Happy Thanksmasversarynewlentines Day!

Has it really been 3 months since our last post? I can't believe how fast time flies. I know I say that all the time. Everyone says it all the time--biggest cliche in the book. But it's so true! Rather than try to catch up on every little exciting thing that has happened in the life of Matt and Sarah, I'll just tell you that Thanksgiving, Christmas, our 1 year anniversary, and New Years were awesome! We spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with the Scotts and also spent time with the Berrys and my brother Michael. All of our "Hawaii family" was greatly missed (counting down to June guys!) but we skyped and called and made it through. Our 1 year was a joyous occasion complete with lots of food, a good movie, and a surprisingly fun trip to the "nickelcade" in Provo.

So lets pick up here. Valentines day. Best Valentines day ever! I got a surprise breakfast, beautiful tulips, and I don't have to cook all week because my sweetheart is cooking all of the dinners for us! The best part of that gift was that he also did the grocery shopping on Saturday. What a dream.

Teaching 8th grade on Valentines day was a whole new ball game for me. Man, I tend to think that those kids are crazy on regular days, but introduce valentines, sugar, sugar, cookie deliveries, and more sugar, and they go nuts. It was quite a day!

Here's the funny part of the story. Matt and I had planned for a nice quiet dinner at Outback Steakhouse, thinking that we could call ahead around 4 and get in by 6-ish. Wrong! I called at 3:30 and they were booked until 9:00. No way were we going to wait that long, so, switch to Plan B. El Mexsal: the random little place that is the site of our first date. Unfortunately that plan fell through when we drove up and I saw that the place was EMPTY. I don't know what happened, I was suddenly just hit with a wave of awkwardness at the prospect of us being the only ones in a mediocre hole in the wall restaurant on Valentines day at 5:30 in the afternoon. Even with the sentimental value, I just wasn't feelin' it.

Luckily, my brilliant husband came up with a Plan C that he knew I would love. Drive through at Los Comalitos for a super huge order of carne asada fries and a bean burrito, then home to eat in the living room and watch the greatest love story of all time. Wall-E. It was perfect. We'll hit up Outback another time, but for now? Los Comalitos will do. I'm so lucky he's my guy!

St Louis, Missour-uh

A couple of weeks ago Matt and I took a trip to St. Louis. About a week before we left I began trying to convince him that nobody in Missouri actually says "Missour-ee," it's pronounced "Missour-uh!" I continued to pronounce it that way throughout the whole trip, even though I knew I had been beat. What can I say, the joke just never got old! :) 

You may be wondering why we decided to go on vacation to Missouri in the first place. . .

Originally, this trip was planned around a med school interview at A.T. Still (a school located an hour or two outside of St. Louis). Then, two days before we were supposed to leave, Matt received acceptances to two other schools! We decided that we weren't too keen on living in rural Missouri so Matt politely declined the interview invitation and we took our trip anyway.

We had so much fun exploring the city. We were there the night of the World Series so we got to walk around the stadium and then watch the game in a little sports bar deep in enemy territory (Matt's a die-hard Rangers fan). Actually, the entire city was enemy territory. St Louis loves their Cards! They even died the fountains red in honor of the game. Too bad they lost. . .

 

We got to see the Gateway Arch

Took a tour of the old capitol building and saw the courtroom where the Dred Scott trial took place.

And then drove out to Nauvoo to visit Grandma and Grandpa Watkins! They are serving a mission in the Nauvoo Temple right now. We haven't seen them since our wedding!

We went to the Blacksmith, Bakery, Printing Press, saw a play, and learned how to make candles out of animal fat.

Of course, the temple was the highlight of the trip. We even got to do a session with Grandma and Grandpa!

Happy Halloween!

One of my favorite things about Halloween is searching through blogs for fun recipe and craft ideas. Mels Kitchen Cafe, my absolute favorite recipe blog, had a series of "spooky treats" last year and one of her ideas was to make your breadsticks into "bones." I tried this last year and failed, so I was excited to try again this year! Matt even offered to help. Can you guess which one of us is taking Anatomy this semester?

We enjoyed our quiet Halloween night together. We carved our pumpkins and set them outside, got our candy bowl ready, and then settled in for Hocus Pocus, hot chocolate, and homemade clam chowder. It was perfect. Especially since our doorbell only rang 4 or 5 times--more Snickers for us!

Another highlight this year was going to a pumpkin patch to pick out our own pumpkins! We actually got there as it was getting dark and hitched the last hayride out to the pumpkin patch. This was a real pumpkin patch--they were all mixed in with the cornfield! We felt very adventurous and had so much fun looking for the perfect pumpkins. It was dark by the time we started picking our way back through the stalks of corn and heard the hay wagon guy calling out "anyone else out there?" Luckily he heard our yells and didn't leave us out there!

Fall is HERE

Hooray for Fall!

The leaves are changing, nights and mornings are getting cooler, BYU football is in full swing, the house is decorated, and we are getting super excited for Halloween and Thanksgiving! Matt and I are enjoying our first conference weekend at home and I thought it would be a good time to work on my poor neglected blog.

This fall semester is proving to be the busiest, most challenging one yet--for both of us. Matt has a full courseload and is balancing school with work and traveling to various schools for medical school interviews. I don't know how he handles it all! I am still in the Young Women's presidency in our ward, and I'm working full time now as an 8th grade English teacher at a local middle school. I love my job, but it turns out that teaching/managing 13 year olds all day can make you really tired. Who knew??

These past few weeks have really made me appreciate married life though. No matter how long and frustrating my day is, I know that everything will be ok once I get home. It's so awesome to have someone there to share everything with--frustrations and triumphs--and to know that they actually care! Basically, I'm feeling like a pretty lucky girl these days.

Happy Birthday to Matt!

We had such a fun weekend! Matt turned 23 on Friday and, I must say, he had a pretty awesome birthday weekend. Dinner with the family last Sunday, a trip to Texas + a Rangers game on Tuesday, a Bees game and Chinese food on Friday, and the Hogle Zoo on Saturday. Plus I made him homemade chocolate eclairs, and he got a caramel turtle cheesecake from Kneaders. He doesn't know how good he has it.

We went to the zoo with Matt's sister, Brittany. Her work invites all the employees and their families to "zoo night" every summer which meant free dinner and a free t-shirt. And a fun night out with Brit! What a deal!

The zoo has a dinosaur thing going right now where there are dino's placed throughout the park. They roar and move around, and even though most of them were 2/3 the actual size, this T-Rex was the real deal! That's seriously how big they were. I thought it was pretty cool. Matt wasn't quite as impressed.

We also saw an amazing bird show and since we were there later at later in the evening the tigers were actually awake. There were 4 or 5 of them all moving around and yawning and I think one of them may have even roared. It was awesome! It even made up for the disappointment of not seeing any gorillas or orangutans, and that's saying something.

Random un-birthday-related side note: Our flowers are going crazy!! I want summer to stay forever.





Zion National Park

Our last camping post of the summer. This trip is one we were really looking forward to and, for the most part, it didn't disappoint! I'll get the annoying part out of the way first and then I can just go on and on about how awesome everything was.

The annoying part:
This was our longest camping trip yet--Thursday night to Monday afternoon--so I really had to plan our meals carefully. Especially since our cooler is teeny-tiny. Luckily we got a camp stove, so we were set!
The first night was going to be tin foil dinners cooked over charcoal, since campfires aren't allowed in August, but we found out that in the national parks charcoal isn't allowed either! We decided to just fire up the stove and cook the foil dinners in a pot. Everything was pre-cooked, it just needed to be heated. But as soon as Matt lit the thing, flames started spewing out of a random piece that we were 99.9% sure wasn't supposed to be on fire. We tried it again, decided we didn't want to explode or die, and decided the thing was toast.
This left us with three potentially dinner-less nights ahead of us. We picked cold potatoes from the foil for dinner the first night, and we were in a private campground the second night so we were able to cook over charcoal, but by the last night we had resorted to the lowest, most desperate of measures. We ate cans of chili that we had left on the dashboard all day to cook in the 100+ degree heat. We also made instant mashed potatoes from a water bottle that was left in the car all day too.

The most disgusting part? After hiking all day long in the blazing heat that sun baked chili actually tasted kind of good!

Other than that little blip, it was a pretty awesome trip. The heat drained us pretty quick, so our hiking stamina was down, but that didn't stop us from seeing some incredible things.

Of course, we had to do Angels Landing. That was our first hike of the trip. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, this is apretty treacherous trail because you're one step away from falling to your death on both sides and all you have is a burning hot chain to hold on to. You can kind of see the chain trail in this picture:

But we made it, in all of our "Y" pride and glory. It's certainly not the highest summit but the view was breathtaking. And there is a lot of satisfaction in climbing to a spot that the pioneers swore was only accessible to the angels :)

The next day we hiked to Observation Point. It was very long and hard and hot (can you see my sweet sweat straps?) but worth it. You just don't get a view like this every day!

We also hiked up Hidden Canyon a little ways, which I would highly recommend. Once you get to the canyon there's no trail so you just pick your way over rocks and through trees and stuff. It's super green and almost foresty, not at all like the trail we had just been on.

Here's Matt at Weeping Rock. This was a cool jungle-ish place too. The water also brought the temperature down a few degrees which was nice.

The Emerald Pools. Not a hard hike, but we were absolutley melting at this point and feeling a little dead. I was so sweaty I didn't even want to take my backpack off. But it was still awesome!

There were lots of tadpoles and friendly squirrels. (Matt's face in this picture cracks me up every time. I'm even laughing as I type this.)

The sun cooked our chili but killed our bananas. So weird. So gross.

On our way out of town we stopped at Kolob Canyons. Holy cow! It was so cool! And it was just 5 minutes off the I-15. Well worth the stop. These pictures don't do it justice, but the mountains were so beautiful and red, and it was nice and quiet because hardly anyone was there. It was a great way to end the trip!





Goblin Valley

A few weeks ago we went to Goblin Valley with our friends Matt and Brittany. We had such a blast! Don't get me wrong, Matt and I love camping together when it's just the two of us, but it was really fun to go with friends. We ate some pretty good camping food, went on an awesome hike through a slot canyon, and had tons of fun climbing on the "goblins" and exploring the nooks and crannies of this super cool place!

 Hiking through the slot canyon was, by far, the coolest thing we did on this trip. As you can see, it's just a canyon that's been carved out by the water and when it's full it's pretty much impossible to pass through. We felt so adventurous traipsing through tight passageways and climbing over the stretches of water. It was pretty awesome--even though I was absolutely terrified that a flash flood would come through and kill us all.

 

This picture of Brittany wasn't posed, by the way. I tell ya, hiking like this for a couple of hours will make muscles sore that you didn't even know you had.

So, yay for Goblin Valley! We'll definitely be coming back here someday. Maybe not in the middle of July though...