best reaction.

Ammon and I celebrated 3 years of marriage on December 30th. My sister babysat and we enjoyed an actual date (those come few and far between!). We finally saw the second Hobbit movie (amazing!) and enjoyed a delicious meal out. We're in love.

This is us in our glory days...before the baby weight and the gray hairs ;)

For New Years we enjoyed an evening in with Ammon's awesome sister. We played games and ate junk to our heart's content. I believe there was even a sit-up competition in the final minutes of 2013 in order to wake ourselves up so as to not miss the countdown. It was a failed effort because totally did miss the countdown! We didn't fall asleep, but we got into a deep conversation and when we realized it was time to count down the seconds, we didn't have our sparkling cider ready! Sparkling cider is a beast to open without a bottle opener (non-drinkers here), so I did spend the first seconds of the new year bleeding. Such a funny start to 2014. I can't imagine anything better than laughing with loved ones to welcome a new year. Yay to new beginnings! My new years resolution is to set 2 goals for each month. Cop-out? Haha nahh.

And my motto for the year is this: Be better at the end than you were at the beginning. 

I'm the kind of person who craves immediate results, so I struggle to see the baby steps of progress. As I reflected on 2013 I realized how much I had grown and improved since the beginning of the year. I was so inspired to stop worrying about immediate change and focus more on gradually becoming better. 

And for those of you who come here merely to gush over Miss Raelan...

This was on Christmas morning. 

She got a stocking full of oranges and cared about nothing else for a majority of the morning.

(Don't mind Ammon wearing my sweat pants...he hadn't opened his new MAN sweats yet.)

 I'm thinking of framing this one for the house.

 Grandpa and Raelan playing with tape.

 Workout buddies.

 Best pals. Oh PS I cut my hair! 

 She got a nasty bruise on her cheek falling into a table at the doctor's office. She then had to have 4 shots. It was a bad day. But look how cute she is anyway!

 She recently became very interested in putting on shoes. I hope she gets over that. I'm not a shoe person, as you can tell by my ever so stylish shoes in the pic.

She spent a good 5 minutes licking the marshmallow residue off this plate. We laughed the whole time.

Good day.