The Truth

The truth behind our minimal blogging in the month of October... we are pregnant!

With the news and the sickness, (I was feeling pretty crummy and then got a bad cold on top of it), it was pretty hard for us to keep it our little secret as long as we did. So we kept conversations short, and many of you may have noticed we didn't call or write quite as much. I have to hand it to Marshall, he was a champ about keeping the secret til we, (which means I), were ready to tell.

Anyhow, I am about twelve weeks along, all seems to be well, and the due date is June 10, 2009. Of course, there will be more news as we have it.

Our October

We have had a pretty busy October but no time to blog about it til now. So, we thought we would catch you up on the month in one entry.

At first, our month started out pretty uneventful. Then, one quiet night the adventure begain. I was sitting on the couch flipping channels and being lazy, when I decided I might want a little snack. I asked Marshall if he would kindly prepare me some grahmn crackers and milk. He agreed, but when he opened the pantry to he discovered that I wasn't the only creature that was craving that particular treat. There in my open package of grahmn crackers was a tiny little mouse helping himself. He had nibbled off the corner of the top cracker and looked as surprised as Marshall was.

We live near a couple of fields and discovered last winter that the mice look for warm places of refuge in cold weather. Little Charger cornered a few last winter and Marshall set some traps. We didn't see any after the traps were set so we thought we were ok.

Anyway, Marshall chased it around for a bit til it hid under the fridge. I screamed and ran and was unsucessfull in taking a picture.

Since we now had a ruined package of grahmn crackers and a clue as to what the little guys thought was tasty, we quickly re-set our traps with the damaged treats and decided to wait patiently for results. Long story almost over, we headed to bed for the night. While I was washing my face I heard a large crashing sound from the kitchen and some squealing, (Marshall swears mice cant squeal but I swear I heard it). I wasn't about to check out the comotion so Marshall and Charger went to check the traps without me.

I didn't ask for details, but Marshall assured me that our little mouse friend was now in the "Big Field in the Sky". We haven't seen any mice or traces of mice since.

The rest of our month goes as follows...

We watched conference with the family and spent all day Sunday munching on this fantastic spread. (October 5)

We celebrated Wayne (October 12) and Nate's birthday's (October 14) at Spencer's restaraunt downtown the Saturday before and ate some more yummy food. Then the next day we celebrated Wayne's birthday with a small family dinner.

Then a fabulous Suprise party Britt put together for Nate the day before his birthday. We ate this yumy spread! Noticing a theme for the month yet?

Followed by Brittany's Baby Shower (October 18).

This is the diaper cake Nicole helped me put together for the shower. Brittanie's mom made a ton of yummy food and her little sister helped me put up the decorations. We had a little scare earlier that week and thought that maybe Isaac was going to come early and crash the shower, but he waited til the next day to start making his way into the world!

Then YaYa Sisterhood night at my work the same day!

Two day's later baby Isaac came (October20)! Marshall and I were starting to feel a little sick so we made a brief appearance and wore some masks to meet him at the hospital, but didn't really get to hold him til Halloween.

He's so cute! Good job Nate and Britt!

The next week I spent most of my life in bed with a bad cold, sinus infection, flu or something. Whatever it was it took me down. The worst hit Marshall over the weekend so he powered through and went to work and took care of me.

Marshall was able to recover quickly enough to celebrate Brittanie's birthday (October 24) with his family. I was still sick enough to have to stay away. :(

We celebrated Halloween with Nate and Brittanie and her family. There we enjoyed a yummy themed dinner that included all kinds of spooky ingriedients. Here is the witches brew.

This is the "Cemetary Cake" Marshall saw on T.V. and volunteered us for. I didn't catch the recipe in time so we modified "Dirt Cake" and it turned out great. That's what I get for making him watch Good Things Utah with me in the morning.

Marshall and I didn't have it in us to dress up this year so Charger represented the family as Elvis.

And before we knew it the month was over! I will do better about keeping updated for November! We are looking forward to a trip to Texas over Thanksgiving to celebrate the holiday as well as William's baptism and all the Fall birthdays in my family we missed!

Going Golfing!

Saturday Marshall and I drove to Provo to snag John and Mindy for an afternoon of golf. I have been working at Thanksgiving Point for over a year now and I thought it was time we took advantage of my employee discount and checked out the golf course. Marshall was pretty excited since he hasn't had much time for golf this summer and Fall is fast approaching.

John and Marshall on the practice green.

Marshall all set to go, waiting patiently for the Starter to give us the "OK".

John's first swing!

Landed here!

Marshall's second ball (He was trying to make John feel better about his)! Those are deer droppings nearby in case you were curious!

John and Marshall regrouping.

We would like to take a moment to remember the snake that tragically lost it's life to Mindy behind the wheel of a golf cart.

The course was beautiful and John and Marshall did pretty well despite a rough start. In case it wasn't clear earlier, I did not golf. I provided emotional support and the discount. We had a great time but only made it nine holes before we had to feed our hungry tummies. We spent the rest of the night eating mix-in shakes from JCW and watching The Office. All in all a pretty good Saturday night if I do say so myself!

Point me in the direction of Albuquerque!

Last week I visited some of my favorite people in the Land of Enchantment!

The main purpose of my trip was to celebrate another wonderful year in the life of Kelley, but while I was there I also managed to visit some other close friends as well as eat a healthy portion of green chili every day! Here are a few pictures from my trip.

This was Kelley's Birthday dinner, Tuesday night. We went to this delicious Italian restaurant in Uptown called Bravo. It was tons of fun to meet some of her friends from Law school and her ward.

The Sunday before, we spent the afternoon with Kelley's family. We had a yummy dinner of steak and potatoes, sang and she opened presents.

The day before that, we spent the afternoon getting massages and pedicures followed by some delicious Dion's subs.

And the night before that, we had a fantastic dinner of authentic New Mexican food in Old Town Albuquerque with some of Kelley's girlfriends.

Yep, that's pretty much how it goes. It's hard not to eat the whole time I am in town when I am not sure when I will get the chance to come back.

Here are some pictures from our Sunday afternoon drive to see the temple.

This is not a great picture of us but it was the only one where we got some of the temple in the background. There weren't any people around to take a wider shot.

For some reason we couldn't capture the sunset in a regular photo, but we discovered it showed up pretty well in the reflection of the front doors.

On Tuesday morning I had a chance to officially visit the beautiful Albuquerque Temple! It was a wonderful morning filled with the spirit. It was my first time visiting that temple and I was blessed to get to spend a portion of my time there with Hazel Hartman a close family friend. When I walked in and saw her, I immediately felt an overwhelming feeling of love and happiness. My experiences in the temple that morning will definitely always be memories I will keep close to my heart.

After the temple we met up with Joe and had lunch. I even managed to get some green chili on my hamburger!

I had a wonderful time in New Mexico and can't wait to go back!

What's that smell?

When we first started our blog we thought we would go back over the last year and hit some highlights in back posts, however, this one was too funny to wait to share.

We recently celebrated our one year anniversary. Because we had a trip to Texas to visit my family planned for the time of our exact anniversary, Marshall surprised me with a weekend away just before. We knew we wouldn't be able to take our wedding cake with us and partake on the day as is tradition, so we decided to hold off until we returned home and take our chances on jinxing ourselves. We have been home for just over a month now and still haven't gotten to the cake.

On a completely unrelated subject, (or so we thought), our kitchen has been smelling a little ripe lately. This is totally unacceptable. So Marshall took out the trash and washed out the can with bleach and we tossed some expired leftovers from the fridge and ran the garbage disposal with soap. A few days later the kitchen is still a little stale. This is not OK with me so after another thorough sweep of the fridge and a few candles I was starting to get frustrated. Marshall came home last night and pointed out that our mystery smell was strangely similar to the mystery taste of our ice. A little back story... Not too long after we moved in we noticed our ice had a musty taste and smell. We assumed it was due to a bad waterline to our refridgerator or a lack of filter and didn't think much of it. We don't use ice much anyway so nothing to worry about.

So after Marshall made the observation I immediately took to cleaning out the freezer. And here is the punchline you all have been waiting for, (and probably already figured out).....

Hey, there is our cake we still haven't gotten to!

And there is the source of our stinky woes. Turns out you are supposed to store just the cake, not the fresh flower topper. Fresh flowers in a freezer for a year makes stinky kitchen and dirty ice!



We would like to thank Brittanie for her delicious pumpkin chocolate chip cookies and Ziploc for their well designed freezer bags that beautifully preserved them for us to use as our plan "b". We hope the serious departure from tradition doesn't affect our marriage too much. However, we know for sure 2 good things have come of this. One- our kitchen no longer smells. And two-I now have some advice to share with new brides regarding the storage of the top tier of their wedding cake!

Our First Meal

Now that we are officially bloggers, I thought I would try to catch up on the last year starting with about a week before we got married when we moved into our first apartment.

This was our first meal in our first apartment! Cafe Rio, it had to be something memorable. We ate on moving boxes in the kitchen because we had not yet purchased furniture. Loey was taking the picture. She was a trooper and made two trips out to Utah in the time that we were engaged. She helped us move in and get settled and helped me keep my sanity!Marshall put together our first piece of furniture in our empty apartment. Any guesses as to what it was?

Tada! We soon realized we were going to need another one to accommodate our vast library, but still haven't gotten around to buying it over a year later.