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!