I love Christmas!!!

Well it's Christmas time and I'm actually kind of sad that it's already the 14th of December; Christmas is coming way too fast and before I know it it's gonna be over.
We've had a busy couple of weekends. On Friday last week we went to Taylor's cousin Amanda's UVU Christmas ballroom dance production. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would and I was completely impressed with all of the dancers. It was a good night. We went to another dance recital yesterday; this time it was our niece Livvy's recital. I'm not gonna lie, we got lost on our way there and her dance was the first one so we totally missed it. She looked very cute in her little leotard though and I'm sure she did great. Hopefully next time we'll actually make it to see her dance.
Last Saturday morning I went to a bread class taught by the "bread lady" and her daughter. For anyone who hasn't heard of this lady she is amazing. She's seriously a bread (and all things bread-related) guru! Check out her blog here bread lady's blog. Marilyn and I went to the class together; I was excited to go and I knew it would be helpful because I am definitely not a bread-making genius but I had no idea how much I would love the class. I learned so much! This lady has been giving these classes for over a decade and now I can see why she continues to be in such high demand. The bread lady's not only a genius about bread (although that's obviously her specialty), she's also very smart about budgeting and meal planning and food storage etc. She gives awesome tips and advice about so many things. Even for anyone who thinks they're already pretty bread savvy I would HIGHLY recommend taking this $20 class.I put my new knowledge to use last Sunday. We had Landry and Susan over for dinner and we had homemade pizza, breadsticks and for dessert a delicious strawberry cream cheese braid. I forgot to get any pictures of my creations. Yesterday we had some friends, Nola and Brian, over for lunch and we had soup and breadsticks. This time the breadsticks turned out even better cause I put more seasoning on them. I also made some loaves of bread. I hope to never buy store bought bread from now on.

We LOVE homemade bread! At our house we're pretty much on an all carbs diet most of the time.

After our nephew Porter's baptism last Saturday we went to the mall and did some serious Christmas shopping, which was very enjoyable :) I sure do LOVE shopping! After shopping and stopping by a friend's house for the end of the Jazz game we came home and even though we were so tired I made Taylor help me put up the Christmas tree and some lights and decorations around the house.

If you look closely you can see the twisty lights on the railing of both our decks.

This pic's kinda blurry.

We got this chintzy tree last year because that's all our little apartment could fit.

This year we were too lazy and cheap to get a new tree so we're sticking with this little guy. It works for now. Taylor likes how my dad uses all blue lights for his Christmas decor (go Cougs!) so we are kind of following in his footsteps and showing our love for BYU with all the blue. We made some delicious hot chocolate because it seems like you should drink hot chocolate when putting up Christmas decorations. Last night we built and decorated the gingerbread house. As you can tell, we didn't put a lot of time and effort into the design but we had fun. Bring on Santa!

Yeah, it looks like little kids did it...