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

Busy busy busy...

Hey Everyone,
This week has been pretty busy for us. Matt has lots of homework, projects and presentations to work on. As for me, I've been cleaning lots of houses, working at the decorating store and getting another apartment ready for renting! So we've been pretty busy.

We are very excited that I got work off the week after Christmas! This means we get to go Virginia to visit the Montoya Clan :) We've been talking about it a lot.
We should be out making more friends but we're pretty content just skyping some of our best friends from college: Will Gierke and Devyn Lafrance. We laugh pretty hard talking to them every week.

I've found out that Matt is a really good natural cook. He just made up his own sweat and sour chicken recipe that was amazing and some stir fry the other day too. So i'm pretty lucky to eat some good quality food.

I went Elk hunting with my parents last week and my mom got a cow elk!

This is a picture of our apartment complex that we manage. It's little but it's fun to live here :)

Well I'll talk to you all next week!
Love The Montoya Family

Another week

Hello everyone.  This week we had Halloween, and we dressed up as Alice and the Mad Hatter.  Everyone says that I don't look very happy in the pictures but that's because the white makeup made my teeth look really yellow so I couldn't smile crazily like I should have...

So there's that.  We went to watch Harry Potter 7.2 in those costumes, they were showing it on campus.

Friday night we went to the Olive Garden in Yakima and it was a party. Other than that, we had some friends over last night to play games, it's the first time we've had people over.  It was pretty fun, but we still need to make more friends. 

I've been doing a lot of homework this week, and Leisha's been working her two jobs and really likes the home decorating job.  She wants to open up her own business someday.  She also went elk hunting with her parents and they shot a big elk!

We are having fun and learning lots.  Until next time,

Matt