June Festivities

Hey everyone!

Matt and I went to Virginia a few weeks  ago to visit the Montoya side. We both very much enjoyed not doing homework or going to work. Most days consisted of Running and Swimming, which we don’t normally get to do so it was great. We went to Grant’s high school graduation and went running with him. We played a lot with Logan- who referred to himself as “the doggy”. He always wanted to eat his meals on the floor as a dog would haha. We went with Cindy and Logan to Washington DC where we went to the Smithsonian museum and looked at all of the beautiful artwork for my entertainment and for Matt’s entertainment we went to the natural history museum and watched a 3D flying dinosaur movie. I found out he was obsessed with dinosaurs when he was little…and now still maybe? Haha… We went running with Frank and he smoked both Matt and I. We were happy though for Grant and Frank to whip us into shape. 

Matt’s parents went to the Washington DC temple with us to do a session and Matt and I got to be the witness couple for the first time so that was great. We also went to an amazing Brazilian restaurant that tasted heavenly. It was all you can eat and servers would bring hot meat by and you could pick what you wanted. The limeade was also heavenly.  Our trip also consisted of shopping, reading, playing the electric guitar (which matt is very excited to be taking home with us to play and record.), watching movies and playing ninjas with Logan. We had a great time and hope to be able to go back sometime soon! We are grateful my aunt and uncle Josh and Erin Volmer drove us to the airport and saved us money for parking at their house instead of the car garage!

Matt got all A’s this year in Graduate school and is glad it will be over for the summer. I’m proud of him for working so hard even with me always trying to get him to hang out with me when I was bored! But he is very disciplined.  He plans on finding a job in these next few weeks. I Go back to work tomorrow also… the countdown is officially on for the next vacation from work...

Well we love you all and hope you have a great week!

Love Leisha and Matt

Our Eventful Spring:

Hey Everyone! Sorry it's been so long since I've given the update! but here it is all the same :)

We went to Rexburg and had a great time visiting my sisters and Matt and I's friends and old roommates. And yes, I cut all my hair off while I was there just to try something new. I was a little scared to do it but I went ahead and did it anyways. Matt has asked me to cut his hair also. I wasn't very good but I'm getting better and he still makes me do it. I've learned he doesn't like it when I say "I'm going to try something new this time." or "oops"...hahaha

I couldn't find a good full time job in Ellensburg so at the end of March I moved to Richland with my family to work as a receptionist at the Tri-City Orthopedic Clinic. (AKA Dr. Hazel's office) It's been a lot to remember and we are very busy making appointments and getting authorizations for insurances etc. But it's been a good learning experience for me and it's helped to pay of graduate program loans as well. Matt would live in Ellensburg and go to school and be the apartment manager. He came home on Thursdays around dinner time to live in Richland with me and would go back to Ellensburg Monday mornings to go back to school. It wasn't very fun being a part so much but we are glad he is done with this year of school so we don't have to be apart! We are staying here for the summer to work. 

Living with my family has been fun and is saving us lots of money. We are grateful to them for letting us stay here.  Easter weekend was great and general conference we nice being with family also.

Matt got to go to our Friends' wedding in Georgia last weekend! Devyn and Will Geirke got married and he had so much fun being with friends and watching the sealing. I was sad I couldn't get work off and had to miss it but he was nice and took pictures for me. And thank you Frank for letting him use your frequent flier miles. He wouldn't have been able to go without them and he had a blast.

Matt was called as the Young Men's Secretary in the first few weeks we moved here. I was called a few weeks ago to the Primary teaching the 4 year old kids....It's really cool how it worked out that even though we moved away from Ellensburg, we were still called to almost the same callings we had while we were there! We try to go to the temple ever week or so. It's really brought us closer together and we love going.

We are very VERY excited to get to go to Virginia this coming Saturday for a whole week to visit the Montoya family! We're happy we will get to see Matt's brother, Grant, graduate. But that will be in our next update!

We Love you all. Have a great week!

Leisha and Matt Montoya

Happy New Year 2012!

I know I know we've been bad and haven't updated the blog for almost 2 months but life's been a bit crazy! So where did we leave off...?

For Christmas we went to Richland, WA. and spent it with my family. It was full of crazy amounts of family. We got some cool stuff for Christmas and had fun staying up late, talking, playing games and as you can see below, playing video games haha :)





We went to Virginia after Christmas to visit the Montoya's!
We went to the Washington D.C Temple. It was lit up and decorated like Temple square in Salt Lake City which was very neat to see.

 It was great going in and doing a session with Mom and Dad Montoya too. We did a lot of other fun things like going to national monuments in Washington D.C. and museums as well. Little Logan was hilarious and always made us laugh. He has a cute personality. It was nice to be able to hangout with Grant for a little bit since he was at a soccer tournament.

 Frank and Cindy spoiled us on our visit there as well. We played games, went out to eat, watched movies and shopped.

When we returned from our great journey back to Washington we became boring again...Matt started his second quarter of Graduate school at Central Washington. He has two classes that he goes to 4 times a week: Jane Austin class and a Creative writing class also. He enjoys them and we have spent many of our evenings watching pride and prejudice, Emma, sense and sensibility, etc.

Matt has been working with the teachers and I've been working with the 3 and 4 year-old primary children. Both are just about the same amount of crazy I think! Matt has a kid with attention disorders and has to keep him still. The boy chose Matt as his favorite and follows him around.

I've been cleaning like crazy with my job. It's been hard on my body but a good workout too! I still work at Real Deals (the home decor store) and love creating the displays when I get the chance. We went to the Columbia River temple In the Tri-cities last weekend and it was great to see more family.

Matt and Logan playing with remote control cars Logan got for Christmas

We were excited to hear yesterday that one of our very nice neighbors is taking missionary discussions and hopefully we can take part in getting him baptized.

We are looking forward to next weekend when our friends Will Geirke and Devyn LaFrance (soon to be Devyn Geirke) come to visit for a few days. Hopefully that will get us up out of this dreary winter feel here in Ellensburg. The snow is melting slowly so that is great!

Logan Bean (my brother-in-law) made this poster for my parents for Christmas. We all got a kick out of it...


In our free time Matt and I like to record music. We've been working on a song bit by bit. Slowly adding in piano, voices, Guitar and hopefully drums and more voice soon. And don't worry we'll let everyone listen to it but we got more to work on so we'll let you know when it's ready!

We hope you all are having a great New Year and are doing well!
Love you guys,
Leisha and Matt Montoya

Merry Christmas!

Hello All,
We've been having a great time in the cold Ellensburg these past few weeks. Here is what we did:

We made gingerbread houses! well... kinda... It was the college student cheap way with gram crackers and frosting! It was a fun activity and we watched Elf again while we made them. Matt laughs so hard at that movie every single time haha... We both love it.

Last weekend we drove to Richland to watch my sister Lenise's show choir performance. It was really good. She sang 'O Holy Night' at it and was SO amazing. We were glad we decided to go because it was worth it.

We got tired of no heater because we were freezing all day so we decided to leave it at a low temperature and even that helped a lot so we are staying warmer then usual!

This last Sunday we 'Ovoo'ed our friends Brittanee, Devyn, Will, and Suzi all at the same time! Technology is so great that even though all of us are in different places, we can still stay in contact and have fun together.

On Monday we went to Sherlock Holmes 2 which we were super excited to see! It was great just so you know and we both recommend it to anyone who wants to see a good movie.

We JUST got our wedding pictures in the mail so to all of you who wanted some from me: They are coming! I hung some up yesterday and love them. Thanks Sharee your a great photographer :)

Matt and I leave tomorrow evening to go to my parents house in West Richland for CHRISTMAS! We are so excited and have a few presents under out paper-made Christmas tree. Then the 26th we fly off to Virginia!! which is exciting because we haven't been able to see Matt's family since the wedding. Also we plan on going to Washinton DC and going to some sites there along with the DC temple too so we are really looking forward to going to visit the Montoya family.

Well I hope you all have a great Christmas and a wonderful New Year also. We are so happy to know all of you and are grateful for your support and love towards us.

We LOVE you!
Leisha and Matt Montoya

He sees you when your sleeping, He knows when your awake....!

It's almost Christmas and we haven't done any shopping yet!! Being as the only stores we have here are FredMyer, SafeWay, and a grocery store we have to drive 30 minutes to a Target or Wal-Mart and 40 minutes to a Mall. So it's made things a little difficult but hopefully we'll make a trip to Yakima to go Christmas shopping soon!

This week Matt turned in his last final papers for his first quarter of grad school and is now VERY happy to be free to read, work out, play the guitar and make Christmas cookies with me to take to the neighbors (we did that for family night tonight)

On Saturday we drove to Leavenworth. There were about 1000 people there and it was packed. We all gathered together and sang Christmas songs and did a count down for them to light the whole town. It was beautiful with all the trees, and shops lit up. We met up with some distant relatives of mine there and they showed us around.

We are excited to be getting to know our ward better. Matt had 3 hours of meetings thought this Sunday about scouts that I think he got a little bored at... hahaha...

Well we'll update you all later! Have a great week!

Leisha and Matt Montoya

Another week

Hey Friends and Family,

A pretty uneventful week for us here in Ellensburg.  We came to the realization that there's less to do in Ellensburg than there was in Rexburg!  One bowling alley... a theater.. that's about it.   For everything else we have to drive to Yakima.  They have food and ice cream places though so we went to Dairy Queen on Thursday and on Friday we went to Fred Meyer and walked around for an hour or so.. .Which was more fun than we thought it would be.  We also got Netflix for 1 month free to keep us occupied, and there's a couple from another ward that are organizing get-togethers for married students this month so maybe we'll make  some friends...  That would be good. And we're getting together with a nice couple this weekend that I met at school.

We've also been going to institute, and that's been a lot of fun.  Classes are over for the quarter though so we'll have to get a little more creative.  I have a week left to finish my two term papers but I won't bore you with the details of them.  Leisha's been working and decorating our apartment nicely for Christmas time.  Other than that we're looking forward to going to Richland the week of Christmas and then Virginia the day after Christmas.

Have a good week!

Matt and Leisha

Happy Thanksgiving!

 Hey Freinds!
This past week has been a little crazy for us! Here is why:

I had on red lipstick!

Last Saturday Matt and I decided that for our date we would go sledding at night time like we used to in Rexburg. We drove about 15 minutes away from our apartment to the sledding hill we heard of. The roads were icy and we slowly slipped across the other lane and into the ditch!!! Don't worry, we were fine and the car wasn't damaged either. We slid pretty slow. So we waited for the tow truck to come and we got towed out of the ditch! It was quite the adventure I must say...

Matt didn't like it very much haha

I was able to get work off the week after Christmas so we are looking forward to go to Virginia and visit the Montoya family :)

The sky was so orange when it snowed!

We tend to leave our shoes by the door...

Matt and I have been cooking together every night to master a few of our favorite meals. We've discovered homemade sweet and sour chicken, stir fry and Fried chicken. We now know it's better if you make it and decided to never buy it at a restaurant again!

We went to the Tri-Cities for Thanksgiving! The night before thanksgiving I talked Matt into stop doing his homework for a few hours and we went rollerskating with my family and kids from our ward! It was hard to master rollerskating instead of rollerblading but we caught on eventually. Luckily we didn't have too hard of falls!
Thanksgiving was fun! My Grandma Volmer reserved the Stake center for the family and we played basketball, dodge ball, other games, cooked and ate the Thanksgiving feast! There was also a talent show and lots of pie!

Matt has 2 weeks left of the quarter and has been working like crazy on his final papers he has to write. The day before Thanksgiving he got up at 6am and did his homework until 6:30 pm....we went skating...and he came home and did More from 8:30 to 11! So he's crazy busy with that!

We drove home late on Thanksgiving evening and I woke up at 4am to be at work for black Friday! I worked for 12 hours at the store and cleaning that day and we still went to Yakima to return some things and go shopping! After we were done shopping at Target we went out to find our car. "that's our car" Matt said. "no it's not it has a white line on the side. we don't have that" I told him...come to find out someone Keyed our car in a perfect line on each side of the car, making it look like it was supposed to be there... We asked a patrol cop to help us and he said there's nothing we could do. So that was upsetting but at least it's on both sides and at least it is completely straight! At first Matt was like "wasn't that there before?" haha that tells you how normal it looks I guess!

We went out to get a Christmas tree yesterday and were surprised at the cost! We settled for some Christmas lights and put them up in our living room and watched the movie ELF to be a little festive!

We hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and are doing great! We'll update you soon
Leisha and Matt Montoya