The most wonderful time of the year!

Christmas is over... so sad :(

But man did Josh and I have fun!

Christmas for us always means seeing and hanging out with family, which also means taking a trip across the country. This may sound long and dull, but by the time December comes around Josh and I are always ready for the nice long trip.

So just before Christmas Josh and I jumped on a plane to Nashville... actually, we are SUPER cheap, so we jumped on a plane to Las Vegas (note the fact that Las Vegas is in the opposite direction of Nashville when flying from Phoenix) sat in an airport for a few hours and THEN jumped on a plan to Nashville. After that we grabbed our bags that had safely followed us from Phoenix, and went to Bowling Green, Kentucky (AKA one of the best places ever!).

Bowling Green is the home of Josh's aunt, uncle, and their kids. We pretty much love these guys to death and look forward to spending time with them all year. We got there just in time to do some family photos and get to be a part of their Christmas eve morning. These kids LOVE to get their picture taken, which is fine by me and Josh since we have decided that photography is one of our favorite things! We are still working with a Missouri internet connection, so we will have to post some more pictures when we get back to a bigger city. :)

Crazy Taylor

Beautiful Tatum!

After that it was time for the six hour drive to Missouri. The road trip was fun and relaxing. The weather was pretty good so Josh and I just chatted and had fun the whole way.

Once we made it to Missouri we got to see more family! We spent Christmas morning with Josh's Johnson family. It is a family tradition for them to all have brunch together on Christmas morning. More specifically, they always make quiche. Even more specifically, they usually make quiche with ham. I always feel bad or rude when I don't eat what somebody makes (obviously) so, being a silly vegetarian, I usually take a piece and just eat around the meat (and it has always been yummy!). But this year they made me my own little vegetarian quiche! No meat at all. It was so nice of them, and it was really good too! I ate it all :)

After brunch we opened gifts, played games, and then made our way back over to the Farmer side of the family for more family, food, gifts, and fun times! I love spending time in Missouri and Kentucky. I don't know if everyone here is as nice as the family I married into or if I just got really lucky. I must say, that I have been immensely blessed with this new family of mine, not only did I get a great husband, but I now have a whole lot of other loving and kind people in my life as well. I love my new family!

Now, with this, I must add that I miss my side of the family for sure! Getting married and having family members spread all over the country makes holidays hard because you can't be with everyone. But to my Washington family (and Phoenix sisters): You were for sure in my thoughts this Christmas, and I hope your holiday was wonderful! Love you!

As for all of our friends in Phoenix, we can't wait to get back and see you all (and get out of this snow)! I hope you all had a great holiday as well! Pictures soon!

Thanksgiving... The end :)

Okay sports fans, it is about 10pm here in Phoenix. The weather has cooled back down to a brisk 65 degrees and Thanksgiving is coming to an end.

After dinner we all sat our full bodies down and watched the stop motion version of Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. This is a holiday classic that many of us loved and others of us had never seen... but after all of that food, sitting down to watch a movie really just made us sleepy. So that could only mean one thing... time for pie obviously!

We had three yummy pies. Becca made a pumpkin pie and an apple pie, and I made a chocolate pie.


After pie it was time for Martinelli's sparkling apple cider (I LOVE this stuff!!!)

Then the realization set in that it was time to clean...

We split up the food and sent Becca, Bernie, and Bernie's friend home with as much ham as we could because goodness knows Josh can't eat 5lbs of ham on his own ;)

Then we packed up the leftovers and, most importantly, we packed up the dishwasher! We always used to do dishes by hand, but a mess like this definitely calls for a professional (not that Josh is not a pro at washing dishes :) )


Now, the kitchen is clean and Josh and I are sitting on our couch, bellies full, listening to the hum of the dishwasher. I would have to say that this Thanksgiving was a complete success!

We did miss many of our family members, but working on this blog really helped us feel like we were able to keep in touch! Thank you to everyone who followed us this Thanksgiving and to all of the wonderful people, near and far, that we got to spend this holiday with! We hope your Thanksgivings were as wonderful as ours!

Love,
Josh and Kelley

Dinner!

We had SOOOO much fun at Grammy and Grandfather's house!

We got home around 4:30 and rushed to get everything together. Then everyone got here and it was time to eat! He is how it all went:

First the Stuffing!
Here are the mushrooms.


Then add in the bread!

All ready to go in the oven!
Becca got me these cool slippers for my birthday!

Becca brought some brussel sprouts :)

She forgot the fruit salad she made and the grocery stores were closed, but Walgreens was open so we got the stuff to make some!

Bernie is so strong lol he opened the olives for us!

We had a lot of food!

Here is us eating...


And here is us full of food...


YYYuuuummmm! It was soooo good!

More pictures of the rest of the night later :)

More to come...

Okay mom, I know you are following this. Don't worry, we will be posting soon! We are eating FINALLY!!!!

Posts coming soon!

-Kelley

Farmer/Bates time!

We are now on to our first Thanksgiving of the day!

We are at Grammy and Grandfather's house with the Arizona Farmers and Beth (a wonderful new addition to the family)

Lots of yummy food and drinks and wonderful friends and family! We have missed spending time with all of these people, so this is great! Here are some pictures:

Yummy food by Jessica Farmer

Yummy Cheesy goodness!

The whole Gang (in two groups) with the Arizona sun in our faces.

Beautiful Beth

Cindi Lu

We love you Stephanie! Oh yes we do

Maddy
Abby Drinking the Dew

Jessica!

That's it for now! More to come later!

-Kelley

Thanksgiving with our Family (And anyone else who would like to follow along)

Thanksgiving = family

Always has, always will. Thanksgiving is a time when all of us are supposed to remember and think about everything we are thankful for. Often times, as is the case with us, we find that we are most thankful for the family God has given us.

Well Josh and I live about 1,500 miles away from our families (thankfully we do have some family here is Phoenix *Love you Farmers and Weiss sisters!). Some are in Washington state and some are in Missouri and Kentucky. Either way, they are not here with us in Phoenix, and around holidays like Thanksgiving is when we really start to miss them the most!

So we are 1,500 miles away from our families, so what! This is the age of technology, and distance is no problem for technology!

We decided that we are going to have Thanksgiving with our families right here on this blog! We are going to post pictures and short posts on what is going on during the day so that our families can share Thanksgiving with us! We love you guys and we hope you will leave comments on our posts and let us know how your Thanksgivings are going as well! We want to spend Thanksgiving with you, no matter how far away we all may be.


So here goes!

For those of you who are not used to late November in Arizona... this is what it looks like in our backyard right now! Yup, a freezing 74 degrees! Better put on a sweater!

Here is how the morning started off. Josh and I got up around 8:30 to start the cooking. First up: Ham!

This baby has been sitting in our fridge soaking up sugar water for the last few days. It better be good, Josh will have to tell you how it turns out since I don't eat meat :) We will be cooking it and pouring juice and sugar over it for about 7 hours :)

Next up: Stuffing!



MMMmm! I love this stuff! It takes a while because we have to toast the sourdough bread and make the veggie broth, but it is going to be worth it! Here is some of the toasted bread and the veggie broth cooking! yyuumm!


We ran into one little problem, the ham has to cook at 200 degrees and it takes 350 degrees to toast the bread... sooo toaster! Which made it a little darker than Josh would like... but I love dark toast!

Well that's it for now. Thanks for having Thanksgiving with us! We will be posting again soon, until then leave a comment and tell us how your Thanksgiving is going!

Love,
Josh and Kelley

The Sensitivity of Men

So, pretty much anyone that knows me knows that I am just about as frugal as can be. For example, yesterday I wanted some potato chips (yes, I know how bad they are for me… but sometimes you just need that salty goodness), but I just could not make myself spend over $2 on a bag of junk food. So, I stayed home, peeled and cut up three potatoes and made my own. Yes it took a lot more time than going to the store and buying my own, but a 10lb bag of potatoes costs like $1.50 on sale, so 3 little potatoes are super cheap… and when turned into potato chips they are also super yummy :)

Believe it or not, junk food is NOT the point of this post. That was just supposed to be an example of my frugalness to transition into this: Laundry.

Yes, we have an HE washer and dryer. It saves on water, electricity… The only real drawback to this is that the detergent for the washer is out of this world expensive… anyways, that is, again, not the point. The point is that we got this washer and dryer set because it is supposed to be saving us some cash, and I’m sure it is. However, this is of course not enough for me. Nope, I have to push everything to the frugal limit. So, I thought “HHmm… how can I make this whole laundry process cheaper for us?” Then it came to me: Line-drying.

Now, both Josh and I, at some point in our lives, have worn clothes that have been hung out to dry. Whether the hanging dry was due to a broken dryer or a mother’s preference for having clothes swinging in the breeze for all to see, I am not sure. Either way, Josh and I were not fans of this drying style when we were growing up. It seemed that hanging our nice soft clothes out to try sent them through some magical process in which they transformed into evil scratchy pieces of cardboard that attacked you as soon as you tried to put them on your body.

I however, was sure that I had matured passed the age in which line-dried clothes could affect me. So, I thought I would give this whole hanging dry thing a try. I didn’t tell Josh of course. I figured if he knew he would be sure to HATE the idea and be convinced from the start that all of his clothes were scratchy… So I decided not to inform him and see how he reacted when he put on his new more frugally dried clothing. I figured if he noticed and hated it I could just go back to putting his clothes in the dryer, and if he didn’t notice I could keep line-drying his clothes.

So, I hung the clothes out to dry, hung them up in our closet, and then forgot about the whole thing. Now, I did not just hang Josh’s clothes to dry, nope, I hung mine to dry as well. I went about a week or so wearing these line-dried clothes and I did not notice anything different at all. Like I said, I actually forgot that I had dried these clothes any differently than normal. Imagine my surprise when, this weekend, Josh asks me if we switched to a new fabric softener or if there is something wrong with our usual fabric softener. Confused, I told Josh that we don’t even use fabric softener (Our clothes are usually pretty soft on their own, and fabric softener leaves an annoying residue sometimes). Josh said, “Oh, well for the last few days my shirts have been really stiff and scratchy. I can’t figure out why.” At this point it all came back to me and I just started laughing. Josh of course had no idea why I was laughing and was sure I was laughing at him. I told him that I had hung the clothes to dry to find a new way to save money and I didn’t tell him because I figured if he didn’t know he wouldn’t notice a difference in his clothes. Josh laughed at my silly frugalness, pointed out that he did in fact notice all on his own, and then informed me that because we have an HE dryer, any amount of money that we would possibly save by hanging our clothes out to dry would be minuscule at most.

Well then, I guess it is back to the old drying routine and time to find a new way to save some cash (we are not destitute, I promise. I just feel like it is important for me to be in charge of us saving money since Josh is really the one who brings most of it in)… Funny how I didn’t notice the difference in my clothes though… Men must be more sensitive :)

-Kelley