The Rest of 2011

I just realized how lame it is that I had this very same "the rest of" post last year, too. But hey, I guess having to play catch-up is better than nothing. This post is quite the eclectic mix of events, so I'll start from the beginning:

The Rest of Fall

Fall is one of my favorite times of year to go flying. Seeing all of the colors from the air is so amazing. Nick's mom was up for the weekend, so we all got to go on a little sightseeing trip. We also got to take Jason, Nick's little "mentee." It was his first time in a plane and he had so much fun. Thanks to Aaron for taking all of us!

My long-time friend, Kirsten, got married! I've known Kirsten since I can first remember. She and my brother, Aaron, met in kindergarten and our families have been friends ever since. Her wedding was in mid-October and the weather was absolutely incredible. Congrats to her and Nurivan!

 

 Nick has been loving his time at Total Care Dental. His schedule was so insane last semester, but he loved being at work every day. He and Dr. Babcock apparently have very similar styles -- yes, the purples shirts were totally unplanned. Hilarious.

Thanksgiving

 We spent Thanksgiving in Colorado this year and it was fun to have Tyler and Jessica there with us, too. We had an amazing Thanksgiving dinner and a relaxing weekend shopping and going to the movies. 

We loved getting to spend time with these little munchkins. They have been growing up so fast! And yes, Nick is styling Adrienne's hair in that picture. Haha. 

And we can't forget little Charlie! Nick and I want a dog soooo bad. We love getting to be with our families because that means we get to be with dogs, too :)

Christmas

Even though our tree barely fits in our little apartment, we still love having all the decorations up. And it helps that Nick is a Christmas fanatic. 

I went up to Logan the week after Thanksgiving to help my mom get all of her Christmas stuff us. Clearly just watching us put up the decorations was enough for Kona to get tuckered out. Haha.

Christmas in Logan was pretty low-key this year. Luckily there was at least a little more snow on the ground than there was in Provo. Hopefully next year Mother Nature will cooperate with the holiday spirit!

Christmas Dinner

Nick was very particular about our gift wrap this year. We had to make a special trip to Tai Pan before we headed up to Logan just to get it. I can't complain though -- wrapping presents is one of my favorite parts of Christmas!

All of us got spoiled this year. You wouldn't suspect it, but my dad is quite the shopper. He brought back lots of loot for us from his overseas trips. My parent's surprised Nick with a new guitar, and Nick surprised me with an iPad! It's fun to have a new addition to our Mac family.

Here are my cute parents with their stash.

Casey and Dianna's Wedding

Nick's brother, Casey, got married on Dec. 30th in the Logan Temple. He and Dianna met in D.C. but ironically her parents live right down the street from mine! We are so happy for both of them and excited to have Dianna in our family!

We loved getting to see Casey's boys, too. They are such little gentlemen. Little Ammon even asked me to dance at the wedding dinner. So cute.

Brian Head for New Years

We were so excited that we could make it to Brian Head this year to see our friends! We met the Yagers and the Fields at Emily's family condo in Brian Head and spent the New Years weekend there. It had been about a year since we had see them, and it was so fun to be together again. Sadly, we were missing Jo and Aaron, but hopefully one day all 8 of us can have a reunion!

(our New Years Eve bash was more of a pajama party)

Every New Year's Eve, Brian Head Resort puts on an awesome light/fireworks show. I had never seen anything like it before and it was so fun. All of the resort employees ride up the ski lifts with bright flares and then ski down the mountain as they put on a firework show. Such a fun way to kick off New Years eve.

 It was also the third anniversary of our engagement!

 

 We had been to Brian Head in the summertime before, but it's amazing to see the red rock in the snow. This lookout point was beautiful!

We're already looking forward to next year. Thanks to Kiel and Emily for having us!

Life Lately

Well, we're back full-force into the school year - at least Nick is at least :) I have to admit, I haven't missed homework one bit so far. This is a super random posts with jumbled pictures we've taken between our camera and phones... sorry in advance for the iPhone pics. 

Between both of our jobs and Nick's night classes, we usually just count on seeing each other on the weekends. Nick is a trooper though -- I don't now how he lives on so little sleep! 

But the good news is that Nick absolutely loves work. Every day I get to hear crazy stories about mouth surgeries  -- these aren't just cavities and root canals I'm talking about, either. The dentist he works for does a lot of cosmetic dentistry and mouth restorations, so Nick is getting a lot of hands-on experience with really intense surgeries. We're so grateful he has this job because  he gets to learn so much before he actually goes to dental school.

We also love the dentists he works for and their office staff -- such great people. They had a 10-year anniversary luau party for their practice at the beginning of the month:

And speaking of jobs... I got a new one! I've been working at Epic Marketing, a full-service marketing agency in Draper for about three weeks now. I'm working as an Internet marketing specialist/account coordinator and I really love it so far. My work also had a bbq/get together a couple weeks ago and it was fun to meet the families with everyone I work with at the office. It was the day of the BYU v. U of U game, so we had a little office rivalry going on, as you can see from everyone's outfits. 

 

And on a side note, I got this very expensive piece of paper in the mail a few weeks ago -- so I guess that means I'm really an official graduate now! 

A few other random events:

Nick's good friend growing up was in SLC with his engineering firm working for the Dew Tour. He was actually the one in charge of designing/building the motocross track and was able to get us VIP passes to one of the motocross events. I had never seen motocross live and it was actually pretty amazing. Scottie and Aaron tagged along with us and loved that we got passes to the VIP booth for the event. 

The other cool part about the VIP booth is that we were chatting with Pink (the singer) and didn't really even realize it at first -- I guess her husband was on of the motocross racers. Nick snapped this pic of her after we realized who it was. Haha.

It was really fun to meet Eric for the first time -- I always hear childhood stories from Nick about all of his good friends growing up. We're excited that he'll be back this winter for the Dew Winter Tour!

We also went up to Idaho Falls for our nephew's baptism. We hadn't seen these little guys since our wedding so we were excited to get a chance to see them -- they've grown up so much over the past couple years! And this was the first picture Nick's mom has had with "her boys" in quite a while, too.

Last weekend I got to go to the General Relief Society meeting with some good friends in my ward. It was my first time every going to the RS Broadcast and it was so great -- I especially loved President Uchtdorf's talk. It was such a perfect day outside, too. 

The weather this weekend was also incredible, so in between Saturday conference sessions we drove the Alpine Loop, which is one of our favorite things about fall. The leaves were incredible -- pictures never do them justice! 

I wish this season would stay around a little longer each year! 

Family Reunion in Kona

Yep, the Gerszewski family is finally at the stage where we require family reunions to get us altogether in one place. With Marissa and Dan across the country for medical school, we don't get to see them near enough as we'd like to. In fact, our entire family hadn't been together since my wedding back in 2009! We were so excited to find out that there was a week this summer where all of our schedules aligned and we could plan a family trip. And, of course, we were even more excited when we convinced my dad that Kona would be the perfect place for it. 

 

My dad and brother are involved with a partnership in two Kona vacation homes about five minutes from downtown. We could actually even see the temple steeple from the backyard! It was so fun for all of us to be in the same house for the week, and not all in separate hotel rooms. 

The house we stayed in had amazing views and we got to enjoy the sunset every night at the dinner table. Having the pool right outside was great too! 

It was our first time to the big island -- it is so different than the typical "tropical" Hawaiian islands we're more familiar with, but it was beautiful nonetheless. What's crazy is that you literally can see almost every climate just by driving around the island. If it were a different time of year, we probably would have seen snow at the top of the mountains, but we did get quite the climate tour. 

There's everything from miles and miles of lava fields, to barren desert land (it seriously looked like the middle of Wyoming!) -- and an hour drive later we saw beautiful tropical beaches and seaside cliffs. It was pretty incredible. 

We loved seeing the waterfalls, too. The fist one we visited, Akaka Falls, was probably one of the tallest I've seen... and so loud, too! This picture probably only captures about half of it - I think it was about 400 feet tall.

And during our second stop at Rainbow Falls, three crazy boys, along with dad, decided to take the trail to the  top. The falls looked so much bigger with them standing at the top! Crazy boys.

On our tour of the island we also stopped at the Volcano National Park. Luckily we  got there right at dusk so we could still see some of the crater -- I'm surprised this picture even turned out with how dark it was. Oh, and it was freezing, too! Hence the family huddle. 

We also got to walk through a lava tube, which was really fascinating.  We didn't really get to see any volcanoes in action, but I guess that will give us a reason to come back eventually :)

We also stopped at what is called the Place of Refuge to see some old Hawaiian temples and ruins. We learned that the island natives used to have a really specific class system with strict rules about mixing with royalty, priests, men and women, etc - and breaking these rules usually resulted in death. However, if people could make it to the Place of Refuge, they were cleared of their so-called crime. Pretty interesting. 

 

And while we were there, we came across these two gems. I mean, have you EVER  seen anything like them? We probably stood there laughing for a good ten minutes.  I now get that they're made to be lava rock/ beach-friendly, but wow. These things look like they belong on the moon. Haha.

And now to one of my favorite parts of the trip -- snorkeling with manta rays! Ironically Nick and I had seen something about this on the travel channel several months ago and were so fascinated by it. Apparently Kona is the only place in the world where you're able to these creatures -- mostly because they've been conditioned to show up to the dive site almost every night. For 20 or so years, people have been putting lights in the water near the coast where there is a high concentration on plankton, which is what they feed on. So now that manta rays know that when they see light, they'll get to eat. It's not 100% guaranteed that they'll show up on any specific dive, but they claim to have about an 85% success rate, which is pretty incredible.

We got to wear these (not so) awesome looking wet suits because the dive happens after the sun goes down and it gets prett chilly. It's a pretty popular attraction, so there were a lot of boats with a lot of people out there. Luckily, my little brother had his waterproof video camera with him, otherwise it would be way too confusing to explain. 

About half of the people there were actually scuba diving about 40 ft to the bottom of the ocean floor, and each one of them had a really bright light, which you can see in the video. All of the snorkelers were at the surface looking down at the divers, and the Manta rays and other fish were swimming in between. I felt like I was in an acquarium! About 30 seconds into the clip you can see a manta ray in the lefthand corner swimming in circles -- which is actually how they always swim when they're eating. We got to be out in the water for about 45 minutes and we all loved it! It was definitely a check off my bucket list.

Can't forget about the beach! This is what we spend most of our time doing. The water was incredible and there was some awesome snorkeling right by the beach.

 

 

Of course, the boys had to keep themselves busy by building sand creations. Giant pyramids have kind of become our beach tradition thanks to Aaron and his crafty skills. 

And of course, we had a blast with these little munchkins. They grow up so fast when we only get to see them twice a year!

The hardest part of vacation is having to pack your suitcases to leave, and realizing you actually have to get back to real life! We had such a great time though and already can't wait for out next family trip.