cHrIsTmAs time is near

MERRY almost CHRISTMAS EVERYONE! Can you believe it's Christmas in 5 days? December has been flying by and we are ready to celebrate. Owen will finally be home for the rest of the week so we can relax and enjoy the holiday season with friends and family.

I've spent the last week shopping, baking, celebrating, wrapping, working, and decorating. It's been Christmas craziness in my house. So behold...some of the craziness:

Christmas Cookie baking

Thanks to my mom for getting all of the baking supplies

8 hours and 300 sugar cookies later...

Owen's parents are in town for Christmas and we kicked off the week by visiting the AZ Temple lights. We are blessed to have so many family and friends to celebrate the Christmas season with!

Holidays and House Hunting

Thanksgiving 2010 was a great one for us. My family always hosts Thanksgiving Dinner for the Massey family. This year we had 54 people over for a Thanksgiving Feast. All morning (week) was spent preparing for the big day. I love the small traditions Thanksgiving brings: waking up Thanksgiving morning to the smell of the Turkey cooking in the oven, turning on to watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade all morning, making last minute food preparations, eating TONS of food then napping in the afternoon. It was a great Turkey day.

Owen was able to play in the annual Turkey Bowl with his friends

3 Turkeys, 30 lbs. of mashed potatoes, 10 pies and a dozen other dishes later...our Thanksgiving feast!

We spent the rest of the weekend relaxing and seeing family and friends. We did, however, skip out on the Black Friday shopping. My someday we will experience this crazy day, but we enjoyed sleeping in together instead.

We found a tree at the tree lot and got it decorated for Christmas

We spent the cold Arizona nights being warmed by the fire


This last weekend Owen's company flew both of us to go house hunting (or apartment hunting in our case) in San Francisco. We are moving our little family there in January so we needed to find a place new place to call home. We arrived Friday morning and spent all day Friday and Saturday looking at apartments. Before we left, I made a long list of apartments I found on line to check out. Some of our musts: allows dogs, has washer/dryer, has enough storage space, doesn't cost a zillion dollars, close to a Target (ok...that was one of my musts) , central for Owen's work, and someplace safe looking. We drove all around the bay area looking at all kinds of places. Finally, we narrowed down our search to a city we liked and then an apartment complex. So our soon to be home will be in San Ramon, CA. The city is directly east of Oakland and San Fransisco. 25 minutes to Oakland. 35 minutes to San Fran. I was suprisingly pleased with our findings. The location, apartment quality and price was exactly what we were looking for (even though rent will be twice as much as Arizona...grrr). I have honestly been really nervous about moving to a place where I know nothing about. But now that I know the city and place we will be living in, I feel a lot better. I am actually really excited for the big move. I can't wait to be in our own place again and have Owen home more often. Below are pictures of the condos we will be living at:

I loved the pretty trees in the area.

Since we found an apartment to live in, we spent Sunday playing tourists. We stopped by the Oakland Temple. OH MY BEAUTIFUL! The temple sits on a hill so you can see it from across the bay. It looks like a princess castle and I loved it.

The view from the temple grounds. Oakland is below, then San Fran in the distance across the bay

We headed down to The Wharf in San Francisco and visted the Piers. Even though it was pouring rain the whole time, we managed to see a lot fun things. I forgot how awesome it is at The Wharfs. It is a beautiful place with a lot of fun things to do. I'm excited to visit it more often when we move there. A perfect place to take our future visitors :)