Pre-Christmas Fun

One Christmas tradition my family had for many years was lots and lots of holiday baking followed by creating numerous plates of treats to deliver to neighbors and friends. For many of those years, my mom would also make us go caroling when we delivered them, much to our dismay. This year, my sister Megan and I got together and spent nearly an entire Saturday having a "bakefest" for the same purpose (minus the caroling though). It was a busy day, and no pictures were taken during the process due to the fact that we started in the morning in our PJs and didn't shower until later in the day...no one needs to see that. Anyway, here's what we made that day:
From the top and going clockwise: sugar cookies, fudge, peanut butter kiss/peanut butter cup cookies, spritz cookies, ginger crinkles, heath bars, and dipped pretzels. The bag to the side contains corn chex candy.

Last Saturday, we decided to spend the day doing fun things as a family rather than filling the day with last minute Christmas preparations. For breakfast we headed to Kneaders for breakfast with Santa and Mrs. Claus. Unlike most children her age, Bridget loves Santa and has no fear about sitting on his lap. She even asked him where his reindeer were. Although we don't live as close to a Kneaders as I would like, it was well worth the 20 minute drive so she could see Santa and we could all enjoy their yummy french toast.
After breakfast we headed to the movie theater to see Tangled. This was actually her second movie theater experience (we went to an IMAX movie on bears over the summer), but this was the first time she'd been to a "full length"movie at the theater. She sat still for about the first half of the movie, and after that she roamed up and down the empty seats next to us and climbed on and off both our laps multiple times. Amazingly, she did pay attention to the whole movie even while moving around and spent the rest of the day talking about various parts of it.

November Happenings

Since I've let a whole month go by without a single post, here's a long one with all of our excitement.

At the beginning of the month, Nate celebrated another birthday. I won't mention how old he turned because that would be rude, but it's way more than the number of candles pictured in his birthday pie. We started the day off with Mother's Crunchy French Toast (a recipe from a delicious restaurant in Portland). Later that day we met up with my sister Jessica, brother-in-law Matt, and nephew Colin for dinner at Mi Ranchito before heading back to their apartment to eat Nate's birthday pie - Black Bottom Peanut Butter Pie (also a recipe from Mother's Bistro).
Another fun happening we had this month was getting rid of Nate's 2-door car and upgrading to a 2008 Honda Pilot EX. With the upcoming expansion of our family, we needed something that will hold 2 car seats more comfortably and still have plenty of cargo room for road trips. It was great timing too because days after we bought it the snow storms started, and it's been great for driving in bad weather. The picture below is one I stole off the internet, but it's our same car - Aberdeen Green (basically a metallic grayish green).
For Thanksgiving this year, we didn't have to travel anywhere because several of my family members came to us, and we hosted at our house. The night before, we got together with my extended family for dinner and then headed to Nate's extended family's for their traditional pie night.

Nate and my brother, being the avid runners that they are, signed up for a 10k Turkey Trot Thursday morning. They (along with my cousin Steve) were crazy enough to run that far in 14 degree weather! At least it wasn't snowing.
The entire Thanksgiving feast was prepared in my kitchen. Thankfully, it's a good size, but I was really wishing I had 2 ovens, a 6-burner stove, and a larger refrigerator. The picture below is one I stole from my sister Jessica off Facebook (thanks Jessica). My brother, Mark, is the one peeling potatoes in the background while I'm rolling out my roll dough. And in case you are wondering, I only made the chocolate mint pie on the right. Megan and Jessica made the pumpkin and apple pies. It was great to have so many of my family members here - Mark, Other Mark, Emily, Enoch, Asher, Megan, Jessica, Matt, Colin, and Nate and Bridget of course.
November is birthday month at our house, so we finished off the month celebrating Bridget's 3rd birthday. Sadly, she had the worst cold she's ever had and was pretty sick during Thanksgiving and her birthday. We started off her special day by letting her open her presents from us first thing that morning. She got a shopping cart, play food, and a sweater. Note to self: Do no let her open birthday presents before breakfast next year because then she just wants to play instead of eat.
For lunch that day, we met up with some of my family for lunch at Paradise Bakery. Mark and Mark even supplied birthday cupcakes and candles since I knew I wasn't going to get her birthday cake made before lunch.
She was so shy about blowing out the candles, so Aunt Megan had to assist.
While she napped that afternoon, I decorated her Curious George birthday cake (homemade chocolate cake with a cookies and cream filling and white buttercream frosting). We'd planned to take her bowling that evening, but her illness and crabby mood made us decide to wait a few days until she's feeling better.
Here's her 3-year-old stats from her checkup at the doctor's office yesterday:
Height: 41" (99th percentile)
Weight: 38 lbs. (94th percentile)
Head Circumference: 20"
She's tall, thin, and basically the size of a 4-year-old.

And finally, Nate really got into putting up Christmas lights this year. He's not one to usually care much about holidays, so he surprised me with his festiveness. Here's our very green house:
All in all, November was a pretty good month for us. Baby girl #2 is also still doing well, and everything looked perfect at her anatomy scan we had at the beginning of the month.

Halloween Festivities

The weekend before Halloween, my sisters, brother-in-law, and nephew came to our house for a full and festive day of activities. We started by making some Halloween sugar cookies (which I forgot to take pictures of), carved pumpkins, and made homemade individual pizzas. We were hoping to make s'mores too, but the rainy weather as well as our lack of time prevented that from happening.

Bridget really enjoyed cleaning out the pumpkins which is nice since nobody seems to like that yucky job. Of course, she wanted to help carve hers but was satisfied just to watch her dad do it.

The finished product

Matt definitely looks more excited than Jessica to eat the pizza in this picture, and it was soooo good!
And here's Bridget in her Halloween costume on Halloween weekend. She made a pretty darn cute Sleeping Beauty even if she has the remnants of a black eye from a fall she took at daycare a few days before. It's too bad this picture doesn't show off her sparkly pink shoes because that's her favorite part.

Pumpkin Patch

Now that Bridget's old enough to understand holidays and the festivities that come with them, we decided to take her to a pumpkin patch this year. She was so excited when we got there and started running around picking up as many as she could as fast as she could while saying, "How about this one?"

We decided on a smaller one for her and a larger one for Nate and me. Neither of us is big on pumpkin carving, so this was really all for her.
I'm not sure if it was worth the price or not, considering we paid double or triple what we would have paid to just buy them at a grocery store, but maybe she'll be able to talk us into going back next year. She had fun, and that was all that mattered to us.

Fall Break Yellowstone Trip

In mid-October, I had a 4-day fall break from school, so we decided to head to West Yellowstone to visit Nate's parents and so Nate could help his Dad work on the shop he's building. Although I've been to West Yellowstone dozens of times in my life, I've never been there so late in the year, and it was certainly a peaceful place. Nate and his dad spent all of Friday and half of Saturday working together on the shop.

After the rain seemed to taper off Saturday afternoon, Nate, Bridget, and I headed into Yellowstone Park. Amazingly, Nate had never been there before, so it was nice to go when it was a little less busy. Bridget loved the animal checklist and had a good eye for spotting them even if all we saw was a bunch of elk and buffalo. She was really hoping to see some bears, but no luck with that.

We didn't have much time to spend in the park before it got dark, so we checked out some geysers at the Lower Geyser Basin and then headed to Old Faithful.

Bridget was pretty good while waiting for Old Faithful for 20-25 minutes and only tried to jump off the boardwalk a couple of times.
I'm actually amazed Old Faithful shows up as well as it did in the picture considering the cloudy, dark sky in the background.

Introducing Baby #2

Now that I'm 15 weeks along and we were able to find out the gender of our baby yesterday, I decided it's time to finally post about it. We just barely started telling people I'm pregnant because I've had A LOT of anxiety about having another miscarriage. Getting through that first trimester felt like an eternity. My doctor has been fabulous to see me every 2 weeks, so yesterday's appointment was actually my 5th appointment and the 3rd ultrasound. When she asked me at my 13 week appointment if we wanted to find out the gender at our next one, I was pleasantly surprised because I was 24-25 weeks when we found out with Bridget.

It took about 5 minutes before my doctor was able to get the perfect shot. And here it is:
And you can see that she typed on the ultrasound right between the legs - it's a GIRL!

Above is the full body shot. In case you can't tell what you're looking at, the head is on the left and you can see the spine in her torso on the right. She even gave us a little thumbs up while she was squirming around.

We are thrilled to add another daughter to our family and feel very blessed after all the heartache we've gone through trying to make that happen. Other than my anxiety, I've had a pretty easy pregnancy so far. Morning sickness was mild and came in waves (mostly in the evenings) from about 7-13 weeks, and other than that I've just had the typical pregnancy fatigue. But I've never appreciated any of it more.

My official due date is April 2nd, but since I'll either be having a repeat c-section or VBAC, she'll probably be joining us the end of March.

Nate's 1st Half Marathon

Yesterday, Nate ran the Layton Half Marathon - his first of what he hopes will be several half or full marathons. He started training for this goal 5 months ago and has also shed 30 pounds in the process! His goal for the race was to finish in 2 hours, and he was close with a finish of 2:12:09.7. To break down the stats, that's 189th (of 395) overall; 92nd (or 137) male; and 24th (of 34) for his age division.

While waiting for him to cross the finish line, I'm sad to say I didn't get the best picture. I wasn't sure what he was wearing because he left our house in the dark early morning, and when he came around the final corner I had my camera out but got all flustered and didn't get the lens cover open in time. Bridget broke it a while back and I forgot to manually open it all the way, so here's the resulting picture:

And there he is just a few feet away. It's funny because he didn't actually hear us cheering him on and ran right by us because he was so in "the zone."

A family shot including the medal. Ooooo....ahhhh.

I love Bridget's cheesy grin in this shot. We'll just forgive Nate's expression since he was exhausted. Bridget liked Nate's "necklace" and wanted to keep it for herself.

And here's the rest of the cheering squad - my cousin Amanda and Aunt Jennine.

I'm so proud of Nate for his accomplishment. He ran the entire thing except for 2 very brief walks to drink water at the aid stations along the way. We can't wait to cheer you on at your next race sometime next spring!

Home Improvement Projects

This summer we had three major home improvement projects we hoped to tackle, and now that summer is just about over, we're happy to say that we got them done!

As I mentioned in a previous post way back in July, Nate and his dad built a shed for us. Nate had to do a lot of the finishing touches himself (shingle the roof and install the door and a vent), so it wasn't actually completely finished until a while later. But here's the finished product:
It's nothing fancy and only 6'x8', but it meets our needs. And now our garage doesn't feel so cramped. :)
Labor day weekend we decided it was finally time to stain our deck. I wish I had a good before picture, but let's just say that most of the previous stain had worn off and ugly, gray wood was what remained. This definitely turned out to be a huge project, and it's not something I ever want to do again. Now our deck doesn't look so ghetto. The only downside is that it's now even more evident how much we need to paint the exterior of our house. I don't even want to think about that project.

Our final project was to have a new front door and sidelights installed. Our old sidelights were ugly yellow 1970s stained glass and the last bit of the 70s that remained in our house. I also HATED the front door.
And here's the new one:

BEAUTIFUL!! We love it!

2nd Summer Trip to West Yellowstone

I find it somewhat ironic that even though both of the trips we made to visit Nate's parents this summer should have been during West Yellowstone's best weather, we spent most of both trips in long pants and jackets.

This trip to West Yellowstone was originally supposed to be a family reunion of sorts with Nate's siblings and their families, but we ended up being one sister and brother-in-law short. I was mostly excited for Bridget to get a chance to get to know her cousins Jaxon and Tanner since she hadn't been around them since she was about 9-months-old.

Even though the weather wasn't great the whole trip, we were able to sneak in some fun on Nate's brother Matt's boat when we could. Everyone arrived Thursday night, and Friday's weather was the worst we had. It was a good thing we got in some boating early in the day because it ended up raining most of the afternoon and evening.
Bridget's first boat ride. She started out in the back of the boat, but when she lurched forward while Grandpa was slowing down, it scared her so we brought her up front with us. It almost made her hate riding in the boat, but eventually she decided it was okay.

The life jacket was not her favorite.

Friday morning we drove the boat across the lake a few miles to my family's cabins. It took less than 10 minutes to get there by boat which beats the 30 minute drive around the lake. The water proved to be a little calmer and better for wakeboarding over there, so several of us got out to let the kiddos play on the beach while Matt went wakeboarding. Sadly, the storm was coming in, so we headed back to Nate's parents' house and got there just in time.

The grandkids can never get enough of playing with Grandpa.

Waiting for the boat to come pick us up on Saturday (day 2 of boating). It's amazing how entertaining skipping rocks can be.

Thankfully, the sun came out and it finally warmed up a little so playing on the beach at the cabins was a little more enjoyable. Grandpa even helped build a sand castle.

We had a great time hanging out with family, eating way too much good food, boating, going to an IMAX movie, and playing games. I'm also glad this trip coincided with a cabin trip for my extended family, so I was able to see some of my family too.

THE BIG 3-0

Earlier this month, I celebrated my 30th birthday. I realize that to some people, turning 30 is no big deal. To me the 20s are the prime of one's life, so turning 30 was not something I'd been looking forward to at all. I didn't actually cry about it, but I did feel like it a few times. Maybe it also has something to do with feeling like I hadn't accomplished all that I hoped to by this point in my life, but I'm sure a lot of people feel that way at any milestone birthday.

My birthday was on a Friday, and after spending the morning cleaning my house in preparation for the family we'd be having over that weekend, I did have a relaxing and fun evening. Nate even got off work a couple of hours early.

For dinner, we went to Salt Lake to have dinner with my sisters and brother-in-law at an Italian restaurant called Tucci's. I'd only eaten there once several years ago and remembered it being good, and it was. One of the owners "Papa Tucci" was actually the one to wait on us which included him singing "Happy Birthday" to me in Italian. They even put a candle in my slice of turtle cheesecake. Even if we didn't do anything extraordinary to celebrate, it was a nice birthday overall.
My birthday celebration even continued throughout the weekend because my sisters and their kids that arrived from Arizona wanted to celebrate too. So Sunday, we had the whole group over to our house for dinner, birthday cake, and homemade ice cream. This celebration also included my nephew Asher who was turning one just a few days later. It was great to have family around, even if it was a very short visit.

Here's hoping for great things during this new decade of my life!

Bowling

Last week, Nate's work had their annual company party, and it was the best one yet. This year, they rented out Fat Cats for 3 hours and provided dinner from The Pizza Factory. In case you are unfamiliar with Fat Cats, they have all sorts of activities - bowling, arcade games, bumper cars, indoor surfing, indoor flying, billiards, and rock climbing. All of the activities were free, be we opted just to do bowling since that was toddler friendly.

Bridget absolutely loved bowling! As I've mentioned before, she's a Curious George fanatic, and there's an episode about bowling. Needless to say, she was so excited to go bowling just like George. She was even really good at being able to carry her 6 lb. ball herself and put it on the child bowling apparatus (I have no idea what it's called).


We couldn't keep her away from the ball return. I was nervous she would try to pick up a heavier ball and drop it on her toes, but we were able to keep that from happening.

Sadly, she actually got a better score than Nate and I did. I should also mention that this was the first time Nate and I had ever been bowling together. It's something I've been wanting to do for a while, but it just never happened. With as much as Bridget loved it, I'm sure we'll be going again soon.

4th of July Weekend

For the 4th of July weekend we headed to Nate's parents' house just outside of West Yellowstone. We got there Thursday evening and left Sunday afternoon, so it was a quick trip but fun nonetheless.

One of the things Bridget had been looking forward to for months was riding Grandpa's tractor. And she did within a couple of hours of us being there.
Bridget also enjoyed making friends with Grandma and Grandpa's new dog, Nic. At first she wasn't so sure about him, but I think she finally decided he was okay. She normally loves dogs, but he's a little skittish which she didn't like so much. (And don't mind her crazy hair in this picture - we'd just taken her pony tails out).
Friday, Nate helped his dad prepare and pour concrete footings for the deck they're going to build. I even got to drive the tractor (a first for me) to help them in the process.

On Saturday, we spent a good portion of the day moving a giant firewood pile from the inside of their garage to outside. I got in a little more tractor driving and found out that I'm pretty good at stacking firewood (such a useful talent). That night we went into town and had some BBQ at one of the restaurants before heading back to the house. On our way back, we also had to stop at one of Grandpa's fire stations so Bridget could check out the fire trucks. She climbed inside all three and looked pretty cute pretending to drive such a large vehicle. Too bad we didn't have our camera with us at the time. :(

When we got back to their house that night, Bridget got to have her first ice cream cone. I know what you're thinking - we must be some sort of crazy parents that our daughter is this old already and hadn't ever had an ice cream cone. I promise she's not deprived. She did pretty well as you can tell from the ice cream goatee she's sporting here.

We originally planned to go home early Monday morning, but ended up needing to come home Sunday so that Nate and his Dad would have a full day to build us a shed before his dad had to head home. (I'll have to do a separate post about that later).

We had a great time and look forward to going back again in August!