Quarterly Update..

Wow.. It has sure been a really long time since we last blogged.. Things are busy as always and we are just getting ready to finish up another semester of school. I am surprised that Jenna hasn't blogged about her New York trip.. but I will have to tell her to get on top of that.. I will be able to provide a little more detail on life when things slow down.

GivingThanks or ThanksGiving

If you really think about it... you might have a nice house/car/tv. You might have a great family and friends that surround you on all sides. You might be incredibly smart and really good a school, or maybe super athletic and skinny. You might be what you think everyone wants or desires, but until you spend the time and effort towards learning to be appreciative and grateful for those things you have been blessed with, your no better off than anyone else. The room is a bright as you make it. Your life is as good as your perceive it. Being grateful isn't a mere reaction to receiving a blessing, its a lifestyle. When we put forth the time and effort, and we're able to live gratefully, then we will truly be happy and capable of seeing what this life is really all about.

I love my wife more than anything and learn to appreciate her and the blessing she is to me, more and more every day. This progression of becoming more and more aware of the blessings around me, is what feeds my happiness for now and is just a small part of the equation which will eventually produce eternal happiness.

I love you Jenna!

The briefest of overviews!

Today it has been exactly a year since Kellen and I got engaged (Happy Halloween!). So I wanted to reminisce briefly over what has happened this past year....

Our First Holiday married: Easter!

That is what we call a proud egg-maker

What is THAT thing?! Let's see if we can give you a close up....

Yes, this egg hung on a wall in our kitchen. And yes it was our only decoration. DO NOT JUDGE people. What do you think we are just made of money?

Our Second Holiday: NBA play-offs

Yes. It is not a nationally recognized holiday. But is should be the way we celebrate in the Madsen household. And yes they are fabulous aren't they? Cookie letters! Made them myself!

Pioneer Day!

The annual Monroe Basketball tournament. The ONLY forgiveable excuse for ever missing is serving a mission. We were there playing street ball until 2 AM.

Then we went camping and back to the spot where we carved our tree.

Look familiar?

Hiking Bridal Veil Falls:

It was really pretty. I loved it! I decided hiking was my new thing... that was the last hike we have been on since...

My little clumsy mistake:

So those of you who think that using a glass cup to drink is not dangerous think again...

I dropped one and got a pretty good cut on my knee. It needed 4 or 5 stitches!

Yuck!

Camping on Bear Lake:

Just Kel and I went camping at Bear lake one night. It was so cool! It got real windy and the water had huge waves like the ocean. I will never forget it. It was amazing.

In the morning our breakfast options were left-over hotdogs, or Bear Lake Raspberry shakes... we obviously needed our fruit serving for the day...

Our Salt Lake Trip: We met one year ago... at a Jazz Game...

Kel surprised me with some much needed away from Provo time. These are the tracks in SLC headed towards the mall.

... it also didn't hurt that we had met at a Jazz game about 2 years earlier and one just happened to be going on that night

GO JAZZ!!!! When you meet your best friend and future spouse at a game, you become fans for life.

Finally Halloween

Seriously, he had the "old-man-taking-a-picture-face" down.

Here is Casey Muir, Kylie Muir, Sean Tanner, Jaime Tanner, and K and J Madsen. We went on a rocking provo river "Creepy Cruise." Seriously, we know how to celebrate.

Our neighbors were seriously showing us up with the size of there pumpkins.. The Old man is just trying to throw his back out lifting one... They are enormous!

Well, that was a short recap of our married life. We do not like to be bored and have found a lot of fun things to do. I truly love the life of a Madsen!

Before there was snow.....


Well, I love Kellen so I will not publicly dispute with him online over exactly how "Our Story" of how meeting turned into marriage. Just so all you know though. . . there IS a different version ;) but mostly he did us justice.

I still feel pretty vulnerable subjecting the World Wide Web to my writing but I guess I will try. Well. It has been almost a year since we got engaged (October 30, 2009) and so much has happened since then! But I was just thinking of even before that. Since it is now miserable and cold in Utah, I have been reminising much happier times when their was sun and joy in our lives. The summer before we got engaged Kellen took me on a four-wheeler ride up the mountain by his house in Richfield. It was gorgeous up there! Looking at the pictures made me miss warm and adventurous weather so much! We carved our names in a tree and I just feel like as cliche as it is, it was so adorable! That feeling was reinforced when we went back to that same spot this summer and it was still there. Not as fresh and pretty but the exact same. It made me think that Kellen and I get to spend so much time together and that this is just the beginning. And seeing the tree the same was so cool because it is something that will be there for a long long time just like us! I'm so excited to be able to get to be with Kel! One of my favorite things about marraige is that I can always count on him. He is always there for me and I hope I do not underestimate the value in that. Anyway, I do not have any new pictures on my comp so I decided to post the old ones from that trip! ! !

Master Chef Madsen

Master Chef Madsen

I'm not gonna lie, I was speaking with Jenna the other day and let out the truth.. I told her that one of my goals in life is to be a really really great cook... It really is one of my goals.. I love making random things up and they all usually turn out great somehow.. She says I have some cooking talent, but who's wife wouldn't tell their husband that.. really? Anyway, last night I cleaned the kitchen and made some great pancake batter for the next morning. Let me tell you.. I make some mean pancakes! (like its tough right...)

Kellen

In the beginning..

So since this is gonna be our makeshift journal, I want to start from our beginning. Two years ago, on the 23rd of November 2008, me and the boys took in canned food to get free Jazz tickets. We ended up getting 18 tickets for that nights game and we were pumped. The only problem is that we didn't even know 18 people to invite. So after finding dates for ourselves, my good friend Ryan tried to get rid of the rest of the tickets and texted a few random people that he hadn't spoken to in a while. Anyway, I went to the game with my date and another couple and was enjoying the game when Ryan finally got there with the other people he had invited. With him was a girl that I had never seen or met before, but just seeing her, I knew that I had to speak with her.

Now my friends will attest, I am not the guy that approaches any girl, in fact, I honestly believe this night, was the first night that I had ever approached a girl, but I had to. So at half time I left my date in her seat and went over and poked my head in between this girl and her date(my good friend Sjon). Without practice, something awkward came out like," Hi.... whats your name..?" without introducing myself at all. She said," uh.... Jenna.. my name is Jenna." after talking for a second, her personality couldn't have made a better impact right off the bat. Then since the game was about to start I kinda just got up and walked back to my seat. Before I got there I got called back, only to realize that I had never introduced myself or told Jenna my name. So anyways, to say the least, after this night all I wanted or could think about was, how could I take this girl on a date(with out feeling like I was undercutting my friend Sjon(honestly not really caring though... she had to be for me..)). The following picture is of the first night we met.

So shortly after this I found a way, and we went on another date, and that date turned into a string of dates and a lot of time spent together. We went on a lot of fun dates, including a Cold Play Concert, and also going to Body Worlds. We did a lot of fun things and grew really close, in fact too close. Around the first of December, 2008, we were on a date, were at the temple just seeing the Christmas lights and I think that kinda just pushed her over the edge. She broke up with me because she “wasn’t ready”, even though I’m still confused to this day about what she wasn’t ready for, I never proposed or even talked about US getting married. But anyways, a week later, I went to say goodbye(forever) and gave her a nice little Christmas gift that I had bought her earlier, only to have caught her at the wrong time(because her date showed up) that made for an awkward moment.

But since you all know that this isn’t the end of the story, I will finish. After that horribly cold night in December, I didn’t see or talk to Jenna for 3 months. One day randomly, I see that Jenna is chatting with me on facebook(and no I never deleted her as a friend), she said that she missed talking and wanted to catch up sometime. So I was kind and said, “ya that sounds great…” thinking, that I would rather get ran over by a small car then have my heart string ripped around again. But life is a funny thing, that very same weekend my trainer from my mission who was here from Mexico attending BYU set me up on a blind date with a girl he thought I would be a good match for. As we were on the date, I found out that the this girl lived in the same Apartment Complex as Jenna(not that she was the first thing I thought of when liberty square was mentioned or anything), then I found out that she lived in the same building as Jenna. Trying to avoid an awkward conversation I tried not to bring up anything, but after a while I just had to ask this girl if she knew or had met Jenna. This is where the story gets out of control, so this girl pauses, and says “of course I know Jenna, she is my visiting teacher!” No joke, so as I took this girl home, I found myself in a place where I swore I would never be, telling myself that I had to get out of there because I was thinking that I would only open up old wounds. Nonetheless, everything else inside of me, made me call her and luckily she was home.

So to wrap up this big long story, It took 2 dates with other girls to meet, and date my wife. Shortly after that night in March of 2009, we FINALLY kissed, only 5-6 months after we met. So if you think I’m impatient, you are wrong my friends.. To wrap things up for the start of our blog, after a few more great months of dating, we decided that we couldn’t live without each other.

We got engaged the 30^th of October, 2009 and we were an engaged couple for Halloween as the picture below shows.

We entered the Draper temple on the 2^nd of January 2010 and we were sealed together for time and all eternity by a servant of the lord with the power and authority to do so. I have never been happier than I am right now, and that only grows day by day. The more we get to know about each other, the sweeter life is. Waking up is much easier when you know what your waking to and what your waking up for. Life just has more meaning and directions with Jenna. She is my north star.