Christmas with the Krauses

Because we would only be spending a few weeks in our little apartment in Provo during the Christmas season, we decided to not get a tree and just wait until we made to the the Kraus home for the real thing :) instead, we decorated our little bamboo plant and placed our presents under it!

Then we were off to the Krauses for Christmas in Colorado!

We had a lot of fun the week before Christmas. We spent the first few days catching up on some Christmas shopping, playing tons of games, and eating delicious food.

One of the major things we did was go skiing at Copper Mountain. Aside from a couple experiences when I was young, I had never been skiing before. Needless to say, I was nervous to go up with the pro Kraus members. The first couple runs were a little rough, but after a nice lunch break in the lodge, I actually had fun! I hadn't decided yet if the skiing was worth how sore I was the next week after though, haha.

Soon after, it was Christmas!! One of the Kraus traditions that I really like during Christmastime is to write letters to Christ for His birthday. They write a letters to Him each Christmas Eve, talking about things they are thankful for and what "gift" they want to give Christ for the next year (such as more faith, service, missionary work, etc). On Christmas Eve, they also read the letters they had written the year before, to reflect and see how they did. On Christmas day, they read the new letter. I thought this tradition really helped to bring the Spirit and thoughts of Christ into the home during the season.

Christmas day was awesome! We stayed up so late the night before watching The Grinch together and sleeping in the basement, it was great to not get up too early. We took turns opening up presents then ate SO many crepes for breakfast (though they call the crepes flinza, weirdos). We even took some lovely family photos in our new matching clothes :)

After Christmas, we didn't have to worry about all the Christmas shopping and spent the time partying! There was just barely enough snow for us to go sledding one morning (as long as you stopped before hitting the plants and pond at the bottom).

We also went to the Denver Zoo. At Christmastime, they put up tons of beautiful lights that you can go tour at night. There are even a few animal exhibits that are open. We were especially amused by the kissing giraffes and the eating baby elephant.

Then it was New Years Eve, and time to go skiing! We again went up to Copper Mountain, and boy was it chilly this time. When we started skiing at sunrise, it was about -3 degrees. If I remember correctly, the high that day was 8 degrees. The lifts were the worst with the temperature and wind. Thankfully, I seemed to start where I left off last time, and hadn't gotten any worse. I actually had a lot of fun this time. I stayed on the greens the whole day still, but I was falling a maximum of only three times per run, which was a major improvement, haha. Dustan spent most of the day on top of the mountain on the hard stuff with his brothers and dad. Unfortunately, we forgot to bring the correct case for our GoPro, so we didn't get the cool pictures and videos we wanted. But it was a blast nonetheless!

It was harder than normal to stay up for the New Year because of the long day skiing. I loved the Kraus tradition of eating finger foods all evening, like little smokies, cocktail shrimp, egg rolls, pumpkin rolls, and leftover Santa cookies. When midnight hit, we ran into the streets to bang pots and pans (apparently that's a normal tradition?!? Who knew!) and I got a New Years kiss :)

After that, it was time to head back to Provo :( we made a couple stops on the way out of town to take pictures in the beautiful Colorado mountains. As we drove, we finished listening to the first Harry Potter book and started the second. And even though we miss Christmas break with family, it is nice to be back in our little home!

Goals for 2016

One of our most successful goals for 2015 was this blog! We are excited to continue this tradition of recording our adventures and progress through marriage during the year 2016. The last couple weeks we have been discussing what other goals and resolutions we want to have during this new year, and we have decided that instead of just listing the goal, we also want to make a plan to fulfill the goal. We hope this will our goals more attainable. So we have written our goals below, and the small beginnings of the plans we have to succeed :)

Spiritual

Family History Work: We want to better understand how familysearch.org works and how we can learn about our own families from it and help complete their temple ordinances. We also want to start indexing to help others this same way, maybe by saying we'll complete a certain amount of names each month.

Companion Study: Each year, Sunday school focuses on a different book to study. For this year, we decided we would follow along with the Sunday school manual and read the Book of Mormon and study the other resources provided to help us gain a deeper understanding.

Personal Study: We don't have a strong plan for our personal study yet, but we want to be more consistent in studying each day rather than simply reading.

Temple Attendance: Because we live so close to a dozen temples, going should be easy. But it isn't always. This year, at least while we are in Provo, we want to try and get to the temple to do some sort of work at least once every three weeks. Once we have a better understanding of what our schedule will be like this year, we can alter that goal.

Physical

Exercising: As most people do at the New Year, we want to exercise more (especially more than we did this last fall semester, it was rough). For right now, our plan is to exercise four days a week and we hope to increase that throughout the year. We are enrolled together in a couple exercise classes, weight lifting and yoga, which should be fun to do together and get working out. These are both on Monday and Wednesday. The other days, we hope to get our cardio in.

Eating Habits: One of the main parts of this goal is to simply not overeat. Kind of going along with this, we don't want to eat out as much as we have in the past. We LOVE going out and trying new restaurants, and we used to limit ourselves to going out once a week. This year, we want to set a stricter budget for how much money we have to go out to eat, and stick to it.

FUN :)

Graduation Trip: We graduate in April!! Though we haven't made any decisions yet, we are hoping to go on a small trip to celebrate after graduation (similar to our Jamaica trip last summer). As a goal, we want to plan and go on this trip!

Review of Our 2015 Goals

As we were writing our goals for 2016, we decided to look back on our post about our 2015 goals. Overall, they went fairly well!

For our physical goals, we did really well through the end of August, but totally fell off the wagon during fall semester. Before then, we were getting out to exercise most week days and even on the weekends sometimes.

Spiritually, we had a smashing success! We wanted to make sure we had Family Home Evening every week with a good lesson and activity, which we had nearly every singly week. We wanted to read a full chapter or scripture each night for companion study, and looking back on the year, we only missed a few days (one of which was on Christmas Eve when we fell asleep watching The Grinch, haha).

For our marriage goals, we wanted to go on a date each week, make new married friends, and plan a trip to Jamaica! We love going on dates each week, that one wasn't too hard :) during the beginning of last year, we had a hard time making married friends. We just seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But during our short time in Iowa over the summer and back at BYU for fall, it went great and we have had a lot of fun doing game nights and going on trips and dates with new couples we've met. And of course, we LOVED our trip to Jamaica!

2015 was a great year, and we look forward to 2016!