Recent Goings-on & Photo Dump

For Thanksgiving we drove to Washington D.C. and spent the weekend with my cousin Taylor, her husband Gabe, and my aunt and uncle. It was a lot of fun, and I'm really glad we went. We were a little worried about weather and our car, but I'm glad everything worked out! Well, we ended up renting a car instead. It wasn't all that much more expensive, since it had better gas mileage than my stationwagon.

Here are some pictures of our trip:

On Black Friday Justin and I drove to Harper's Ferry & Antietam while everyone else went Christmas tree shopping. It was a lot of fun! We followed them to the Christmas lot, which was in beautiful horse country of West Virginia. Then it was just another 20 minutes to Harper's Ferry and another 20 minutes from there to Antietam. It was really amazing to see.

My uncle gave us an awesome night-time tour of D.C. He is so knowledgeable and it was a lot of fun to get that opportunity.

The Capitol is under construction right now. My cousin currently lives about half a mile from the Capitol. It is crazy!

 My cousin and I married tall men!

On the way back from D.C. we went through Ohio in order to go to IKEA. My cousin has a tiny apartment that was built in about 1910 and the entrance is really bizarre. The door is at an angle and only open about 45 degrees up a narrow staircase. It is one of those kind of apartment buildings that has been converted from one large, narrow city house to 3 small apartments. It is really cute, but because of the entrance, basically all of their furniture came from IKEA because it had to be assembled inside. 

ANYWAY, we went into IKEA looking for a shelf like the one my cousin had in her kitchen. We walked out with a different shelf and a futon couch. Haha! Worth it. So here are pictures of the new furniture:

This is the shelf we bought. It is our new pantry. I don't have any before pictures, but there used to be a little table that held some of that. 

Also, the garbage can was in the entry way. Now the kitchen entrance seems much bigger. It really is much better efficient use of space.

And now we have way more surface area! Imagine about half of what is in the pantry was on the kitchen counter. It made the kitchen seem smaller and constantly cluttered. 

Here is the futon couch. It is actually really comfortable. More so than any futon I've ever been on. It folds out to be a double bed, too. Bonus!

And I'll just keep going with this photo dump to show you Christmas Decorations!

Advent Calendar!

It is kind of hard to tell because of the flash, but there are little snowflake LED lights in the wreath.

My Snoopy blanket. Seriously one of my favorite blankets. So warm, but thin.

This blanket used to be on my bed all year round, but since it is for a twin bed, it isn't out as much. It is perfect Christmas colors, though! So I put it out with our useless lumpy pillows that happen to match very nicely!

Our little tree Justin brought back from Utah along with presents his parents and my parents sent back for us! Although I really enjoyed last Christmas when we got to come home, I'm sort of excited to have our own little tree and gifts. I'd probably feel different if Skype didn't exist!