Merry Christmas!

The little Dorn family wishes you all a very merry Christmas from Chelseas new BlackBerry!

Somehere beneath the glitter, that comes this time of winter...

Last friday, even though I was feeling pretty 'under the weather' (I work with kids so I get a cold anytime the weather changes), we decided to go see Glendale Glitters for date night. We ate at the Pizza Roma restaurant (SUPER GOOD, kind of greasy), walked around in the crowd for awhile, bought a chocolate caramel apple (San Francisco Chocolate Company, I love you),

watched part of the Sun City Poms performance (Senior year assembly anyone?), walked around some more, bought wooden roses, met up with Steven's parents, walked around with them a little, then walked through the less populated are of downtown glendale to take random pictures, went home, and finished off with watching Get Smart at home! Besides feeling pretty icky, I thoroughly enjoyed it!!

It's Beginning to Look alot like Christmas!

Well, we sent out Christmas Cards this last week. We mostly sent them to out of state people and family members. Don't be offended if you didn't get one. I got them ready while Steven memorized his last speech. Here's what they looked like and what the message said:'Twas the month of finals, and all through the Dorn house,

Not a sound was heard, not even a spouse.

The office was covered by paper without care,

In hopes that graduation soon would be there.

The presents were nestled all snug under the tree,

While ideas of "Our First Christmas" brought extra glee!

And Steve wearing black, and Chelsea in silver,

Posed by their tree, in order to deliver...

Their very first Christmas Cards!

Then there was a reference to our blog...and we hand signed all of them. (what a pain)

Well taking pictures of yourself is no easy feat. We were trying to figure out settings and timings between two cameras. One of them turned out like this:

Pretty cool huh?

Consider yourself virtually Christmas card-ed!

Picnics...

Last week Steven's new printer that he got for free with buying his laptop came. However, his laptop isn't here yet (don't mention it to him-it's a sensitive subject). ANYWAYS..the point of the story: He opened up the printer on our kitchen table and there were papers and packaging all over. So, we ended up having a picnic by Christmas lights for dinner.

The menu: Chicken nugget wraps, salsa and chips, juice or eggnog

All in all, a good night after a long day at work:)

Decorating the tree...

We spent last Friday night decorating our tree. We inherited my paren'ts old artificial 7.5 feet tree because they decided to get a 12 foot last year. Well it was all fun and games until we ran out of lights. I guess my family does lights weird because it ended up taking 10 boxes of lights. We had a top heavy tree topper that I was ready to give up on. But, my amazing intelligent husband figured out what to do and fixed it. I can't even tell you what he did because I just watched in amazement. Maybe I'll get him to post his secret.

He really is Mr. Incredible...(I bought him that shirt) But he was aggravated about me taking pictures...haha

Here are some things you don't know about our tree:

-On the level K section, we were short one branch...well we looked but couldn't find it in any of the other bunches. So, we decided it was in the back towards the wall and no one would know there's a hole back there.

-On level H we found the missing letter K branch...but by the time we realized, it already was entangled with lights..so there's a branch that is a little longer than necessary...

-There's a thousand lights on it.

-We spent less than $50 total on everything: lights, tree, ornaments, topper, etc.

-I still haven't taken pictures of the finished product because I wanted to have a tree skirt first...so I bought that yesterday and will take pictures soon.
-My mother in-law is really excited to see our tree.
-We have one mismatched ornament. It's our Hallmark Ornament that Steven's family bought for us last year. It has one of our engagement pictures in the frame and plays a song.
-The tree with the star on top is less than an inch from our ceiling.

Thanksgiving!

Due to the fact that I am always behind on this thing, I am going to start with recent posts and as I have time, fill in all the time I missed.

Our Thanksgiving was awesome! We woke up early to an argument going on outside our window. This was a little scary because all the other townhouses in our section are vacant except ours. We couldn't understand what the man and woman were fighting about because there was so much vulgar language. By the time Steven got the phone book to call the non-emergency police, there came a huge thing of thunder and the rain started up again. The couple relocated to a different area under a tree but we could still partially hear them. So, even though it was four and we were awake, we decided we deserved a little longer sleeping time.

When we woke up, Steven made breakfast and we got to work on our 'assignment' for dinner. Our assignment was only a vegetable tray. I thought that was boring, so I decided to make life difficult and make turkey cupcakes. They took a lot of effort but only one last minute trip to Fry's and they were cute :)

What it was supposed to look like and the actual product: Pretty close right?
He's super cute...and I'm not talking about the turkey!
Pretty bomb right? Too bad some of their heads fell off on the way to dinner...
Well our first stop was at Steven's Aunt Deborah's house. We got there and realized we beat Steven's parents. That never happens-usually we're the late ones. Slowly but surely, everyone showed up. We had Steven's 3 aunts and between them all their 5 kids plus one girlfriend. So all together there was 16 of us-plus two dogs. Dad Dorn made salsa and it was amazing as always. Steven's aunts spoiled him and brought him cranberries (he's the only one in the family who likes them). The mashed potatoes had a hard time because the butter soaked in all weird and they were almost liquid. We stayed and ate and filled out our Christmas list. The way things work with his family is that all the grandkids write out their Christmas list and then all the adults get together and decide who is going to buy what. It's pretty nice. Then they all separate out the ads for Black Friday. While the adults were starting to divey out the Christmas shopping, we passed out turkey cupcakes (which no one wanted to eat because they were too cute) and headed out.

Next stop- my parents. Of course they said dinner was at four and it was actually almost five by the time we got there. But, it was still good and worth the wait. I missed Talia a lot. It didn't feel complete and I kept waiting for her to walk in the door.

After dinner, we all sat around for awhile and I tried to help mom clean up. We played dance-dance revolution and Wii for awhile. Then, we convinced Jaden he wanted to come spend the night with us at Wal-Mart to get Steven's lap top.

Well, we had to stop at Steven's parents house to grab something. In the process, he turned it into a four hour event trying to figure out what lap top he wanted. In the end, he found a better one online for the same price. So, Greg, my brother in law, decided he still wanted to go out Black Friday shopping. Steven wanted to go to 'witness the mayhem'. Obviously neither of the two had ever done it before. I rolled my eyes and said ok boys...

By the time we got back to our house, filled up the air matress for Jaden and were sleeping it was about one. Wouldn't have been too bad except we woke up at 4:15 to Greg calling to make sure i was awake. If you've ever been black friday shopping, i don't have to elaborate: chaos, anxiety, angry, crazy, early. We went to five stores and made it back to take a nap by nine haha!

All in all, we thoroughly enjoyed our first married thanksgiving! We're looking forward to decades more!