Holidays

I have always liked celebrating holidays. In middle school I used to try to decorate my bedroom for each of the holidays, but there is only so much you can do in a little bedroom. But now that I am married and we have a place of our own, it is much easier and much more fun! The day after my birthday I came home from work to find that Samuel had surprised me by decorating the whole front room with Halloween decorations. He did a very good job and was very thorough. It is really hard to get a picture of the whole apartment, but here are my attempts:





Kylie had given me the trick-or-treat plaque in the picture above for my birthday so it was cool that Samuel could find a home for it so quickly. It has been a lot of fun to have the decorations up for the couple weeks leading up to Halloween.

Last week we had hot chocolate and carved jack-o-lanterns with our friends and neighbors Pete and Dani and it was a lot of fun.

Our pumpkins are all on the steps in front of our apartment in a nice little pumpkin family.

Last night we had a Halloween party and had some of our friends and family over. These are the Halloween treats I made:

Apples for bobbing, candy bowl, orange drink, ghost cookies, and pumpkin chocolate chip muffins

We have been getting a lot of good use out of the orange dishes my mom bought for the wedding. And the cake platter/punch bowl that Becky gave us as well:

Samuel really wanted to have an apple bobbing contest and so we did and it was fun. The girls did a lot better than the boys though :)








We have done some other things to celebrate Halloween as well, like making Halloween crafts at a relief society activity, making Halloween cookies and other treats, etc. It has been fun and I am excited for all the other holidays coming up as well. Especially Christmas! I love Christmas season!! And it is definitely the most fun to decorate for. We are hoping to find a little mini Christmas tree we can put up if they aren't too expensive. And I already have ideas for other decorations swimming around in my head. I love nativity scenes, especially seeing ones from around the world, so it will be fun to, some day in the future, have some of those in our house. We have also already been talking about the different Christmas treats we could make. I have a tendency to plan way ahead when I am excited about something so I have had ideas for Christmas for a long time. But now we aren't very far away at all and stores are starting to put Christmas stuff up already. Yeah!! I love all the aspects of Christmas. SO EXCITED!!

Samuel's Fashion Sense

Since Samuel is such a "manly man" who is into all things masculine and would be very offended to be told he is not a man, I was surprised to find that he actually has quite a few opinions about women's fashion... and good ones too. I never really liked shoe shopping that much until I met Samuel. A little while back I let Samuel go shoe shopping with me and pick out a pair of high heels for me. These are the ones I came home with:

They might not look like it in the picture, but they were higher than any other pair of high heels I owned. Surprisingly though, they were not uncomfortable and I really like them.

This summer I said something to Samuel while we were in a store about how I thought I might want to get a purse for my birthday or Christmas since I have only ever had the small ones that hold nothing more than my wallet, and the tote bag I had used for a long time had worn out with a hole in the side. Instead of waiting until later Samuel took us over to the purse section right then and proceeded to pick out different purses while others he pointed out as "too old woman like" or "not fashionable." We narrowed it down to two and then this was the one we picked out:

I didn't think I would ever own an alligator skin type purse, but I actually really like it and it has gotten a lot of good use.

Another time that we were walking through the mall Samuel spotted these teal high heels through the window:

I had looked all over for teal shoes for the our wedding but I hadn't found any until now. They were not very expensive and so Samuel said "We have to get them" (Yes, his words, not mine :) ). There was a buy one get one 50% off sale on the high heels and so we also got these black high heels:


It's not very often that we buy shoes, clothes, etc with our limited budget but it has been fun to see a different side of manly Samuel who has a good fashion sense :).