October?? Seriously?

Yep. It is officially October, I cannot believe it. And it is going to be a crazy busy month, so I am sure that it will fly by and soon I will be saying "November? You're kidding me!". Since my last post we have had several people to stay, and let me tell you it sure has made all the extra space nice! We had one of my very best friends in the world, Mange and her boyfriend Luca for 3 nights and mange's sister april and her 2 kids for one of those nights. We went on a beautiful ward campout also. It was alot of fun even without any running water or toliet facilities. Luckily my wonderful in-laws have a super swank port-a-potty that goes in the tent. That saved my life. Even when I am not 6 months pregnant I can barely pee in the woods without an "accident", or make it through the night without peeing, but being 6 months pregnant, forget about it! Seriously, can't camp without the potty. Anyway, I managed to not get ANY pictures of Mange and Luca, or of the campout. What is wrong with me? My newest nephew carter was born to my sister emily and her boyfriend Mike, and I have yet to meet the little guy! He just turned 3 weeks old and I have never taken so long to meet a nephew! But we have had something EVERY weekend this month. This past weekend my sister Andrea and her 2 boys Kaleb and Benjamin came to stay with us while they were waiting for their husband/daddy's flight to come in to Sky Harbor. He is on an 18 day leave from Iraq. It is his 3rd Middle East tour in the past 6 years. It will be so nice for them to spend this time with him. I can't imagine being an Army wife. Josh (my brother-in-law) was supposed to be out of the army last year, but recieved a stop-loss and was deployed for 15 months in Sept. instead of being released. I am so glad for them that in just a few months this will all finally be over for them and they can try and have a "normal" civilian family life. Anyway, I am glad that she is getting to see him and that the boys are spending some time with their dad. And it was great to see them all.

Life his been really busy and it is still "go go go!" Matt will be leaving for Mexico in a week for a week on a boys trip with his dad, uncle, cousin and some other "dudes". I have never gone that long without seeing him, so it will be weird, but i will get the chance to spend some time in Thatcher with my family, which will be great.

Anyway, i will try not to pack too much info into this blog and call it quits for now. Here are a few of the pics that I managed to take this month.

Three cousins and their "cheese" smiles

Kaleb

Ben

Playing in Nana & Boopah's new sandbox

Daddy snuggles (quite frequent latley-this is how the hang out all the time)

Bath time! Everyday I am begged for a "bat, hot!"

Parties, Politics, Parks and more!

I never know how to start these little update blogs. They are always full of random events that have occured over the last few weeks. I am sure that it would be better to get on each time that I have something to write about and write some small little blurb, and that is always my intention, but who has the time to do that a couple times a week? For me it is mostly the laziness of having to upload the pictures to be honest. Anyway, I guess I'll go in chronological order :)

A couple of weeks ago I bought a bag of Hershey's extra creamy milk chocolate with almonds and toffee Nuggets. Big mistake. Huge. I love them. I saw them in the Fresh and Easy when I was buying produce and I couldn't resist them. I LOVE them. Alot. It is pathetic. Anyway, I have been SO good at NOT buying any junk this pregnancy. I crave it and I know that if I buy it I will eat it. I have yet to gain any weight, which I am extremely happy about, but that can not continue to be the case if I EVER stoop to buy these delicious treats again. I bring this up, because I am finishing off the bag as we speak, or as I type I suppose. I figured that I might as well just down the last 5 nuggets or so today and then they won't be here to tempt me tomorrow, then I can get back on track. Great logic right? Anyway, hershey's and I currently have a love/hate relationship right now. Along with Jello Pudding. Like my Grandpa always says, "I can resist anything...except temptaion"

2 weeks ago we decided to start the process of trying to revive the backyard. We have an HOA so the front has always been nice but the back yard has been in pretty rough shape, and I would love to let Lily play back there when it cools off, so we have been working on it. The first day we stripped her down and turned the sprinkler on to entertain her so we could both work. She loved it!

She loved the water, it didn't intimidate her at all!

yep, she ate mud...would she be my daughter if she didn't?

We went to the park last week, we are REALLY close to this great park that has peacocks and chickens and kitties running around the citrus and historical areas. Lily loved to see the animals and also to play on the sets like a big kid! She is growing up too fast!!

Matt loves the above picture because he thinks it looks like she is "letting one go"

We had a big Labor day family gathering at Nana and Boopah's house (matt's parents). It was fun and Lily got to play with her cousins which she loved. It is wonderful to be living so close to Matt's parents for the first time, we are really enjoying that. And so is Lily. Everytime we go anywhere in the car she starts saying "Nana", "Boopah"! Thinking that we are driving to their house. We usually go over on sundays and occasionally once during the week for a short visit, but she is convinced that everytime we get in the car we should be going to nana and boopah's.



We bought tickets for Disney's Lion King stage production. I am really excited! It should be great, although it is the first week of Febuary, so hopefully I won't be too nervous about leaving the new baby. I am sure that it will be a great first date for matt and I after the new addition though. If it was going to be a show that we were less excited about we probably wouldn't have gone since the dates aren't great, but we couldn't pass up the opportunity, we got great seats too. It will be fun!


I can't believe that it is already the first week of september! That means I am only 4 calendar months away from having this little girl! May doesn't seem like very long ago and the past 4 months have flown by, so when I think of all the holidays and how quickly the next 4 months will go I am blown away. I am barely starting to really feel like I am pregnant. Even with all the sickness it just hasn't really felt real to me. The only reason that it is starting to now is that this girl is ACTIVE and I am constantly feeling her squirm inside of me. a feeling I will never get over. Matt can feel her now too, which I love. Anyway, now I am just starting to really believe that I am indeed pregnant, but the thought of actually having another baby here, living with us is still a ways away for me. I just can't imagine the reality of it. I am excited for it, but it feels like we are "making-believe".

Did ya'll watch the Sara Palin speech at last nights RNC? I have to say, I loved her. Was it perfect? Of course not, but for the first time I felt really behind someone, I actually believed in her. I am not a huge McCain fan, or even an average sized McCain fan, so I was really pleasently suprised with how great she is. Of course I am really looking forward to her debate against Bidden on the 2nd of Oct to really see how she tackles the issues under pressure and on her feet. There were of course lots of issues that she didn't cover so it will be good to hear more from her. I am not crazy about the way that both sides attack and demean each other, but I guess that now a days that is unavoidable. I did REALLY love some of the things she said though. Like the importance of serving your COUNTRY and not your PARTY. I love that she has tackled corrupt republicans. I love that I actually believe that she is in politics for the right reasons and hasn't been tainted by washington politics or the greed, pride and ego stroking that come with being a prospective candidate for years. Anyway, I know that we are just getting to know her, and I am sure that there will be times that she sticks her foot in her mouth and I feel embarrassed for her. but as far as first impressions go, she made a great one. It is about time the republican party produced someone who was actually inspirational!



Anyway, life is good. Matt is supposed to take a class on-line this month, my sister is having a baby, we have a ward campout and a few other events so hopefully I will keep up on my blogging and there will not be any more of these randome HUGE posts! If you are still reading this, thanks, I am impressed! You must either love me or not have cable :)

It's a bird, It's a plane...

It's a ...

.

.

.

Girl! :)

That is right folks, we have having another girl. The image implanted in my mind right now is two little girls with matching dresses and bows in their hair...

I am sure that they won't let me dress them like that forever, but I will be able to squeeze a few years of cute little photo op's out of them.

Anyway, I REALLY thought it was going to be a boy, along with most people, but I was wrong. So much for mother's intuition right?? Although I have been readily willing to admit this whole time that I have no basis for the "gender guessing" and would probably be wrong. So much for the Chinease gender calander! :)

We are happy and the baby looked healthy! I will post the pics once we upload them, along with some pics of Lily playing in the backyard sprinkler.

Baking Bread

Today I officially made homemade bread for the first time! I have assisted in making bread and taken over for someone else halfway through the process several times in my life, but I have never attempted to make some solo. While I was in Thatcher last weekend I got my Grandma's (GG) bread recipe and today I tried it out. I must say on a side note that my GG is the best cook on the face of the planet and NOTHING I ever make will ever come close to the way that she could execute it. However, I am actually pretty dang proud of myself. It turned out GOOD. I don't have a bosch or any other kinds of fancy gadgets, it is all done by hand the old fashion way, but it is worth it, because it is dang good! Anyway, hooray for me for doing something house-wifey! I can't wait for Matt to come home and taste it, and I am sure that he will be urging me to repeat the process quite often! :)

Going Home

So this past weekend we packed up and went to Thatcher for Fri-Sun. It was great. Friday night we got a nice monsoon storm and Saturday morning Matt, Lily and I went to the park.

It is amazing how much cooler it is in Thatcher. It was actually like 9:30 before it started getting too warm. It was fun, but Lily hadn't slept pretty much AT ALL the night before, so we didn't stay too long, we headed back to put her down for a nap.

We went down because it was my sister Emily's baby shower, which I of course left her gift at home and then proceded to get really sick halfway through her shower. I was then sick until about 5:30 am, at which point I was finally able to crawl out of the bathroom and into bed for a couple hours until we had to pack up for the trip home.

Below is a picture of Lily playing with my straightening iron, she LOVES to play with all of my hair gadgets, she kept going up to the mirrors and pretending that she was using it on her hair.

We had made plans with several people and so we thought that we were going to have a really packed schedule while we were there, but every person cancelled on us! It was pretty crazy. In the end, it was nice though. I got to relax a little and also just hang out with my family, which was great.

All in all, if you just looked at the stats it would seem like a pretty crappy trip, but I actually really enjoyed it. I do love it there. As soon as we approached the Gila Valley and I could see the surrounding mountains and cotton fields, I felt at home.

Here is a big one...

OK, so it has been over a month since I have blogged. But I have good reason, my life has been a crazy whirlwind! This post will probably ridiculously long and jam packed so just bare with me :)

I guess that I will start where we left off. July 11-14th we drove to Utah for Matt's family reunion on his Dad's side. It was a long drive, but we had A TON of fun. It was way better than I expected actually and the weather was so perfect. Remind me again WHY I live in Arizona?? So anyway, that trip was great and we came home right in the middle of a monsoon storm, which was even better! I love the rain.

Before we left for the reunion Matt and I decided that we really should move and Matt had the STRONG desire to do it sooner rather than later, so we started looking at places to rent. On Friday the 18th we had an appointment to meet with a landlord and check out an older 70's style duplex (That we had viewed before our trip and wanted to look at again). Since we were driving over to Glendale (about 40 minutes from our apt in Mesa) for the day, I decided to try and find some other places to look at, we had already looked at a bunch of apartments and a few of those duplexes. On a whim I decided to check out a rental house website just to see. I found a house that looked great and was only about $25 more/month than the other apartments we had looked at, so on the way to Glendale I called the real estate company and arranged to look at the house that same day. We went to the duplex first, some other people were there looking at it, but the landlord never showed up to meet us and answer our questions. As I walked around the place I didn't have a very good feeling and was overwhelmed by the general craptastic splendor. It was definetly more poorly maintained than I had remembered and just the fact that the Landlady missed out appointment, made me feel pretty uneasy. Before we went to the other house, the realtor called me back to tell me that they had just decided that morning to drop the rent on the house, but hadn't changed the online listing yet, so it was even cheaper than we thought. In fact, it was going to be cheaper than the duplex we had just looked at. We drove to the house and it was PERFECT for us. By far a million times superior to anything we had looked at in the proice range. 1300 sq feet, 2 car garage, backyard (that needs a little TLC, but that's ok-we'll work on our tans) and 3 bedrooms. I was in love and so was Matt. We said a quick prayer, felt great and decided to put in a application on the house that day, before someone else jumped at the dropped rent price (it really is an amazing deal).

Tuesday morning I got the phone call that our application was approved and that we could pick up the keys on Friday the 1st (a week and a half later). I had to run ALL around town getting everything worked out and it was a CRAZY day. I decided to not put anything off until the next day, to try and sqeeze it all into one miserable day instead of 2, which was really lucky because a little karmic balance was right around the corner.

5:55 am Wednesday morning, I fall down the stairs half asleep...ALL the way down. If any of you have EVER walked up my stairs you know how ridiculously steep and narrow they are. As soon as a started to fall (from the first step) I flopped to my back, I figured that would be the best for the baby, I was try to protect my stomache and reached my arms to the sides to prevent myself from tumbling and just laid back. Which turned out to be great, the baby is fine, thank you Lord! But unfortunetly my butt was the thing to take the brunt of ever step, and trust me as I was going down I felt every single step and knew that my tailbone had broken before I was even halfway down.

So now I have a week and a half to pack, a husband who just started his 3 12 hour days of work in a row, a one year old, and a broken tailbone. I don't know if any of you have ever broken your tailbone, but it is one of the most painful things I have ever experienced. In fact, even though I am typing this 3 weeks later, I am having to type it in incriments and take a break every 15 mintues for a couple of hours, because I can't stand to sit on my booty for an extended period of time.

So needless to say, it made doing any and everthing about 50 times (or more) harder. There was alot to be done, switching on and off of utilities, etc. and of course the house has to have gas and electricity and then the usual H2O, trash, phone cale, etc. I had to do lists written and stuck to every available surface! I put Matt in charge of the U-Haul trucks, we were going to need 2 trucks, and we were going to do it in 2 days, since we weren't going to have alot of help. In hind site I am REALLY glad that I gave him that job and not something else, because it turned out to be SUCH a hassle and by that time I was SO done with the stress. Almost everything that could go wrong with this move did. Both days the U-haul place didn't have out trucks, is the short version of that story, Matt had to call the corporate office and drive around town to find an available truck both days, which put us running late and really behind, which in effect caused us to miss/be late for other things. One thing it didn't effect was the people who showed up to help us from the ward...because NO one showed up. Matt's family and my brother Charlie were our only hope and they were SUCH a huge help, thanks so much you guys. I owe you my sanity. One of the things that we missed was the gas guy coming to turn on our gas, so we had no hot water for the first 4 days of living here, before he could make it out again.

Anyway, I won't go on any longer about the details of all the drama, but lets just let it be said that nothing can ever be easy right? I did EVERYTHING I could to be so prepared and organized and make it easy and smooth for all involved and everything that happened was just completely out of control. Matt and I have been living like college kids for so long and this house and the place emotionally/financially/physically/spiritually we are currently in is just too good to be true, so I guess that the universe just had to balance it out with a few dozen grains of salt :)

As the dust settles and I look around it is amazing to see how truly blessed we are. Life is good. Things could have been so much worse. Everything that has been thrown at us has been a challenge, stressful, irritating, even painful, but it has all been things that we can handle. I have the most amazing husband, who I love more than I ever knew was even possible. He is my best friend and I just genuinely like him. I have a daughter who keeps me on my toes, is a ball of fun and a beautiful wonderful little person (even when she makes me crazy), and I have another baby on the way. A baby who I can now feel wiggling around inside me. I can't wait until next week, when we find out which flavor he/she is and we can refer to him/her as "____" instead of baby :)

I am grateful to my friends and family for your love and support, especially if you are still reading this. I love my Savior and the gospel. I am grateful for my faith and testimony and for the amazing and crazy experience it is to live on this earth!

I feel like I am leaving so much out, but that this post is already too long! My tailbone is finally starting to heal and I am appreciating the ability to roll over in bed without wanting to scream out in pain and the increase in ease of moving around. It is slow coming, but it is finally starting and I am GLAD! Hopefully now I will be able to update this more often!

Here are some family reunion pics

And some others from the past few weeks:

Lily in her I love NY shirt that Auntie Andrea brought her

Lily loved having all of the cupboards and cabinets emptied. My family I am sure will think of the pictures of me crawling into the kitchen cabinets at this age, I guess she is more like me than I admit :)

She is getting so big!

Random Update

Ok, so I have needed to blog for a while, but things have been SO crazy and I am still puking/nauseous so I have fallen behind! I'll try to just do a quick update on the goings-ons.

First off, we got our car back!! Woohoo! Thank you to the random pet store worker who phoned it in and to the Mesa PD! They ripped up the center console to get the CD player out (which didn't work anyway), but that was about it. Funny how that works, if they would have just knocked on our door we would have gladly given them the player! Matt's theory is that they drove it for a couple days until it started overheating on them and then the dumped it!

We have officially decided to just rent somewhere else. We have been looking around, we just aren't sure when exactly we are going to go. Our rent will more than double anywhere we go so it is a plus and minus situation, although it will be REALLY nice not to have to run upstairs every time I have to throw up! I won't miss the awesome disco strobe light that is our kitchen, if you have EVER been in my kitchen I am sure that you have noticed the strobe!

Lily is getting bigger and cuter and more of a handful everyday! It is so fun as she learns new things. She is definitely going through a frustration phase as she feels like she is big enough to do all kinds of things, but doesn't quite have the coordination and ability to do it all. It is so great to see her learning new things every week and especially as she learns new words. Her hair is finally long enough to put in full out piggy's so I am LOVIN that!



Also we have been trying to get her comfortable with the idea of sitting on a big girl potty, which she has NO problem with. She would strip down and sit on that thing all day if I would let her!



We have a family reunion this weekend, which should be cool, although I am definitely not looking forward to the 6 hour car ride with Lily, wish us luck and send warm happy thoughts our way this Friday and Sunday as we are driving, so that we all stay sane with the screaming and complaining that is sure to be had!


Life is good! With everything that has been happening to us lately, all I have been able to think is how incredibly blessed I am. Matt and I have really seemed to have such a great life since we got married, not that we haven't had our share of difficult circumstances, but I have always had such a sense of peace and understanding and love. And I do feel like we have been watched over and guided and protected far more than anything we could ever deserve or that our actions have merited. I just hope that we will always remember and be presented with opportunities to pay it forward as our life continues!