Sean's 25th Birthday!

Today is Sean's 25th birthday! And we had a wonderful day!

We started out our morning by having breakfast at our favorite joint, The Antique Kitchen. And it turns out that when you go on your birthday, you get a discount off your meal! It was wonderful.

Then we opened up a few presents and had some alone time together before we headed out to Paw Paw for Sean's party. I had been planning his party for a few weeks, because Sean has never really had a birthday party with his friends before... or at least not that Sean could really remember. And me, being a person who loves to plan fun get-togethers just had to plan something.

We found out on December 15th that Sean was officially hired with Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety (in other words he is going to be both a police officer and a fire fighter). We also found out that I got accepted to Western Michigan University for graduate school... it was a very exciting day, and the Lord blessed us greatly.

So back to planning Sean's party. I was able to convince him to have a few other people besides his family there if we celebrated his being hired with the city as well. We were able to have the Szekely, Skinner, Osbon, and Quantz families over to Sean's parents' home, as well as the Ulman family and most of the Koontz family. It was a wonderful celebration of Sean turning a quarter of a century old, and he and Ben being hired with the city.

Sean's party was Chicago Cubs themed since we were unable to make it to a game this summer, and Sean LOVES the Cubs. Katie Koontz made the most delicious cake I have ever had, and it looked like the old kiosk at Wrigley Stadium with a baseball that stuck out as if had been thrown into the cake!

Scott gave a toast to congratulate Sean and Ben for their accomplishments and looking forward to the kick off of an awesome career. Scott said some wonderful things, and gave advice that the boys will hopefully remember.

Happy birthday, Seanie! Hope this coming year will be full of as much love and exciting changes as this previous year has brought!

Thanksgiving 2010

This Thanksgiving was our first together as a married couple! We have decided that we are going to try to spend every other holiday with Sean's family, so Easter was with the Szekely's which meant that Thanksgiving was with the Davis family. My parents had originally decided to go to Syracuse to be with Peter and Erin for the holiday, but Peter wanted to come to MI. So my parents and Peter and Erin flew into Detroit and drove over to Kalamazoo the Tuesday before.

Wednesday was a fun-filled day of wrestling, shopping, getting nails done, and baking! Peter and Sean went to Paw Paw wrestling practice in the morning, then Erin, my mom, the Krenk girls, and I went to get our toes beautified! Then home to bake cookies, cheesecake, and these really yummy tarts!

Thursday I cooked the turkey all by myself! Sean had to work at Sear's in the morning, so before my family came over I set the table, made broccoli casserole, and made sure the rolls were rising properly. Then I met my family and Sean at Sweet Water's donuts (yes, they were actually open!) for a quick breakfast before dinner. The other things that we had were sauteed veggies, corn, garlic mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, Sean's yummy rolls, apple salad, and of course, TURKEY!! Then we went to Sean's parents' house for dessert!

Friday morning Sean needed to at Sear's by 3:30am!! He had a filling fall out, and he woke me up in a panic thinking it was part of his tooth. After that I couldn't fall back asleep, so I decided to do some Black Friday shopping. I got my first pair of snow boots for $15 at Burlington Coat Factory!! The women's sizes were too big, so I had to get the children's size, but hey it saved me $5 which I then used to buy some DVDs at Target where were on UBER sale! But I'm not going to post about Christmas presents here because they are a secret! I had to work Friday night at the Kalamazoo Valley Museum so the family came in to see the Race: Are we so different? exhibit, and see our Pink Floyd laser show. They got to see about 20 minutes of the laser show and then the cooling system in our planetarium broke so it wouldn't work anymore!

Saturday, Peter went to wrestling practice again, and then we chatted some at the hotel before the family headed back to Detroit.

It was a wonderful visit, and as Sean said, it was really nice but too short!

Pictures will be posted soon, or you can see them on Facebook, Sean and I are tagged in a few that my mom posted!

So I have been horrible with my new goal of writing something new about once a week... I haven't even posted once a month!

Anyways, Sean and I are very excited for Christmas which is just around the corner! It's been so fun figuring out what traditions we should have as a family! We have decided that we should make sugar cookies (which we will be doing with this super cute family that we have become friends with over the past month or so), and go caroling together. We have our Christmas cards almost finished, we're just waiting to hear back on some news before we officially print out the Christmas letter.

We have our home all decorated minus the tree because Skyler thinks that the tree is her personal jungle gym! And since we don't want all of our ornaments to get broken we just have lights. And I'm really mad at Target because they don't sell nativity sets in the store anymore, AND when I asked a worker about them she didn't even know what a nativity was!! I mean, what is this world coming too!!

We are excited for the Christmas concert that the KUB is putting on tomorrow night at 6:00. And this Sunday will be our last at the University Branch and we will be moving to the family ward (Kalamazoo First Ward).

Hope you all are having a wonderful holiday season, and that you are staying safe! Our next few posts will be about Thanksgiving dinner, and hopefully we'll know soon about the exciting news and we'll post about that too!!