The Keller Wedding Week-Part 2

We took a day off from wedding festivities and then had the Bachelorette party. Now planning a bachelorette party for a bunch of girls who don't drink, dirty dance, or party could seem like a challenge. Are you dieing to know what we did?

Ok I'll tell you. I rented a hotel room and we had a little staycation. We went swimming, played some get to know you games (for her high school friends and her college buddies), did facials, did pedicures, ate a lot of food (which was hand delivered by the groom himself). And of course there was ice cream. I didn't stay the night so I could be home with the baby. I'm told that they went swimming again and watched a movie. The next morning, they ate breakfast and I checked us out of the room.

For each of the bridesmaids, I created a little gift bag of sorts. Inside was a pair of pajama pants, a matching headband, a shirt that said bridesmaid, their favorite treats, and some other little knick knacks. They had wondered why I kept asking for measurements and sizes. It was a fun night and I'm glad we got to capture the bride away from the groom one last time :)

PS Quintin stayed with grandma and grandpa and got spoiled out of his mind!

Our First Visitors

In mid-August, Allegiant had some GREAT deals on airfare from home here to GF. So, we convinced my mom and sister, Talia to come visit us...AND THEY DID!! FOR A WEEK!!

It was AWESOME! We warned them of how exciting our city was in advance, but we did manage to do some fun things. I'm only including a few favorite pictures because between my mom and I there are over 400 photos from the week...

Steven gave them the grand tour of UND and the airplanes.


We visited the farmer's market and took some pictures in the downtown district.


We drove to Fargo and visited Bonanzaville, USA- and yes it is as GREAT as it sounds. We laughed a lot.


Bonanzaville


We drove to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada one day. We toured the mint, went to Tinkertown to play mini golf, shopped, had a picnic at the park, and had lots of fun minus a few pregnant break downs :)


Holding half a million dollars.


We went to Kegs for some old-fashioned root beer and burgers.


We grilled at a park and played frisbee.


On the last morning, we rented a tandem bike from the union. It was hilarious to watch them figure it out. They did get the hang of it though. Steven dragged them ALL over the city on that thing too.

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!