November Visit from Jeffy

In November my older brother Jeff took a business trip out here to SLC and spent a weekend with us! We got to roll around in his rented red Camaro (albeit in 8 inches of snow) AND he treated usto a gargantuan sushi feast, which was, needless to say, delightful in every way. Well, that is, until I mentioned that mytuna sashimi was slightly subpar. Two minutes after that comment, the waitress came around asking how everything was, I said great, and Jeff felt the need to chip in and say, with a big smirk on his face, "Well, actually, she just said she didn't think it was very good." Well THAT was followed by a huge awkward silence. Thanks Jeff!

Anyway, we tried to entertain him by taking him to a BYU football game and getting my favorite football treat: COUGAR TAIL. If you can't tell from the picture, this was Nelson's first time to try a cougar tail too. (Cougar tails are a footlong maple frosted doughnut, FYI.)

It disappeared pretty fast.

And then he left on Sunday morning - somehow both of the males in this picture were plenty able to get ready for church and look presentable while I, on the other hand, clearly just rolled out of bed... ? Oh well! We had fun. The end.

October Domesticities

So, in October we really grabbed the old-married-couple bull by the

horns and decided to get all domestic.

Domestic project numero uno: strawberry freezer jam. It was SOoOoO good, and in fact, we still have one and half jars of it left in our freezer. Perfect, just enough to last us until summer and MORE STRAWBERRIES YUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

Also, I know there is a huge thing of oil sitting on our counter, but NO, we didn't put oil in our jam. We used oil for our next domestic project...

DOUGHNUTS!!

We had to make them in flower shapes because it's the only dough cut out we own. Oops.

Has anyone else ever noticed how doughnuts are exponentially more delicious when they're made by a man in a pink and cheetah print apron that says...

This may be my favorite picture EVER! Bahaha.

(I got that apron as a gag gift at one of my bridal showers.

It's only been used this once... but it is so worth owning! Thanks Amanda!)

September Family Picnic

And last but not least in the glorious month of September, we decided to head up into the mountains before it started getting too cold up there for a good ol' fashioned FHE! We christened the matching picnic basket, dishes, and blanket that my friend Eileen got us for our wedding and it was faaaabulous! Actually... I was still freezing and had to steal Nelson's work shirt from him to wear and we got in trouble with the park ranger because we didn't know we had to pay to use the picnic table (laaaame...) and then bees starting attacking us and we had to leave BUT besides that it was faaaabulous!

Thanks Eileen for the picnic set!!

Complete with 7 plates and 7 cups for our eventual 5 children :)

(who are going to be so cute by the way)

I don't actually know what is going on in this one, but check out

the pretty mountain background!

Hooray for autumn in the woods.

September 2

Our second family activity ran a little smoother :) We had Nelson's little siblings come over for a sleepover. We ate pizza, painted our faces with glow in the dark face paint, played sardines at the park, and then I pointed and laughed while the kids just jumped all over Nelson before bedtime.

I had a picture of a really pretty huge green blob on my cheek...

Gianna had a pink heart, of course...

And Kennedy, I believe, attempted a star.

I especially love Kennedy's and Gianna's faces in this one! Bahaha.

Josh is about ready to kill someone with that clementine...

And Nelson thinks he's the target.

Josh didn't want to paint his face, but he's darn cute anyway.

Heh heh heh.

September

One of the purposes of this blog (actually the main purpose) was to have it around as a life record of sorts. I'd heard about companies that printed off books made from your blog posts and thought, "SOOO much easier and lots more fun than writing in a journal!" I mean really, it's the new and improved version of scrap-booking (which I was never good at - I'm pretty sure I spent my entire high school career trying to "catch up" on my scrap-booking but never made it past the seventh grade because I was too much of a perfectionist and every page took three plus hours sooo... it pretty much never happened. Whoops.) So instead of trying and inevitably failing miserably at that again, Nelson and I decided to have a blog book for every year of our marriage! Unfortunately, not only did we not come up with this grand idea until half way through the first year of the mawwiage, but we came up with it right before the busiest, most agonizingly stressful month of our lives, which set us up for a major blog fail. However, that month is now over (curse you, March), and I have my first completely FREE day pretty much since Christmas break, where there is NOTHING on my schedule that can't wait until tomorrow, and I'm just relaxing, living the one-day dream, and doing whatever it is that I feel like! OHHHH THE JOY! And, right now, all I feel like doing is listening to my Yael Naim Pandora station and catching up on our lives from September through March in hopes that blogging will become less formidable once I can just post little notes about the here and now :)

SEPTEMBER at the Wittwer House (errr... apartment...)

Once Nelson got home from CA life was so so sweet. It finally felt like we were real married people because let's be honest, August was really just a continuation of the long-distance stunt we pulled all throughout our engagement that happened to be interrupted by a nice vacation to Cancun. That was lame. We filled our time mostly with fun family activities such as the following:

Preston and Jordan (two of Nelson's brothers) came over for Sunday dinner! We made use of our CrockPot for the first time and made a delicious pot roast! Mmmm. And, being the charming young men that they are, they offered to contribute to the feast by bringing some greens (see left :)) I love them. Nelson also (wisely) pointed out that it would only be appropriate to have them over if we provided a copious amount of dinner rolls. So, in his baking enthusiasm, Nelson forgot to turn off the stove burner from something else we'd made and ended up putting our silicon baking dish full of

straight-out-of-the-oven rolls onto the blazing

hot burner. After a couple of minutes, we looked at each other and asked... "What's that smell??" We looked at the stove and realized what had happened, but before I could do anything,

Nelson had let out a passionate Tarzan

bellow and heroically pounced toward the rolls, grabbing the dish off the burner. Lamentably, he didn't think about the fact that the dish was about 500 degrees by that point. We had to wrap up his fingers pretty good there.

The Beginning

OK, OK. Nelson and I have finally gotten enough mocking, disappointed, and otherwise obnoxious comments that we decided we better update the blog again! We are really bad at this. SO! Where did we leave off... K. When we got home from the honeymoon, we started searching for apartments. At this point, all of our stuff was still in our single student apartments in Provo. Nelson continued to be mostly dead for the ONE weekend we had to apartment search before he headed to San Jose, CA for the next three weeks to do some job training with EY. Oh yeah, and also during that ONE weekend, I forced him to get dressed up and go to his college graduation :)

YAY NELSON!!!! Congratulations to the handsome college grad! I was so proud.

Then, we managed to decide on an apartment complex, and off went Nelson to CA while I embarked on the moving journey. Two packed up apartments later, this is what my car looked like.

I couldn't open the back to take a picture of the best part for fear it would all crumble down on me. Suffice it to say, that was not so much fun. The worst part was that we couldn't move into our new place for another week, but we still had to be out of our old apartments. Nelson's family was SO nice to let us store it all in their basement for the week, but that meant I had to pack it up twice. Yikes. FINALLY we got the keys to our first little apartment while Nelson was back for a weekend. Here's the place!



So there you have it! Nelson's AWESOME brothers Preston and Jordan helped us transfer all of our stuff from their house to the apartment because they are so so nice.

...And then we had an official toast with the lemonade they give out for free at the main office of our apartment complex because we didn't have any other dishes or food yet. :)

(Side note: Notice from the crazy hair in this picture that Nelson was still SO sick at this point, and still had to sleep for 18 hours a day. Poor kid. I was happy he was able to get up for long enough to make the cheesy toast for our first home. That's a big moment.)

I then spent the next 2 weeks driving in between Target and Ikea, organizing the place, building furniture with my super human strength, and missing my husband. Nelson spent the next two weeks watching over 2,000 Power Point slides about IT security, management, and education, fighting three infections, and missing his wife, of course. At least the apartment was all ready for Nelson when he got home! Yay! And that, my friends, was August in the Wittwer home.

Some of my Favorite Things

Hi internet world,

We have been pretty much married for six months now, and that makes me smile. A lot. As promised, we wanted to share with you some of the highlights of our life which you. I'm going to be honest though, I'm really kind of motivated to post on this here blog because of all of the naysayers out there. *cough* Wendy *caugh* So what if I only posted like 4 times on my own personal blog a few years back. In my opinion that thing was perfect, it didn't need anything else. I had a poem about Mac and Cheese, a video of Gianna playing Wii boxing, and tales about my time as in EY intern. I don't know if it gets much better than that.

On that note, I begin my epic tale of our marriage so far.

First Things First: The Mawwiage

Luckily, our marriage did not include a storming of the castle or the Dread Pirate Roberts, although it did include someone who is was mostly dead. Someone decided to get married, graduate, move, and start a new job all within a 10 day period = not good for the human body. Sorry for being sick on our wedding honey. Oh ya, and sorry for being sick during our honeymoon and for three weeks after. Luckily the sickness didn't hit until after the wedding, so I was able to remember our wedding day.

It was an amazing day, and I still feel like the luckilest guy in the world. I cannot even begin to thank everyone for all of the planning, work, and sacrifice that went in to making our special day perfect in every way. We are blessed to have such a great and supportive family, who did so so much for us. Even to this day we are humbled by the amount of generosity that was shown to us. We cannot thank all of you enough for everything. My cheeks still hurt from smiling so much. It was so fun to have so much support, but most importantly, it was amazing to share such a special day with my dear wife. In case you couldn't see it then, we love each other a lot :)

Also, she looks incredible. I'm a happy, lucky man.

One of our big regrets is taking close to zero pictures on our honeymoon. The one day I was feeling well enough to be adventurous to stand up and walk we went to this ropes course called Selvatica. It was a lot of fun. We did a zip line / 4 wheeler tour in the jungle of Cancun, and it was crazy fun. The only problem was I forgot to bring closed toe shoes to the ropes course. Luckily, I married a woman of many talents who found this solution:

The best part of the Selvatica trip was this crazy cool zip line over this pond in the middle of the jungle. The water was a perfectly chill temperature, and it was fun to do dives and flips after doing the token Tarzan yell. I highly recommend it. 

I hope you enjoyed these happy memories. Stay tuned for more, gumshoes.