Thanksgiving

Back in the summer, Garrick and I decided it'd be fun to spend Thanksgiving in Colorado. So we started making plans and saw that the Lion King on Broadway was going to be playing while we'd be there! So we quickly bought tickets and then convinced Kayla that she should come with us.

This was Garrick's first Broadway show, and I wanted him to love it. We bought slightly more expensive tickets so that we could be super close to the stage, we were literally 4 rows back! I had never been that close before and it was so cool! The costumes were amazing and we were right next to the guy playing the drums. Needless to say, it was a pretty amazing show. It was also pretty fun driving around Denver, we've flown into that airport a million times but had never seen the city. 

My best friend, Shanon also happened to be living in Denver so we got to see her! It was so fun seeing her all grown up, living on her own in the big city. She is interning with the Denver Broncos marketing department, no big deal...

The rest of our break consisted of hanging out with Skybekah and their cute kiddos. Jace is the sweetest baby ever, he made me super baby hungry! McKay and Alicia are too cute and we had a lot of fun playing with them.  

Watching Charlie Brown's Thanksgiving movie.

Jace has SO MUCH HAIR. I could not believe it. I had fun playing with it. Here's his man bun.

It's not Thanksgiving without watching the Macy's Day Parade!

Another thing you might not know about Garrick is that he LOVES to bake and cook. So during the break he thought of all of the recipes he wanted to make. Here is the table of desserts after our Thanksgiving feast. He was pretty proud of all his desserts. They were delicious! 

The best part about the break was definitely playing games with Skyler and Rebekah. They always introduce us to awesome new games! Loot, Set, and Settlers of Catan were some of the games we played together. The break came and went far too quickly. We were really sad to leave Colorado and make the treacherous journey back to Provo (it was terrifying driving back through mountains and in blizzards!) But we're so glad we were able to come to Colorado for a few days to relax and be around family. Thanks for the good times Skybekah!! 

Bits of Fall, Bits of Winter

We ended our October with a super fun ward Halloween party. As you can see, we put a lot of effort into our costumes. This is the first year that we've dressed up for Halloween since we've been together so we went all out! We also dominated the games at the activity because we're winners!

Another highlight from October was having my parents come visit for a quick weekend! We love every time they visit, it's always a party.

One Sunday night Garrick and I were both doing stuff for our callings and I thought it was so cute so I took a picture. We've really loved the opportunity we've had to get more involved in our ward this year. We've been able to make a ton of friendships and have learned so much from our callings. 

It's been Garrick's goal to be able to study from home this semester, typically he spends late nights at school. But to prepare for when baby comes, he wanted to get in a habit of successfully studying in our home office. There's been a couple of successful study nights but most of the time I distract him from his work haha. I'm hoping we'll figure out a better system some day. 

We supported both of our schools by going to the BYU vs UVU weekend. The men and women's basketball teams played as well as women's soccer. It's cool that UVU is now a big enough school that they can compete against BYU! 

A cool thing that Garrick did lately was teach a self defense class at our ward FHE night. One of the boys in the ward had been trying for months to have Garrick put on this activity for the elder's quorum. But Garrick had been swamped with school so the only night that worked was Monday which meant the boys invited the wives to turn it into FHE. It was pretty fun having him teach everyone different moves. My husband is a stud. And he could probably kill you with his bare hands....

One thing you should know about Garrick is that he loves Christmas. I am the one in our relationship that has to make us wait to put up the Christmas tree. Garrick started listening to Christmas music at the beginning of November and had asked several times to put up the tree before I caved. We compromised by making it a "gratitude tree" for November. So we wrote what we were thankful for on leaves that we hung on our Christmas tree. I've actually loved having the tree up an extra month so this will probably be a new tradition. 

Towards the end of November we went to an event called "Light up the Riverwoods" with some friends. It was actually really cool, they had a big concert, people making ice sculptures, Santa Claus and at 9pm they turned on all of their Christmas lights. It was pretty magical. 

That sums up our life for now. Next, is Thanksgiving!!

Beck Home Projects: Part Two

Seeing as how this occurred 8 months ago, I figured now was as good of time as any to blog about Beck Home Project number 2! Last Christmas Garrick and I randomly decided to redo the guest room and I loved it! Since then, I have decided that every time I visit home now, I will tackle a new room. This past March I went home to visit my dad being inducted into the Hall of Fame. While I was there I gave some much needed attention to Kayla's old room.

This room has turned into another guest bedroom that is meant for the grand kids (hence the crib). Here is the before shot. I loved pre-teen Kayla, but lime green was an awful choice for a bedroom color....

This is the walk in closet that one hasn't been able to walk in for a number of years...

This was a huge project to tackle, especially since I knew my visit would be short. So this room will be completed through phases. The first phase was to de-junk! This took up the entire time I was home. But after some sweat, blood and tears, we threw out a ton of stuff!

After removing the junk here is the after picture: 

I'm so proud of my mom for allowing me to get rid of so many memories. It was hard for her to let go of so many mementos from our childhood but she soldiered on for me! 

The last thing I was able to do for this room before I flew back to Utah was pick out a new paint color. Those green walls HAD to go. I had really hoped that I would be able to paint before I left but didn't have the time. So together my mom and I picked a color and the next day she painted the room all by herself!

Here is the after paint picture: 

So much better, right?? I love that we went with grey, it is so calming for this room. There are still a million things that need to be done to this room but I think we've made tremendous progress. Next up is to replace the beds, bedding, dresser, and add fun art. I'm really excited to see how it turns out. I can't wait until we move home for the summer-so many rooms to play with!! Thanks for letting me help decorate your house, mom! 

October

Two words: Fall Break. It's the best thing ever and I wish BYU jumped on that bandwagon. UVU had their fall break last week and it came at the best time. Garrick is taking his heaviest load yet this semester so that next semester will be easy since baby will be here. He has been so overwhelmed with his coursework (even though I keep reminding him that grades don't matter at this point). So fall break was the perfect time for him to be completely lazy and carefree for a couple days. He came home on Wednesday night after taking a test with ice cream and hot wings in hand as he declared "It's fall break!" He then proceeded to move our mattress into the living room, turned on netflix with his wings and ice cream by his side. It remained in our living room until Sunday night, it was so fun. 

While I had carefree Garrick, I told him I really wanted to do a session in the SLC temple so we went up on saturday during fall break and enjoyed the afternoon in Salt Lake with Dallas and Lauren. 

Every time I go, I'm completely mesmerized of the beauty in this temple. I'm so glad that we live close to visit. 

Right after we got home from Salt Lake we went to a corn maze with some friends in the ward. We successfully navigated our way through the maze and came out with free pumpkins and coupons to restaurants. With our coupons we went to Sub Zero to get free ice cream and then went home to watch a scary movie. 

Like I said, fall break is the best. It was the perfect weekend. And now Garrick is living at school again studying and taking midterms while I'm counting down the days until Thanksgiving break!

Family of Two

I love getting pictures taken of Garrick and I, it's part of the vainness of my generation, I'm sure. But I love how pictures can capture personalities and time periods. Our newly-wed time period is coming to a close with baby gaffney coming in January, and I wanted to document the last few months of being a family of two. So I made my sis, Kayla take pictures for us while we were at the Mapleton house. We wanted it to be a pretty quick and painless so it literally only took 10 minutes but Kayla was able to capture so many pictures that I love! 

Here's to 12 more weeks of just us.

September Highlights

I was pretty bummed to see Garrick start school but I was pretty thrilled that I didn't have to. But he started the year with a bang, hearing back from 5 medical schools we were pumped preparing for his interviews.

I had a pretty fun time dressing Garrick up for his interviews. We saved up so we could buy him a snazy new suit, with all the accessories! I think he looks pretty dang hot! He flew to my home in Iowa for his first interview, the school was in Kansas City which is only 2 hours from my house so it worked out great. Kansas City was tied for his first choice, so he was super anxious to go and to learn more about the school. I was attached to my phone the entire day wanting pictures and updates of everything he was doing and seeing. 

He finally called me at the end of the day while he drove home describing everything. He had fallen in love with the school! He couldn't stop talking about how incredible the program was, how it had everything he wanted and how it fit perfectly with his learning style. There wasn't a single thing he could find that he didn't like about the school.  He was happy with his interview and so impressed with everything about the school, so much so that he cancelled the interview he had at Arizona later that week. I was pretty worried after hearing him decide that he wanted to cancel an interview since it took away another option but Garrick was confident that Arizona wasn't a school he was interested in. 

For the rest of the month, Garrick extensively researched the other schools he was going to be interviewing at and he just couldn't get excited. KC was the school he wanted. With each passing week he got more and more depressed. He was part of the second week of interviewees at KC which meant he wouldn't be hearing anything until the students before him had heard. Finally at the end of the month we were at the mall getting my phone fixed when he saw that a student had written on their student networking site that he had been accepted to Kansas City-finally the school was starting to accept students! But hearing this news and not receiving an email from them only made Garrick more sad! He was driving me crazy at this point. But sure enough the very next day Garrick received the glorious email congratulating him on his ACCEPTANCE! It was amazing! Garrick was part of the very first wave of students to be interviewed and accepted into his dream school. We couldn't be more excited or feel more blessed. I am so incredibly proud of Garrick, he has dedicated his life these past 3 years for this point, I can't think of anyone who deserves it more. So he accepted, obviously, and once we paid the deposit he cancelled the rest of his interviews. We are going to be living in Kansas City for the next 3 years! 

We introduced our "little brother" Tommas to the world of football. He handled the 4 hour game as expected, and ended up crashing as soon as we got to the car to take him home. But it was a good game so it was a fun one to take him to. 

This is to document that I have a growing baby inside of me, it's still so weird! 

We went on a last minute camping trip with the Beck's and Hancock's. It was fun being outside and admiring the gorgeous fall trees! I also want to note that this is the first camping trip I've been on since pregnant where I actually slept! Our tent was on an hill and somehow it made Garrick and I sleep like babies!

I've been hating our nightstands ever since we moved apartments. The white worked perfectly with our bedroom in our old apartment but when we moved it looked gross. So I enlisted the help of our good friend Jesse to transform these bad boys. I decided that I wanted to make it a more classic piece, white is trendy right now and I'm already over it! So we striped the paint and stained the wood to make this awesome nightstand you see! Jesse also replaced the tops so it looked less like ikea. I'm in love with how they turned out. And I loved the experience, I already told Garrick that I need an electric sander, heat gun, and a work table for future projects...

And that sums up our September. I'm so glad fall is here!