Crafts, Crafts, Crafts! :)

As all of you college students know, finals are fast approaching. This means that if any of you are like me at all you have been a nervous wreck/emotional rollercoaster/grouchy/ball of stress all at the same time. I feel like my whole life has been classes, homework, work, sleep, repeat. I haven't even had hardly any "Eric time" which makes things even worse. I have been stressed about keeping my scholarship thanks to my dang Chemistry class/lack of motivation, applying for USU, getting all of our Christmas gifts bought, making our money stretch just a little bit further, and trying to get a work schedule that actually gives me the chance to see my family over the holidays. With all of this stress I have had a similar thought several times. "Why?" Why is the Lord doing this to me and now of all times. I have felt constantly overwhelmed, like none of my hard work pays off, and that even though we are doing everything we should and keeping the commandments we are still not receiving the blessings that others so easily receive.
A couple days ago I decided that my bad attitude was doing nothing but dragging me down so I turned to Pinterest for some inspiration (haha.) I found several quotes that just seemed to fit my life perfectly. The first was "Sometimes the Savior prefers to prepare us to fight through the storm, rather than calm the storm for us." This made me realize that if everything in my life was easy I would never learn anything. Another thought was "Having faith in God means having faith in his timing as well." Even though I may feel like it is the time for me to receive certain blessings God may feel differently and I need to remember to seek God's will not my own. My last thought was just to be grateful for what I have. The past few weeks I have been dwelling on the things that I don't have. I don't get the weekends off to go home and see my family rather than I get to work the weekend to make a little extra money. Or I don't get to spend enough time with Eric rather than every night I get to crawl into bed next to my husband and spend way more time with him than military wives get to spend their husbands. I have decided that I need to start working on changing my perspective. I can sit around and complain all I want but nothing is going to change unless I make it change. I need to stop complaining and start being someone others enjoy being around. I need to trust in the Lord with all my heart and with every decision he makes. I am so blessed and even if it took this crazy month to make me realize it I am so grateful.

and now for a little less serious topic..

So lately Eric and I have been into crafting! I have been trying to gain a good variety of holiday decorations so Wood Connection has recieved about half of our income haa... So this post I thought I would post a few pictures from the holidays! :)

This is really a craft but we had so much fun carving pumpkins I thought I'd post a pic anyways! :)
Eric made his own design (the alien) and I cut mine out of a book (I know I know, creative!)

This one was a lot of fun! We made this turkey to hang on our door :)

Pinterest has taken over my life the past couple weeks... but thanks to this I have super cute christmas decorations like the cute ornaments hanging from our curtain rod! :)

Another pinterest craft... this one was hard and kind of expensive and at first I didn't like it very much but the longer I have it hanging up the more I like it.

Wood Connection... we seriously can go in that store without spending at least $40! We made this adorable Santa decoration with all sorts of things haha!

This is probably my favorite! We actually planned on hanging this on the door until I found the ornament wreath. The thing that is so fun about this one is that for every holiday/season they have a cute set to hang on the welcome board so we can just keep it up all year round! :)

and of course... our beautiful christmas tree :) Eric picked this tree and cut it down himself!

So needless to say our house is very "Christmas-y." I can't wait to get a bigger place so we can even more decorations haha!

Happy Halloween :)

I was feeling a little bored this morning so I decided to "Spook-ify" our blog! :)
Eric's family LOVES halloween so we are getting pretty excited. In fact, I requested work off and we are going to miss classes the day of halloween so we can go home and go trick or treating with all of our adorable neices and nephews!
SO... exciting news? Let's face it, Eric and I are living in Ephraim... that pretty much eliminates any exciting news haha. We have had some fun things happen in the past couple of weeks, however. I have had to work on the weekends for 4 weeks in a row so we haven't been able to go and see our family, but they have definitely helped make life more bearable. On conference weekend Chad and Melanie drove down and came to see our apartment and then we went out to lunch! I loved that because hardly anyone has been over to see our apartment! Last weekend we met Eric's family at Thanksgiving Point for Grandma Allred's 75th birthday. It was so much fun! We got to see all the pehrson kids and just relax. Yesterday we went to Provo and met up with Chad, Melanie, and Emily and went out to eat at Ruby River for Mel's birthday!
This week is a pretty crazy one for us! Today is my wonderful mom's birthday, tomorrow is our nephew Aidan's birthday, and Thursday is Melanies birthday! Luckily we get to go home this weekend to celebrate with everyone.
Other than that not too much has happened! Eric and I are looking into what we want for Christmas and we have drawn names for gift exchanges already so we are just trying to get a head start on the shopping!

We get super bored here so if any of you have the urge to come to Ephraim give us a call! :)

On and ending note, I thought I'd share this adorable picture of our new neice who is getting so big! We love her chubby cheeks, and isn't that witch hat the cutest thing?! Like I said, we have the most adorable neices and nephews! :)

Oops....

I know, I know, I am a typical blog slacker! Let's see if we can get caught up here....

Over the summer me and Eric lived with my Grandma and Grandpa Darts house in Tooele. I worked at walmart and Eric worked for the school district!

The summer wasn't too eventful. Lots of working and spending as much time as we could with our families.

We got to go to St. George with the Allred family and go to the Tuacahn and see the Little Mermaid, which was super fun. Other than that we stuck pretty close to Tooele county getting in more than our fair share of family barbaques and get togethers. All in all, we had a pretty good summer.

As of now we are back in Ephraim for the school year. School started a couple weeks ago and so far so good. Eric is taking a math class and modern social problems. I am taking interpersonal communications, courtship and marriage, jazz dance, and intro to dance. We are also taking intro to chemistry, a chemistry lab, intro to mass media together, and are hoping to get into a miracle of forgiveness institute class together. Other than having a crappy chemistry proffessor we really can't complain.

Now for our living situation... Me and Eric are staying at an apartment complex called Oak Creek apartments... we haven't been too pleased with them. We decided to switch to this apartment because month was $50 cheaper a month and we get 2 bedrooms whereas with the other apartment we only got 1. What we didn't take into account, however the fact that 1 bedroom apartment included full interenet and cable TV servieces. We just assumed we could easily get internet and cable for $50 or cheaper a month. Well we have ended up having to pay $60 a month for internet and your basic 15 channels so that was kind of a bummer, but it was like my mom said, that just sort of evened out getting the extra bedroom. Where we really became unhappy was with the condition of our apartment....

The day we went to move in the manager of our apartment complex told us that they forgot to have the carpets cleaned and that a man was coming to clean the carpets at 11 AM... well it was 9 AM and we were already there. So we went and found some things to do until after the carpets were cleaned and then started to move everything in. The carpets being cleaned, however, brought us several problems such as no where to set up all of our furniture and our favorite... making the entire apartment smell like dog pee.

To add to the awesome carpet issue, we also moved in to find mold growing in our freezer, the walls with holes all over them and having the paint be chipped and worn away, the oven and cubbords all had caked on food, the bathroom had build-up along the bottom of the tub and a used belly button ring in the medicine cabinent, not to mention that everything just looked dirty.

So we called the manager and told her the condition of the apartment and all of the problems and she told us she would go look and see what she could do. We recieved a phone call back saying that they wouldn't do anything.

Well we have no officially lived in the apartment for 3 weeks and after trying everything I could think of to get the pee out of the carpet, adding 2 fresh coats of paint to the kitchen, calking the bathroom, scrubbing the walls with countless magic erasers, going through multiple bottles of wall putty, and giving the entire apartment a good scrub with some bleach we finally finished everything 3 days ago. Great news is that we love it now, and with the major help of some wallflowers and scentsy's our apartment no longer smells like dog pee!

We still aren't completely sold on the place, however. We have had some issues such as our neighbor that lives underneath us calling in a complaint because we leave our apartment and walk around upstairs after the 10 PM curfew (when I get home from work late.) and a few dumb things like that but other than that nothing too horrible!

So now for some pictures of our masterpiece apartment that took way too much work, pain, sweat, tears, frustration, and trouble.

 Front door :)

Living room!

The kitchen! :)

 Kitchen Table :)

 Our Bedroom! :)

 The Spare Room!

 Bathroom!

Summer :)

I haven't posted in a while because nothing too excited has happened to be completely honest haha! But I figured I would just summarize the basics of the new married life :)
For the summer me and Eric are trying to save some money (since when we got married neither of us had a dime we decided that saving the majority of our summer earnings was probably best.) so we are currently living in Tooele at my Grandma's house! In the fall we will be moving to Ephraim so we can attend Snow College to finish up our associates degrees (with the help of some awesome grants luckily!) and we have a super tiny, but cute apartment lined up!
We (mainly me haha!) are super excited to have our own apartment and to be able to use all of our cute new wedding gifts!
Eric is working for Tooele County School District and he is such a trooper! He goes out in the burning sun and works his tail off for us Mon-Thur for 10 hours a day. He really likes the kid that he works with named Porter so that is good for him and he could ask for better hours or days!
I am working at Wal Mart unfortunately haha! I work in the back as an ICS associate and it is the worst job I have ever had. The reason I am sticking it out is so that I will be able to transfer to Ephraim for the school year (Which those of you who have ever looked for a job in Ephraim know what a good deal that is haha!)
Me and Eric both have the 4th of July off so we are getting excited to do something fun!

Other recent happenings... My lovely husband took me out for my birthday and spoiled me rotten.. I had buyers remorse extremely bad afterwards, that's for sure haha! But we had a great night! We went to Benihana's for dinner and he took me to Rue 21 and bought me and entire outfit, not to mention the adorable decorations for our future home! I definitely have to make sure I make is  birthday just as awesome!

We have really just been loving the married life and enjoying each others company, eating out way too much, and falling more in love :)
I couldn't ask for a better life!

Happily Ever After :)

So our big day finally came!!

Me and Eric were married in the Draper Temple on May 6th, 2011 <3

So many exciting things have happened the past little bit!

I went through the temple on May 4th

and even more exciting than that, my dad went through the same day and I had the chance to be sealed to my family.

It was the most amazing day (for 2 more days anyways haha!)

It was such a special feeling to not only be able to participate in a temple ceramony for the first time, I got to enjoy it with both of my parents.

Even though we had a few struggles getting there, it was such a neat day.

When we arrived at the temple the temple workers asked me where my fiance was....

well he was at home because me and mom had misunderstood the instructions and told him he didn't need to come until later!

So after they assured a million times that everything would still be fine and work out with him coming later I went to get ready and just before we getting ready to start one of the temple workers came in and said "You're fiance just arrived and he says you have his temple recommend!"

well that was also at home... Eric had forgot to remind that I needed to bring his recommend with me because it was in my car and with all of the other stresses going on I didn't even think about it!

So I started crying (WAYYYYY embarrassing!) and all of the temple workers and my mom and my grandma were trying to calm me down and I felt dumb for crying so that made me even more upset and it was just a big mess haha!

But.... They were able to get ahold of our college ward bishop and confirm that Eric had a valid recommend and everything went smoothly after that! :)

After the sealing we got to go to Red Lobster for dinner with all of our close family guest who came to celebrate our big day and to celebrate Eric's sister's, Kami, birthday! It was a lot of fun!

So now for the big event...

Our wedding was truly all I could have asked it to be!

It was the most magical day of my life and I couldn't have wanted anything better!

We woke up super early (like 4:30 AM for me! :/) and got ready and drove into Draper to be sealed for time and all eternity.

We had Eric's sister's husband's uncle (hahaha! confusing I know!) seal us!

Basically Eric's brother-in-law is David S. Baxter of the seventy's nephew!

He did such an amazing job! He talked about the Royal wedding and how that even with all the prepartion and the whole world being involved, what me and Eric had the oppurtunity to go through was so much more special because we had the opportunity to be married in the Lord's temple.

One of our favorite things he said that while the royal wedding was so beautiful and the ceremony seemed so nice, when they said "I Do" the were saying that they agreed upon a divorce but since me and Eric were married for longer than just "till death do we part" we were agreeing for a relationship that never has to end as long as we keep the convenants we made and follow the commandments of the church and always vow to take care of each other and never let our love die.

It was such a special speech and me and Eric both felt so honored to have a member of the seventy there to share our big day with us!

Also... Did i mention that David S. Baxter has THEEE most amazing English Accent I have ever heard! haha!

After we were sealed our amazing photographer took our pictures with all of our lovely family members and friends who came to the temple and we headed back to Tooele County to get ready for the luncheon!

Before me and Eric went to his sisters house to help set up we went to his house so he could change and I got the most disgusting burn from their steamer on my leg! It was horrible!

The luncheon went really well and thanks to help from our awesome family we had delicous soups, fruits, sandwiches, salads, and Eric's favorite, Chik-Fil-A chicken nuggets haha!

The reception...

everything was so beautiful! The decoraters and my mom and the rest of my family all did such a great job and still owe them so much! It was everything I had ever pictured for my wedding! Our colors were aqua/turqoise blue and lime green! We had the ceilings and walls covered in a beautiful white fabric with blue and green chinese lanterns hanging from the ceilings! All of our chairs had white chair covers and either blue or green sash tied around them and all of our tables had either a blue or green overlay over a white table cloth and to top it off we had damask printed table runners on all of the table runners! The buffet, cake, and sign in tables all had black table clothes with the table runners and our centerpieces were square vases filled with limes and wire that was all twisted with 2 white calla lillies and 2 blue gerber daisies! Our back drop were 2 adorable black doors with monogrammed "A's" I can't wait to get the pictures so I can post them! Everything was perfect!

The honeymoon :)

For our honeymoon me and Eric went to California and went to six flags, disneyland, a pirate dinner, the beach, and shopping at downtown disney! We were still super tired from all of the wedding excitement but it was still a ton of fun!

Me and Eric are now living in Tooele at my Grandma's house for the summer and we are planning to back to Snow College in the fall! I am starting my new job at Wal Mart this Thursday and Eric is still job hunting away! All in all.... We have loved being married for the whole week that we have been haha! We can't wait for all the adventures to come :)

Catch up!

Well Just a quick catch up on the past couple weeks...
Me and Eric have this week of classes and then a week of finals and we are done with school!!!

...until next year of course :/

I am definitely ready to be able to worry about strictly wedding things!

So happenings in the past couple of weeks, there have been a lot!

My favorite though, on April 8th Eric turned 22!!!

Two days before his birthday we had a big steak and potato dinner birthday party with his roommates that was super fun!

And then on his actual birthday we went out to Tucanoes at the gateway with his family!
It was so much fun!
He got lots of fun things like an awesome new pair of Nike shoes from his parents and some basketball clothes from both his family and mine! He also got a new basketball so he can go play whenever he wants to from my parents and then from me... He got tickets to the "A Rocket To the Moon" concert and t-shirt from the concert! We had such a great time!
The concert was on the monday after his birthday and the bands Go Radio, Anarbor, Valencia, Runner Runner, and of course, A Rocket To the Moon.
We fell in love with the band Runner Runner!
Eric had listened to them a little bit before but after seeing them live we have definitely had to add them to our favorites list!
All in all, Eric's birthday was so much fun and I think he enjoyed it! (I hope!!)

Me and Eric at the concert :)

Me and Eric with the lead singer of Runner Runner! :)

An other exciting event was our Bridal/Groomal pictures! :)
The weather, once again, didn't want to cooperate with us.
So we ended up having to reschedule from Saturday to Monday and miss our classes.

Pictures went really well though! I can't wait until we get them!

Here is one sneak peak (the only sneak peak we have even seen!)

7 weeks and counting :)

Just a fun update on all the wedding plans...
Things are really starting to come together!
We are getting more and more excited by the day! :)
As Eric said in his blog post a couple weeks ago, we had our engagements taken and WOW did they turn out awesome.
Our photographer (Leah Miller Photography [leahmillerphotography.com]) did an amazing job :)
Other exciting news... This past weekend we stopped and met my mom at Allyse's Bridal on our way home from school and paid for my dress in full and picked out a veil!
This weekend I actually get to bring everything home :) I can't wait!
We also went and picked out Eric a handsome new suit and get to pick that up soon too!
We paid the decoraters and after a very LONG and draining search  have decided what to do for our bridesmaids and groomsmen! :)
(who would have thought that finding a dress in apple green or aqua blue for under $200 in the spring would be hard?! Certianly not me!)
My Aunt Jennie is going to make a skirt for all of my cousins, neices, and bridesmaids! She is a saint! I definitely owe her big time!
This weekend I also get to meet with my hair dresser (Chelsie England) and decide on a wedding hair do! :)
I am pretty excited, needless to say!
and to top it all off, We get to have our Bridal and Groomal pictures taken on the 9th of April!
I can't believe how times fly.. we are down to only 45 days!
Other than wedding planning, life has been as busy as ever.
Trying to find some places to work and figuring out where we are going to live should be plenty to keep us busy, but don't you worry! We have so much more going on!
Eric's sister Brittany and her husband James and adorable 3 year old daughter Cecily and newborn baby boy Heath had to go back to Guam about 2 weeks ago...
It was a super sad night with plenty of tears shed by all!
We sure do miss them but hopefully if things work out the way we hope they do, all of Eric's family wants to plan a Hawaii vacation in about a year and meet them there! :)
We are down to the last 4 weeks of classes (FINALLY!!) so there are plenty of tests and final projects to keep us occupied.
Mine and Eric's biology class may just kill us...
and poor Eric... We had to take our 2nd test in that class the week before spring break and for some reason Eric's answers didn't save so last night he had to re-study so he could go take the 107 question test again!
He was a much better sport about it than I would have been haha!
As for me... Drill Team is almost over (also FINALLY!!)
I have 8 more days of practice (not that I'm counting down ;)) and then next Friday (April 1st) is our end of the year review!
I can't wait to have that off my plate haha!
Other than that life has been pretty simple!
We are getting our fair share of late night movies in (I mean I know there are so many different options in Ephraim ;)) and just enjoying each others company! :)

And to end this blog I think I will post a few more engagements :)

The Photo Shoot!

Well The process of becoming wed is becoming shockingly real as of late. On march 5 we had our engagements taken... you know to show everyone how beautiful we are so they feel obligated to buy us cooler gifts at the wedding. Well we drove to downtown salt lake where the sweet backgrounds were located, conveniently nestled in the backstreets of the terribly dangerous Utah ghetto. We drove up to a bunch of drunk college students dressed like elvis, construction cones, and other odd things. Well we got out and finally found Leah, our photographer. We began by taking pictures in front of a wall covered in dead vines. It was awesome and perfect for my complection. After being accused of being a grumpy nugget multiple times I (ERIC) made it clear that I was just trying to get my smile on and as soon as that happened we would be ready to party. Well after about 37 pictures from that backdrop we moved to the metal garage looking back drop. Well we bounced to a couple more places and by this time my jaw started to cramp and I felt as though my face may suffer a seisure at any moment. It was aweful. Well we went to one last location near sugar house. It was a historic Lds church and it was a good place to take our formal pictures. I started finding it difficult to smile because every smile morphed into a monsterous yawn... Well I think Leah noticed this and let us off easy. Well that was our adventure. We finshed it off by having a delicious dinner at spencers. yum!

Quilting!

So this semester I signed up for a quilting class and I absolutley LOVE it! So far I have completed 6 blocks and I am so excited to see how the whole quilt turns out! I have attatched some pictures of all the blocks so let me know what you think! (If anyone [out of my 3 friends/followers] even reads my blog haha!)

So on a different note I thought I would post a little about how the wedding planning is going and all that fun stuff!

So far we have met with the decoraters and planned everything for the reception and I went dress shopping and pick out my dress! It is so pretty and I can't wait to get to wear it! Me and Eric have our engagements pictures planned for February 19th so that is pretty soon! We also have someone who is going to make our cake but we haven't really discussed much other than that! We are planning as we go and so far things are going great!

This weekend is going to be super busy between badgerette performances for me, Eric's amazing cousin Troy and her husband going through the temple, Mercedes Jolee's 6th birthday (we bought her a super fun present today!), and to finish up the week we have my Grandma and Grandpa Dart's 50th Wedding Anniversary party! It is going to be crazy busy with lots of driving back and forth.. :/ Other than that not much has been going on.

 Eric wrote a new poem called Hesitate that is amazing just like the rest of his writing! He is so creative! He has also been working on a picture book all based around his neices and nephews. It is adorable!

That is all that we really have to update everyone on!

Oh... and 87 more days :)

92 days and counting :)

Attempt at blogging number 2!

So in the month and a half that I forgot I made a blog a lot has happened!
 Christmas, New Years, and my personal favorite GETTING ENGAGED!!!
To give you a little background I accidently snooped and saw a text from Eric's mom saying that they "bought the ring" and that she would send a picture soon! Needless to say... Eric wasn't too happy with me for ruining the element of surprise!

So on Christmas Eve, after our crazy day of racing from family event to family event, me and Eric went over to the Allred's to exchange gifts with the family. After everyone had opened their gifts Eric told me that he needed to go get me my Christmas present... Well I had made Eric promise me that he wouldn't get me a gift since I knew one gift was coming for sure and that was more than enough, so I gave him a dirty look for him making me look like a horrible girlfriend without my gift for him and reminded him of the promise he made! Eric, being the sneaky person he is, just simply said "just wait and see"... What in the heck is a girl supposed to think about that?! It was going to happen, I knew it! So he brings out a gift bag and I open it. (the brat really did get me an amazing gift!) The whole time I am opening the present and Eric is standing there nervously rocking back and forth and so I start getting all nervous and shaky! So once I have opened everything Eric pulls out a black ring box and gets down on one knee and says "Lex... Will you marry me?" So at this point everyone is watching and I am freaking out! Then Eric opens the box and says "even with a gold ring?" (I told Eric if he bought me a gold ring I would say no... Totally as a joke!) Eveyone started laughing and I felt super stupid and it was pretty funny...

Needless to say, I learned my lesson! I will never read Eric's texts again! 

 On December 30th (Exactly a week after the fake proposal) me and Eric decided to go out! We drove into Salt Lake and went and saw the movie Tron at Gateway and then the sweetheart took me to Olive Garden! During this date some weird things were happening... I had made a comment about how I needed to have Eric's amazing sister Emily paint my nails again before New Years Eve so they looked good for pictures (I thought for sure it would be on New Years) and Eric assured me my nails looked great (normally he would reply with the "uh huh.. sure thing" not fully paying attention type of answer...)

 Weird thing #2 While we were waiting to be seated at Olive Garden Eric texted his mom and said "Will you clean the living room up a little bit?" (apparently I didn't learn my lesson very well! :/) So all during dinner I kept thinking that maybe it was going to happen that night but the more I thought about it the more it didn't make very good sense and so I decided that it wasn't going to be that day! Then as we were leaving Olive Garden, Melanie called Eric and told him that the whole family was going over to his sister Kami's house to play games and that if we got home early enough we could come play if we wanted. At this point I was positive it wasn't happening! So we went to Kami's and we started playing Yahtzee and then Emily (clever her!) told me that she needed me to help her approve photo tags on facebook so we went into the office and we were on facebook when Brittany came in and told us that Eric was going to be playing the new song he had just written if we wanted to come listen. I started frantically scanning my brain... I couldn't remember him talking about a new song at all! So when I walked in the room Eric told me to sit down next to him... I was soooo nervous! He then played me the most amazing song and the whole time I was trying to not cry and look like a baby in front of his whole family! Then he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him (for real this time) and I just hugged him and said yes and then hugged him some more and it was so amazing! After everything, Eric's amazing sisters all gave me hugs and everyone was so nice and it was just the best night!

 SO this long story brings us to the title of this post... Eric Chad Allred and I will be married in the Draper Temple on May 6th 2011... in exactly 92 days! I can't wait to join the Allred family and be sealed to the love of my life for all time and eternity! :)