Valentine's Day "Campout", Basketball games, and Lisa's Birthday

This past week has been a fun week.  First off, because it was Valentine's day.  I love Valentine's day.  I love having a day to think about the ones you love and celebrate it with the people you love as well.  I decided to plan this Valentine's day out a little better seeing as last year I didn't really plan that much.  Peter lately has really been itching to get out and go camping.  From watching like 'Survivorman' and 'Out in the Wild' to reading his Ranger Survivor Handbook, I picked up on the hints that he wants to enjoy the great outdoors.  Unfortunately, Mother Nature doesn't agree with him because it seems like it hasn't been higher than 35 degrees since January and so he would have to wait until Summer to actually go camping.  That's when I thought it would be nice for him to have an outdoor experience in our home.  After weeks of planning and keeping Peter guessing of what is going on, I kicked Peter out of the apartment and decorated the place so that he could go "camping".  I was a little disappointed at the end result of my decorating (it looks a lot cheesier than I envisioned it to be), but Peter loved it and we enjoyed eating our dinner on our blanket while watching "Skyfall" and sleeping in our tent. 

Yes.  I put that tent up by myself.  Be impressed.

Our "mountains"

The "river" I made, the stuff on the floor was "leaves" instead of rose petals,  and our "campfire" was a disc that was playing on the TV.

Pretty successful Valentine's day!

The next day, while Peter was in class, I cleaned up the living room, and packed our bags due to a last minute decision to head to Utah for President's Day weekend.  We spent a couple of days with Drew and Jessica and it was a lot of fun just relaxing and enjoying their company.  We got some tickets to a BYU Basketball game that we decided to go to later on in the day.  It was my first BYU basketball game and I must say I was glad I didn't get any boos or objects thrown at me seeing as I was wearing the wrong colors for the game (I wore my purple and white sweater which turned out to be the color of the opposing team.  Oops!) Lori was nice enough to hook us up with some awesome seats and it was fun watching the fans, the intensity of the game, and the excitement of it all.

They were great seats!

The next day was Lisa's birthday.  I felt bad that she had to spend her birthday so far away from home but Jessica did a great job making birthday crepes and decorating her place just for Lisa.  It was a fun morning celebrating Lisa!

Happy Birthday Lisa!

After church, we packed our things and went to have dinner and spend a day with my family.  It was fun shopping and spending the day relaxing with them.  (We spent most of the time relaxing or shopping and I didn't think to take any pictures.  Sorry!)

I love spending time with my family!  And I love spending time with Peter's family!  I hate it when the time comes to say goodbye to both and head back to the frigid Rexburg and it seems like the more we visit them, the harder it is to leave.  

It was a great weekend and I can't wait to see everyone again!

IHOP, Superbowl, Kitchen aid Cake, and Couponing...

I've been trying to do better at updating this as best as I can, seeing as I am apparently the worst at updating this according to some people (I will not mention names...but you know who you are.)  So let me start with what fun stuff has been happening in the past couple of weeks. 

One Friday evening, Peter and I have decided to relive an old "single-status" tradition called a "Denny's Run".  This is where you grab a bunch of people late at night and head to Idaho Falls to have a meal at Denny's.  While we didn't have a TON of people with us and we didn't end up at Denny's, we still enjoyed the company of Lisa and Shane and the food of the next best, if not better, place, IHOP.  After stuffing ourselves with pancakes and omelets, we headed to Super Wal-Mart for a few things that our 'normal' Wal-Mart in Rexburg doesn't offer, and Lisa and Shane had fun with the camera while we were heading back home.

Over Christmas, I received a beautiful new Kitchen-aid from my wonderful Father-in-law and Mother-in-law and a few days ago, I finally found a good recipe to put it to use and I'm proud to say that it was a success.  I can't wait to use my awesome Kitchen-aid even more in the future.

The cake's a bit small and the frosting could've been better, but everyone else seemed to like it!

And on a more recent note, we've enjoyed the company of Lori and Lisa at our home the past couple of days and with today being the Superbowl, we thought it would be fun to have a little family party with every Barnes in Rexburg, plus Zachary.  We all met up at Melissa's (Peter's cousin) house and enjoyed making our own pizzas and skyping with Annette wishing her many birthday wishes from the West.

We've come to discover that the men are better at laying down pizza dough.  The trays on the far left and far right are Peter's and Zach's.  The one in the middle is Lori's...

Happy Birthday Annette! We love you!

Just had to get a cute candid of the cute couple:)

Zach had to go and ruin this photo with his PDA. Gross.

After the food and the game was over (we're not big football fans, so we just kind of had the TV on while we finished up our food) we had to say our goodbyes to Lori who had to travel back to Provo and then we all sat down for a couponing lesson from Melissa.  We decided to have this lesson due to Peter's love of the show "Extreme Couponing" and the discovery of the wonderful food storage that Melissa had because of her coupon skills.  We are very excited to see how much we save this week due to our new coupon binders!

Peter's dream came true! He has a coupon binder!

Just like a kid at Christmas.

It's been great fun getting to know Melissa and having our little family gatherings as much as we have.  Having family here makes the winter here a little more bearable.  I can't imagine the fun that we are going to have come summer!