Holiday candy

In the Jergensen family, a holiday tradition is homemade English Toffee. Anyone who has had it understands why it is tradition and why a diet is necessary after the holidays. :) Being away from home I knew if I wanted the toffee goodness I would have to make it myself. After a few calls to my mom, success!


And I have to mention how much I loved making this in my amazing wedding pot from my Dad's siblings. They are the best pots and pans ever!! I also loved doing this in my new kitchen. Our builder was weary of building our kitchen to our request, but I wouldn't want it any other way. It was the main thing we changed from his original plan.

{disclaimer: though it appears I am the only one who worked to make the toffee, Colby helped a ton. You have to stir the toffee for about an hour and he did the majority of that! Thanks, babe!}

Deck the Halls

Thanksgiving has past (and we loved it) so we can now bust out the Christmas decorations. While I had Colby home I coaxed him into putting Christmas lights up on the new house! It was much more of an endeavor than we initially thought, and we had to keep laughing at ourselves. In my dad's terminology they are a little redneck-ish (meaning not perfectly straight) but we can live with that for now. I think just having lights up after being in the house for 2 weeks is quite an accomplishment. Our boxes may still need to be unpacked, but we have lights :)

We are officially home owners!!

...and have been for two weeks now. With moving, blogging has moved down a bit on my to do list. Once I locate to camera with the new house pics we took moving in I will get a few up.

costumes

I have some great past times of dressing up for high school dances, football games, "super cute sunday", 80's roller skating at BYU and many nights in the dorms. I am glad I can force Colby into having fun dressing up as well.

He actually is the one who protested against being costume repeater. And of course I couldn't say no (also couldn't commit to having a new costume ready in 20 minutes to be on time to the party, so we were fashionably late). And, if it wasn't for Colby and his brilliant ideas, I would have been swimming in a size 14 pirate dress, but instead I wore it with staples down the inside so it wouldn't hang off me. Pretty ingenious idea. He probably just saw me heading for the sewing box and knew that would take waaaayyyy toooo long so had to come up with an idea to stop me quick!

{disco dancers at the church trunk-or-treat}

{pirates for a halloween party}

{had to throw this pirate picture in to show Colby's classy earing. I had to remove it before he fell asleep...he had forgotten about it}




the best part---each of these 4 costumes were found at the Wal-Mart Associate/sample store for 50 cents each!!

jack-o-lanterns

I love carving pumpkins, possibly more so for the pumpkin seeds I get from it more than anything (really, last year we carved pumpkins after halloween just so I could bake the pumpkin seeds...), and this year we tried to get fancy with our carvings. We were happy with the outcome.






unfortunately, we learned the hard way the impact Arkansas humidity has on the life span of Jack...



this nastiness was growing out of the witch 4 days later. yuck!!

progression

It has been so fun to watch our house be built. We go out there almost every day. You could say we are a little bit obsessed--we are.

Here are WAY TOO MANY pictures of the progression of the house from Aug 21st through now. Most of you probably don't want to look at all of this, but I wanted it on here for my records.

We can't believe how fast this house has gone up. We could be closing as early as this Wednesday--yes, in 3 days!! CRAZY!





















The only things left to complete are the carpet, paint/stain touch-ups, and the yard! Wowsers...