Tyson & Martha: December 2021

Friday, December 31, 2021

December 2021

December was full of events. Both good and sad.

Early December was filled with fun activities like the ward Christmas party, visiting the Bugarin’s, the Blakely’s and getting the house decorated.

Both Tyson and I were busy with work deadlines but thankfully it wasn’t too crazy. Tyson got to go to LA with his dad, brother and sister and her husband to watch the Aggies play at the playoffs. What an awesome experience they had! Tyson also took the final two weeks off from work and it was pretty perfect.

We spent Christmas Eve with the Ashby family and Rogers family. We played games, had yummy food and did a white elephant gift exchange.

We got home around 9 pm and put the kids to bed. We quickly did stockings and hid all the presents. We were in bed by 1030. The girls got up around 710 and started looking for presents. They found all of them except 3 that were hidden in the kitchen.

We opened the stockings, then had a breakfast of waffles, quiche and bacon. We watched the Amazing Race and relaxed. We slowly opened our presents, called our families and enjoyed a relaxed day.

We had the missionaries and the Hinton family over for Christmas dinner. We did prime rib, salad, mashed potatoes and yummy treats. Everyone left around 8 pm and we quickly cleaned up.

The next day Tyson work up feeling pretty bad. So he went and waited almost 3 hours for a COVID test. He spent the next two days sleeping in other rooms and resting. Thankfully we got his results back as negative.

On Tuesday 12/28 we were able to spend a night at the Gaylord Rockies Hotel and do a bunch of activities.

We did snow tubing, ice skating, scavenger hunt, swimming, decorating cookies, and the interactive displays. It was a really great time! The girls loved swimming. The hotel was very busy but it had a bunch of holiday cheer.

Sadly on Thursday, we dealt with the crazy Marshall Fire. We got our on pre-evacuation orders and scrambled to get packed up. We planned to head north of the orders came. It was so so so heartbreaking to see people just a few miles away lose Their homes. The girls were scared and so was I.

It was a good reminder of how quickly life can change. Everyone slept in the same room. Thankfully the next morning the fires died due to 6 inches of snow falling.

New Year’s Eve felt really sad. We had the Floyd family and the Frey family over - it was fun to play games, but we all talked about how sad it was to end the year like this. My heart still hurts over it.

Everyone left around 9 am and quickly cleaned up. The girls decided to sleep upstairs. We quickly got to bed and it was a good way to end the year.

The day next day we worked out at bodypump, cleaned the house, and put away Christmas. The house always feels so big after we take the tree down.

Also, two big things we did in December is that we technically bought 2 cars.

Our transmission went out on the Caravan, and it would cost us 6K to fix it. But the Van is only worth about 4K. So we decided to buy a new car - which came at the WORST time.

But after 10 weeks of looking, we found a 2013 Honda Odessy with only 30K. It has a salvage title but we looked up the damage photos and it was very minor. So we bought it and we are very happy with it.

Tyson also bought a risky Toyota 4Runner from an auction in California. We are having transported to Vegas where Chenille's friend is looking over it. This is a big risk and we will see how it turns out.