Nate's 30 by 30 list

http://skippyn8tion.blogspot.com/2011/06/filling-bucket.html

Just to prove we didn't fall overboard

I recently heard that people think we are dead. Is that what happens when you move to Millville? No one knows you exist anymore. Well, at least I know we were loved. Since we went on a cruise since everyone last head from us...this is of course what that post is about. First of all, we had a lot of fun. Don't let people tell you we hated it. But also, don't let people convince you it will be the best vacation you ever had. And lastly, don't, under any circumstances let the cruise company book your flights. They can't handle it.

First, we told them to take care of it, paid for it and didn't hear from them for like two months. We found out what our flights were going to be about a week before we were scheduled to leave. And after much discussion with the nice lady on the phone who assured us that we would be flown into Miami (the port we were leaving from) so that we could have the day before we left to visit the campus of the University of Miami (one on the list of school's being applied to for Law School), we were flown into Fort Lauderdale anyway. Which we could have done all on our own and spent far less money, we just couldn't figure out how to get from there to Miami in enough time to get to the school. Needless to say we were annoyed. Fine. We got over it.

We got to Fort Lauderdale and took the airport shuttle to the hotel listed on our travel information papers. We hadn't gotten the name of this hotel until about 2 days before we left, and only because we kept checking the Carnival website everyday, not because someone called and told us the info was there. So we get the hotel, which is pretty nice I'll give them that, and they have absolutely no record of reservation for Saturday for the two of us. But after calling Carnival and being on hold for a while, we found a reservation number to find they did have a reservation at the hotel for us for Sunday night. When we were supposed to leave on Sunday from Miami at 4 p.m. Awesome.

We did get this worked out and made it to the boat just fine. After waiting in a long line to get on the boat, we finally got on the boat and finally set sail. Our room was great, if a little low and forward on the boat, but who really wants to pay more for a balcony I'll probably never sit on? The turn-down service made animals out of towels every night. Obviously everyone on the boat was fascinated to try and figure out what we would find everyday. Here's an example...

Super cool right? I know.

After a day on board to get to our first destination (which actually wasn't as bad as I thought. I was worried I would puke my guts out, great image. Sorry.) we were so excited to get to Cozumel, Mexico. It is beautiful! The water is so clear and blue. It was amazing. And then we hurry to get on a boat to go across the water to the mainland to get to the Mayan ruins in Playa del Carmen. Didn't really spend much time on the actual island of Cozumel. Twenty minutes tops. Oops. But I'm a history nerd, so what did you really think we'd do? Shop? Ha! The ruins it is!

 This is the door to the city, which was surrounded by a wall, all the way around, with the ocean making up the fourth wall. There was a door on each side that looked just like this, and this was the only way in or out.

 They were pretty amazing with their math, and being able to follow the sun and stars to figure everything out. It's also how they built their buildings. It was amazing. Our tour guide knew a lot of stuff about them to tell us, but that was his job so...

 Best part. The bay the city sits in is surrounded by tall coral reef that protect it. It's almost impossible to enter unless you know where it is. When the Spanish came and tried to invade the city, they of course didn't know it, and standing where I am you can see 3 dark boat shapes in the water where the boats sank after hitting the reef. There are something like 300 more ships of enemies and the Spanish surrounding the city in the water because of the barrier. Great place to build a city! I found it fascinating, made want to dive to look at the boats, not the fish. Sorry. I'm nerdy. If you are getting bored with me spouting out random facts you can just skip down to the bottom...

This reef also creates a great little private beach that we spent a lot of time at as well. The water was warm, even though the day was only in the low 80s, which was by FAR the warmest day of the week. This was probably my favorite stop of the week. It was amazing. I learned and had fun. Who knew?! I would easily want to go back and spend a week just in Cozumel and Playa del Carmen. Awesome!

 This is our boat. The closest one behind us. Yes. That's how many boats were there that day. And this is literally how long we spent on Cozumel.

After this day we headed down to Belize, but I haven't gotten those picture developed from the waterproof camera yet, so you'll just have to wait. 

See? Not dead!

Birthday, Christmas, New Year's and Beyond

Okay, okay. I know it's been awhile. Maybe I like to keep people on the edge of their seats. December is a BUSY time of year for us. Since Thanksgiving, we've had Nate's 27th birthday! He's not THAT old I guess. We went out with friends and generally took the opportunity to be lazy since we knew the next month after that would be a whirlwind!

Thanks for coming out everyone!
After Nate's birthday, that next week was finals and after a long and rough week full of studying and packing for moving that weekend I graduated!! I don't think it's quite sunk in yet that I'm all done... I think it will in a month or so when I wonder why I don't have any homework to do as I see those around me at work frantically scrapping something together to turn in. Ha! It will feel good then! Although now that I'm done, now what? What do grown-ups do? What do people do when they don't have school to worry about all the time? What things are you supposed to do to fill up your time if it's not with homework? Also, what suggestions do you have for books to read now that I can read books I WANT to read and not books I HAVE to read?
Since there is no fall graduation ceremony at USU anymore I instead spent the Saturday after school ended moving. Fun right?! I'll let you guess what the biggest box in the house was full of. That would be shoes. You heard me. All of my shoes. Thanks for everyone who came and helped us! It went so fast, I went to the post office and came back and everything was inside the house. Awesome! I would post pictures, but I haven't really unpacked anything yet, so I won't show off how messy the house is. Pretty much right after we got slightly settled we packed our bags and went to visit my family in Maryland for Christmas! They live just outside of DC so we got to see the sites and relax. What a great week! Here are just a few scenes from the week, mostly because this is all I took...

The National Cathedral. It was really amazing work on that building, but admittedly, the dead people buried there is a little creepy. Thank you LDS church for burying people in cemeteries and not in churches.

 These are all from the Museum of Natural History. I guess I was so excited to be there and look at stuff that I forgot to take pictures. I'm a nerd like that, and because of this, all you get are the pictures of the dinosaurs from the first place we went in there. Mostly for the viewing pleasure of my 5 year old nephew who loves dinosaurs. I especially like the one of Nate about to get eaten by a bunch of bones, terrifying right?

When Nate learned that the original Kermit was inside the American History Museum, we were there. Probably the highlight of his life. Almost matching our wedding day. Maybe even better. I mean, it's Kermit. Can't you just see the stars in his eyes? Best part of the whole trip...watching me point to the room Kermit was in and him run to it like a kid to an ice cream truck...

We leave this weekend on our CRUISE! Which is going to be so much fun! It will be warm and sunny and we will be on a boat. Definitely should have done this years ago. I'll be sure and take more pictures than of our very first stop this time, maybe you'll get to see more than just the boat and our stateroom. Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season, and that you had just as much fun as Nate did seeing Kermit.

Thanksgiving and the Snow

Well, another Thanksgiving has come and gone. And we spent the majority of our day doing this:

It's kind of a dark picture, so if you can't tell that's Nate asleep behind me and Zoe asleep on top of me. I'm pretty sure D'Jayden was curled up on the lazy boy next to us. It was a wonderful holiday! Good food, family, and football! Best holiday ever! We could all use more holidays just like it: more excuses to take 4 day weekends. It was wonderful!

Then it all came crashing down on us like the snow usually does, never can it ease us into the transition from Fall to Winter, it just dumps. These pictures don't do it justice because this was after it snowed the first time and it's snowed multiple times since then. My calf high boots are no longer tall enough.

Nate shoveling, all the time. Think of this with about 8 more inches and you'll get this morning. Then after it dumps on us, it drops to about 9 degrees as the high for six or seven days in a row. Put on some extra pants and a couple pairs of gloves and I'm good to go! Lucky for me I have my brand new jeggings. Yes, I bought them.

And just had to share this because who can resist this face? I know I can't!

Especially not when I go to leave and she runs almost outside in the freezing, all wet in a towel just out of the tub to give me a hug before I go. What would I do without her?!

Hope everyone is getting into the holiday spirit! I will be in about 2 weeks and 5 days!

Halloween Party

Okay, so I know this is like three weeks late, but we're busy people. What do you want from me? So for Halloween this year, our nephew had his first Halloween walk at his kindergarten! I wasn't able to go, but Nate went and took some great pics. And of course, if D'Jayden does, Zoe must follow and so she got all dressed up and was so excited to be a part of it!

 Our little chicken! (And yes, that is a KFC bucket on her head...)

She wandered around trying to sound like a chicken, but it mostly sounded like a duck, but it was still cute!

D'Jayden's costume! He went as, and I quote: "The mean guy from Princess and the Frog."

He generally refers to all villans, bad guys, or people that are not nice as mean guys. Zoe agrees.

A few days later we went to a fun Halloween Party, my first since probably high school, and the first time I'd dressed up since I was like 12. (Needless to say, and you can see our previous post...we're not fans of Halloween. I'm one of those people that don't dress up and leave all the lights off at my house or just leave so that kids won't come begging for candy. This could be because we don't have any kids, but we'll see...)But this year, we made the effort, although it was a little lost on the crowd seeing as how the main goal of dressing up as such decided to go to Disneyland for Halloween instead...

I know you've all been dying to see our costumes...I know it's consumed you, so I will relieve your stress...

Behold, the APX couple. Just know that we sure didn't do this to offend anyone, we just wanted to make fun of the funny stuff we think people do. Please note my pregnant-ness, with the leggings, oh yeah, with glitter, and a mini-skirt. Please note Nate holding the RockStar energy drinks (which he did drink, but totally made him sick). Also, though you can't smell it here, he was wearing about 7 gallons of cologne...everyone could smell it...My hair had been much bigger, but my hair doesn't stay like that so it fell...

 This is Nate totally signing Obama. Yes, he's THAT good.

This is Nate...holding a baby. Haha. This is our friend's little guy Oaklen who was dressed up as an owl. So cute! Such a good costume Lauren!

Happy Halloween! And now we can concentrate on the really important holiday of the year. Thanksgiving.

Not Halloween

It is that time of year. Everyone's favorite. I just can't figure out why. We at the Laursen household are not fans of Halloween. I don't ever decorate for the silly holiday, don't dress up, and try not to be home so kids don't stop at my house begging for candy. That week also usually means mid-terms so I'm stuck studying the whole time anyway (but the bag of candy I don't hand out, usually tends to be pretty useful during this time period). So there you go. I said it. I hate Halloween. I'd rather skip right over it and skip right to the very best holiday ever made up:

We LOVE Thanksgiving. We get three whole days off of school (and usually more than 1 from work), I get to procrastinate all homework. Most teachers don't assign big things over the Thanksgiving Break, so you don't really have that much to do anyway. Seeing as how I live in a tiny little house and have lots of family, I go to as many households as I want, stuff my face and not feel one bit guilty about it, and then sit around and watch a lot of football until my stomach settles enough to eat some more. Who wouldn't love that? Then, you only have about one to two weeks left of the Fall Semester (which this year means graduation). Awesome. I therefore propose the obliteration of Halloween and replace it with another Thanksgiving.

As far as a family update for Nate and me, we are just waiting for Nate's LSAT score to come back so that we can try and figure out what we want to do with our lives. We have a few schools pretty high up on our interested list, but we just have to wait for people to tell us whether or not they want us to come to their school. It's really fun. We are preparing to hopefully find that new chapter in our lives. We are unsure of where we are going and what we will be doing with our lives, but it's requiring us to exercise a lot more faith in our lives, which I think is something we aren't very used to. So we are learning.

Mormon Message and Some Running

So everyone has seen at least one Mormon Messages Video right? The movies the church makes from some of the talks at General Conference and other places that reenact some of the stories told in these inspiring talks. Does everyone remember the talk by President Uchtdorf in April 2010 Conference called "Continue in Patience"? Okay, keep that in mind...

Nate is on this list from the church that sends out announcements when they are making something for the media asking for volunteers, etc. This is also where they send out announcements for these same Mormon Messages. Nate replied to one of these announcements asking for 20-something males to participate in an army type reenactment. When he heard back from them they told him that they were making a Mormon Message for "Continue in Patience" and would love his participation and was told the details.

So a few months back in July we drove down to Camp Williams and spent the day filming. A few other wives were there, especially those of us who came from quite a ways and we spent the day helping the boys get dressed up and generally hanging around. While the boys did a bit of sitting around and a lot of running. And I do mean a lot. Most of the day was spent outside, in the heat of July, running. The few scenes in the movie don't really do it justice, because we went all over the camp running and running in different places and in different formations. We had an old general show up to make it look like someone was in command. A guy who really was in the National Guard was playing as the Drill Sergeant and he ran them all around the compound some more.

It was actually a really fun time. Some people had done things like this before, and a few, like Nate, had never done any. Everyone was really nice, and it was really awesome to get to participate in something that we know will bring the Spirit to many. Check it out below and see if you can spot my husband!



I loved this talk! It is probably one of my favorite talks of all time and it was so amazing to be a part of it! I am so grateful for my husband! Even though it was hot, and there was a lot of running and sweating, this experience was actually pretty spiritual I think for both of us. I love the church's efforts to bring the gospel to the world and I was so grateful to be a part of it. Not only that, but I am now so proud to be able to share this experience with others!