Christmas in November?!

So mom came into town about 3 weeks ago and with her she brought all these christmas decorations that my Aunt Sandy gave Mary and I. Because our apartment is so small we had them sitting out in plain view ever since and they have been whispering to us every time we saw them telling us to put them up! So we justified putting them up two weeks before the official "after thanksgiving so it's ok to put up the decorations" date because we figured we would only be able to enjoy them for two weeks before we went back down to Utah for X-mas break :)

Before...

After!

I talked with Dad while writing this post and he mentioned how he was feeling "jolly" this year and wanted to decorate early on the 22nd... the 22nd of December! I realized that our over-compensation with decorating may be caused by Dad making us wait so long every year! Merry early Christmas!

Family Matters

We've had a great and busy week. Last weekend we got to go down and see our new little nephew John Harold Alley Jr. He has a few features of his dad, most notably his upper lip which sticks out like John's did.

John Harold Alley Jr.

It was great seeing the family also. Julie and Steve were in town so we were with them the whole time. Saturday we had the whole family together so we went to the park and played tennis and volleyball and had a little picnic.

The Fam at the park

It was great being home also because mom let me raid the food storage! I don't think she quite understands how much that means to us poor married college students. We had an eventful drive home also as my gas gauge decided to get stuck at 2 bars and thus running out of gas about 15 minutes outside of Idaho Falls. Luckily my cousin Kariessa lives in IF and she sent her husband out to rescue us and bring gas. We were so grateful they came out because we don't what else we would have done without them.

We finished our decorations up for Halloween for FHE. We carved some pumpkins and decorated the outside of the apartment. I'll let the pictures explain...

The outside of the Apt. Our theme was the "Great Pumpkin"

The pumpkin eating the scarecrow... haha!

We enjoyed more family time over the weekend too. Mary's sister Liz came up and got away from BYU life and stayed for a few days. We all went to the African Childrens Choir performance on saturday night which was fun and touching. One girl shared a story of how she walked 6 miles every day to go to school! I thought of how sometimes Im lazy and drive to the library which is about a 10 minute walk... It put things in perspective. We also got to have dinner with Kariessa and Jared and his family. We had tried to invite them to have dinner at our place to thank them for rescuing us but it ended being dinner at the Lamphs! It has been a joy being able to be with our family this last week.