amber & josh: 2012

Thursday, September 20, 2012

School....

Well we are back in school!! Not like we ever got a break, since I went full time this summer and Josh took one class. I got my Associate Degree from SLCC in August! Yay! Now I am at Weber State University completing my RN (Registered Nurse) license, I will be done in May. I plan on completing my Bachelor's Degree in Nursing, since it is only an added two semesters after my RN. So I will be DONE with school for the rest of my life in 4 semesters! Spring 2014 baby! I will be 23 with my BSN :) Josh is in his 2nd year of his Bachelor's Degree at UVU and loving it. He loves his manager job and doesn't stop thinking of ideas for when he is done with school and a business man. He plans on getting his MBA after his Bachelor degree, so he has about 4-5 more years of school. Getting to the end! :)

St George

The weekend before school started we went to St George. We needed one last summer getaway before I started back into nursing school and Josh started back into business school. Josh was able to get half day off Thursday and all day Friday, so we were able to have a nice long weekend. We got to St George on Thursday night and put back all of the furniture because the condo had just been stripped of popcorn ceiling, so all of the furniture was moved into the kitchen. On Friday, we went for a full day to Sand Hollow. We got so lucky and were the ONLY ones on the day beach. It was so quiet and peaceful and relaxing. We floated on our rafts and tanned our skin for the last time of the year ;) We found some sweet cliffs to jump off of and toured the whole middle island. On Saturday we had quite the experience..... We had gone up to Zion's National Park planning on doing the River Walk. We parked our car in town and took the shuttle up to the park... only to realize we had forgotten our walking sticks. Back down we go to the 15 minute shuttle bus ride to the car. We get our walking sticks and head back up to the park. We take the long park bus ride all the way to the top, where the river walk is, which was about 30 minutes. When we are pulling out our walking sticks, I told Josh we should put the keys in our waterproof bag. But... we cannot find our keys anywhere. We dump out our backpacks and they are nowhere to be found. Panic sets in. Did I leave them in the trunk when we went back to get our walking sticks? Did they drop out on one of the shuttles? Great. So we head back to the park desk and ask if any keys had been turned in, nope. Head back to our car and notify all the buses going into town that we are looking for our car keys. All three buses respond saying they don't have them. Long story short, we end up calling our Mazda support people and they send a towing company to break into our car. The keys were in the trunk. We had first arrived at the park at 11 am and by this time is was nearing 4 pm so we decided to call it a day and go back to the condo... sad :( All in all we had an awesome relaxing trip and wish we could go back more often!

Golf cart ride

Funnies picture EVER

Love my baby :)

We love the Bees!

We try and go to one Bee's game each summer, preferably one with fireworks. It was nearing the last week of our summer and we still hadn't gone, so I got last minute tickets. We don't really go to watch the game... I like to eat hotdogs and ice cream :) My favorite part is just lying on the grass in the warm summer air and then watching the fireworks.

Connor's Baptism!

My littlest brother, Connor, turned 8 in June. He got baptized the first weekend in August and we were so excited for him! I cannot believe he is so big! We are so proud of his decision to be baptized. We love him so much!

Bear Lake

We were so excited to get to go to Josh's family's annual Bear Lake reunion. We didn't get to go last year because it is usually during the week and Josh can't take very many days off since we are usually just getting back from taking 10 days off for our anniversary trip. We went up Sunday afternoon and came home Tuesday afternoon. The weather was great until Tuesday, then it was cloudy and rainy all day. But I am glad we got 2 days of sun :) The water was really high this year and it stunk like fish and was really mucky and gross... and COLD! So I just layed out most of the time and went for occasional floatie rides with Josh. We just love to get out and go camping and lay in our tent all day and sleep and watch movies on our ipad. It was a nice, short, get away.

Tawni and I laying out

Josh and Nike

Brianna asleep

Roxy turns 1!

Roxy's 1st birthday was on July 11. I had school til late that night and Josh was at work so she was in her cage for most of the day :( I gave her her birthday presents before I went to school though and Josh took her to Petco while I was at school and got her some treats. She has been the best little puppy ever and we love her so much!

Eating her birthday cookie :)

Nike's Birthday

We went up to Idaho for the weekend for our nephew Nike's 1st birthday party. His birthday was on July 1st, but since it was a Sunday, we had his birthday on Saturday. We can't believe it has been a whole year already! Happy Bday Nike!

NEW CAR!

Josh and I have been talking about getting me a new car for about a year now, and I didn't want to commit to anything that big, so I always told him no. I was reviewing our credit earlier this year and noticed that we have awesome credit, but it won't go any higher until we actually are paying on something; other than the one credit card that we have from Amex that we use to get a certain percent of cash back from our spendings, that we pay off completely every month. I asked my bank how to increase our credit score even higher and they basically told me it will stay the same until we make a big purchase, such as a house or car, that we make monthly payments on. We plan on buying a house in the next couple years after we are out of school, so we decided we need to get a new car now so we can have an even better credit standing by the time we buy a house.

One morning I woke up and was like... I want to go car shopping! I didn't tell Josh cause he would want me to wait to go with him, and the only days he could go were weekends, which I work. So I figured I'd secretly go without him and narrow it down to a few that I loved and then have him go with me to make the final decision. Josh had always told me he could see me in a white Mazda, but they got not so good gas mileage, and that was the one thing I wanted. Mazda just came out with a new engine that gets AMAZING gas mileage, so I figured I would go try one out. I took a test drive and LOVED everything about it. But just to be safe I went and drove a couple other cars that were picked the top best cars of 2011 in some car magazine my dad had.

I ended up hating everything else. I told Josh that night that I wanted the Mazda, took him to test drive it with me, and we both loved it. I put my Civic up on KSL and within 10 minutes had about 10+ phone calls about it. I sold it for the asking price, which was more than the KBB value, in 3 hours. SCORE! So that gave us a nice down payment, that we added a lot more too, so we were able to get a good rate for our loan. We ended up getting a 1.9% rate on a 60 month loan... which is amazing. Our plan is to pay it off in two years, instead of five, so we aren't paying on a house and a car. So far we are on target to pay it off by April 2014!

I love my Mazda. I get power locks and windows! (I know this isn't cool but I had to manually do everything in my old civic) I have bluetooth and can use my phone over the speakers for calls and music so I am completely hands free. I just push the phone button on my steering wheel and say "Call Hubby" and it calls him :) It said it would get about 33 MPG city and 40 hwy... but I have been getting an average of 37mpg driving to work and school which is mostly all stop and go and when we go on trips to Idaho, St George, and Wyoming I have gotten as high as 43mpg for the whole trip. Wahoo!!!!

Friday, June 15, 2012

Punta Cana, Dominican Republic- Two Year Anniversary!

Josh and I have gone on 3 trips out of the country so far; Our honeymoon to Mexico, First Anniversary to Jamaica, and this year we went to the Dominican Republic for our Two Year Anniversary. We were told time and time again to travel before we have kids, and since we are school full time fall and spring, our anniversaries are the only time we can go on a big trip that doesn't consist of St George or Idaho. We had never thought of the DR being a beach vacation, so we had never brought it up. We were looking to go to Cozumel this summer, technically still Mexico, but it is a separate island with lots of good snorkeling. I was Googling the top beach vacations and Punta Cana came up, so we did more research and found amazing reviews. We found an amazing hotel that was #3 out of 96 hotels in Punta Cana and had 4 1/2 stars on Trip Advisor, which is the place we always read reviews from before booking anything. This hotel was like our Mexico hotel, it had an older part and a new part. The older part was the Majestic Colonial section and the newer part was Majestic Elegance. I had first found the Colonial side and liked it quite a bit, but it was too boring for Josh, so we kept searching. He found the Elegance part, and we both LOVED it, and didn't put two and two together for a while about them being the same hotel. So we ended up booking this hotel in January and then just had to wait about 4 months to leave!

We have gotten redeye flights the last two years because they are cheaper and I just sleep the whole way and when its light outside, we have arrived! They are so nice! Josh on the other hand, can't sleep on an airplane to save his life, he stays awake worrying. We left Friday June 1st at midnight and arrived in the DR at 1145 (0945 Utah time), after catching a connecting flight in Charlotte, NC. On a sad note, these hotels don't allow pets, so we had to leave Roxy with Josh's parents :( Thankfully Susie was able to watch Roxy the whole time we were gone. Check-in wasn't until 2pm, so we got to the hotel at 1 and had to wait an hour, so we went to the buffet for lunch. When we were finally able to go to our room, we were so excited because of pictures we had seen, these rooms were definitely elegant!!

Hotel Lobby

Our amazing room!

Josh showing how big the closets are

Robes!

Jetted Tub!

Our balcony

View from the balcony

Bathroom and shower

Sitting area with sweet light

We were there from Saturday to Saturday. Most of the days we would eat breakfast, go down to the beach for a couple hours, and then end up at the pool til the sun went down. Our resort had 6 restaurants which was AWESOME... Tepanyaki & Sushi Bar, Steakhouse, Italian, French, Buffet on the beach, and buffet by our room. We tried all of these and we never had one bad meal, the food was delicious! I always had french toast and mangoes for breakfast. There was always someone at the buffets cooking fresh stuff; for breakfast someone would be making omelets, lunch they would usually grill fish, shrimp, and hamburger, and dinner it depended on the theme of that night but we had fajitas one night and they were so good! We always had breakfast and lunch at the buffets and then dinner at one of the 4 restaurants. For our anniversary dinner, we went to the french restaurant and they had us right by the piano player and had covered our table with little pink flowers.

Steakhouse Bar

Steakhouse

Sushi bar.. yes I actually had 2 pieces of "sushi".. my meat was cooked :)

Tepanyaki.. mmmmm!

Anniversary dinner- French

We went on two excursions during the week. Tuesday we went on a full day excursion from 7am-7pm to Saona Island. It was an hour and a half bus ride to the beach where we were boarding our catamaran, and then an hour catamaran ride to the private beach (don't remember the name). We were at the private beach for 2 hours. There was about 50 people on the beach from our boat and another boat. We had a big lunch that they cooked for us including grilled fish, chicken, and beef. They had diet coke too!!! Our resort only had nasty Pepsi, so I was in heaven. Poor Josh stepped on something pokey in the water and had about 4 thorns stuck in his heel, right at the beginning of the 2 hours at the beach. We couldn't find any tweezers, so he just had to deal with it the rest of the day and walk on his toes :( We then took a speed boat to a shallow place where starfish were. We got to hold the starfish. Then it was on to Saona Island. This island was so pretty! The water got deep really fast so we didn't stay in very long, especially with Josh's foot hurting him. We bought a coconut here and drank the milk... nasty! I think everyone else liked it because they all had rum in theirs. It seriously tasted like I was drinking warm dish water or something. Josh found his new friend, a one-eyed crab. He was a nice crab and let Josh pet him. Josh kept him safe until he could burry himself under the sand. It was so cool to watch him dig a deep hole, he kept coming up and throwing a little bit of sand out at a time, so cute! We took speedboats back to the buses, it was still like a 30 min ride, and they went so fast and the water was extremely choppy. Josh and I both had bruises on our hip bones and butt by the next day.

Catamaran :)

Private beach

Since we were there for 2 hours, we took some pics

YUCK!

On Thursday, we went on a half-day excursion to Bavaro beach. Bavaro is a town we hit before we got to Punta Cana, about 20 minutes away from our hotel. We first got on a big boat and went out to the middle of the ocean and went snorkeling. The guide LOVED our sweet waterproof camera, he basically took it out of my hands and swam with it the rest of the time. At least it was for a good cause, he dove down deep and got some pretty sweet shots of coral and fish, and also took tons of Josh and I! Thanks Victor for being our personal photographer! We then went and got to drive little two-man speed boats, which is what I was most excited about and Josh not so much... til he got to drive it and thought it was the coolest thing and got us in trouble for not following the rules! After the boats, we got to go snuba diving. I have tried actual diving in Lake Powel (my dad and step mom go diving all over) and it FREAKED me out and I never wanted to experience it again. Snuba still has the oxygen tanks and weights on your body, but you don't go as deep as actual diving. I was terrified. When it was my turn to go down the rope, I turned to Josh and was shaking my head and was going to have a panic attack. I sucked it up and went down, I equalized perfectly and just focused on my breathing so I didn't have an attack. It was so much fun!!! Our snuba guide, also loved our camera, since all they ever see are those dumb disposable water cameras. He took it from us for the whole time as well and was our personal photographer once again! We got so lucky! This was by far the best excursion I had been on in all 3 of our trips.

Waiting to get on the boat

Creepy pirate ship

Speed boats!

Feeding the fish!

Josh got some really neat pics, I can't dive down as deep as he does

SWEET!

Driving

Snuba!

Look at all the fish!

Everyone thought our snuba kiss was so cute :)

Hi fishie!

There was a ship wreck right by our hotel, so we decided to kayak out to it... it definitely was further away than we thought but we eventually made it!

I really wanted to take some nice pictures of us while we were dressed up for our anniversary, so we went out to the beach around 6 pm when the beach was empty and set up our tripod! I love the way they turned out and plan to blow one up and hang on our wall!