February: People Don't Notice Whether It's Winter or Summer When They're Happy

Since I'm still in catch up mode, I didn't feel like making a million posts for February... so here is our February in a nutshell! It started out with a celebration of our 6 month month-aversary. I would say anniversary, but Jeff and Alisha have nicely pointed out that anniversary denotes years, so that actually doesn't make any sense, and I don't know a better word for a celebration of six months. Anyone know one? Well, we went to The Roof in downtown SLC on February 6 because the Joseph Smith Memorial Building gave us two vouchers for two meals each for having our wedding reception there. I think it was a mistake - they probably only meant to give us one, but since we had two we decided to use them on our 6 month month-aversary and our one year anniversary! Pretty sweet set up. We had a wonderful time drinking mango and raspberry lemonades, devouring the best rolls in the state, eating prime rib, and gazing into each others' eyes and being in love.

Ze Roof

Being in wove

(It's ok, we're married.)

Then came Valentine's Day. It turns out that Valentine's Day is actually a pretty fun holiday when you actually have a Valentine! (Twas a rare occasion for some of us... don't judge.) Sooo I thought it was only appropriate to make pink waffles for breakfast! Yum. Now I just need to get my hands on a heart shaped waffle maker for next year... I know they exist because my freshman roommate Laura had one that we used every Sunday back in the day... maybe I'll just hunt her down and steal it in her sleep. She'll never suspect me.

DON'T I HAVE THE CUTEST HUSBAND IN THE WORLD???????

Look at that face... all dressed up in his little work clothes... with his little fork...

And theeeen... toward the end of the month, we decided it was time to try to make our own bread. I'd never made bread before in my life, or even thought about it, but I did watch a lot of amazing Croatian women do it and found a fool-proof recipe on allrecipes.com which made it pretty easy.

Look, it wasn't a total disaster. Miracles do happen, after all.

And it was about time, because I was getting really tired of trying every brand of

whole wheat bread in the grocery store and never being pleasantly surprised with it.

So now we just make it and freeze it.

And this is my laptop with my dad in Hong Kong - we were torturing him with our fresh-out-of-the-oven bread during our Sunday chat. He was not too happy about that. Heh heh heh. Sucker.

We made a Croatian creation out of it: stuffed sandwiches. Well, I'm sure it's not JUST Croatian, but that's where I first ate one! Just pull out the inside of the loaf, mix it with whatever's in your fridge, and stuff it back in with some lettuce and tomatoes. We used cottage cheese, feta cheese, mustard, green peppers, olives, salt and pepper, tomatoes... and I don't remember what else. Nuts maybe. So good. You should try it.

And, of course, we had to join in the Jimmer-mania.

I think my favorite poster from the season said, "Upstate New York changes the world... again!"

Go Cougars!

Jordan's Farewell

In January, Nelson's little brother Jordan left on a mission to Germany! We were sad to see him go, but SO happy too! We are so proud of him! Here are a few of my favorite pictures from the night he was set apart - and the last time we'll see him for two years!

OK, actually, this is a picture from November when Jordan received his endowments in the Salt Lake Temple. I forgot to put them in my November blogging so I though this was a good place to add them in. :) Ya know... mission prep. Anyway, as Nelson would say, this is a picture of "the first litter."

And one of the whole fam! Well, everyone who could be there.

We missed Brooke and the boys!

Also, I missed the "YOU ARE ONLY ALLOWED TO WEAR BLACK" memo. Oops...

Nelson and Jordan, lookin' classy.

So it turned out a little blurry, butt I couldn't resist adding this one in.

(Who got my joke? Anyone?)

Brothers don't shake hands. Brothers gotta hug!

In order of ascending height.

And last but not least, here is some brotherly advice that Nelson and Preston had for Jordan. They were being really funny and then got all camera shy when they realized I was filming... OF COURSE. If you can't understand them, Preston told him to wear clean socks everyday even though sometimes he won't want to. :) Nelson told him "3%... you'll figure it out later." I have no idea what that means.... ANYWAY! Bye Elder Wittwer!

I Love To See The Temple

The best thing to happen to us in January was our new church calling to be temple workers! Because of our work schedules, we have to work different shifts (disappointing), but we are both loving it. We feel pretty lucky at the opportunity and know that so many good things have come into our lives as a direct result. In fact, it seems like EVERY good thing in our lives is a direct result of the temple. So, here's a tribute to a few of our favorite temples:

Hong Kong Temple

This is the temple I went through before I left on my mission in 2008.

And a picture of me and my mom at the temple together for the first time!

Salt Lake Temple

Obviously our favorite because we got married and sealed here for time and allllll eternity. Also the temple Nelson went through before his mission in 2005.

Rome, Italy Temple

This is just a picture of the plans for this temple - it's still under construction. It made the list of favorites because it is the temple that will serve Croatia! (Mission-land) I am so excited to have a temple that much more accessible to those amazing people.

For example, these people :)

Preston, England Temple

This was the temple in Nelson's mission - it was right next to the MTC he went to.

They only got to go once a year and Nelson has a lot of great memories there.

Jordan River, Utah Temple

Last but not least, this is the temple we get to work at nowadays.

And this is us outside of it on a snowy Saturday morning! Joy :)

December! The Month that is Cold.

What's up internet world? This is Nelson. It has been a while. Some things you should know about December: my wife is amazing, Santa isn't real (sorry kids), snow is a good thing, and the best gifts are the gifts that keep on giving.

One of the highlights of the holiday season was decking the halls with bowels of holly. (Yes. Bowels. No one actually knows what they are saying in that song; also, it's kind of strange to look back at Christmas in April. It is especially strange when there is still snow on the ground outisde. Woof.) Since our apartment was already bare because we are poor newly weds surviving off the scraps that Uncle Ernie (Ernst & Young) throws at the employees on the bottom of the totem pole (no offense Uncle Ernie), we took the opportunity to splurge a little and decorate our cute, humble apartment. Lauren and I had fun running around trying to find Christmas decorations at the start of the month. It was harder than one would imagine. We wanted things to be classy. We are classy people. As readers of our blog, you know this. Feast your eyes on these festive holiday decorations. We put Martha Stewart's homemaking skills to shame. I pitty da fool.

Sorry, I had to. What is Christmas without Martha Stewart and Mr. T eating gourmet Top Ramen? Also, Lauren doesn't know who Mr. T is. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. With that out of my system, here is our cute Christmas decor:

This super cute number was picked up at the Primary Children's Hospital Gift Store. After work on a December night, Lauren spotted this awesome advent calendar and vowed it would be in our house. And so it was. Also, we put Dove chocolates in it and they were yummy. Nelson got to eat them on the even days and Lauren got the odd days, mainly because Lauren wanted to eat the first one. I valiantly tried to win that battle, but in the end I had to hang my head in defeat and wait til the 2nd to dip my dove chocolate in my Chunky Skippy peanut butter like a true Wittwer.

This is where St. Martha would be proud. Lauren made this center piece from the leftover clippings of our Christmas tree. She gets three gold stars for that. That center circular decorative thingymagig is one of our new Christmas traditions. As we plan on getting a real Christmas tree each year, we decided to cut off a bit of the trunk and label it with the year and save it forever. We hope to save a piece of our trunk for every year. Cute, huh? Eat it Martha.

Here is our nutcracker. Apparently eating nuts like these are good. I never got into it.

Festive fruits. Insert funny caption here.

I liked this one a lot. I think you are supposed to put this on your door, but we didn't have any way of hanging it outside. Instead we hung it from our Doctrinal bookshelf. Mazel tov.

This is where you get to see how strange and deranged we are. So, at some point in Lauren's BYU tour of active duty, she acquired these two green stockings. There was no way we were going to settle on those stockings for our Christmas. You can't even fit a chocolate orange in that thing. Seriously. We had to buy bigger stockings of course, but Lauren wanted to keep these greenies to add to our decor. We naturally put our names on the big stockings, but we were left with two more renegade stockings without names to go with them. Lauren asked if she could put the name of her stuffed gorilla Monson on one of them. I agreed on one condition: only if I could put the name of my only chest hair Chester on the other. She agreed for some reason, and now we have this spectacle to haunt our posterity forever. I love us. Gold star.

We really wanted to get a nativity for our house, but it turns out you have to sell your soul for a decent one. Kind of ironic. We found one that didn't look so bad and picked it up at Wal-Mart. It was funny watching the price of this set slowly rise as December progressed. Way to go market economy.

It's too bad we forgot to get a picture of our decorated tree in the dark, it was real puuuuurty. Sorry about Bradford's peace sign. We try to be accepting of him, he lives in Asia after all. Back to the tree, we were happy with how it turned out. We got the ornaments from just about every store in the valley as it had to be just right. It was quite the project, but we thought it was worth it because we will have Christmas decorations for years to come. Sorry for the Asian insult Bradford. Love you.

Speaking of Bradford, he was nice enough to drop in from the sky and pay us a visit during the holiday season. He's a nice man. Every now and then he has to fly back to the corporate mothership in Seattle, and he is nice enough to take a detour after his business stuff and pay us a visit. To our surprise, Brad brought some visitors with him. We found out after he visited the doc that Brad had some parasite friends that weren't playing very nice with his insides. He wasn't feeling very well at all. MVP of the season goes to this bald freedom fighter for putting on a happy face and spending a fun weekend with us anyway. He was feeling so miserable, but he still managed to be his happy-awesome-father-in-law self. My hero.

Temple Squrrrr! We took Bradford around Temple Square to see the lights. It turns out he hadn't seen the lights on Temple Square in a long time. It was fun to see him light up with excitement, and see the lights reflect off his cranium.

This one was just too cute. Love it.

Say what you will about the strange weather patterns of the beehive state, but the snow here is awesome. Lauren and I picked up some 2 for 1 passes at Snowbird from BYU as Christmas presents to each other. We got 4 passes each for the season. This was the first time either of us had been to the bird since we both learned how to ski on Chickadee.

I'm afraid I got myself into quite the pickle during our first outing of the season. Lauren has only been skiing a handful of times, and I was pretty oblivious of this, as it turns out. I didn't know how to navigate my way around Snowbird and neither did Lauren. We found our way to our first lift called "Peruvian." For those of you who know their way around the Bird, you will know this lift serves mainly black diamonds and one very crowded blue square. Oops. Lauren wasn't very pleased with me after that. In better news, Lauren dominated that lift at the end of the season. Am I a bad person?

We are cute.

This is me loading the calories before I hit the slopes. Sometimes I am starved for attention. Probably because I am the middle child in a family of 8.

Thank you Subaru.

Oh the weather outside is frightful. Seriously though, there were like 8 cars stuck on the side of the road. Thank you Subaru x2.

Back to Christmas time. I found this pretty picture of our tree. It looks nice.

Oh, Christmas tree.

Possibly my favorite Christmas tradition. Sticky buns. This was Lauren's first experience with Sticky buns, and I think it is safe to say they were an instant hit. In fact, I think we downed the entire plate, save two rolls, in one sitting. I love Christmas.

Oh, yes! This was awesome. So it turns out Lauren is a pansy when it comes to onions. She tears up like the kid who gets picked last for dodgeball when she chops into the clear flesh of an onion. For whatever reason, our Christmas onions were EXTREMELY strong. The tear ducts started to explode, so she did what any sensible American would do: put on ski goggles. I love this woman.

We celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve because Lauren had to work on Christmas day. It was super chill and amazing in every way. We just spent the day with each other cooking, singing, and just loving the fact that it was just the two of us. Check out our Christmas Ham we cooked. It's got brown sugar and cloves on it and such.

This Christmas ham is brought to you by the Brown Sugar bear.

Doing his part to keep things fresh in the Wittwer house.

This is me cutting the Christmas ham. That thing was crazy good.

Here is our Christmas feast. It was amazing.

What would Christmas be without rolls. As you can tell, rolls and homemade

strawberry jam are kind of a big deal.

Here are the cookies and milk we left Santa. I liked eating them afterward.

I also liked being Santa for the first time.

The award for best Christmas gift goes to me, of course. Remember when I told you about Chester earlier? I tactfully tied him to a piece of ribbon and put it in Lauren's wedding ring box. I wanted to give her a gift that was close from the heart. Also, she was trying to steal him from me for months. I thought this was the perfect way of saying "I love you." Obviously I nailed it. Merry Christmas, everyone. From Nelson, Lauren, and Chester (RIP)