Favorite/Memorable places in Rexburg

As our time here in Rexburg and as BYU-Idaho students comes to an end, I wanted to share some of mine (since I was here for a year and a half before we got married) and Cameron's favorite and/or most memorable places.

Our very first apartment as a married couple. Where we created millions of memories during our first two years together.

Carriage House apartments. This is where I lived most of the time my first several semesters. Many crazy times were had and awesome friends were met here.

The temple. One of the prettiest temples ever and it was especially fun to watch as it was built and dedicated and then to be able to go often.

Destinations Inn in Idaho Falls. We discovered this wonderful getaway and have been a couple times now. It has really helped us out during stressful times with school and work.

BYU-Idaho campus. This is actually the picture we are sending out in our graduation announcements, but I think it is a good representation of campus. Being a communications major I have spent a lot of time in the spori building and Cameron pretty much lives in the Clark.

I had to throw this one in here too. It isn't necessarily a place, but our apartment is up on a hill above Rexburg and we get to see the best sunsets. We loved coming out and sitting on our porch on summer nights and watching the sunset.

Although we are happy to be graduating and moving on to new adventures, we will really miss Rexburg and BYU-Idaho. We have both grown so much as individuals and as a couple being in this environment. We have met amazing people who we will never forget. We have struggled with the stress of school while working to make enough money for school, finding time for homework and time to hang out, but we know that these struggles along with TONS of great times here have shaped us into better people.

Yes, we are alive...barely.

Well, it has been almost two months since I have updated about our lives, so I am going to do one post to catch up on all the happenings since school started. Most pressing (and the reason that I haven't updated) is the fact that both Cameron and I have been sick for a ridiculously long time. We luckily didn't have the flu, but just really bad colds that dragged on FOREVER. It seemed like we were just passing it back and forth which was pretty frustrating.

Here is a non-exaggerated picture of our kitchen counter for the past month or so. We figured in the last month we have spent roughly over $200.00 just in cold medicines and juice alone. I am fairly sure that we have kept the people at Tree Top Apple Juice in business for the last little while with how much of their product we have been consuming as well. By the way, we have just as much medicine as right here in our upstairs bathroom...fun times.



The next notable occurrence at our house is how "domesticated" I have become lately. For Christmas last year, Cameron's parents got me a bread maker and his mom showed me how to do a couple easy bread recipes with that. So since Christmas I have been making all of our bread, which has been fun and cheaper in the end. A couple weeks ago two of my friends and I decided that we wanted to try our hand at making some freezer jam. I had never done it before and I was expecting it to be pretty hard for some reason, but it was really easy and turned out great! Here are a few pictures from that adventure.

The chefs

My partners in crime...for many things (:

cooking

Rylee got to help out a little too

The finished product, it is delicious!

The next event in our lives was "celebrating" Cameron's birthday. I say celebrate with a little hesitation, because it did not exactly turn out as well as we might have hoped. Here is how I envisioned the day, First of all, I had great plans to wake up early on his birthday and make him a big, nice breakfast with eggs, bacon, and pancakes, then have a fun drive down to Provo for the weekend, get a mini-vacation with the hotel that his parents put us up in for the game, relax and enjoy the great game and watch BYU destroy TCU. In reality it went like this... the night before both of us go to bed horribly sick and hacking our lungs out. By about 2am I can't take it anymore and make Cameron go sleep on the couch for the rest of the night(he snores normally, but with him being sick it was out of control and with me being the lightest sleeper EVER, it was not a good combo...This is the first time in this story that I win wife of the year, making my husband go sleep on the couch on the eve of his birthday. But it gets better. I wake up too late to make his beloved pancakes(second time I win the award), but I figured, oh that's fine I will just make the egss,bacon and some toast, that is still a great birthday breakfast. Well, I started making everything and halfway through cooking the bacon, the fire alarm started going off and I could NOT get it to turn off. It was still pretty early in the morning, and I was afraid I was waking up all of my neighbors, so I ran around forever trying to get it to go off and by the time I got back to get the bacon out it was a total loss. Normally I would say burnt bacon could be salvaged, but this was beyond any kind of saving. SO... we were down to eggs and toast at this point, which is what he got, but I believe I am at a total of 3 wife of the year awards at this point. Cameron went to class and I picked him up later that day to start the drive to Provo. I grabbed us some Taco Bell thinking it would be quick to just eat on our way and I know Cameron likes it. We get driving and there are tomatoes on EVERYTHING of Cameron's. I, recieving wife award #4 completely forgot to ask for no tomatoes on Cameron's things and this made it unedible for him. I then sat there trying to make up for my "life and death" mistake and picked out every single one of those stupid tomatoes. Ok, so I think this was the end of my mistakes for the weekend, but it continued to go not as hoped the rest of the time. Luckily when we got to Provo Kory was So nice and let us eat at Pizza Pie Cafe, which was delicious and really hit the spot. After leaving there we headed back to the hotel, where we sat downing every kind of cold medicine until the next day when we went to the BYU game. Everyone knows how that went... BAD. It was a miserable game and miserable cold, rainy weather. We decided to save what was left of our voices and stopped cheering after the frist quarter. After the game we decided to drown our sorrows in food and heaaded to Tucano's. It was my first time going and was actually pretty cool. It was good food and lightened our moods, which was a good thing. We went back to the hotel, went straight to bed and got up and headed home the next morning. Overall, it was a good trip and nice to see family and hang out, just not quite as we had been imagining. As for Cameron's birthday, I think all in all it was ok. I totally suprised him with an I-pod touch. He had NO idea and was completely suprised by it.

Before the game at Pizza Pie Cafe...obviously it was before the game, they are smiling

Cameron with his new i-pod, which hardly left his hand the whole weekend(and ever since)

After the game...cold,wet, and angry

Sean full from Tucanos, but managing to fit in one last piece

My Sweet Husband

Yet another shout out to my wonderful husband. He is always making me laugh and keeping me calm when I am freaking out about things(which is pretty often). Anyway, yesterday I was having an especially stressful day trying to get my class schedule figured out for this last semester so I can still graduate. I was talking a million miles an hour and thought I was having a heart attack(this is usually when I say "my heart hurts", which is not really an exageration). I started making dinner and sent Cameron out to get a few last things for the meal. He knew how completely stressed out I was and when he came back he had brought me this:

A beautiful rose and a Coke. He knows me way too well. It was exactly what I needed to just relax and not think about my schedule for a while. A wonderful suprise! Thanks hunny!!

Adrian's Wedding

Right after we got back from the rafting trip we came home, unpacked, re-packed and left again all within about ten hours or so. We headed down to Salt Lake to see my good friend Adrian, from college get married. It was a beautiful day and the bride looked gorgeous. It was fun to see her and I was also really excited to see my friend Rachel who I hadn't seen in a year! It was so good to see her and spend the day just chatting and laughing like the old college days (:


I was very proud of my bargain shopping for our hotel. It was a Hampton Inn that I got for way cheap, but I wanted to still get a nice one. This one looked really nice online and got good reviews, but you still never know. I was very pleasantly surprised when we got there. It was really big and everything looked brand new and way good for the deal I got. Just had to share my proud little moment on this trip.


The night before the wedding, my cousin Stephanie invited us over to her new apartment for dinner. She made a delicious meal and it was so fun to see all my cousins who live in Utah. This is Cole, Amy(my cousin Jordan's wife) and Garrett.


Here are Rachel and I outside the temple. It was SO good to finally see her.


Cameron and I outside the temple


Not sure what we were laughing about here, but I thought it was a cute picture.


The beautiful bride. She looked so happy, and I am so happy for her. Congrats Adrian!


After the wedding and before the luncheon Rachel, Elissa, Cameron and I decided to go take a tour of the conference center. This is on the roof.




The girls

Skelton Family Rafting Trip 2009

This year my family decided to do a white water rafting trip. We went to Riggins, Idaho which is the same place that my dad has been taking the young men rafting for over ten years. Cole and Cameron and my dad had been before, but it was the first time for any of the girls. We had a few minor(ok, pretty major) setbacks to start off the trip with, but in the end we were able to get in two days of rating.

The whole family... So much fun!


Dad, AKA Captain


It rained and was cold the whole first day so we were all stylin' in our ponchos


Cameron and Cole leading the way




My dad devouring a huge burger at our favorite place to eat in Riggins


The owner saw us taking pictures and thought it was so great, so the next day when we came we saw she had put this up on the reader board: Looks so good, tastes so good, Take a picture of it! It was pretty hilarious.


Cameron saw the photographer on the bridge and decided it would be funny to wave.


We also had fun just hanging out in the hotel. It was a really nice hotel that looked out right over the river. It was also kinda nice because there were not many people there so we had a lot of it to ourselves.





Overall it was such a great family trip and even though there were plenty of car problems, I don't think it could have gone much better. I think we are all hoping it will become an annual Skelton vacation.


The family


The real us (:

Lovinger Family Camping Trip 2009

It is a long standing tradition in the Lovinger family to go camping at Glacier National Park each summer. I have now been twice as a new Lovinger and it is tons of fun each time. This year we went about a week after school was out at the end of July. It is a great time to just hang out with the family and get together when we are all living in different states the rest of the year.


The trip got off to a rough start when the suburban broke down about 45 minutes away from camp. Cameron, Sean, Scott and I all went ahead in our car to hurry and set up the tents before it started raining. We were just in time because right as we were finishing it started pouring. Cameron went and picked up his parents and Nicole and Tyler from the car and by the time they came back Sean, Scott and I were all huddled in one tent trying to stay dry. We quickly threw everything in the tents and set up our things to go to bed. Cameron and I walked into our tent to find huge puddles of water everywhere. We thought we could just go to sleep and be fine, but there were drops of water dripping through the top of the tent and onto us. We decided that we would just sleep in our car that night and hopefully the rain would stop soon and we could go back to our tent. The rain didn't stop all night which meant we spent the first night of our trip crammed in the back seat of our car. Here is our nice bed.


We spent lots of time down by the water and skipping rocks was a favorite pastime.




Sorry this is a little blurry, but it had the most people in it. We played lots of games that were way fun as well.


Making homemade ice cream was VERY entertaining


Reading was a big part of this trip as well. Everyone had a book or two they were reading throughout our time there.


The girls making dinner... Very soon there will be another girl to add to the family.


Cameron and I in front of the gorgeous scenery.


The boys tubing


Cameron and his dad after tubing


The soon-to-be grandma and grandpa Lovinger