Tree Lot

Although its a little outdated I figured I could still put up a post of us in chicago before christmas, decorating and getting into the holiday spirit. It was so fun decorating our little apartment and got really excited for our first christmas together. 

our first tree, its tiny

We bought our tree for 10 dollars, it was the top of a full sized christmas tree, i think we got ripped off. 

On the bus with our tree!

In our lobby mirror with our tree. funny poses. 

Homemade, from leftover from our baby tree head

Our charlie brown Christmas Tree. Love IT!

 Special Thanks to Cathy McConnell and Beth Brunett for getting us the wonderful wedding shower gift of a basket full of christmas decorations. You helped create our first Christmas in Chicago!

Thanksgiving Break!

So I know I promised you all more blogs to come in the near future, so here's another one on the tally board. Don't worry it took me all week to get to this after several group projects, a couples tests, and some major espanol homework. And don't even ask what Jeremy has been doing, cause all I can say is that the corner of our apartment with the little desk in it is always lite up by a study light and I can just say yours truly is not the one sitting over there at late hours of the night. :)

Our thanksgiving break was wonderful! We were able to do quite a few things including taking a couple of extra days off so that we could go to a wedding in pheonix for my cousin, go to Idyllwild, and then go to Ventura! Needless to say it was a whirldwind week but we had a lot of fun and it was so great to see all of our family.

First we headed to the wedding in Phoenix which was so great to be able to see all of my extended family there together. Jeremy and I shared a hotel room with my sister and my cousin for two nights so slumber party with the girls and Jeremy! Hahaha, it was a lot of fun, for me at least. The most epic part of the weekend for me was the extreme uncomfortableness that a little thing called constipation brings. Never had it before never want to again, but for about three days, my insides wanted out of me and they were screaming it. 

After the wedding we went to Idyllwild for a few more days. The boys went hunting the morning after we returned from Phoenix and the mom and I stayed home and crafted. We began making stockings for Jeremy and I. (Pictures to come) the original design that we had picked out was one from Martha Stewart, but when the Martha Stewart hole punch broke on us instantly we cursed Martha and moved on to a new design. So the new and improved is a very cute little stocking result that I finished in chicago. She also had a few other crafts for us to do but those are a secret. I wish we had more pictures of this but I'm a bad picture taker. Although we do have pictures of hunting I'm waiting to let Jeremy share the excitment of his first hunting experience with you. All I can say is I think we've created a monster here people. Jeremy got sunburned from the snow that day, hahaha. We're so white.

Yes they change in the parking lot why do you ask?

After an awesome time in Idyllwild although short lived we moved on to visit the Allen side of the family in Ventura. There was lots of beach going and surfing, even though it was super cold.


Jeremy Surfed as much as he could but sadly the waves weren't that good.

Me and the Emsta

There's my surfer

The Brothers

Party Wave, Timmy & Jeremy

Boys

Girls, we're not as chubby as we look

So Besides surfing we did a lot of cooking. We each kinda made our own dish for the thanksgiving meal which was a lot of fun. FYI if you ever see a mashed potatoe recipe that says simple garlic mashed potatoes then don't listen to it cause its a lie :) Sarah and I made the Mashed Potatoes and then later I made some little bread appetizers with olives and artichoke hearts, parsley, and parmesan cheese. mmmmm I think I want some right now. Everything turned out really great and we had a great meal. Jeremy made the green bean casserole. The theme for the cooking week was the Real Simple magazine that I've found we're all obsessed with. 

pretty cute!

Needless to say we had a lot of fun and can't wait to go home for Christmas break! it's only about a week and a half away which seems crazy because we just got back from Thanksgiving but either way we're all full of Christmas music and I'm currently obsessed with making home made apple cider in the ever wonderful crock pot. 


Tomorrow is Jeremy's 23rd birthday so we rented a hotel in the suburbs to take a little family vacation for the night. It's snowing outside and I've heard that where we're going they have great christmas decorations on the streets so it should be fun!


love you all! But we miss our families the most. Thanks for a great Thanksgiving break all!

Halloweeeeen!

checkin out the potatoes

 Well, we know we've been slacking, but I have to warn you there are several really good posts lined up and coming your way... as long as book reports, papers, projects, finals, birthdays, and ya know married life doesn't get in the way. So sorry for the hold up but here's what we did on Halloween, I know I know ages ago. Somehow I think you won't mind going back in time :)




There's a farmers Market that happens right up the street from our apartment, it's the biggest one in the city and I went almost every Saturday since we returned to Chicago, now it's over, this is the last day that we could go. 

Looking down the market st.

This was Halloween day and the last day of the market being open, but the first day that Jeremy could go with me since he works a lot of Saturdays. I miss him those days, so this day was a lot of fun, even though we didn't buy too much, it was good to look around and people watch. One of our favorite past times. 

Pumpkins!

 

 

 

 

We bought four pumpkins that day. We were planning on having a pumpkin carving contest later that night with some friends (pictures to come), we only needed two for that but decided we wanted two more for decorations.

Ugly Dog

 We saw this dog and Jeremy said "that thing deserves to be shot." what an animal loving husband I have :)
We overheard someone say what a beautiful dog that is, Jeremy snickered, the owner replied don't touch him he'll probably bite you. hahaha. 














Our pumpkin carving contest was a lot of fun, and even though we brought three pumpkins over we only ended up carving two because we decided to do it boys vs. girls. I'll let you guess who did which one. But the one on the left is supposed to be charlie brown and the one on the right is supposed to be Mator from Cars. Halloween was a good time. We went to Chipotle together and pretended to be different kinds of processed foods by using aluminum foil as hats to get two dollor burritos, then we went back to Matt and Erin's apartment and drank apple cider, ate cookies, played cards, talked about Oprah (as usual) and then did our pumpkin carving contest. No one won because it was three and three and everyone voted for their own pumpkin obviously.

Stop Moving! -Matt

The only good one, and then there's Matt

We like to hurt eachother.

From left to right; Matt & Erin Halverson (The Matt and Erin Show) Jeremy & Amy Allen (hopefully you know that one already) Julianne & Mitchell (recently engaged so I didn't include both their last names but the future mr. & mrs. Goins, Julianne is not sure if she likes the sound of that). 

So that was our Halloween season. Today we got a Christmas Tree and decorated our apartment for Christmas, lots of fun! But those arn't ready for posting yet, guess you'll just have to wait!

Love you all,
The Allens

Project Land continued...

 Well, back to project land. Jeremy and I went to town on our four day weekend and we worked and got a lot done. Who knew painting such a small space would take so much time!
This is me to the right painting our kitchen walls, martha stewart sea glass green. It's so bright we love how it turned out. 

 There's the project man himself (such a good husband doing all my little projects with me) He's painting the big wall that leads into the closet a light gray, it turned out real good too.

 I just put this one up because he's so stinking cute. :)

 Also one of our updates was a peg board for some good closet organization. It's so perfect and it's cute. I'd been pinning after one for a while and now thanks to my very handy man husband I have one hung and functional too.

 There's me with some paint in my hair painting our shelves and the hardware attached. we didn't remove them from the wall because we were afraid we wouldn't be able to put them back in with the plaster behind it... so tricky. File cabinet white for the shelves and a my own mixture of acrylic paint for the hardware to make a nice green. 

There's the final product... well a work in progress. Now that the paint is up my mind goes running with ideas. the water pitcher to the left is a new thrift store addition. I want to add some red and things like the rustic water pitcher look... I'm sure you all care so much about my random house decorations, probably have the same look on your face that jeremy does when I talk about these things to him. He's such a good sport. 

 Ok so super excited for this addition. Been Thinking up this one for a while. Ever since I saw some fruit crates staked up at the farmers market like this it triggered the idea to make a night stand out of it. We don't really have a big enough space for a real night stand so we hammered two wood crates together. It fits quite a bit of books which works out pretty nice for us being students and all.

 I stenciled in some numbers and a big letter A down the side, just to give it some style. You can't see it but on the top of the upper crate I painted a big number 17 in typwriter stencil.If you don't already know that was Jeremy's number in water polo. I got major brownie points for that one :)

 This is also a new addition and a work in progress (still putting new additions inside to add to the style of it) It was a cd shelf we found at a thrift store. There's a perfect place for it in the corner by our bed and the window. It fits a lot of books once we moved the shelves around, and a few tea lights inside the tea cups add to the mood ( you know, we're newly weds, don't judge us)

 There's the final product. Newly painted desk as well, all it needs now is new hardware (via anthropology) and for it to be sanded down to antiqued perfection.

There's our new couch! Thrift stored that one too and we love it. We bought some cleaner and borrowed a vacuum from the Pine's and now it's as good as new. 





There are many more home improvement projects to come so stay tuned. Next on the list picture frames! we have very blank walls at this point. 
we love our new apartment more and more. It definitely feels like home now. I really look forward to being here with Jeremy at the end of the day. It's really relaxing and has been so much fun to do all these projects together. Studio apartment life is the life if you ask me.

Project Land

This past week was Missions Conference and this coming Monday/Tuesday is what Moody calls Study & Reading Days...which means two things: #1 Sort of a Break and #2 The Creation of Project Land.

Missions Conference is sort of a break...more of a break if you live off campus because you aren't required to go to as many sessions, but its a conference that is at Moody concerning Missions. Anyways, it means no classes and therefore a little break from nightly homework. Although we still have stuff to do and work to be done, we have had a good week so far hanging out and building up to what I just coined...

Project Land: It is in a tiny little 425 sq. ft. apartment on Maple and Dearborn where two people live. Though it be a small space, the possibilities of PL are endless. In PL you will see painting, peg board mounting, closet organizing, nightstand equipping, and painting (and all the little projects that show up in other projects that you didn't plan on having as projects). Amy loves to be in Project Land. I think I like Project Land and am excited for Project Land and am pretty sure that I will enjoy Project Land. But Amy loves PL.

Look forward to many pictures of all of our great ideas and projects and creations coming soon.

If all goes well, PL for this weekend should end by Tuesday evening.

Breakfast With My Boo

One of my favorite things about Saturdays is that my boo and I get to have breakfast together. During the week I have class at 8 a.m. four of the days and Amy has class at 8 a.m. the one day that I don't have an 8 a.m. class. So most of the mornings consist of a quick breakfast...either a bagel with cream cheese, maybe toast and eggs, but never anything more than that. Most of the mornings we go for no breakfast because of my sweet Food Service benefits which gets me a bagel, coffee, a piece of fruit, and chocolate milk at school. I go for that option a lot because it saves us money and gets me more sleep in the morning.

Anyways, so this morning I got to make breakfast for my boo. On the menu was: Vanilla Banana Waffles, Brown 'n Serve Sausage, OJ, and coffee. I think these things are my four favorite breakfast items besides omelets. I'm still trying to master the omelet and haven't quite come up with the perfect recipe or skills to make a great omelet. But back to this morning's breakfast...waffles...these were an ode to Waffle Wednesdays with my little brother Timmy. Most Wednesdays Timmy would have like 3.5 minutes to make waffles even though he had a late start day at school. But I put a little dash of vanilla, mashed some bananas and put them into our $1 Waffle & Pancake Mix. They were good. Secondly, the Brown 'n Serve Sausage. I think I love these because I grew up eating bacon. I still think bacon is great and would eat bacon all the time, but for some reason I was deprived of sausage at home growing up (Kind of like why I'm really into crunchy peanut butter right now, because we only had smooth peanut butter at home growing up). So Amy, being the wonderful wife that she is, buys sausage at the store for our breakfasts together. Third, OJ...Orange Juice...only kind of watered down OJ and not completely watered down OJ. Amy and I got a really big juice pitcher and for whatever reason, Amy felt that we needed to fill the whole thing up even though we only put in one thing of frozen OJ. Anyways, this morning's OJ was good and we no longer fill the whole pitcher up with water. Lastly, we had coffee. There's not much to say about the coffee except that I put half and half in my coffee this morning, which reminds me of when my mother-in-law and father-in-law came to visit Amy and I at school (although, they were not my in-laws at the time)...

 

So Bob and Lynne were in Chicago for a few days getting to see Moody etc...and this one morning we stopped by Starbucks underneath the train station at Chicago Brown Line. I think we all went for the cheap and easy drip coffee and headed for the milk, cream, sugar bar. Now, I don't know Bob that well, but am getting to know him...I think we first talked about wedding stuff that weekend and so I was at the nervous/scared state still, but I learned that morning that Bob loves Half and Half. He was really excited about the Half and Half. I think he said something like this, "Oh, I love Half and Half. I always put Half and Half in my coffee. Its my favorite." I kind of chuckled and affirmed that I too love Half and Half and consider it the best additive to coffee. I remember Amy telling me that he gets stuck on things like that, which I thought was pretty funny because I get stuck on stuff like that. Anyways, good story, huh?

Hey Bob, I put Half and Half in my coffee this morning.

First Time With No Wife

My wife is away this weekend for a wedding in Santa Cruz. I miss her. This is the first time in our marriage that we've been away from each other. I'm glad that it was her that left and not me...I don't have to bear the guilt of being the first one to leave. The apartment feels empty without her, although I practically fill the room by myself.

Anyways, I'm going to try and supplement my depression of not having Amy around by working out more, doing more homework, and putting in some hours on the job. Since its the beginning of the month, I have to pay bills too. (Only a couple though.)

She comes back on Sunday night. I'm going to meet her at the airport. I'm also going to attempt to make banana bread for her on Sunday afternoon. I tried to make cookies a little while back and despite my baking expertise and pride, they turned out pretty bad.

Come home soon boo.

Nature Walk

Sunday after church I took Amy on a little nature walk through Lincoln Park. They were doing construction all last year on this part of the park/zoo. We could never figure out what they were doing until a few days ago when I went on a run up there. Even though we're in downtown Chicago, there is a little bit of nature...sort of. Chicago has no mountains like Idyllwild or ocean like Ventura, but at least it tries to do something. Here's a couple of shots of Amy and I on the Nature Boardwalk!

Second Month-a-versary!

              

 On Saturday, September 25 Amy and I celebrated our 2nd Month-a-versary (8 weeks of marriage...crazy, I know). So we decided to celebrate with a little bit of fun. After thoroughly cleaning the house and washing all the laundry (we're trying to only do laundry every two weeks...its expensive), we got dressed up...Amy looking super cute in some Amy outfit and me in none other than jeans, vans, and a gray t-shirt. We walked a couple blocks west of our apartment to State Street, where everything was hoppin'. Not really, but we meandered our way into Anthropologie, where Amy was diagnosed with house project ADHD. I resorted to reading the cookbooks. Although, I guess this would be inappropriate to share on the internet I do actually like Anthropologie. I think one of the reasons why I like it is because everything is so expensive (ask Amy about the $198 grocery cart she wanted to buy from there) and we'll probably never buy anything. After an hour in the store we decided that it was time to eat. Our restaurant of choice was Big Bowl, a nice Asian food restaurant. Although it was a little bit overpriced, Amy and I had a good dinner together with authentic pomegranate ginger ale (with real ginger ale), gyoza a.k.a potstickers, kung fu chicken with noodles and teriyaki shrimp fried rice. It was rather delicious.

Instead of choosing dessert at the restaurant we went for the homemade dessert with a movie. We stopped by Jewel on the way home and picked up some chocolate chips and got "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" from Redbox.

The movie was okay...not the greatest plot or story development, but it did have some pretty good lines. The cookies were better though. Amy has jumped leaps in bounds in her cookie make skills. I think it was a combination of figuring out the oven and figuring out the exact amount of flower. I was really happy because the cookie jar, even after our date, was all filled up. Speaking of which, a cookie sounds really good right now.

600+ and No Blogging

Lack of blogging....homework, lots of it. Amy and I want to apologize for the lack of blogging recently. We seem to have hit a hump in the semester, where all of our classes and due dates coincide with each other, resulting in some late nights and early mornings.

In particular, I had the opportunity to read a 600 page book for my Historical Theology class. It was quite the challenge, as I attempted to finish it in about a week. I read it everywhere...in between class, on the train, at home, on the way to class, all the time. (Amy didn't like the book because I was always distracted by it.) I did finish it and managed to squeeze out a review on it too. I really liked the book and learned quite a bit from it. Roger Olson, the author, writes the history of Christian theology in story format sort of making all the key theologians characters within the grand scheme of God's plan of salvation for mankind. He scrutinizes all of the major events throughout history and breaks them down to show the major doctrines, creeds, and standpoints that have been established throughout history. I would definitely recommend it.

As for Amy, I'm not sure what she's been doing. Not really, she gladly switched me teaching dates so that way I could teach in our Teaching the Bible Practicum class this week. She did a great job. She also had lots of homework, but the last thing Amy would want to share on our blog would be about her homework.