Last week of class!

This week, my ward had a formal Christmas party on Wednesday night. We had a catered dinner in the Wilk, and I wore my prom dress! We also got to hear some Christmas musical numbers, which were great.

Amelia and I in our formal attire:

Then, on Thursday night, the Cannon Center put on a semi-formal "White Christmas" dance. I went to that with some of my friends and we had fun, though the music was kind of weird. Amelia did my hair for me and I was really happy with it! Since she has short hair, she sometimes misses playing with and styling long hair.

Amelia, Meredith, and me:

Me, Lauren, Suzanna, Camille, Kira, Amelia, and Hannah: 

Taylor had asked me to see The Hobbit, part 2 with him at midnight that night, so we met at the dance and left early to pick up our friend David and his date. We had a fun time at the movie, though I didn't get to sleep until 4 am and was tired the next day.

Today was my last Sunday of the semester, which is sad because my ward is going to change quite a bit after break! We have a bunch of guys and quite a few girls leaving on missions, plus some people are moving to Heritage. I just found out that one of my good friends, Marissa, is moving to Heritage next semester, which is really sad! Anyway, my Relief Society decided to take a group photo, so here we are. I'm in the front row:

This week, I'm taking four finals and then I fly back to Laramie! I'm can't believe my first semester is almost over, but I can't wait to come home! :)

Thanksgiving and school

I'm behind on posting! That means I have to catch up on two weeks of stuff. On Tuesday, November 26, I drove to the Salt Lake City airport and flew to Denver, where I met Mom, Dad, and Josh. I felt pretty proud of myself, because I've never driven on the highway alone or been in an airport alone. It made me feel like a real adult! Mom, Dad, Josh and I flew to DC, but our flight was canceled, so we didn't get to Morgantown until about noon the following day. We were picked up by lots of beautiful faces in the Morgantown airport, where I finally got to meet my newest niece, Mary! She is absolutely perfect and I wanted to hold her all the time. She is so soft and warm and smells amazing. After they picked us up and showed us their new home, we relaxed for the rest of that day and ended it with a fantastic meal at Olive Garden.

Mary and I:

And her beautiful smile (she loves Grandpa!):

The next day, Thanksgiving, I mostly played with the girls until we went to go see Frozen and had a great Thanksgiving meal! Afterwards, Lainey, Evie, Nora, Josh, Bob and I had the coolest dance party ever. :) We read a lot of books during the week:

Also, one day during the week, Lainey and I decided to be ballerina-bun twins:

On Friday, we went bowling in the morning, much to Nora's excitement.

We then had lunch at Qdoba, at my request. The Cannon center doesn't have anything like Qdoba food, and I've been missing it! That night, we went to Cold Stone.

On Saturday, Bob, Josh and I babysat Carolyn and Kip's four beautiful girls while they went on a double date with Mom and Dad. We had another dance party, ate macaroni, and watched The Lorax. That night, I watched the BYU basketball game on TV with Dad and Kip, since we are all major fans. :)

On Sunday, we went to sacrament meeting, played for a couple of hours, and then had to leave for the airport. It was hard to say goodbye after such a fun and wonderful week! I love our family so much and hate having to be separated again. It was a wonderful break. Here are some additional photos (some are Carolyn's -- thanks for sharing!)

When I got back to Provo, I had to jump back into another week of school. It was a pretty busy week! On Tuesday morning, we woke up to a ton of snow! Here's the view from our window:

That night, we went to the basketball game and had a lot of fun. This picture is absolutely horrible, but here we are anyway :)

On Thursday, I volunteered in my kindergarten classroom. Because of Tuesday's snowstorm, my car was absolutely buried in snow and it took me at least 15 minutes to clear it off. It was an adventure! I didn't clear off the roof, so I drove around with a snow hat on my car. I wish I had taken a picture of it because I felt ridiculous. When I got to the elementary school, the little boys were very charming! They kept whispering to each other and saying "he wants to marry you!" and "he wants to kiss you!" One of them even kept whispering "kiss me" in my ear. I had no idea what to say to those crazy kids!

On Saturday, Amelia and I had a Lord of the Rings marathon with three guys from our ward. We only had time to watch the first two movies, but it was a lot of fun! Especially because one of the guys kept saying "Aragorn is so hot!" and cracking us up. :)

Other than that, things have been about the same as usual. Finals are coming up next week, so I'm trying to get all of my assignments done so I can focus on studying! I can't wait for Christmas break!

Lamest post ever

I am ashamed to admit that I did not take a single picture this week. It was also a pretty uneventful week, so I'll just give a short recap.

On Monday, my FHE group played Apples to Apples. On Wednesday, I didn't go to the men's basketball game because not a single one of my friends had time to go, and I didn't want to go alone. We lost the game by two points, so I'm okay that I missed it because I would have just been disappointed anyway! On Thursday, the kindergarteners were super rowdy and disobedient. I then walked to the creamery in the rain and my shoes were soaking wet all day. However, the day improved that night when I went to Amelia's philharmonic orchestra concert, which was great. On Friday, my ward did a speed dating activity. They are trying really hard to get us married off. It was really fun though, actually, since the boys actually showed up! On Saturday, I took Amelia to get her hair cut and did a lot of homework. That night, we decided to go see Catching Fire, the new Hunger Games movie, since everyone had been talking about it and said it was amazing. We thought it was really good and incredibly well done, but it was also very depresssing. Church was great today, and one of the guys in my ward played the most amazing musical number! He played a beautiful arrangement of "If You Could Hie to Kolob" on the piano, and I was thoroughly impressed with his skills (and maybe slightly jealous...)

On Tuesday morning, I go to Biology at 9 and then leave for the Salt Lake airport as soon as it's over! I am so excited to go to West Virginia for Thanksgiving! I promise that next week's post will be much more exciting than this one :)

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Fun week!

It's been a good week, though busy of course. On Monday, my FHE group went bowling at the Wilk (and I just realized that I should have taken my camera to that!). On Tuesday, I took my American Heritage midterm #2, which was tough but went pretty well. On Wednesday, Amelia and I awkwardly went to the Cannon center at 7 for Zumba, in sweatpants and t-shirts, only to find out that there was never any Zumba. :( Our awkward Wednesday continued with a fire in our building at 1 in the morning. We had been asleep, so we woke up to blaring alarms in the hallway and had to go outside in pajamas. I was totally disoriented, had my gross retainers in, and basically had a rat nest on my head. It was slightly embarrassing. Luckily, our building was fine and we got to go back in about 25 minutes later. Someone had been cooking in the basement and forgot about it, so there was a lot of smoke that set off the alarms.

On Thursday, I had my third Human Development test in the testing center. As I was walking back, I passed by my favorite basketball player, Eric Mika! It was a great way to start off my day. :) I also volunteered at Provo Peaks Elementary School again, and then in the afternoon, Amelia and I went to Joshua Bell's open rehearsal. If you don't know who he is (I didn't either), he is one of the best violinists in the world. Literally, I think he is the second best violinist in the world right now. It was incredible to listen to him play!

On Friday, after we ate dinner in the Cannon center and were walking back to Hinckley, I got a phone call from the guy I asked to the opera a few weeks ago, Taylor. He called to invite me to hike the Y the next morning with one of his friends and his date. Later that night, his friend's date canceled, so Amelia ended up going with the other guy (Kyme). We woke up at 6:15 because we were going to leave at 7, but the boys were late so we didn't leave until 7:30 ish. We did the whole hike while it was snowing. It was cold and my hair got completely soaked. I'm sure I did not look good, but it was way fun. After we got back, we had breakfast at the Cannon center and then watched The Croods in one of the library's media rooms. Then we ate lunch with them! So the date ended up being about 7 hours long. We didn't get a whole lot of homework done yesterday, but we had a great time and were happy to finally go on another date. :)

Here is Amelia, Taylor (my date) and I at the beginning of the hike:

 And us at the end of the hike:

And here's all four of us at the Y! We survived!

Here's a picture of the snowy mountain that I hiked yesterday.

 And this one just because it looks beautiful covered in snow!

Amelia and I also went to the men's basketball games on Friday and Saturday night, which were so fun! We won both of them and had a really enjoyable time, especially because we are 100% boy-crazy (and crazy in general) and the team happens to be very attractive. I didn't take any pictures at those since I have at every other game.

It's been a really great week! I only have 3 weeks of instruction left before finals, and I only have one more art class, since we take our final early, on December 6. The semester has been flying by! I'm really excited to go to West Virginia for Thanksgiving. :) I hope you all have a wonderful week!

Another update

Hi wonderful family!

Even though this week hasn't been anything out of the ordinary (as usual), I will write a short update. One of the highlights of my week was the release of One Direction's new music video for "Story of My Life." Poor Amelia has had to put up with me watching that video a lot. :)

On Sunday, we went tunnel singing with some boys! Tunnel singing is where a bunch of people meet in the tunnel by the Marriott Center and sing hymns. It's always a really great experience.

Also this week, there have been several different activities for "Helaman's Got Spirit" week. On Wednesday, we went to a yoga night at the Cannon Center, on Thursday they had an indexing arcade that we went to, and on Friday they had a movie night, showing The Best Two Years. There was also a basketball game on Friday night at 7, so we went to that before the movie night. Unfortunately, the only picture I took this week was of me and Amelia at the game (we went with a huge group of girls and I thought it would be too difficult to get a picture of all 9 of us):

So...since there are not nearly enough pictures in this post, I will include a picture of my new favorite basketball player, Eric Mika. ;) He's a freshman and is very handsome.
                                                     
Last night, me, Amelia, Camille, and Lauren watched Miss Congeniality together and it was so fun! It was a nice break from homework, and I always love watching chick flicks with other girls. There is nothing more fun than that. :)

Other than that, I've been busy with homework this week, and I also had two tests to study for, in Book of Mormon and Biology. I have two more tests coming up this week, in Human Development and American Heritage. However, once those are over I won't have any more tests until finals! There are only two full weeks of school before Thanksgiving break, and I am so excited. I hope everyone has a great week!

I'm running out of titles for these posts...awkward!

This week has been great! On Monday night, our ward got together as a whole group for Family Home Evening and we all carpooled to get to Lowe's Extreme Air Sports. It's basically a gigantic room filled with trampolines, trapezes, rock walls, basketball hoops, and foam pits. We spent an hour and a half there and it was super fun! I went on a high trapeze from which I fell into a foam pit, which was awesome.

Here I am with two of my friends, Amber and Meredith (you can see the pits full of foam cubes in the background):

That night at midnight, Amelia and I registered for our classes for winter semester. It turned out really well, as I got into all of the classes I wanted and was happy with my schedule. However, I later looked up my Spanish teacher (once the name was posted) and found that she didn't get very good reviews. So I am currently in the process of switching to a new professor. But other than that, registration went quite smoothly! The classes I am signed up for are Writing 150, Physical Science 100, World Civilization to 1500, Spanish 321, Elementary Skills and Activities, and Book of Mormon.

The rest of the week was pretty much just my normal schedule, nothing too exciting. On Thursday, we were given special visiting hours for Halloween, so that boys could trick-or-treat in the girls' halls and vice versa. I went with some friends to trick-or-treat, dressed as Mary had a little lamb.

On Friday night, they had Despicable Me 2 at the Varsity Theater in the Wilkinson Center for $1, so Amelia and I went to the 9:00 pm showing. It is an absolutely adorable movie!

On Saturday, we slept in, ate breakfast/lunch, and then went to the Provo Towne Center mall. I've noticed lots of cute styles here at BYU, and I've been wanting to buy a maxi skirt, ankle boots, a scarf, and some new jeans, since the Cannon Center is definitely making me gain weight and I have some trouble getting my jeans on in the morning. Anyway, it was a very successful shopping trip and I found everything I wanted! That night, we went to the basketball game at 7 with two other girls, Hannah and Jess. I was really bummed because we were on the end of a row in the student section and I was really hoping to take a picture with Cosmo, but he didn't come up to where we were. Maybe next time! :)

I know this picture is kind of horrible and at a weird angle, but here we are at the game (me, Amelia, Hannah, and Jess):

This morning, I went to church and hall meeting, and tonight there's a fireside and ward prayer! It should be a good afternoon. I love you all! :)

8th week of school!

This week has flown by. I don't know why, but all of my classes seem really hectic right now and I don't have a lot of free time. When I do have free time, I love to practice the piano music from Pride & Prejudice. Despite the craziness, it has been a really good week. On Sunday night, Amelia and I talked to some nice boys at ward prayer for two hours! On Monday, our ward put on a talent show that was amazing.

On Friday, I went on a date! Amelia is in the philharmonic orchestra, which performed in the German opera Die Fledermaus on campus this week. Because she's in the orchestra, she gets two free tickets to one of the showings, and she offered them to me as long as I promised to ask a boy to go with me. So I asked one of the guys we had talked to on Sunday, and we had a great time! Afterwards, we went with one of his friends to get Italian sodas and play games.

On Saturday, Amelia and I went Halloween costume shopping at D.I., which was somewhat successful. I also did my visiting teaching (it's so weird to say that!) and then we went to see a Cougar basketball game at 7 pm with three other girls. We won the game by almost 40 points and it was way fun!

Camille, Amelia, me, and Hannah. Sadly, Lauren, the other girl who went with us, got cut out of the picture :(

After the game, we went to the Halloween dance at the Cannon center and had a blast! There were a lot of people there and the music was actually pretty good, so we enjoyed it.

Today, we went to church, had a hall meeting where we learned self-defense, and then Amelia and I made Halloween "gingerbread" (graham cracker) houses. Her mom sent her a care package with all of the supplies, since it is one of their family traditions.

Overall, it's been a great week! I love BYU, but I miss my wonderful family. I hope you're all doing wonderfully and know that I love you :)