Family Home Evening: Fall Carnival

We're trying to do Family Home Evenings now that Zach is getting a little older.  We also wanted to do something to celebrate the fall season.  On our way to Costco and a Stake conference, we passed by this carnival looking thing and so I looked online to see what it was.  It was a charity fall carnival for kids, so we decided to check it out.

We knew that it was going to be good for Zach when we saw a bunch of other kids his size there.  I am personally so excited to be a mom that sometimes I plan activities for my son (like science museums) that are WAY PASSED his caring level.  So this was perfect.

Up first was the pumpkin patch right at the front.  He wanted to feel all of the straw.

I love seeing these two together.  They're adorable little buddies.

Zach found more of the hay bales and wanted to devote his life to touching them.

Luckily that led him right into the maze that was perfectly suited to his size.  It was awesome because we could see the whole maze but he was like, "What is this place?  This place made of magical hay bales?"

We let him take the lead and let him work his way out.  I mean, that's kind of my parenting style.  Watch and see what he does and if he gets in trouble, help him out.  But he was having fun going around and around and seeing and discovering.

After Zach worked his way out of the maze (all on his own!), we picked out a ride that we thought would suit us.  Luckily my 23 week pregnant body can still fit inside a "Medium Banana".  They were all labeled with different names but they were all the same size.  Like, there was the "Long Banana"  and the "Big Banana"  but they were all the exact same size....weird.

He smiled the whole time on the ride.  I can't get over his face in this picture.

I include the picture below so that you can see how it was swinging out.  Imagine trying to get my pregnant body into that swinging banana while also holding my son....it was kind of an ordeal.

 After all that running around, Zach was ready for dinner and getting a little grumpy so we headed back out.  Seriously, this carnival was the perfect size for Zach to have fun.

Maybe we'll go again next year too.  Make it a little family tradition.

A Boy, A Bucket and a Rock Garden

Aaron and I never imagined that NOT having a grass yard would be an awesome adventure for our little boy.  We felt bad leaving our Ogden backyard and giving it up for Las Vegas' classic rock gardens.  But it has really been a blessing in disguise.

Zach LOVES the rocks and thinks that every time he goes outside, he has to pick up a rock and bring it inside with him.

For his birthday, he got a gift certificate for Michael's and since I'm a toy snob, this was the PERFECT present because I knew that it would be creative open ended toys.

One of those toys, was a bucket.  So Zach took his bucket and to the rock garden we went (two steps outside my front door).

Of course, his personal bodyguards had to come too.  They are ever watchful of their little boy.

I told myself that we would sit outside playing until Zach got tired of it....we were outside of over an hour with Zach filling up his bucket completely full of rocks.  People are going to think my dogs dig holes...not so...that would be my son.

Family Home Evening: Walk to the Lake

The greater neighborhood that we are located in, is called Desert Shores.  It's this cute area that centers around a man-made lake...or rather, three skinny man-made lakes.  It was made that way so that all the center houses are "lake front property". (This is really funny to me because the area that I lived in, in Bangkok, was also a neighborhood built around a man-made lake.)

So, this lovely Monday evening we decided to take Zach to go and see the "quack-quack".  I guess that I say, "quack-quack" more than I say "duck"...so...it is what it is.

I thought that my sister would like this because whoever this vandal is, they spell "Crystal" the correct way.

This is not a duck.  Who knows what this is?  I named it Gru...because he looks like Gru from Despicable Me.

We found the "quack-quack"!!  I don't know what they were eating but they all apparently loved it.  My little bear is holding a pine cone in this picture.  They were everywhere and he wanted to feel one.

I love being able to settle into a routine here and start calling Las Vegas "home".  As Zach gets older, I'm excited to have many many more Family Home Evening nights like this.

General Conference October 2014

When I was growing up, I would hear people say all the time, "I can't wait for General Conference!  I'm so excited."  And I would think, "LIAR!!"

Twice a year, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, cancel their 3 hour block of meetings and devote a weekend to TEN HOURS OF MEETINGS (11 and a half if you watch the Women's Conference meeting the weekend before).  

Yup, instead of going to church for 3 hours on Sunday and being done with it, we spread out 10 hours of meetings in 2 hour increments throughout the weekend.  And here is the weird thing, 

WE LIKE IT.  WE LOOK FORWARD TO IT.

As I've gotten older and I've grown closer to the Lord (because that's the real thing.  It doesn't matter how old you are, it matters how much you like feeling the Spirit close to you.), I've started to be the person who says, "I can't wait for General Conference!  I'm so excited." 

We get to hear our Prophet speak.  We get to hear inspired messages from so many different leaders of different parts of our Church.  It's exciting and as you listen, you can feel the Spirit whisper to you things that you need to know.  You get to hear your own personal prayers answered.

I was super excited for this Conference.  But....I was extremely sick with pregnancy all weekend.  Also, our apartment is still a total disaster because we are still only halfway moved in.  We had just gotten internet but no wifi....so our laptop had to be far enough away from a certain somebody (who shall remain nameless) who enjoys pressing the power button on the laptop.

As I laid on my bed with a huge headache and fighting back vomit, I kept thinking of how lucky I am.  This was the weekend two years ago, that I found out that I was pregnant with Zach.  

Now I'm laying in bed with a little ball of energy who just wants to snuggle me and convince me to get up and play.  AND to top it all off, I get to have another baby.  I get to feel my tiny little daughter kick around inside of me.  This weekend, I don't need to be reminded that I'm a child of a Heavenly Father who loves me personally.  I KNOW.  I know through every trial and difficult time that I'm special to Him who created me.  I know through all the tiny blessings that I get every day that I'm cherished.  And I know through the obvious miracle that are my children, that Heavenly Father wants all good things for me.

Even when those miracles straight up steal my CapriSun.

I have CapriSun by my bed for barfing purposes.  I drink them to settle my stomach or give me something to barf in the morning so I don't dry heave for forever.  Well, Zach has been a straw thief  for awhile.  He will pull them out of the box, take the straws and put the drink back into the box and horde the straws.

Well, I hear him moving around on the side of the bed during the middle of conference and I look over.  He is sticking the straw into the CapriSun and then starts drinking.  WHAT?!?!?!  Who taught a 16 month old to do that?  Apparently he is watching me closer than I thought.  I let him finish it.  I felt like he earned it.

And in other news, no one is worried about his fine motor skills.

The weekend was spent in bed, listening to a prophet's voice and snuggling my boys.  Yeah...there was barf....so much barf because I'm making another human person. Yeah, I had a massive migraine that made it hard to open my eyes.  Yeah, I spent a good amount of the time, keeping a small bear entertained looking at pictures from our photo album.  But I really couldn't think of a better way to spend my time.

Could you?

First People to Know I was Pregnant

It was a really crazy summer for us.  As you all know by now, we moved to Las Vegas.  It took us nearly 5 months to sell our house (we started trying to sell it in April).  Luckily, we had a furnished apartment that we could move into rent free for the summer so that we didn't have to worry about paying rent AND mortgage.

Most people don't stay in the furnished apartments for any REAL length of time.  They are a nice place for families to vacation in Las Vegas because you are further from The Stripe and you can legitimately live out of them.  But people....vacation...in them.  Not live in the them.

We got to the know the staff REALLY WELL.  They knew our situation at check-in, since they were like, "Wait...you are staying HOW LONG?"  The front office had their own movie rentals and snacks.  They had the internet (we could have gotten wi-fi but we were too cheap) and pool towels.  They saw Aaron and I on a nearly daily basis.

Until around June 16th.  We have been there over at month at that point and they gradually stopped seeing Zach and I at the pool during the day.  I didn't come to rent a nightly movie.  I wasn't coming to get internet.  I used to walk Zach around the complex in the stroller and let him play in the rock gardens.  They just stopped seeing me.

In the middle of July, Aaron went into the office to talk to them about getting clean sheets (every other week we got full maid service so the apartment would go back to "factory settings").  They asked, "Hey.....we haven't seen your wife in awhile.  Is everything okay?  Did she and Zach go back to Utah?"

He paused.  We had only told our parents that I was pregnant.  Our siblings didn't even know that I was pregnant.

He said, "Yeah....she's fine.  Well, not fine.  She hasn't been feeling well."

"Does she need a doctor?  We can help you find a good doctor."

"It isn't that....she's........she's pregnant."

"WHAT?!?!  That's awesome!  Congratulations!  Oh....does she have morning sickness?  That sucks."

Every time after that, that ANY of the staff saw me, all they could do was congratulate me and ask how I was doing and how far along I was and if they could do anything for me. It was the sweetest thing.  One time I went to the office at 10pm (to get peanut M&Ms...because I NEEDED them) and met a security guard that I had NEVER seen.  Yeah....he congratulated me.

INTERNET AT LAST!!!

Aaron and I FINALLY have internet!  After nearly three weeks in this apartment, we got a company to give us internet.  We had a LOT of false starts and didn't even know if we would get it until the end of next week.  But, they finally got it taken care of!

All summer long (starting in May) we had spotty, sometimes internet.  It was very frustrating.  I would look forward to going back up to Ogden for a weekend so that I could use the internet.  You know, super important things like....watching Hulu.  And other things, like better stalking pictures of friends on Facebook, reading news articles (or Pinterest) without worrying about going through my data plan, and transferring my phone photos onto my google+ cloud.

Typing it all out, it sounds really lame.  That was more the day to day stuff that I missed. I guess more important things were: trying to find an OB/GYN in Vegas, communicating with my parents who traveled across the world almost two months ago, and writing blog posts for all of adoring fans!

There is so much that I want to write about for this summer.  I don't know if I will get to it.  There have been so many gaps in it in the last year and a half.  Goodness gracious, I never even finished writing about our "Babymoon" in March 2013.  I know that you are all wondering, WHAT HAPPENED AT DISNEYLAND!?!?!

Some stories might never be told....

....but stay tuned because most likely, a lot will.

Fully Planned Baby #2

Since announcing on Facebook that I'm pregnant again, I've gotten a couple requests and questions. The requests were for blog posts about finding out that I was pregnant again and how this pregnancy is going. And the questions were basically the same with an added question of,"was this a 'surprise' pregnancy?"
I thought a nice little blog post would get that all covered.
First of all, these questions make me laugh when I think about them because ...well...we all know how babies are made, right? A bit of a personal topic. But, you know me...I'm a bit of an open book.

I guess after you have a baby, your OB/GYN comes to talk to you about birth control options.
Probably to push certain medications on you. I'm an intelligent person and don't trust doctors at all.  Especially not THAT doctor.  (If you don't know why, I would refer you back to Zach's birth story.)

Because of that, I didn't listen to her when she said, "Oh yeah, the pill messing around with your hormones and confusing your body all over again is totally fine." Instead I decided that non-hormone based birth control was best since i have infertility issues as it is.  I mean, I was on the pill BEFORE getting married to try and straighten out my whole "lady time" things and....it didn't work at all.
I also read that our best bet getting pregnant would be 6-12 months after Zach was born. that way we could coast on the flood of hormones that had been caused by my second miscarriage and following successful pregnancy.

When Zach was 6 months old, Aaron asked if I was ready to start trying again. Ummm....no. Zach was waking up every two hours to hour and a half at night to breastfeed. I needed sleep before being willing to start all over.  He also was a baby that needed a lot of "in arms" time.  I couldn't imagine trying to have another baby while he still needed me so much.

At 11 months old Zach started sleeping all the way to 5 am (MIRACLE). But we were getting ready to move.

The night before Aaron went down to Las Vegas in May we talked about having another baby. We agreed to start trying but not to get infertility treatments till we sold the house and found a place to move in. You see, we weren't very hopeful that I could still get pregnant. Some TMI body stuff was going on that made us think hormones weren't happening for me any more.  We were pretty sure our window of opportunity was already passed.

June 14th I had this dream that I gave birth to this beautiful baby boy that looked like he could be Zach's little brother. I told Aaron about the dream and told him I wanted to take a pregnancy test. He warned me not to get too excited. It had only been 6 weeks since our discussion and he was worried I would be crushed if I wasn't pregnant.  The poor man had gone through 3 years of me getting my hopes up and being disappointed.  He's so sweet and wants to spare me from being broken hearted.

I'd been feeling really tired and slightly nauseous for a couple weeks so I was hoping that pregnancy was the cause.

On the 16th coming home from an outing to the library, I stopped at the store and got a pregnancy test.

You won't believe how excited i was to show it to Aaron. He couldn't believe it. We got lucky in Vegas!