Catch-up

So I know it has been like five months since I posted last, and I always make goals that I am going to blog more often but usually it doesn't happen. So I won't make any promises! It has been super busy, but things are starting to calm down. This past semester went by so fast. Some of the highlights were a weekend trip to Las Vegas with McKenna (Dan's sister) and her fiance McKay, and I got to go to Washington D.C. with my public health program. It was a super fun to see all of the sights. We are actually home in Billings for the summer. Dan is working at Western Security Bank and I am doing an internship with the health department for my public health program. It has been so nice to have our evenings free to hang out with our families and do relaxing things like watch TV! McKenna is getting married in less than two week here in Billings, so we have been helping with all the planning and are excited for the wedding.


Here is me and a few of my friends that I went to Washington D.C with. We walked soooo much, but we saw all of the monuments and went to all the museums we wanted to! And we also went to a conference, but that definitely wasn't the highlight of the trip. It was also freezing cold!
Here is my family I think at Christmastime. We are living with the Kirkpatricks for the summer, but have had lots of visits so far to my house. Dan is becoming a regular at Thursday night basketball. We visited Ashely and Andrew in Burley one weekend this semester, but are excited to see them over Memorial Day weekend.
Here are some of the Kirkpatrick kids. This was also a picture from Christmas vacation . . . I am kind of a slacker at taking pictures, but hopefully I well have some more coming soon!

Happy Holidayssss!

It has been a really long time since I posted last, and a lot has happened since then! First of all, Dan and I got a new car (well, new to us) because the old Taurus died. It is a Honda CRV and we really like it so far!

Right after school started, we went up to Billings for labor day for my cousin's wedding. Here is Dan playing with our cute little niece Reese.
For Halloween we carved these pumpkins and went to our ward trunk or treat. We missed Chelsea and Cody, and we definitely didn't have the coolest trunk this year!
Thanksgiving at the Stott house! Dan will do anything to get out of a picture, including hiding behind Dallin.
Here we are at the Kirkpatrick's. We had fun playing games, shopping, eating, and of course . . .
Christmas tree hunting. We found a really good tree and brought it all the way back down to Utah! It is so nice to have a fresh Montana tree in our little apartment!
We went to the Christmas devotional last night and walked around temple square. It is getting really chilly and we have had tons of snow the past couple of days! So there you have it, Happy labor day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas!
Besides celebrating these fun holidays, we have been busy with school and work! I have been pleasantly surprised with my masters program. I have really liked my classes and teachers this semester. I also am working teaching weight loss classes and doing nutrition counseling at the Central Utah Clinic, which I love! Dan is still working in the history department and working hard in his business classes. There is an update, if anyone still checks our blog. Hopefully I will post again before three months go by!

Virginia Lovin

Dan and I are back in Provo now, but the past six weekends we have been traveling! Needless to say we have been busy, but I wanted to post these pictures of Dan with our three ADORABLE nieces. We got to visit Katy (Dan's sister) and Sean and their girls in Virginia two weekends in a row during our time working in Philadelphia. It was so fun! This first picture is of Dan and Liz dancing at the Floyd country store. Every Friday night a bluegrass band comes to play at this country store and all of the locals come out for some hillbilly dancing. It was quite entertaining! I think we were the only ones there without a southern Virginia accent.

Katy and the girls came up to visit us in Philadelphia for a few days and we saw all of the sites there. We toured independence hall, saw the liberty bell, and spent some time in Amish country. This is the only picture I got of their visit, but I think it is so precious. Little Jane is only two months old and is the cutest baby I have ever seen!
Our second weekend in Virginia we went to a lake just outside Roanoke and played in the water. It was really fun! Dan and Anna attempted to build a sand castle.

Pilgrimage to Palmyra

Since our last post, Dan and I have left the big apple for the city of brotherly love. Since we spent a month in Philadelphia last summer, we weren't too excited to come back because we have already seen the sites, and don't really like the city in general. So . . . this past weekend we drove up to Palmyra to see all of the Church history sites. It was sooooo cool! We were both very glad we made the trip. For those of you who aren't LDS, this post might not make very much sense to you. If you want to know more I would be glad to explain it though!
Our first stop was the EB Grandin print shop where the first Books of Mormon were printed. A cute old missionary couple gave us a tour and explained how the books were printed and bound back in 1830. The original press and tools they used were still there.
Dan was really excited to see copies of the first Books printed. This picture was on the first floor where the book store was located.
Here is a picture of the outside. I was surprised that the city of Palmyra was really old fashioned looking and there is only one street in the town.
Our next stop was the hill Cumorah. There is a big visitor's center at the bottom with some neat displays. We climbed to the top of the hill where this memorial marks the area where the plates were probably buried.
Our next stop was my favorite: Joseph Smith's old house and the sacred grove. Here we had a cute sister missionary give us a tour and tell us about the rooms in the house and stories of things that happened here. The old log home that these pictures were taken in is not the original, but it was rebuilt exactly like the original and in the same spot. This picture is in one of the bedrooms upstairs where the angel Moroni appeared to Joseph!
Here is the kitchen of the old log home. I was so happy because the sister missionary kept on offering to take our picture, so Dan had to consent to be in them!
This is the Palmyra temple that is just right across the street from the sacred grove.
This is a picture inside the Smith's frame house that they built a few years after they settled in Palmyra. This is actually the original home they lived in, and the one that Joseph brought the plates home to. The sister missionary pointed out all of the places he hid the plates from the mobs, and told us some other stories. It was so neat!
In front of the frame home.
This is just a picture of the fence that surrounds the Smith farmland. Upstate New York is such a pretty area. Everything is so green!
After our tour of the homes we got to walk through the Sacred Grove. It was so beautiful, peaceful, and calm--everything you expect it to be.

Our last stop was the Peter Whitmer farm in Fayette, NY. This was where the church was officially organized, and where Joseph spent some time translating the plates. This is a picture inside the house.
Lucky for us, the coolest town in Pennsylvania was on the way back to Philadelphia---Scranton! We were excited for this stop too because we are big fans of The Office. We were a bit bummed that the Scranton welcomes you sign had been moved from it's original spot that you see in the show, to a mall. But, we stopped and got a picture of it anyway!

Metropolitan Museum of Art

On Saturday we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We went in expecting to spend maybe two hours, but we ended up staying 7 hours! The place was huge, and had so much really neat stuff besides just paintings.
There were tons of Greek and Roman statues and artifacts. This is a real Roman column.
And these are real mummy coffins from like 3000 BC! They also had all these walls with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
There was a whole wing of the museum with medieval suits of armor and all sorts of swords and guns from hundreds of years ago. Dan really liked this part!
Here is a picture from outside the museum. Even though I am not a big art fan, I would recommend this museum to anyone going to New York for a visit.
Of course you can't be in New York for too long without being sucked in by at least of few of the street vendors. Usually I am the one who gets lured in by their low prices, but Dan found some nice Italian ties for $5 dollars each! This gave me a good excuse to stop at some purse vendors on our way back to our apartment!

Dan and I had a really fun weekend here, even though I was really sad we couldn't be in Billings with my whole Stott family for the Nugent sealing and my grandma's 80th birthday. Dan and I took a ferry out to see the statue of liberty, and it was really really cool. It is so big and is a breathtaking sight. We didn't get to climb to the top because the tickets to do that were sold out until September!

I loved being out in the water. The New York harbor is so beautiful, I don't think my pictures do any justice. It is just cool to see the sky scrapers right next to the ocean.

After the statue of liberty we took the ferry over to Ellis island. We got a little tour and watched a movie there about the peak immigration years. It was quite a patriotic day and made me really proud to be an American. We really are so blessed to live in this free country!
Here is a picture of ellis island from the ferry. It is a really ornate and beautiful building.
Another picture of lady liberty. A few things I learned about the statue: The full name is "Liberty enlightening the world". Also, did you know that the thickness of the green copper shell on the statue is as thick as two pennies stuck together!
On Friday night Dan and I walked around Times Square a little bit, and I got this picture of the Mary Poppins Marquis. A day care director told us that she can always tell the tourists from the New Yorkers because the tourists are always looking up. I think we stick out as tourists because I am always craning my head up to see the tops of all the buildings!
This isn't the best picture of times square, but I think it is so funny that every time we go there, there are all these people just sitting in lawn chairs in the middle of the road and I really have no idea why.
Me with Morgan Freeman! . . . Acutally it is a statue, but doesn't it look so real! I really thought it was him at first. Dan and I did pass Diane Keaton on the street the other day though! She had a hat on and was trying to look inconspicuous but I totally made eye contact with her. I would have stopped and asked to get a picture with her, but by the time I realized who it was, we had passed her. Well, those were our adventures for the weekend, hopefully more will be coming . . .

Fun in the City

So Dan and I have been super busy since we got to New York. We have been working quite a bit, and when we aren't working, we have been busy trying to see the city! We spend a lot of time on the subways, and can pretty much find our way around. We are staying in a cute little apartment in the "east village" which is near NYU and is quite the party neighborhood. I feel pretty safe because there are three locked doors you have to go through before you get to our apartment!
We found out that you can get extremely discounted tickets to broadway shows on the day of the show if you have a student ID. So we went and saw Mary Poppins the other night and it was soooo cute. The stage equipment was amazing and the dancing was really fun.



Last week we went and saw South Pacific, and it was really good too! I didn't even know the story before, but I recognized some of the songs and the music was really really good.



Dan and I in the Mary Poppins theater. This is the only picture I have of Dan and I since we got to New York. He absolutely hates taking pictures, so the only way I can get pictures of us is if I ask someone to take the picture without telling him first. Hopefully we will get a few more before we leave the city!



On the 4th of July we went to Coney island and witnessed the national hot dog eating contest at the famous Nathan's hotdogs. The competition was on ESPN, and we could really only see it on the big screen because there was so many people there! The winner ate 68 hotdogs in ten minutes! I ate a hotdog from this stand, and it was pretty dang good.



We also walked along the boardwalk, but didn't feel like shelling out 10 dollars for a ferris wheel ride!



We also went and watched the Macy's fireworks over the Hudson river on the 4th, which were amazing, but we didn't get the best view again because there were so many people! Hopefully we will find some more fun things to this weekend, and I will try to post them sooner!