Our First Round of Holidays as an Engaged Couple

Going into late November through the new year is like a blur.  We travel a lot and basically spend each weekend immersed in some big activity whether it's partying or traveling or shopping.  The wedding planning preparations pretty much took a backseat during this moment (aside from researching small details online in our spare time).

One thing that I was 100% focused on doing at some point over the holidays was taking Kristen to the ICE exhibit at the Gaylord Palms.  This is something I know she has always wanted to see, and each year we procrastinated and ended up not going.  That was not going to happen this year!  One random Friday after work, I arranged some tickets and told Kristen that I planned "something," but wouldn't tell her what.  I like to keep her on her toes, so I turned it into a fun little surprise. 

The exhibit was at least 500 times colder than I actually imagined.  About 5 minutes in, the tips of my fingers and my ears were going numb.  The sculptures were definitely everything advertised and more.  Here's a shot of us as we exited the attraction...




Our faces were actually frozen this way for a good hour or so

 In addition to the fun holiday attractions, we had friends throw annual parties that we look forward to every year.  We have annual "White Trash Christmas Bash" and the Dillon's famous pizza party.  These parties are generally right around the same weekend or on back to back weekends, so that's always a part of the year I look forward to (I like to party if you haven't noticed yet). 

The pizza party was awesome this year, especially seeing as I did not have wisdom tooth surgery 2 days before the party this time (last year I couldn't eat pizza and stayed hopped up on pain medication the entire time).  This party is always fun for me personally, because I feel especially proud of how creative my future wife is;  she always makes the most creative pizza each year.  After seeing her construct an exact replica of Rudolph the red nose reindeer, I basically decided there was not much I could do to top this so I just rolled my whole batch of dough into one giant slice of pizza...

She won on creativity, I won in the weight division.  This slice gave me issues after I ate half of it.

In addition to our friends yearly get-togethers, we also had the annual company Christmas parties.  Kristen's company [IZEA] had a pretty fun theme and did a masquerade party on Wall Street.

Here are a few more shots of the festivities....

White Trash xmas bash!  Nothin' better than some natty light and a bon fire!



The IZEA Masquerade Christmas party at the Globe. 

Figuring out our Christmas situation each year has proven to be a bit of a challenge.  We both want to spend as much of the Holiday's with our families as possible, so we've had to come up with some kind of middle ground.  For the past 2 years, we've woken up on Christmas morning and went to Kristen's parents, opened gifts, spent a few hours together and then driven to Pensacola to arrive for dinner time.

This has worked out well for us for the past few years and it's pretty cool getting to see our family's on opposite sides of the state in the same day.  We spent Christmas day and the 4 days after in Pensacola just utterly relaxing.  Whenever we're back there, we find that it's a huge escape for us.  We usually sleep in each day, go out at night, play board games, fish and just hang with my family. 

The other great part about being there is Milo absolutely loves it.  He thrives off of terrorizing my parent's boxer Achillies and having a back yard to run freely for those few days.  When we come back to Orlando, he usually mopes and barely looks at us for days.

This past holiday season was another success in the books and I look forward to many more as we approach married life!

Christmas Morning at the Barnhart's -- 2010

- Smitty