4th of July Weekend

So we had a 3 day weekend over the 4th of July and it was so much fun! The first activity was the Rexburg 4th of July parade that TJ marched in. He was so good! Julia sat out in the sun all by herself waiting for him....and he finally came!!



As you can see, Julia has some pretty mad camera skills. Anyway, after the parade was over, we met up with our friends Kate and Jeff and headed to Idaho Falls to watch the fireworks and BBQ. Granted, this was at about 4 in the afternoon so we only had to wait about 6 hours for the fireworks, but we kept ourselves pretty entertained. We played some games, taught Jeff and Kate the amazing card game called Hand and Foot, ate some amazing stake (after the Men assembled our new high-tech $10 grill), and had a riveting watermelon seed spitting contest.



Julia doesn't like watermelon, but she still got to be in one of the pictures

On Saturday, TJ had to practice for a little while, but after he was done, we left for Yellowstone! It was TJ's first time! Our goal was to see a bear. We'll see if that happened....
It didn't take us very long to see wildlife. We saw TONS of bison and elk. After stopping to take pictures a few times, we stopped to go on a little hike. Even though it was only 5 miles roundtrip, we were both pretty tired by the time we got to our destination of Fairy Falls. It was pretty and we had fun speculating why it was named Fairy Falls. Did a fairy discover it? Is it whimpy and so people rudely called it Fairy Falls? Is it so small that it's only a waterfall to a fairy? These were just a few of our brilliant ideas. Probably the most exciting thing about Fairy falls, however, was the yellow bellied marmot! It was a friendly little guy and came pretty close to us. We named him Fred.


On the return trip, we had some fun fighting off gnats. TJ's head ended up with little red dots all over it :( Julia's probably did too, but they were a little harder to see.
Next we headed to Old Faithful. We didn't feel like waiting around for it to errupt, so we left a little dissapointed. We did, however, sight some awesome hippies. They all had dreadlocks (even the 10-year-old daughter) and TJ was pretty grossed out by the never-been-shaved legs the females were sporting.
We stopped a few more times to take pictures and then headed out of Yellowstone into Teton National Park. We saw more bison and elk and had a beautiful view of the Teton mountains. The most exciting part, however, was our sighting of none other than a BEAR. It was pretty much amazing. There were two of them and when we both got out of the car to try and get a good look at them, one started crossing the road in front of us and we were told very firmly to get back in our car by the ranger. TJ was more than happy to comply.

We saw some more animals after that, including a bison pooping, but unfortunately it was to dark and none of the pictures or videos turned out very well. All in all, I'd say it was a pretty good trip!

Married Life...

So now that you guys have seen all of our wedding pictures, you know that we're married but might be wondering, "What's next?" Well let me tell you!
After our little accident and hour from home because the U-Haul trailer (totaling the truck and damaging a lot of our stuff in the process), we bought plane tickets, packed as much of our stuff as we could, and headed back to Idaho. Our first day back we thought it might be fun to have a bed to sleep on, so having no luck with Craig's List, we bought the cheapest one we could find from The Mattress Place (they sell mostly mattresses there, in case you were wondering) here in town. The mattress was all the furniture we had for a while and so we were forced to spend all our time in the bedroom (because it was the only place to sit! come on guys...)
Once we finally got our love sac that we'd been waiting for since thanksgiving, we were grateful to have somewhere else to hang out. The bed was a little awkward when we had friends over. After that, things really got rolling and after getting some unexpected extra money, we decided to buy a couch and a kitchen table. This place started actually feeling like a home!
Over their spring break, Julia's family came out to visit and brought a lot of the stuff that we'd had to leave home, including a bed frame, a coffee table, and TJ's drum set. We're now on the brink of have to much stuff!
We just recently went up to the Seattle area to visit Julia's sister Hillary and her family and TJ's sister Katy and her family. The trip was amazing and we got some nice weather (TJ ended up with a pretty bad sunburn), though the day we left, it was actually snowing! The snow didn't last to long once we got past snoqualmie pass, which was lucky. That luck didn't last long though... Right past Couer d'Alene we ran into a blizzard. After it got so bad that we were driving around 10 mph or less, we tried to stop at a hotel, but they were all full! We tried to keep going but didn't make it very far before we just pulled off some remote exit and tried to get some sleep. That was only semi-successful since we had to wake up every half-hour or so to heat the car back up. After about 3 hours, we started on the road again. We made it about 45 mins away from home, and then....got a flat tire. After a good samaritan stopped to help us get one of the bolts off, we finally got on our way an made it safely home! After this little adventure along with all our other, we've come to the conclusion we should always fly from now on.
So now the summer semester has started and we're both in school. It's pretty stressful and we don't see each other half as much as we would like, but we're dealing. We've finally gotten most of our apartment decorated, excluding our wedding pictures (Julia's in the process of staining the frames), and it looks great, we think. :) Most of the decorations we got at Ikea while we were in Firth visiting Katy. She's basically our hero now for introducing us to this blessed store. So here it is! We hope you like it....

Here's TJ sleeping on the job, as usual...


Here's our pretty table... and Julia posing like a dork

Here's one view of our kitchen (which TJ cleaned just for you!), hallway, bathroom (door on the left) and bedroom (door on the right)

And here's a final view of our kitchen.

We love you all! We're going to be lots better about writing on here. We've decided since neither of us are very good about writing in our journals, this is the next best thing! :) Remember, patience is a virtue....

Wedding Pictures!