New Year's Resolutions

I thought that I should post our resolutions for the new year, just for the record. Hopefully posting them will help us remember and accomplish them. Amazingly enough, neither of us had weight loss as a high priority, although Allan is working hard to eat better and exercise more in general. I guess we're not in the majority of Americans.

We have two goals that we are working on together.

1. Read our scriptures every single day.

2. Find the positive in everything.

The first is self-explanatory. I'm going to give an example for the second. In recently being diagnosed with celiac disease and struggling with so many health issues, it's hard to be positive. And being negative will really drag you down. So to avoid this, we're trying to find the good in EVERY situation. For the celiac diagnosis, we've decided that at least I was diagnosed with it and not Allan. It may sound strange, but it really is a blessing. Gluten-free food is so incredibly expensive. Just a normal, small box of spaghetti is about $3.50 or so opposed to the $.99 for regular noodles. So if Allan was the one with celiac disease, we couldn't afford to feed him. He eats too much. (This is NOT a fat joke nor is it poking fun at how much he eats.) Since I eat a lot less, it's affordable for us. So at least I can still eat the foods I like. See? A blessing! Hopefully we can keep this up for the whole year. Being positive makes life so much better.

Allan's personal goal is to make it to all of his classes this year. A very worthy goal indeed! I'm really hoping he follows through with it. It makes passing classes so much easier.

My personal goal was the positivity one, but I decided to include Allan in it as well because I know that I'll need the help. It's always nice to have support. 

Now that we have our goals set, we just need to figure out what our reward will be for reaching them. A BIG dance trip? A vacation back to his mission? Who knows? We'll come up with something. For now, we're just plugging away at them.

New Years

This year for new year's Allan and I went dancing, of course! What else would we do? Allan had two performances at First Night downtown with the Salt Lake Jitterbugs. They had a pretty good turnout and did a great job, despite the freezing weather. Allan is SO fun to watch. He's a natural performer.

We then went to The Depot to dance to the live music of Royal Crown Revue, a new-swing band. I've decided I like new-swing in small doses. It was still fun though. We also competed in the competition that night. We took 4th place. Our prize was $30 off a tattoo. We gladly gave that away. 

The competition was hard because I hate competing, but I did it. I didn't look at the judges for the most part so I did ok, but then at the end, I saw them and kind of freaked out. Oh well. I'll just have to do a better job next time. Below is a picture of some of the competitors and judges. We had a great time dressing up and dancing.

Speaking of dressing up, Allan looks so dang good in his zoot suit. And I had so much fun getting my vintage look on. I LOVE red lipstick and the winged liquid eyeliner. I've included pictures below. I remind myself of Marilyn Monroe with my makeup and short blonde hair. We were smokin'! ;)

At the stroke of midnight, we kissed, danced one more song and then went home. We were home and in bed before 1:00 a.m. We were so exhausted that we just went home and went to bed. I think we're getting old. Ha! :)

Haircut

I've been thinking about cutting my hair for awhile and about two weeks ago, I finally did it! I cut 10" off in a ponytail and then another 3" more after that for a grand total of 13". I then cut some drastic side sweep bangs. My hair hasn't been this short since 1st grade. I love it! I actually have to style it now instead of just pulling it up in a bun and I really don't mind. It's nice to look nice. :) My hair is now on its way to Florida to Locks of Love to be made into a nice wig. Below is a picture.

Christmas

Our first Christmas together and it was great! The plan was to spend Christmas eve and Christmas morning with my family and then drive up to Smithfield to spend Christmas afternoon and night with Allan's family. However, due to the HUGE storm, we stayed with my family and had a lot of fun.

We opened up our presents Christmas morning and played with them for a while. My family got Rock Band so it kept us entertained for a couple of hours. We then bundled up and went outside to shovel and play in the (approx.) 10" of snow we got. It took five people and a tractor to get our car out of the driveway. We had snowball fights, made snow angels and played like little kids. It was a blast!

Temple Square

One of my favorite things about Christmas time is seeing the lights at Temple Square. They are amazing. Allan & I had the opportunity to go a couple of weeks ago with his sister, Liz, and her family and his parents. It really was a lot of fun. Our nephew, Benjamin, was full of ooh and ahs. Especially when Uncle Allan put him on his shoulders. Benjamin's face really lit up at being so close to the lights. Their picture is below. Aren't they cute?