March showers bring April downpours which eventually lead to flowers I guess...

Yard work! Yay!
I actually love working outdoors, but living in this rainforest type weather has presented problems. It rains so much here that it feels like we live in a jungle. Everything grows and it grows FAST! You have to do a lot of yard work each week just to keep the grass mowed and the weeds down.

I'm so thankful that Aaron takes care of the mowing of the grass. He takes care of the yard, and I take care of the house. I LOVE this arrangement!

The flowerbeds are a joint venture though, which has been a lot of fun. First of all, we had to rip all the weeds and weed tarp out of the yard from the previous owners.


Needless to say....we were VERY worn out the next day!

More pictures to come on this in the future... once we are done. I can't wait to see how beautiful it will be when we're done!
Random picture from that day: Aaron LOVES airplanes....He was unwinding from the hard work by building a model airplane. Love this guy!

-SL

General Conference Weekend!

Lots of updates to post!

General Conference was GREAT as usual... both in the messages we heard and the people we spent the weekend with. We traveled to Mountain Home, Arkansas to visit Aaron's extended family. We stayed with his Grandma Drake, who is such a lovely lady. We love spending time with her. Aaron has a favorite meal of his Grandma's that I don't know how to make. It's chicken noodle soup over mashed potatoes and EVERYTHING is made from scratch. So this time when we went to visit her, she showed us how to make everything. I still think it will take me years to perfect it, but I will keep trying!

Aaron and Grams making homemade noodles for the soup
We also got to spend time with Aaron's uncle, aunt, & cousins who live just down the road and elsewhere in town.

Cousin Emily, and her son Tanner
Emily is expecting her second child (a girl) at the end of the summer/early fall!

Grams & Aunt Robin


Dinner with the family: Uncle Randall, Cousin Emily, Grams, Cousin Joseph and his wife Julietta.

At the very end of the table you can barely see Joseph & Julietta's baby boy Clark. Tanner is on his Grandpa's lap.It was a great trip! These trips are never long enough, but we're so glad that Mountain Home is only three hours away so that we can hopefully make many more trips!

-SL

New Camera!

I have always loved taking pictures, but now that I am married I have really wanting to start taking more pictures so we can document our lives together! I have always been really creative too, and have gotten really good at editing pictures so I figured I need to take the next step and just get a good camera!

Also, since my mother-in-law owns a scrapbooking company... I need good pictures to scrapbook!

So...

Aaron bought me a new camera!

It's a Cannon Rebel T2i.... it came with two different lenses, a beautiful camera bag, and all the other little gadgets. Aaron's Aunt Lynette helped us pick it out. I know quite a bit about basic camera taking. I took a black and white manual developing class awhile back, so I know a lot about your basic "how a camera works" type of a thing. BUT I have a lot to learn about this camera, and the different lenses since it is all digital. We are in Mountain Home, AR visiting Aaron's extended family right now, so I plan on practicing with my new camera this weekend. There are lots of cute kids around to take pictures of!

I'm really excited about being able to take lots of good quality pictures of our extended families, me and Aaron, and then our future kids .... eventually.... ;).

Maybe this will help me keep up on our blog more often, too!

-SL

Date Nights!

Ever since we have been married, we have had a date night on Friday nights. Lately we decided to start doing themed date nights!

Here is a quick recap of a couple of them:

Italian Theme

I didn't take any pictures this night, but we ate dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant: Napoli's. While we were waiting for our dinner we read some trivia about Italy! After dinner we were too full to go get Gelato, but it IS delicious so we may have to do that one for a different Italian date night. For our after dinner entertainment we watched a couple of episodes of Top Gear which is our favorite car show. Now...while the show is British....they have lots of Italian cars that we like so we counted that as part of our Italian theme!

Disney Theme

This was just last weekend. As of last Saturday, we have been married for 6 awesome months! For those of you who don't know, we spent our honeymoon at Disneyland. We LOVED it. We had both been before, but it was so much fun to be together. We can't wait to go back again!

We ate dinner at our favorite steakhouse- Colton's!


We realize we are pretty goofy, but we like to take pictures of each other and be silly :) I don't know how I could EVER be bored married to Aaron!





After dinner we watched "Ratatouille". It was awesome. We love Disney movies!

This coming weekend we are doing an outdoor theme! Now that I have an awesome camera, I will take a lot more pictures!

-SL

Saturday Morning Meetings

So for those of you who don't know... ( and I think most everyone who reads this knows) I work for Sam's Club Corporate Offices.

Sam Walton started a tradition when he was growing the Walmart business called "the Saturday Morning Meeting."

If you want to read more about why management level employees of the corporate office at Walmart/ Sam's Club have to wake up at 5:30am on a Saturday morning once a month you can read about it in an old article in Fortune Magazine(Click Here).

Even though Aaron is at a management level (he's much higher up than I am) he doesn't have to attend because he is on call on some weekends.

I actually like the meetings most of the time. It makes us feel unified as a company, and unified in what is most important to the company and how we can move forward with a common vision. We also always have really famous people attend as guests which is kind of fun! Here are some of the past people that have visited our meeting...

Today's Guest: Halle Berry




Other Past Guests:

Steve Carell


Former President Bush and Laura Bush

Eva Longoria





Others:

Sanda Bullock
Jesse James
Sheryl Crow
Robert Pattinson
Jamie Foxx

There's a lot more but those are just a few good ones!

Some mornings it's extremely hard to get up on a Saturday morning and drag myself across town, but I am always glad that I do.

Thanks, Sam, for this great tradition!

Having a job is stressful/ Fairy Godmothers

You go to college to get a good job right?

Well.....

Here are some things they don't tell you while getting your business degree:

1. Yes you make a lot of money, BUT you don't get paid more for working more hours and sometimes you have to work many hours just to get the job done for the next day and at some point the money doesn't equal the time spent.

2. People in the "real world" are much different than you picture them in the classroom. When you wake up to reality you realize people will walk all over you any chance they get, so you better have your act together if you want to survive.

3. Everyone is extremely hard to please. everyone....especially those with a lot of power and authority...

4. There will ALWAYS be more work to be done than you can possibly accomplish. Always. It's not like homework where there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Nope. No light.

5. There will be days that you work so hard and for so long and it will go completely unnoticed. It took my awhile to learn this. It's noticed every once in awhile... but day to day it will probably go unnoticed.

6. It doesn't matter how great you were in college...what kind of grades you got....how awesome your teachers thought you were.... in the "real world" there will always be someone more experienced than you and always be someone one step ahead of you. At some point you just have to suck it up and be the best you can at your job and learn as you go. Humility gets you a LOT further than any kind of past rewards you earned in college.


Now just to be clear.... I actually do love my job. It is just a lot more stressful than I ever pictured my first job being. I am good at my job but it took a couple of months to figure things out. Some days are so stressful that I purposefully work late so that I have time to clear my head as people start leaving so that I am not stressed for the rest of the evening and can calm down before I leave for the day.


I should not be complaining... I am extremely thankful to have such a great job in such a struggling economy. I am very lucky. I worked hard for this kind of a job, but it will take me awhile before I am completely accustomed to the after college life and to come to terms with how things work in the "real world." I literally have a perfect life. The only thing I have to complain about is that my job pushes me to my limits (which I guess isn't always such a bad thing).





What I really am thankful for is my perverbial "fairy godmother" aka husband... (sorry honey for comparing you to a fairy... but it worked in this scenario ;) ) ... he's the sweetest person I know and always takes care of me. He always asks what he can do for me. And most of the time knows exactly what to do for me even if I don't say anything at all. No matter what kind of day I have had I always end up feeling like this at the end of the day ....


Thank goodness for fairy godmothers.

-SL

The Spirit of Christmas

I am teaching a lesson in Young Womens today about bring Christ into our homes.

This video is a great example of how we can each do our part to influence our homes, and bring the spirit of Christmas into our homes.

WATCH IT! It's awesome.