Christmas in Tennessee

This was my FIRST Christmas away from the Kalilimoku fam bam and I'm proud to say that I made it! :) I was really nervous (and yes, there were tears) but everyone was so great so it made it fine.

Here are some pictures of the trip. It was great to surprise Janae (who got home from her mission), spend time with family, shoot rockets, be married for 2 years, sleepovers with Ashley and Russ (thanks again for letting us crash with you guys), and just have fun with everyone (shout out to all you Tennessee blog-stalkers.... let's be blog buddies)!!

I can't believe that I have been married to Ben for 2 years.... time flies :)

Catching rockets.... SO MUCH FUN!!

I've always cut a Christmas tree from a tree farm.... I've never gone out, just found a tree and then cut it down. Needless to say, I was pretty excited to (help) cut this one down.

Family pictures

More family pictures....

.... And a trip to TN wouldn't be complete if we didn't go out shooting :)

Sometimes I'm Spontaneous.....

How it happened:

(Sitting on our couches)
Ben -- What are we doing this weekend?
Trina -- Well we have a soccer game tomorrow morning and then Hector called and said he wanted to play with you at 1.
Ben -- Hector called? Oh man, he's so good at soccer. Too bad I won't be able to outrun him with my turf shoes... but if I had real cleats I might be able to play with him. I want new cleats.
Trina -- Haha, yeah, and I want that piano we saw the other day at Costco.

-- pause--

Ben -- I'll get my wallet.
Trina -- I'll get the car keys.

And then off we go to by new cleats and a piano.... no kidding. You'd think that we were made of money or something.....


Oh well.


Happy Birthday/Merry Christmas for the next 2 years to both of us..........

Happy Birthday Ben!!

26 years of lots of fun!!

Love you bubb :)

Attempt #2

Ben and I have almost been married for 2 years now (yay!!) and I've done my own Thanksgiving ever since (hence the title, Attempt #2). This year was so much better than last year, I think. I wish I took pictures of everything but you can use your imagination (or the help of these Google images... haha). Here's just some of the things I made that I'm particularly proud of (because sometimes you just want to be proud of what you did, you know?) :




First, and most importantly to every Thanksgiving meal, the turkey. This year, I was only going to buy a small turkey because my family has never been a big turkey fan but thanks to our friend Fuzzy, we got a 20 lb turkey for absolutely free (and as a college student, how is free not good?!). His work was handing them out and he surprised us with one. Anyways, the turkey was so big it didn't fit in any of our pots.... Ben fixed this problem with a 5 gallon bucket and a lot of scrubbing because who knows what was in that bucket. We brined the turkey in this maple-brine from Better Homes and Garden. It was seriously, so good!!



Second, the stuffing. If you don't like stuffing, I PROMISE you will like this one: Awesome Sausage, Cranberry, and Apple stuffing. I doubled the recipe for this one because Ben cleaned house with it last year and I hardly had any.... Plus, I had to stuff a 20lb turkey with it! Anyways, you can find the recipe for this on allrecipes.com.


Next up: cranberry sauce! I know, I know.... you all have probably had it at every Thanksgiving meal but I never have. And I'm not talking about the kind that you take out of a can (although we did have that as well). It was so good with the turkey... I couldn't stop raving about it to everyone. All it is: sugar (1/2 c white, 1/2 c brown), water, orange juice, and a package of cranberries. This will definitely be something that I make every year!! Plus, it looks so pretty!

Finally, the pies! If I do say so myself, I make a pretty good pie.... 3 actually: maple-flavored pumpkin pie, grandma ople's apple pie, and irresistible pecan. I think I found all 3 of these on allrecipes again. I added and took away some things from the original recipes but seriously, these are some amazing pies. I think I'll make another one soon....


So I guess the point of this whole post --- It's really not as bad as you may think putting on your own Thanksgiving dinner! We had 8 people over in our little dungeon and there was more than enough food. It wasn't as stressful as it may seem (although Ben did help out so much with the cooking!) and it is so much fun trying out new things!! The guys went out and threw a football/frisbee around, the gals played Ticket to Ride (although Riena cheats... I think that's how she has her name written in the board so many times....), we pigged out, life was good :)

Hope you all had a good Thanksgiving!!

I Still Bleed Blue!

As much as I wanted the Cougars to win this year, I had a feeling that Utah would take it... so I wasn't surprised when they did (although I'm pretty sure that it would have been a much closer game had Hall not given them a few touchdowns....oh well, at least the Mountain West gets a BCS and we'll finally get the recognition that we deserve, right?).

I'll just let you all know that this has been the BEST football season I've ever been to... and I've got pictures to prove it!

This is one of the last football games we went to. *Sigh* I will miss those front row seats....

What I love about our seats: we get to touch the BYU flags every time they run past us when we score a touchdown, trying to get all the camera men and reporters to talk to us, hearing the defensive coach yell lots of fun things at his team, looking at Pace's eyes (mmm), talking to the players, getting tons of pictures with Cosmo, getting on the big screen/tv/newspapers/etc.....

But my absolutely most favorite part of our seats were these guys:

This is our friend Fred and he's part of the chain gang. During the half, the whole chain gang would get a boxed lunch... most of the time it was disgusting, horrible things that these poor men wouldn't eat like chicken crescents, a bag of chips, an apple, a bag of vegetables, and a bottle of juice. They would give out whatever disgusting thing they didn't want to eat to whoever the craziest fan/the best pouty face.... we usually won that contest. At the last game of the season, we snuck in 10 bags of Neimann Marcus cookies and gave each of them a bag. They gave us their entire box. Oh yeah, and we made t-shirts that said we loved the chain gang... this pic below was on the back of the shirts. The picture above this extensive paragraph is Fred showing off his #1 fans (aka. us) and their t-shirts to a fellow chain-ganger.

The whole gang (see also: hard core, intense, front-row fanatics, cone heads, etc.):

Yup, it was a crazy, super fun season... I really REALLY want the same seats next year but we'll see. Go BYU!! (and no, Max, I don't blame you)

My (attempted) Green Thumb

Ben and I decided to try our hand at our 2nd year of having a garden... and this year we EXPANDED! We had tomato BUSHES (seriously, so many...), strawberries, corn, peppers (thanks Mary Anne), string beans, and 2 different types of winter squash. I was just looking through pics and thought how funny the difference between a few months are.

This was taken in July/August. Everything was so green!

And then 3 months later.... Everything died. Dead.
(Sorry the pic is crooked!)

Point of the story: I already am sick of the cold and want the sun back...
But I don't want to miss Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Why can't we have them in the summer?!

Why Would I Have Voted Yes on Prop 8??

That's why.... How cute is he?!

I know, I know... everyone is probably sick of hearing about Prop 8 but I have to just say that the craziest part of this whole thing was to see everyone else's reaction to Prop 8 passing!!

I was looking at different blogs/sites that I usually look at and I found this blog that really just bugged me the wrong way. It was a site for people who call themselves LDS members to apologize to all their gay/lesbian family and friends for the Church's request to support Prop 8. Some of the things people were saying were unbelievable.

Ugh, okay... end of my rant! :)