Goal #14007 Become a Cacti Farmer

While in Arizona, I found out I live cacti, they have so many cool shapes and colors! I wanted some at my house, but since we flew down and had limited baggage, I accepted that we'd have to find some in salt lake. While visiting an old ghost town, there was a cactus sales lady and she had so many different styles and a sign "cactus can fly", so I quickly googled it and found that the tsa allows cactus to fly in your carryon so of course I had to buy three and overstuff all of our bags but my cacti are growing well. It took a while to get the guts to transplant them but once we moved it was time and they are now living outside and thriving in this hot weather!!

Goal #2541 Honeymoon #2 Phoenix Arizona Dec 2011

With a goal to go on a trip every three months, the day after I finished finals we boarded a plan to head down to sunny Arizona!

We then picked up this super NERDY car, it was so small, nothing like a Chevy Aveo Hatchback for a fun little trip.

 We then traveled down to Tuscon where Kyle's uncle Alan and aunt Ruth live and we stayed the first night with them. After having some delicious omelets and attending their ward Christmas party, we settled in and watched a movie.

The next day we went to Colossal Cave National Monument  

Lots of neat things that are all over. The local robbery hide out from the olden days that was then opened up and turned into a place for visitors through the CCC - Civilian Conservation Corps. It was different from Lehman Caves here in Utah because it was a dry cave rather than a wet one. So if you aren't traveling to Arizona anytime soon, head down to Lehman Caves which is only like 4 hours away from SLC.

What a beautiful day for mid December!

 Sorry I didn't turn any of the pictures, but I have a really good old western face

 Even though I may have died.....

 We could have lived in a sweet adobe house!

 Or traveled the Old Spanish Trail

We spent the afternoon with Kyle's cousins Sam and Sunny and they took us to their favorite Mexican Place. Where I had a delicious Mexican Hot Dog and Kyle had a quesadilla - both delicious!!

 Kyle hanging with his cousins....

 Then they tried to shove him in the pond

 In Arizona, they don't have the luxury of having snow all over. So instead you can purchase it in small boxes and have fake snow in your house!

 They also have Sand houses where Santa can sit.....

 We went to a sweet Christmas Light Show with Clint and Amy and had some delicious Chinese food

Kyle also survived a day full of shopping - where we got tons of great clothes for great prices
So the rest of the pictures are on my other camera and there is way too many anyways so I'll give a brief synopsis of our trip and maybe show you the rest of the pictures someday.
Purchased some awesome cacti that are now happily living in our backyard(more pics later).
We had lots of fun with Clint and Amy - played lots of games, toured a wild west town and went to some wild west shows. Ate lots of delicious food. We also went to the most fantastic movie theater I have ever been too....we had recliners!! I am not a fan of the movie theater, I find them to be over priced and grungy. But now that we have been to that very nice theater - Kyle is going to have a much harder time convincing me to go around here....
Kyle had a terrible toothache the whole time we were down there and had a couple sleepless nights but besides that we had lots of fun! Definitely a perfect trip for December....although we got lots of funny looks due to our shorts and summer apparel!

Goal #17222 - Survive Car Crash...well our car survived on it's own

The last day of our honeymoon, we received a call around 7am from our Landlord. Although the news at first was shocking, it turned out to be one of our greatest wedding gifts! Earlier that morning around 3 am a drunk driver came flying down our narrow street and crashed into our neighbors truck(who was parked about 6 feet in front of us) Her Subaru Legacy was going fast enough to push his Dodge 2500 up over the curb across the lawn over a speed bump and land on top of our car.

So as you can see from the grass marks, this girl was going pretty crazy. But the best part for us is that after she crashed, she got out of her car and ran home. So then a few hours later when the neighbors noticed that there was three cars crashed blocking the road, they called the cops who found the driver at her parents house and this 20 year old girl was taken into custody and we got a call from our landlord. So after we checked out of our hotel and came home. We found our car looking like this...

 

After calling her insurance company and all the fun stuff of waiting it out and getting things priced. The insurance company decided to "Total" our car, meaning there was more repairs than the value of the car. So after having my dad and uncles look it over, we determined that for about $120 we could have the car running again and be good to go. So we took the insurance settlement amount, which somehow turned out to be way more than we thought the car was worth, fixed some headlights and drove the car another 7 weeks. But after that time we decided this car needed to go to someone else and we sold it on ksl for a decent price to someone that needed a cheap car to get them around for awhile. Then we bought our new sweet Ford mustang! Lucky for us, my parents had this project car and were willing to sell it to us so now Kyle drives the sports car and I get to keep driving my grandma car! But even though this was a hassle to deal with, it really did turn out to be one of the greatest wedding gifts!

Goal #2540 Honeymoon #1 Park City

Getting married in the middle of your last semester has many pros and cons, here are a few just in case you ever find yourself in a dilemma such as ours.

Pros:

            Avoid the trend of all college students being married during summer and winter breaks

            Get married sooner

            Don't have to plan a wedding all semester

            You are forced to plan a simpler honeymoon(in case you have to return to school for any tests)

            Have the perfect weather wedding (although there is a higher risk of snow, just not in 2011)

Cons:

            You may fail a test...or two

           Depending what part of the semester you get married in, you may have to live with roommates for a bit

                  

This is pretty much what our Pro/Con list looked like, just a bit more detailed but somehow it just fit together best to get married in Sept. For those of you that don't know, Kyle and I got married Sept 17th and I spent the next three months living in Logan with my college roommates Monday -Thursday and then came home to him on the weekends. It was kind of crazy but worked out great for us. We were able to live our bachelor/bachelorette lives for an additional three months while still having all the benefits of marriage. So for us, it was a win-win! Although living with roommates wasn't my favorite, living with my best friend made things a lot easier. So I finished my last semester of school while Kyle worked in Salt Lake and it made the marriage transition easy and carefree. 

So anyways back to the PRO of being forced to plan a simpler honeymoon: 

We got super lucky and ended up getting a great deal on a condo in Park city for $272 for an entire week, so that was a huge money saver and it was tons of fun. It was great to just spend time with each other and not be somewhere super cool that we'd never been to before. Park city was a great place because we were far enough away that there was plenty of things we wanted to do but not so many that we couldn't sleep in all morning and just relax. The second bonus of our simple honeymoon came in the form of a free week at any condo of our choosing. We were lucky enough to buy our Park City condo on a weekend they were having a Buy One Get One Sale so we got a second week, which is why we spent a week in Arizona but that's for another post in another day.

Goal #3 Become Sealed for all Eternity in the Draper Temple on September 17th 2011

We decided this goal in March but it was a long time coming while we planned all of the details and arranged for this special day. September 17th was a beautiful day, minus the fact that I had to wake up early and decided to stay up the night before messing around with friends. The weather was perfect as you can see in this lovely picture of the Draper temple

Our friends and family filled the largest sealing room in the State of Utah (72 people!), I only know this fun fact because I was surprised by the Logan temple only holding 55 and so then I called them all and asked. Although this is not why we chose to be married in the Draper Temple. The sealing was wonderful and everything went according to plan. We exited the temple very gracefully....and my first thing I needed to do was cut the end off of my bouquet. I thought it was too long and looked disproportional, but the temple workers didn't have a knife in the brides room, luckily my little brother was prepared and saved the day.

So once we were able to get the bouquet straightened around, we continued to take more pictures with all of our many guests! We truly are so blessed to have such supportive family and friends!!

Then it was our turn for a lot of pictures!! There were so many wonderful pictures that it was hard to pick just a few to post so you'll probably see more later. We were so lucky to have found such a great photographer Alicia Arlene, that just made Kyle and I look good without us doing much! She took all of these great shots and was really easy and great to work with! Click on her name for more info! :)

Kyle and I didn't care about much for the wedding, I was never the girly girl that planned out every detail in advance, I only had one request that my brothers looked good and wore tuxedos. I've been to way too many events where none of us matched and we look ridiculous so this was the one day it mattered, which as you can see they all look stunning!!

Luckily Kyle has 3 brothers as well so it balances things out nicely and they all look great together.

My sister-in-laws all matched great even with no help from me. I never had any plans what they should wear but lucky for me they are all extremely smart women and can take care of themselves and look great!

We weren't the best at fake laughing...

But we couldn't leave out our only nephew, Kyle and I agreed that we had to have a baby tux for Carter. Since we are his favorite uncle and aunt, he had to look distinguished at our wedding(not saying that his mom wouldn't have dressed him nice if we didn't get this tux for him, she always makes him look good.) We mostly just love baby tuxedos, cuz they are so cute!

The Anderson Family!

Everybody

The standard Lyman family pose - "Gaston" style

Even though my brothers are dressed nice, that doesn't mean they are going to act nice, I'm still their only sister and I guess that means they get to pick my nose!?!

The Lyman Family

My dad just jumping in Josh and Alex's nice picture....weddings are a long day for everyone

For some crazy reason, Kyle has always wanted to follow tradition and smash cake, what he forgot to consider is that his wife is kind of extreme and wasn't going to be very nice with the cake smashing as you can see my hand has completely covered his face with cake and he was much nicer to me.....

So the day before the wedding I was googling wedding traditions because I plan on only getting married once and didn't want to miss any sweet traditions. Kyle's family mostly immigrated from Iceland and their traditions included day long parties and the groom carrying the family sword throughout the day. Since my plan of having a 6 hour reception was already vetoed, I knew I wouldn't get around with having a multi day party and there was no family sword for Kyle to carry around, I kept searching. The majority of my family has immigrated from Denmark, which is where I found the one wedding tradition I liked.  The brothers of the bride are to grab the groom flip him upside down and cut the tips of his socks off. This has been a tradition for about a century and the actual reason is that the brothers wish to prohibit the groom from "turning his socks green" which means he cannot get them green or dirty anymore by running across the grass in the middle of the night after the girls. Pretty much it involved knives, had good meaning and was an original tradition. So the day before I told my mom about this and she hated the idea and told me I couldn't do it, so I asked Kyle what he thought, he also didn't like the idea mostly out of fear that my brothers would cut his toes off. But despite their wishes I told my brothers to be ready for it and told Kyle it would happen. Lucky for me our actual wedding day was busy and he completely forgot. So right after we ate our first piece of cake, my brothers came from behind and flipped him upside down and cut his socks off! 

Bouquet throwing - The first throw I overthrew all of the people and hit the mirror behind them, nothing was hurt and I threw it again

I love this picture because Paula is ducking so low and everyone is just looking at the bouquet that I threw way too far!

Chelsea was the winner and I can't wait to go to her wedding next December!! ;)

Then I had to slid down the banister because there was one and Will told me to, but I was kind of scared.

So that's our wedding day in brief, everything turned out great, we got married, ate great food, had lots of fun. Thanks to all of you who helped us with getting this wedding ready!!