KerMatt: Classes are over and Crunch time begins!

We have had another action-packed week as we continue the countdown to Christmas and our highly anticipated vacation to San Diego. As I have been working hard to make up for the two weeks I'll be missing, Matt has been finishing his classes and preparing for his finals which ended on Thursday. PriceWaterHouseCooper even sent him a nice bag full of snacks for his finals week (except that most of the food was organic which Matt is not really down with so I now have inherited most of the snacks).

We put on our first "Newlyweds" FHE with 3 others couples attending including 2 couples we have been hanging out with a lot (Jake & Suzanne from Texas and Brian & Lindsay from Washington/Idaho). Lindsay is actually a cousin's of Matt's best friend, Matt Fairbanks. I gave a lesson about remembering the true meaning of Christmas pulled from a talk by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland on the LDS Christmas website and then we all played a new game for Matt and I called "Ticket To Ride". It was a fun strategy game but we played in couples and as you can imagine, Matt and I were the most feisty ones as we both had differing ideas of how we should proceed each turn. Oh the lessons we are learning on patience and understanding each other.

Then while Matt went and played his usual church basketball on Wednesday night, I got together with Lindsay and Suzanne and we hung out and chatted about our silly men and their quirks, which the boys are not loving so much. In fact when they returned and we started teasing them, one of them said "Oh no, maybe we should have made sure to put a movie on or something for them BEFORE we left so they wouldn't just talk the whole time." As if we are children or something!!!! Can you believe it?!

On Thursday night our festivities continued down to Jump On It in Lindon for Matt's ASM (Association of Systems Management) Closing Social. Matt (as ASM Activities Co-Chair) had rented out Jump On It for the night and we spent the night jumping around like flying squirrels. Jump On It is a huge warehouse fun center full of trampolines all connected together with more trampolines lined along the walls so you can jump all over and off the walls. They also have a bunch of balls and mats and hoops inside. We had a BLAST - although the night was not without injuries and bruises, including Matt landing his leg between the one of the diagonal wall trampolines. You should have seen his ASM colleagues pulling out all sorts of tricks and chucking footballs at each other mercilessly. I really didn't want to leave and we'll definitely have to do that again.

And again on Friday, we got together with the same 2 couples and actually took TRAX up to see the Lights at Temple Square in Downtown Salt Lake. We just missed a performance by the Mo Tab but that is probably not a bad thing for us as that also meant we missed a HUGE crowd of people who were leaving as we arrived. We also walked through the Gallivan Center, which was created for the 2002 Winter Olympics and had it's own fantastic lights and little outdoor ice skating rink. Even though we were FREEZING, Matt and I were so glad we went since we had chickened out seeing the lights last year and they are just too fantastic to miss. I am telling you, they have got the tree light-wrapping down to an art! And I hear they have to start putting up the lights months before December.