Pumpkin Patch Pickin'

Last night we were able to go to a pumpkin patch with all of our awesome friends!  It was so fun!  I can't even remember the last time I went to an actual pumpkin patch to pick out a pumpkin.  I ended up picking like five or six pumpkins...oops.  In the end I just go three.  One to carve and two to paint.  I'm trying to be crafty nowdays!!

Isn't my husband one hunk of hunkiness?!

None of us had stuff to carve pumpkins with so we went to Walmart and then went to the other Smith's to carve and paint!  Tess and I went the artsy fartsy way while the guys and Caroline carved.  Granted, I did hollow out the guts of ours.  Nate just carved one pumpkin since space was limited.  We have another bigger pumpkin to still carve! 

Ours looks pretty good all lit up!

Scrapbooking

I think I am currently addicted to online scrapbooking.  I wanted to scrapbook our wedding but was a little overwhelmed with the idea so I decided to try out Shutterfly.  I've made a calendar on there before but that's about it.  Let me tell you, if this turns out well I will be sold.  I figure if I can just buy everything when it's on sale, I won't be spending that much more money than regular scrapbooking.  Heck, it could even be less seeing as I have practically NO scrapbooking materials here.  I've always just used what my mom has.

I'm really excited about the wedding one but it is just so hard to pick which pictures are my favorite!!!  I have to keep adding pages to the album...whoops.

I'm going to start another book on our first year as well.  I really want to make sure I stay up-to-date with our lives so I don't forget anything :)  I've thought about getting my blogs printed off into a book as well to have the journal side of things as well but we'll see.  I should probably do it with my old blog and my Peru one.  Sadly, everything costs money which we don't have much of haha

Our First Christmas Tree

Christmas time is here!  And it's been here for a while in this Smith home.  We've been playing Christmas music on Sunday's for weeks.  I remember right after Nate got home from his mission we went to Cedar Point together and listened to Michael Buble's Christmas album...it was August.

So Nate researched Christmas trees and boy are they expensive.  With his love of Christmas decorations, there was no way we were getting a Charlie Brown tree.  He found one on ebay that was a sweet deal so we bought it!  Here's a lovely "before" picture of the plain tree.  I'm actually pretty impressed with how thick it is!

Yesterday for fhe we went shopping for decorations.  Let's just say...it was an adventure.  We literally spent over an hour looking up and down aisles.  First at Michael's where we got the flowers and ribbon and then at Walmart where we got the ornaments.  We went back and forth on colors, what flowers to get, what size ornaments, how much of each color...everything.  BUT I do think the tree turned out PERFECT.  I really can't even imagine it looking any better.  It's a good thing I married someone with an eye for decorating because there's no way I could have done something like this on my own.  To my credit, I did pick the colors and the snowflake ornaments.  Now we just have to make one that looks this good every year....

Pumpkin Carving

We've been pretty bad about having actual FHE but on Monday we actually had a real one!  We took a little trip to the store (we aren't quite cool enough to go to the pumpkin patch yet) and picked out the perfect pumpkin.  Actually, I picked it out all by myself.  It was the first one I laid eyes on.  We both knew if we tried to pick one out together it would take years.

While the picking was easy, it was not so easy to decide what to carve on it.  A face?  Ghosts?  Witches?  We decided (after quite a while...) on a haunted house.

Two weeks ago we watched some extreme pumpkin carving competition and all the competitors carved the pumpkin from either the back or the bottom...not the top!  We figured if it was good enough for professionals, it was good enough for us.  Nate took the bottom off, I scraped out the innards, and he did the carving while I picked out seeds and baked them.

Like the Christmas lights we shoved on the inside??