andreon

Silly Baby

2011-11-16T20:50:00.001-08:00

Danny would not eat the green beans I tried giving him at first, but he liked the sweet potatoes.

He liked licking them off his hands and then rubbing them on his head.

There is only one thing that can be done with a silly sweet potato covered baby...

In to the tub!

He liked splashing and playing with the water while getting cleaned off.

The floor was pretty soaked by the time he was done splashing.

All clean! You can see some of his teeth here; He has two on bottom and three on top with another one on top and one on bottom that are almost breaking through.

Happy baby. Clean baby. Happy mommy.

Its been a while since I wrote on my blog. Things are going good. Life is still very busy with family, work , and young women's taking up pretty much all my time. We are very blessed and I am grateful for that. Danny is still a little sweetie and has been pulling himself up and walking along the furniture for about a month, so it is only a matter of time before he actually starts walking. I guess when he starts walking that begins a whole new phase of life- the toddler phase. I have been enjoying the baby phase a lot and being a mom to our precious baby has been a wonderful experience. I kind of don't want him to grow up, but I do at the same time. Life is crazy. Life is good.

Life on Fast Forward

2011-09-12T18:02:00.000-07:00

I don't know if I mentioned that I got a new calling in my ward a little over a month ago... Well I did. I am the Young Women President. It has been really fun. I was nervous at first that I would not be able to handle it, but it has been really great and I love the girls in our ward. I even went to girls camp for a few days shortly after I was put in as president. I'm still working at the doctors office and am very busy right now because our front desk receptionist is in Europe for the month and I am covering for her and trying to keep up on my stuff too. It is busy but it makes the work day go by quickly.

Jon has started classes again for this sememster and he is really liking them. He is taking a lot of education classes and it is confirming to him that he wants to be a teacher. We also got the scooter up and working again and he has taken it to class a few times. Because of his schedule he is still able to watch Danny a few days a week and I think he likes hanging out with our sweet little boy.

Danny is now 7 months old and is all over the place. He has his first tooth and another coming in on the bottom. He is a really fast crawler and loves standing up and climbing on everything. He also loves trying to find plastic bags and trying to chew on computer cables, so we have to keep a close eye on him.

We have used our Seven Peaks passes quite a bit this summer. Danny has really enjoyed playing in the water and he will probably like it even more next summer when he is a little older.

Life is good, but busy. We want to get our carpets cleaned because they are super nasty. The garden is pretty much done; my tomatoes never got very big but we got quite a few of them and they are very tasty. I also want to try to transplant some of my garden plants (my pepper and cucumber) that didn't grow very well into pots and bring them inside for the winter, so we'll see if they can survive the winter inside.

Over the Labor day weekend we had a little Westover reunion with my parents and siblings at my parents cabin in Timberlakes. It was really fun we played a lot of games, I ate the best steak I have ever eaten, and on Monday we rented 2 wave runners at Deer Creek and spent a few hours zipping around the resevoir on those.

This weekend we are going to be hanging out with the Ware side of the family, so that will be fun.

Life is good. It is going quickly, but that is just the way it goes sometimes.

I dont have a video of crawling on here but...

2011-08-12T12:06:00.000-07:00

Life

2011-08-06T17:42:00.000-07:00

We have started Danny on solid foods. Here are some pictures of him eating some squash.

On Saturday afternoon when I got back from girls camp we had a family nap on the living room floor. When I woke up I took this picture because I thought it was cute.

I picked the onions in my garden and I think they did pretty good. They weren't very big, but I have been using them and they are pretty good. When I was picking them I saw this massively-huge brown hairy spider and ran to grab the camera but when I got back out to the garden it was gone. I am now slightly freaked out that a giant spider is going to crawl up my leg and bite me when I'm in the garden.

Pictures from Ware and Snow Reunions

2011-07-28T21:36:00.001-07:00

Ware Reunion:

Snow Reunion:

Too cute

2011-06-20T11:11:00.000-07:00

So, we decided to try out the Provo freedom festival baby contest and Danny WON FIRST!! I was sure he hadn't won anything when they announced third and second. Our boy is just too cute. I really think that what wins it for him is how happy and social he is. He loves people and will smile at anyone.

We decided to try feeding him with a spoon and it was totally hilarious. We mixed a little rice cereal in with some breast milk and so it was just really soupy. I don't know if he swallowed any of it, but he had a lot of fun. Also a note about the video- he is wearing a diaper. My mom was convinced for about half of the video that he was naked.

For Claire

2011-06-12T03:44:00.000-07:00

We hung out with Kyle and Claire last night and Claire asked how long it was after we were married before I cried. It took me a while to think about when it was, but I think it was in our first apartment which would have been at least a month after we got married. You might think that thinking back about the first time I cried in our marriage would have been a negative thing, but it actually made me really grateful and brings me to my marriage advice.

1. Focus on the positive
2. Assume the best

When I thought about the answer to Claire's question I didn't automatically think "February 19th. Jon said this. Blah. Blah. Whatever." I do remember that Jon said something that was not meant to be hurtful, but I took it the wrong way and cried. I don't remember what he said and I'm glad I don't. I also remember standing in the hall with Jon being very sweet and holding me as I cried. Sometimes you just gotta cry it out and get it out of your system. Before I get upset about something that Jon has said I try to remember that he isn't ever going to do anything that will intentionally upset or hurt me. A lot of the time this works, but sometimes it doesn't. Try to always assume the best of your spouse and it will make things easier. Focus on the positive things in your relationship and remember those rather than the bad things. Also just because something makes you cry sometimes doesn't mean it is all bad. I cried the day we moved in to our new apartment because it was dirty and gross and I was very overwhelmed by the change, but I don't think of that every time I'm here. How you view something and what you choose to focus on can make a big difference.

That is not the most eloquent thing I have ever written and I could probably keep blabbing more random advice, but hopefully it articulates what I wanted to say. It is also early in the morning and I couldn't fall back to sleep after feeding Danny, so I'll just throw that disclaimer out there for if I said anything really weird or made crazy typos.

Summerfest Baby Contest

2011-06-11T16:03:00.000-07:00

So it is official; Jon and I bred a winner. Ok, so he didn't win first place but he did win second in the 4-6 month age category. We entered Danny in the baby contest because like all parents we think our child is the most adorable thing in the whole world. He won over the judges with his cute smiles and charming personality. His picture that they took there was not his best work, but oh well.

On to his winnings. In his little 2nd place gift basket we got a stuffed puzzle animal, bubbles, doTerra oils, stuffed animal, Cascade golf gift certificate, Texas Roadhouse free appetizer, Allen's photo certificate, a ball, a book, and a Taco Amigo gift certificate. The estimated retail value of the basket is $101.75.

Here is Danny with his winnings.

Growing things

2011-06-05T14:24:00.000-07:00

This week Jon and his mom cleaned up our front yard and flower beds. It looks really nice and we now have some cute little flowers and plants rather than yucky weeds.

Our vegetable garden is also doing really well. I harvested some of the spinach and lettuce to make a little salad that we are going to take to my parents to have with dinner tonight.

We did a little photo shoot with the cousins a week ago and here are some of the cute ones of Danny we took.

I thought that these ones were cute and funny too. You can notice Danny going from fine to really upset.

Conservation of Matter

2011-05-25T11:35:00.001-07:00

Jon mentioned this morning how it was cool that I have been able to sustain Danny by breast feeding him. I thought about this and my nerdy scientific brain thought "oh my gosh all the weight he has gained and the waste he has excreted over the past 3 and a half months has all come out of me." This was a kind of strange realization because he has gained at least 5 lbs since birth and he poops and pees quite a bit and all of that should be equal to the milk that has been put into him. Bodies are weird and amazing all at the same time. That is my random thought of the day.

Me and some of my cousins are having a little book club because I decided I wanted to read more. This Friday we are meeting at my house to talk about The Help by Elizabeth Sockett. I am going to try to make some carmel cake like Minny makes in the book. My first practice attempt from last night didn't work out too well because I accidentally put too much salt in it. Oops. I think I'll try again tomorrow night and if that one doesn't work out then I'll see if I can put something together on Friday after work. The book was fantastic and I am really excited to talk about it with my cousins.

That was dumb

2011-05-13T18:13:00.000-07:00

So I just did a super stupid thing. I was going to mow the lawn and the mower wasn't starting so I checked the gas and it looked a little low so I grabbed the gas can and pointed the nozzle into the tank then pressed the button to let the gas flow. This may not sound so stupid right now, but I did not mention that the gas can was warm and full of expanded gas fumes. When I pushed the button a gust of gas fumes went into the tank and blew a whole bunch of gas up into my face and all over me. I got gas in my eyes and ran inside to rinse them out. I don't think I caused any permanent damage and the gas smell hopefully should wash off easy. Dumb. Jon is now going to fill up the gas can and he is going to mow the lawn.

In more positive news, the garden is doing well and Danny is as cute as ever. I'll probably try to put up some more pictures soon.

Happy Mothers Day

2011-05-08T09:31:00.001-07:00

This is my first mothers day as a mother. It has been pretty good so far. Jon made me some breakfast in bed and gave me a new lens for our camera. It is a cannon 50 mm lens and I love it! I did a little photo shoot with it to test it out. These are some of my favorites.

(Danny looks scared in this picture and it makes me want to laugh. He is so expressive.)

My garden is starting to grow and I am very excited. The onions are growing like crazy. The peas, spinach, and lettuce are starting the come up. And the tomatoes are doing excellent in the wall-of-waters; I think we will probably take them off soon because maybe it will finally stop snowing.

Also we are now in a new ward and it starts at 11:00 and that is so so so so so much better than 8:30.

Happy mothers day to my mother and mother-in-law. You guys did a wonderful job of raising Jonathan and I and you are both doing an excellent job as grandmas. I love you both.

The Joys of Motherhood and Gardening

2011-04-27T11:20:00.000-07:00

So last night Danny and I were sitting on the couch and he pooped on both of us and the couch. So I changed him and then changed my clothes while Jon cleaned up the couch. About an hour later he spit up on the both of us and I had to change again. It was one of those nights where I felt very much like the mother of a little baby. Danny also had a doctor appointment yesterday and we found out that he now weighs 11 lbs 7 oz and is 23.5 inches long. He is getting so huge! Everything seems to be going well with him and he is healthy, so that is really excellent.

This past Saturday morning I planted the garden while Jon was shooting guns with his elders quorum. Luckily it didn't rain and Danny slept in his carseat outside with me pretty much the whole time I was working on it. I planted carrots, onions, peas, spinach, lettuce, and cilantro in the larger box. Then when Jon got home he helped me with the wall of waters and we planted the tomatoes in the smaller box. Hopefully the tomatoes don't die or anything because it has been really cold these past few days. I am very happy that I finally got the garden planted and can't wait until later in the summer and fall when I have delicious vegetables to eat. I still want to get a cucumber and plant that, but I think I will wait until it gets a little warmer.

Danny also had his first easter and that means an easter party at Grandma Ware's. Jonathan went up on Thursday with him to Draper and then I came up after work. After I got there we had dinner and dyed eggs and hung out with the family. It was a lot of fun.

My Final

2011-04-19T14:53:00.001-07:00

Learn more about this project

Yup, he's doomed.

2011-04-15T23:02:00.001-07:00

Yippee!

2011-04-12T07:59:00.000-07:00

Danny slept through the night last night! It was pretty fabulous. I still woke up a few times, but went back to sleep quickly when I realized he was still sleeping. I am hoping that he will make a habit of this night time sleeping thing.

I thought I would include some of the videos Jon has taken of Danny in this post because they are very cute. It is nice because Jon will take a video of Danny and then email it to me so I can watch it at work during my lunch break.

We find out soon if Jon won the iPad. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Working Momma

2011-04-07T19:34:00.000-07:00

I have almost made it through my third full week of work since coming back from my maternity leave. It is kinda crappy to have to work, but it is comforting to know that I won't have to work full time forever and people I know and trust are taking care of my baby. Jon is on campus trying to get as many last minute views on his IIC video as possible to try to win the people's choice prize. A new ipad. I really hope he wins because he has been pretty obsessed and will be really disappointed if he spent all this time and effort without any physical reward to show for it. Danny is sleeping in his bassinet right now and making cute little sleeping baby noises. Here are some pictures I took of Danny over conference weekend. He is growing a ton and I'm pretty sure he weighs more than 10 lbs now.

Ok this one isn't from conference, but this was pretty funny. I was doing laundry and Danny was fussing so I was holding him while I was loading the washing machine. I couldn't hold him and put in the soap at the same time so I grabbed a towel from the dryer and put it in the empty laundry basket. I set Danny down on the towel and put the soap in the washing machine and when I turned to pick him back up he was asleep. I guess he was cranky because he was tired and the warm towel from the dryer made a great bed. Who needs a crib when you have a laundry basket?

Danny has started smiling and making little giggle-like cooing noises that are adorable. This was him smiling at my mom.

What a cutie.

Lexi likes her baby cousin. You can see Jon taking his post conference nap in this one too.

Danny has been doing this little pouty lip thing when he gets upset or scared recently, and this was my attempt at taking a photo of it. This was just the other night and the lighting in my house isn't too great and he was flailing in displeasure, so its a bit blurry. I'll see if I can get a better picture of the pouty lip another time.

I'm really grateful for my cute little son and for my wonderful husband and family who have been taking such good care of him when I'm not at home. I'm also glad that I have a job and co-workers that will cover for me when I am "doing my thing" as Dr. Preston called it once when I was pumping. I'm glad that we were able to watch conference and hear the inspired words of our church leaders. The church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is true and I love it.

Yeah, this is probably how it went down

2011-04-06T08:26:00.000-07:00

Everybody knows that dinosaurs were around when Noah built his ark. Now we know why they didn't get a seat on board. They had paied 2 million euros, of course.

Excited for spring

2011-03-13T12:43:00.000-07:00

Every year when it starts to warm up a little I start thinking about planting a garden. I absolutely love garden vegetables and I like being outside, so the garden thing just makes sense. In our current place the dirt is not very great and the space we tried the garden last year ended up not getting much sun, so this year I want to try a square-foot-style garden. Yesterday we went up to Draper and Jonathan built us two garden boxes at his parents. One is 2' x 4' and the other is 2' x 3'. We are probably going to buy some dirt and put the boxes right in the middle of the backyard so they will have plenty of sun and good soil to grow in. My current plan is to have the shorter plants like spinach, lettuce, carrots, and onions in one box and then have the larger plants like tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and a melon in the other. I worry a little about our plants getting too big for their boxes, but I'll deal with that if it becomes an issue later in the summer. I am very excited to get our garden boxes ready, so I can plant some peas (it is still too early for almost everything else). I'll take pictures and write more once there is something to take a picture of.

Also in baby news- Danny rolled over once! It was crazy. We were watching a BYU basketball game at my parents and my mom set him down on the floor on his tummy to play. He somehow got his one arm under his body and after a lot of squirming he slowly turned from his tummy to his back. It hasn't happened since, but it was kind of fun watching him wiggle and flail his way onto his back.

More than a month old

2011-03-11T08:47:00.000-08:00

Last week I got a call on Saturday from the credit union asking if I was ordering laptops to be shipped to Maryland. Jon's debit card information had been compromised, so I canceled the card. We were able to get him a new card and we disputed the charges that went through before the card was canceled. That was kind of annoying, but I was really glad that the credit union called because they recognized something was fishy before too many charges were made. I just checked and the money for the fraudulent charges is already back in our account, so that makes me happy. It makes me wonder how or from what his card info was obtained. Oh well, at least it wasn't worse than it was.
Earlier this week we went over to my cousin Ashley's so Danny and I could hang out with her and Dean. It was nice to have a change of scenery and to be able to talk to Ashley. While we were there Danny decided he wanted to become a spit up fountain. He normally doesn't spit up much but he spit up on Ashley's couch and on the blanket they were laying on on the floor. Luckily Ashley is a mom too and is used to spit up in her house (you can see the paper towels that she brought me when he spit up on the couch in the background of a few pictures). We let the boys play on their tummies on the floor and while they were playing I took some pictures. Ash gave me some good tips for learning to use my camera better which was good because what is the point of having a nice camera if you don't know how to use it well.
I think Daniel is a very strong little guy and he is getting pretty good at lifting up his head. I didn't get a picture of it, but he really likes to lift his legs in the air while he is on his tummy too. The problem with lifting his legs up like that is he will usually pee and then the wetness ends up running out of the top of his diaper and soaking his clothes.
Dean is really good at holding himself up while on his stomach, but Ashley said he usually gets really upset when she puts him on his tummy. I don't know if he was just being good because there was company, but he stayed looking up for quite a while before getting upset...
and plopping his face into the floor. It was pretty cute and funny to see him do that.
Besides puking all over Ashley's house Danny was pretty good while we were over there and it was fun to visit our cousins.
I think that Danny slept for like 6 hours solid last night. I'm not really sure because I fell asleep while holding him in our bed and then I think I dreamed that I fed him around 2. I usually dream that I'm feeding him when he starts to wake up in the middle of the night, but I know it is a dream because I will wake up and he will still be in his bassinet. This time when I woke up I was holding him and he was asleep, so I put him in his bassinet and figured he would probably wake up to eat for real soon. He didn't wake up until almost 6 a.m. So I'm pretty sure he slept for 6 hours and I just dreamed he woke up and ate. I don't know if that was just a fluke because he was very awake during the day yesterday or if he is going to start sleeping for big chunks of time at night or what. He was pretty fussy and cranky before we went to bed and it was probably because he was so tired.
This is typically how he sleeps. He hasn't ever liked having his arms pinned down when we swaddled him and even though his hands will get kind of cold he still prefers to have them free.
Jon calls the bassinet Danny's cage. This is the view I have of him from my bed. We took out the bumper pads on the side so I could see him and see if he is waking up or not (and the pediatrician recommended taking them out when he starts rolling because they can be a suffocation hazard).

I think I might go to the store today and get a few things. Here is my list:

burp cloths (I have three, but one of then is not very absorbent and it would be nice to have more)
nursing bra pads (I have almost used the whole box that my mom gave me because sometimes I am a leaky milk machine)
a mirror (I want one of those baby mirror things so I can make sure my boy is still alive when we are in the car)

There were probably some other things that I had thought might be good to have, but I can't remember what they are right now.

What day is it again?

2011-02-23T19:24:00.000-08:00

Life since having Danny has been a bit of a blur because everything is kind of the same. Sleep. Eat. Feed Danny. Change diapers. We had his two week doctors appointment today and he is doing good, and we are happy about that. I have had fun taking pictures of him because I think he is the cutest thing ever. Here are some of the pictures.
This was his first bath. He didn't like it very much.

Luckily my mom was there to help with the first bath. It is a lot easier with an extra set of hands.
I gave him another bath and couldn't resist taking more pictures of him in his duck towel.

Ashley came over and brought Dean because I needed some moral support and to interact with another adult. She took this picture of Danny staring at his cousin. I think they are going to be good friends.
I took a few pictures of Danny to try capture some of the funny faces he makes. I like the hand under his chin in this one.

Human baby or turtle baby?

This is his pirate face. It is pretty funny to see him make this face when he is really upset because his face gets all scrunched up and he looks even more like a pirate.

I just remembered this and thought I should write it down because it was pretty impressive. At the doctor we found out that Daniel has a yeast infection thing on his bum, so we got some stuff that we are supposed to use and we are supposed to let his bum dry out before putting on a new diaper to help with the infection. We decided that we would give him a bath and then let him dry off so he was nice and clean for when we put the ointment on his bum this first time. As I was cleaning off his poopy buns he started to pee and got himself right in the face before I was able to cover the stream. After that as Jon was carrying the naked kid to the tub Daniel peed again right on Jon. And last but not least when he was in the tub and I was washing him off he peed again and this time hit me with the stream. Pretty amazing is all I can say.

Being a mom has been stressful and exhausting at times, but our little boy is worth it and I love him a ton.

Baby is Here... Finally

2011-02-13T11:17:00.000-08:00

I had been having off and on contractions for days and kept hoping that I would really go into labor any day.
We went on walks in the snow to try to get me to go into labor. No luck. When I got to my due date February 3rd and then past it I was ready to have a baby.

I bounced on an exercise ball and ran on the treadmill. Still no baby.I could have been a lot more uncomfortable and miserable those last few days, and I'm grateful I wasn't.

On Sunday February 6th we went to church in the morning and it was fast and testimony meeting. About halfway through the meeting Jon got up and bore his testimony about how miraculous the coming forth of the Book of Mormon was. When he sat back down he leaned over and whispered to me something like "maybe that was what the baby was waiting for." I thought, if all I have to do is share my testimony so we can have a baby I can do that. I got up and shared my simple testimony about the truthfulness of the gospel, the reality of Christ's atonement, and our Heavenly Fathers love for us. I went to Sunday School and my back started to really hurt and I was pretty uncomfortable. I don't remember if I was having any significant contractions, but I had heard that back pain is often an early sign of labor so I was very hopeful. I made it through Sunday School and Relief Society and I was having a few contractions but they weren't super close together. After church was over I got the keys from Jon because he had a ward council meeting he needed to stay for. When I got home I was having more contractions and I thought maybe I should do some things I would want done before we went to the hospital, so I threw some laundry in the washer and picked up a little. Then I started having some really painful contractions and I went to the bathroom because I wasn't sure if I was really having contractions or if I was just having some serious bowel issues. I started timing and they were happening about every 4 minutes, so I texted Jon to see if he was close to being done with his meeting because he normally would have been by this time. He responded that they were wrapping up and he should be home soon. I was to the point that I was ready to go to the hospital as soon as he got home, but then the contractions started to get less painful and less frequent and then Jon got home. I wasn't too happy because I was ready to go, but things had pretty much stopped. We decided to go for a walk in hopes that things would start back up again. They didn't. I was having contractions while we were walking but they weren't the same as I had been having before and they didn't keep on going after I stopped walking. I tried to accept the fact that it wasn't going to happen yet, so we went about our Sunday pretty much as usual after that.

At around 5 we went to my parents for dinner we hung out and talked about having babies and stuff.
I'm not sure how it started, but we put a balloon in my niece Alexis' shirt so she had a "big fat baby tummy" like mine. She thought it was hilarious.

At about 7:30 I started feeling not so great again. My back pain was back and I started having the ambiguous contraction/constipation pains again. The contractions weren't as distinct or regular as they had been earlier, but we decided to go home so we could maybe get a little sleep. We went to bed and Jon had me timing the contractions on his iPod touch, so I would wake up and press the lap button whenever I had one. At first they were about 18 minutes apart and not super consistent or not all of them were painful enough to wake me up. As the night went on they got closer together and more painful. At about 4 in the morning I was having contractions about every 8 minutes and they were very painful. I woke Jon up because I was ready to go to the hospital even though I figured they might send me home because the contractions weren't very close together. We got up and gathered our stuff together. It was snowing as we were driving to the hospital and on the way there I was having contractions about every 6 minutes. I was hopeful that this meant things were progressing. We went up to the 5th floor of the hospital and we filled out some paperwork and then they started to monitor me to see how things were going. My contractions had slowed down a lot and I was not happy. After monitoring me for an hour the nurse asked Dr. Rees if they were going to keep me or not. When she left to go ask she told me that they would probably send me home. I was happy when she came back and told me that they were keeping me. This was at about 6 in the morning and the nurse who had been monitoring me was about to finish her shift. She told me good luck and that if I was still there when she started her next shift she would probably be taking care of me again. My new nurse came in around 7 and told me that things weren't progressing and they could start me on the pitocin to try to get my contractions going again. I figured I was there already and I wanted to get this show on the road, so they started me on that. I was only dilated to a 2 at this point and after the contractions started back up I got some stuff in my IV for the pain. When the IV drugs weren't cutting it I had them give me the epidural. I was dilated to a 4 when they gave me the epidural at around 10. I had been a little worried about the epidural being painful, but it was nothing. I felt kind of weird after getting the epidural and I really didn't like that I couldn't move my legs, but I had been complimented on how small I was by my first nurse and the anesthesiologist so at least that was something I could be happy about. I could still scrunch up my toes but my legs were just big tingly blobs of flesh attached to my body.
I sat in my hospital bed and waited. I watched movies on the iPad and tried to sleep. It was slow going from here. They put me on oxygen at around 11, I think because the babies heart rate was dropping when I would have a contraction but I'm not completely sure if that was the reason. At about 12:30 Dr. Broberg broke my water in hopes that this would speed things along. Nothing much happened and the baby's heart rate was going down with the contractions so they started to worry that because I was over my due date the baby was not going to fit and they might have to do a c-section. The nurse said the doctor was going to come in and talk to us about the c-section option, but I guess they decided to just wait and hope things started progressing. At about 3 my mom came over to the hospital because she was all worried that I was having an emergency c-section and was going to die or something. This was about the same time that I got really cranky, and it wasn't because my mom was there. I was cranky because I was hungry and I couldn't move my legs and my hips were hurting and I didn't feel like things were progressing and I figured if this was all going to end in me having a c-section anyway I wanted them to just do it rather than making me wait all day and then doing it. Very cranky. Jon was very sweet all day he brought me ice chips, gave me a blessing, told me to relax and try to sleep, and would push the nurse button for me whenever I needed something. After being very cranky for a while I decided I would start pushing the button on my epidural that would give me an extra dose of the medication to see if that would help with the pain in my hips and in turn help with the crankiness. I think that helped a little. I also determined at about this same time that when it was time for me to push I was going to push that baby out like it was no body's business because I was sick of being in labor. At around 5 pm or so I started feeling some pressure and had the nurse come check me. I was dilated to an 8! This made me happy because that meant I was getting closer to the end of this whole labor thing.

I finally made it to a 10 at 5:45 and I was so happy. (In the picture the red line was the baby's heart beat and the blue line was the contractions)

The nurse who had been taking care of me all day was off at 6 and then the nurse who had monitored me in the morning came back in for her next shift. She got me all ready and taught me how to push and had me start pushing. I was doing some pushing and the baby's head was starting to come out, so she had me stop while they called the doctor. I started feeling really nauseous and then I started throwing up. This was not pleasant, but the nurse said that this would probably start pushing the baby out even more because the same muscles you use to push you use to throw up. Sure enough the vomiting was pushing the baby out a little more and the nurse was saying things like "I might have to catch this baby myself" and was sending people to find the doctor. Another doctor who is not part of the group that I see came in because they thought that I might pop this baby out at any second. Luckily right after he came in Dr. Thorpe came in and got all ready and he had me do some small pushes and then had me stop pushing for a little bit because he thought if we took it slow I might not even tear. He had me push again and the baby's head came out. He had me look and see the baby, which was a little weird because I leaned over to look between my leg and my gut and saw a baby's head sticking out. He then worked the baby's shoulders out and Daniel just kind of slid out of me like a fish.
When he first came out he wasn't breathing so they called in the respiratory team and they worked on him for a little bit and got him to start squawking a little (I like the face he is making in this picture; he still makes this face and I call it his pirate face). As the respiratory team was working on Daniel Dr. Thorpe delivered the placenta and was stitching me up, I had torn a little.
They let me hold Danny for a few minutes and then they took him over to the ICU to make sure that his breathing was going to be ok because he had a hard time when he was first born. I was shaking like crazy from the adrenaline of having a baby and I ended up throwing up the juice that the nurse got me because I was finally able to eat. My parents came in from the waiting room and visited with us for a little bit and they took our stuff down to the room in the mother baby unit while we went and saw Daniel in the ICU.
They said that they had put him on a CPAP machine to help with breathing, so he had this little thing on his head that they used to hold that in place. I was feeling kind of sick and shaky while in the ICU so after a bit they took Jon and I down to our room and they said that the baby would probably be down to the nursery soon because he was doing really well and wasn't having any problems breathing on his own. Because I was in labor so long and the way the doctors and nurses shifts worked I had one doctor admit me, one doctor monitor me during the day while I was in labor, and another doctor deliver the baby. I had two different nurses and three student nurses that all took their turns helping out before I had the baby too.
We spent two days in the mother and baby unit recovering and Danny passed all his tests.
We bundled him up and took him home. Time for real life to start.

Daniel Hugh Ware was born at 7:01 pm on February 7th 2011. 7lbs 6 oz. 21 in.

Getting ready for baby

2011-01-27T17:33:00.000-08:00

I was looking through the pictures on our camera and I realized it has been a while since I wrote anything on our blog. I'm not really going to write much about Christmas or Christmas Eve, but I thought this was a pretty sweet picture.

Christmas Eve was spent with my mom's side of the family and we had fun doing our traditional Christmas Eve stuff: Pinata, Nativity (I was Mary- pretty sure it was type casting on that one), drinking frappe, and white elephant gift exchange (we ended up with the flat-D flatulence filter and a plunger bedazzled with plastic jewels). Christmas morning we did our own presents then went over to my parents to do more presents and then had lunch at my grandparents. After that we headed up to Draper and had Christmas with the Ware side of the family and had a lot of fun eating, opening our stockings, searching for the pickle (sadly we were not the winners this year), and playing some games. That is all I'm going to say about Christmas.

With my due date rapidly approaching (one week from today) we have been trying to wrap our minds around the fact that we are really going to have a baby. It is still a little crazy to me that in less than two weeks I will have birthed a child. I'm not very dilated, so the doctor told me last week that they would let me go a week past my due date before inducing me if everything was ok with the baby and I. I'm hoping that I don't go a week over, but I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high just in case I do. In the past two weeks I have had 3 baby showers and have felt very spoiled. On the 15th my sister-in-law Julia threw a baby shower for me, and I got a bunch of fun stuff. Then on the 20th after work we had a little baby-shower with the girls there and my favorite friend at work, Rachel, organized that. Then on the 22nd Jennifer, Melinda, and Karen had a baby shower for me up at Melinda's with the Wares, McKellars, and some close friends of Karen. After three baby showers I am feeling very spoiled and pretty set with bunches of stuff for this unborn child.

I feel like I have a pretty good stockpile of diapers, wipes, and butt paste with the ones I have bought and the ones I have been given. I have been told that a newborn goes through diapers like crazy, so I guess I'll see how long my stack lasts.

This is a pile of some of the other stuff that I got from the baby showers. In this heap of bags and such are a bunch of clothes, a bathtub, a gate, blankets, burp cloths, a boppy, a bumbo, a moby wrap, and all sorts of other things both cute and practical.

Along with all of the baby stuff I got something else I have never had before- a pedicure. Last night I had a girls night with Jon's mom and sisters. It was super fun and fabulous. This being my first pedicure I wasn't quite sure how it would be, but it was nice. I sat in a massaging chair and had my feet in a little hot tub and the lady washed and scrubbed and lotioned and massaged my legs and feet. They also clipped and painted my toenails. Parts were a little painful like when she was clipping the excess skin and cuticles around my nails and when she put on some warming lotion stuff after scrubbing my legs with an exfoliant, that kinda burned in a few places. It tickled quite a bit when they took their little sand paper block to the bottom of my foot, but after the foot massage I had in Taiwan the little bits of pain and tickling with the pedicure were nothing and I was able to maintain my composure. When I got home from work today I wanted to take off my shoes and socks and walk around barefoot because my toes are all cute and painted. So I did even though it is kinda cold.

Just FYI taking a close up picture of your foot while pregnant is kind of difficult. I probably should have got out the bigger lens because that might have been easier, but I didn't think of that until just now. After the pedicures we went to Wendy's and chatted and had a good time. I was just thinking that Jonathan and I got pretty lucky because we both like the others family and get along well with them.

We still have a few more things that we could do to get ready for the baby to come, like get his room ready, but those are things that can wait. I am really excited to meet this little boy when he is finally outside of my guts and am curious to see what he will look like. I have been pretty lucky and have had a good pregnancy overall and I am hoping that the next little while until he is born and the delivery part goes good too.

Fantastico!

2011-01-16T20:32:00.000-08:00

So, I've been waiting on a good RAM deal for quite some time now and just the other day I found it... two 4GB sticks of ram for my lappy toppy. I Installed them on Saturday and was really upset because after installing it I booted up and it kept giving me this screen.

I was all bummed out and worried that I had bought some crummy ram but I decided I was going to troubleshoot the problem the next day (when I wasn't so frustrated that it wasn't working) So today I cracked the laptop open again and tried plan #1, take it out and put it back in. To mix things up a bit I swapped the location of the two sticks. I turned it around, fired it up... and no error! I've been running it all day and no error. Just some really really fast loading stuff.

8GB of RAM... you're so good to me.

Trimming the tree

2010-12-13T21:17:00.001-08:00

Saturday we went up to Draper and borrowed some decorations from Jon's parents. Karen had told us they weren't decorating this year because the back half of the house is currently torn up and we could borrow some stuff if we wanted. I didn't really think we needed much for our house, but we did need stuff for our tree. We ended up coming home with a bunch of giant pine cones, rusty jingle bells, an assortment of rusty metal stars, and some white berry things. Jon and I decided we would do the tree in rust and red with accents of white from the berries. I wanted some red berries, so we decided that we should just buy some at one of the many craft stores around. Unfortunately I was very particular about the red berries I wanted. I wanted them to be the same style as the white berries we had borrowed from the Wares. We stopped by the Joann's and Michael's up in Draper, but neither of them had what we were looking for. We decided we would stop by a few places a little closer to home that might have them. We tried Hobby Lobby, Taipan, and Roberts and didn't find what I was looking for. We decided we would stop by Kmart to get some red balls, so we could still have some red on the tree and looked for berries there too with no luck. We got our red glass balls and decided we might as well try the Quilted Bear by the Kmart as one last attempt at finding the red berries. After wandering around a bit I spotted a little area that looked promising. It had wreaths with the right type of berries, but nothing like the picks with the berries we had got from Karen. Jonathan noticed one long garland of the berries in what seemed to be a little deeper red than I was originally thinking, but they matched pretty good with the glass balls. I decided that I could just cut the garland up into pieces and that would work. After driving all over and going to what felt like a million places we finally found what we were after.

Sunday after church we decorated the tree. It was fun. Stringing the rusty bells on the wire and wrapping that around the tree was kind of a pain and my hands got super dirty, but I think our tree ended up looking really neat. We set up our camera (a Christmas present to ourselves that we opened early) to take a picture every 2 minutes as we were decorating. The battery died not long after we started, so I strung most of the bells while the battery was charging. Jon put the pictures together into a little video. For some reason I can't figure out how to put the video in the middle of the post, so it is down at the bottom.

After the tree was done I had fun playing with the camera and taking the close-up pictures of the tree.

Here is my self portrait :)

The tree turned out good and Jon takes every chance he gets to turn on the lights so we can enjoys its full grandeur.

Birthing a Christmas tree, Megan's party, and the washer and dryer

2010-12-07T17:36:00.000-08:00

Labor and Delivery

The first weekend in November Jonathan and Phil went and got permits to cut down a Christmas tree for this year. We had never chopped our own tree, but Jennifer and Phil did it last year and had a great time, so we decided to give it a shot. It didn't work out for us to go with the Willsons to cut down our tree so Jon and I went this last Saturday the 4th. We ended up leaving Provo around 3 and then stopped by my parents house to grab some rope and some things we thought might be nice to have for hauling a tree. We were under the impression that getting the tree wouldn't be too difficult. Unfortunately we were mistaken. We drove our Neon up to the woods outside of Heber to the area it showed on our little map from the forest service of where to cut our tree. A couple miles short of where we could cut our tree the road was no longer plowed and the paved road was covered in slushy wet slippery snow. We tried to go up a few times but couldn't make it up the little hills, so we slipped and slid back down to where the road was plowed and parked our car. We were not giving up this easy, so we started to walk up the snowy street.

We hiked up the snow covered street for an hour and a half. I thought I was going to die. As we were walking up every so often there would be a no trespassing sign or a sign that said private property, so we thought if we could just go far enough up until we hadn't seen one of these signs for a while it would probably be far enough up that we could chop our tree. Hiking through melty slippery snow up hill is not the funnest thing to do while pregnant. On the way up I was getting pretty discouraged because we kept seeing the private property signs, and I just wanted to cry every time I saw one. I kept myself from crying because I knew that Jon would make us turn around and go back if I did. I didn't want to give up and have to hike back down without a tree. We were already there and there wasn't going to be a better time for us to go later. Because we didn't plan on hiking for an hour and a half it started to get dark as we were trekking up. It was getting kind of dark by the time we saw some footprints leading off the road into the woods and we realized it had been a little bit since we had seen a private property sign, so we decided to go for it. We hiked off the road and tromped around in the snow looking for the right type of tree. We didn't find any thing and then we noticed that the trail that the previous travelers had taken went over a little creek and in the creek there was a little chunk of a pine tree, and it was the right kind of tree!

Jon leapt over the creek to see if he could find a tree for us. I stayed on the other side of the creek and waited because I did not want to attempt a flying leap across a creek while pregnant for fear of losing my balance and ending up all wet. While I was waiting I had to pee, so I did. This is the first time I can think of that I have ever peed in the snow. It kind of reminded me of when we had a dog and how he must have felt in the winter. I took a picture of the snow after I had relieved myself, but I decided reading about it would be bad enough for some people that they probably wouldn't want to see a picture so I didn't include that one.

Besides relieving my pregnant bladder I also took some long exposure pictures, so we could kind of see where we chopped the tree from. The picture above is probably a 4 second exposure- it was pretty dark by this time and I couldn't see where Jon was but he was in the trees that are right in middle of the picture. We couldn't see each other but we could hear each other, so I told Jon about peeing and taking pictures and he gave me updates on how the search was going and then when he found a tree he gave me updates on how the cutting was coming.

He got the tree cut and drug it back to the creek where I was waiting. I helped carry the tree out of the woods and we started back down the road carrying the tree between us. Jon tried to get me to let him drag it but I didn't want the tree to get all mangled by us dragging it down the snow covered road. After all we worked hard for this tree and I wanted it looking as pristine as possible. Sadly my determination was cut short because I started having a pain in my right side a little above my hip inside my guts. The pain went away after I stopped helping with the tree and Jon drug the tree the rest of the way down. The hike down was a cinch and went super quick even though it was really dark. We got back to our car and started the task of affixing the tree to it.

It wasn't too difficult and I think we did a pretty good job. As we were getting the tree tied down some people in a truck that was parked in the same place that we were asked if we had seen some people on snow mobiles. We had seen these seasoned Christmas tree choppers coming down with their first few trees on tarps behind their snow mobiles as we were walking up and then they had passed us going up again as we were still making our original trek up the mountain, but we hadn't seen of heard then as we were coming back down. We told the people that we had seen then and about when it was (I didn't mention that I had wished they would have picked us up and given us a ride or something so we didn't have to keep walking). Right as we were taking the pictures of the tree on the car and were ready to go some of the snow mobile people made it down and we overheard them talking about having some problem (in my mind I thought maybe if you had given the pregnant girl a ride on the way up you wouldn't have had any problems). It was good to know that they made it back before we left because I would have worried about them.

The drive home was a little scary because it was raining and visibility wasn't great, but we made it back to our place safely and unloaded the tree. We had to cut a bit off the bottom of the tree because it was too tall, but we got it in the house and in the stand with some water.

I determined that getting this tree was kind of like having a baby. The process of getting the tree was a pain and a lot of hard work, I imaging birthing a child will be more of a pain and more difficult than hiking up a snow covered mountain for an hour and a half but the idea of laboring to get something is similar. The next day at church the bishop mentioned to me that Jon had told him about our tree obtaining experience and he said our tree better be the most beautiful great smelling tree in the world. I told him that it was like having an ugly baby: you might not realize that your baby is ugly, and even if you do, you still love that baby because it is yours and this is how I felt about our tree. The last reason why I think this tree is like having a child is because now that I have done all the work of obtaining it and I have it in my house and it has lights on it and I'm enjoying it; I am already forgetting how uncomfortable and miserable it was to get it here and thinking that I would be ok doing it again next year. We'll see what we end up doing about a tree next year, but now that the laboring is over I am enjoying my tree and am excited to finish decorating it.

Megan's Christmas Party

With pine needles still covering the floor in the living room we left our place after the tree adventure for Megan Rogers Christmas party. On the facebook invite she had said to wear an ugly sweater or cheesy Christmas attire. I didn't have a sweater, so I decided to wear my lovely hand crafted Christmas tree skirt as a cape. It was fabulous. I looked both ridiculous and festive, which I think was the goal.

We met my brother Michael and cousin Teri at Megan's and took some excellent photos with the cheesy photo backdrop that Megan and her roommates had prepared.

We had a lot of fun at the party with Christmas Karaoke, Pin the nose on Rudolph, Pass the parcel, and a greeting card competition. When we got there Teri told me about the greeting card competition and she was already formulating a card that would be sure to win the approval of whoever the college-student-age judges would be. Her completed card had a limmerick on the front that said something like "You are my favorite Ho Ho Ho! So meet me under the mistletoe. We'll make it so merry, it might get scary. But you will be asking for mo' " then on the inside it said "here's to hoping we make the naughty list this year." (Teri if I butchered that you should leave a comment with what the exact wording was). Needless to say at the end of the party when the time came for everyone to decide a winner for best card, Teri's card won hands down.

I think that of all the people at the party only the five of us (Megan, Mike, Teri, Jon and I) grasped the true meaning of Christmas Karaoke. Jon put it well when he told me that Karaoke is not about singing a cute song and looking cute and sounding good (which is what most people were trying to do) it is about making a fool of yourself and having a good time while doing it. This is exactly what we did. There were a few karaoke moments that stand out in my mind as our best the first being when we did an a capella rendition of little drummer boy with Teri and I doing our best young boy sounding vocals, Jon being our metronome of pums, Michael adding flourishes of rum pa pum pums, and Megan finishing off the vocal-percussion section with the clash of cymbals at appropriate times. It was pretty amazing. The other great times were Megan and Jon singing an amazingly slow version of "Do you hear what I hear" and then Mike and I singing "Good King Wenceslas" with Mike singing the parts of the narrator and king and me singing the page and joining in for added emphasis on the last part of the last verse. The other Karaoke gem that we performed was "The friendly beasts." We sang in our best animal voices and even though I was trying not to laugh while I was singing the part of the sheep with the curly horn I couldn't help it because Teri told me I sounded like a sheep that had been possessed. So classic.

Pin the nose on Rudolph was fun, but nothing too memorable to note for anyone that I knew. Jon won the lovely apron that he is wearing in the picture of all of us in the pass the parcel game and Mike got a Santa sippy cup from the same game. We all had a fun time and I think that the party was a success for Megan and her roommates because a bunch of people came and had fun.

Washer and Dryer

A few weeks ago my grandpa Snow mentioned in an email that they were having some problems getting the people from Sears to deliver their new washer and dryer. Jon and I had been looking on KSL.com for a washer and dryer because we thought this would be a really good thing to have when we have our baby in a few months. I took the opportunity to respond to the email and inquired about the old washer and dryer because this was the first thing I had heard about them getting new ones. I thought that if there was nothing wrong with them, they still worked fine, and my grandparents were just getting rid of them we would like to have them. The email I got back from my grandpa was a little discouraging. Some of the things that he said that worried me were-
1. " We had a leak in the washer last week"
2. "I imagine the heating element will need to be replaced sometime soon"
3. "If you want them we'd like you to pick them up later this week"

Leaky washer, broken heating element, and having to find time over Thanksgiving weekend to drive to St George and pick them up when Jon and I both had to work the Friday after Thanksgiving didn't sound like that great of a deal. I responded to that email with an "if they are broken I don't think it would be worth it" tone and to let Sears take them. I got an email from my aunt who was there in St George with my grandparents saying that grandma thought the washer and dryer were fine and they worked great and they think the leak was just because they overfilled it and they would be happy to leave them on the back porch until we could come and get them. I still had my doubts, but after my aunt and my grandmas assurances we said we would like to have them.

My parents went down to St George for a quick weekend trip last weekend to get the washer and dryer and help grandma and grandpa install their new TV. It was very nice of them to do that for us and grandma and grandpa appreciated my dad installing the wall mount for the TV and getting that all up and running. They dropped the washer and dryer off at our place on Sunday night and it just happened that Jon's parents were down here (I'm sure it had nothing to do with the wooden shoe of goodies we got delivered to us that night ;) ) so Kent helped Jonathan and my dad to bring in the washer and dryer. We got the washer all hooked up and started a load of wash, but we couldn't test out the dryer because our plug in the wall and our plug on the cord didn't match.

We knew we would have to get some sort of converter or something for the dryer and Jon figured out that we could change the cord rather than re-wiring the plug. We went to the Home Depot and got the cord with the right plug and Jon double checked with Marion (the old-white-haired-bearded-electrical expert at Home Depot) that this was what we needed and how he needed to switch from the old one to the new one. We went home and Jon with his electrical man skills took off the old plug and hooked up the new cord to the right leads and bolts and stuff on the dryer. We plugged it in and it works! It didn't even blow up or cause the power to go out on the whole block or anything. It has been really nice having a washer and dryer in our house I have done two loads of laundry already and there have been no leaks or problems with the washer or dryer. I think they are going to work great for us and I am grateful that my grandparents let us have them and that my parents helped get them from St George for us.

This weekend was busy but I learned a few things, like that I don't think this baby is going anywhere for a while because getting our tree could have easily put me into labor, Jon has some serious man skills, and having a washer and dryer is great. This post was pretty epic, but so was the weekend.

Halloween fun

2010-11-01T11:31:00.001-07:00

This year we did more the week before Halloween to celebrate than we did closer to the actually holiday. On Monday the 18th Jonathan and I went over to my cousin Ashley Webb's and we had a little party. We carved pumpkins and ate delicious treats with Ashley and Karl Webb, Teri and Michael Draper, and a couple that are friends of the Webbs. It was a lot of fun.

On Wednesday the 20th we hosted a murder mystery dinner at our house. It was really fun to have everyone over all dressed up and acting like fools.

Jonathan and I were a Casper White, nerdy-supernatural scientist, and Lucy N. D'Skyes, a snoody socialite.

My sister Carrie was a Pam Pyre, a disco dancer, and my cousin Vincent was John Wolfman, a DJ.

My brother Michael and his girlfriend Makenna were Frank N Stein, the "play-boy" wine steward, and Ivana Hunt, the safari tour guide.

My cousin Ashley and her husband Karl Webb were a zombie bar-maid and Mumford "Mummy" Clumsie, the clumsy security guard.

My cousin Teri and her husband Michael Draper were a stock broker and Freddy a fire man.

My friend Megan was Elvira Ebony, a goth movie star, and her friend Randy, was Jaques Ripperier, a plastic surgeon.

Sadly the solution was dissappointingly simple, but I think everyone had fun dressing up and being crazy.

On Friday the 22nd we went to our ward Halloween party. We dressed up as batman and robin and were robbed of the award for best costume. Jon is convinced that the couple announcing the winners said the wrong name. We had fun even though we didn't win best costumes. At the party we also had a little tunk or treat thing and I was fool enough to stick my hand into a mysterious bag. Inside the mysterious bag were 2 live snakes. I felt them and actually wrapped my hand around one and squeezed. It kind of freaked me out a bit. I wouldn't have minded touching a snake if I knew I was going to be touching it, but it was completely unexpected so I kinda freaked out. The guy whose snake it was thought that was pretty funny. I'm just glad the snake didn't have a problem with some random hand coming and squeezing it. Blech.

Other than that we didn't do much for Halloween. On Friday the 29th we were supposed to have a party with some members of the ward, but the wife of the couple was sick so that got cancelled. Saturday the 30th we went over to my parents house and played games and ate some treats. We got to see Alexis and Lilly in their Halloween costumes, and that was fun because they were super cute.

Absent mindedness IS a symptom of pregnancy

2010-10-27T07:34:00.000-07:00

I have done some pretty stupid things since being pregnant and I am going to blame them on the fact that I am pregnant. I will give some examples of my absent mindedness.

The other morning as I was getting dressed I couldn't find the bra that I was sure I had pulled out to wear, so I grabbed another one. I realized as I was putting on this bra that I was already wearing the bra that I could not find before. Wow. I felt really smart trying to put on 2 bras.

Jon and I went to the hospital to visit my cousin Ashley who had just had a baby. As we were visiting I asked her if her mom was here already. She then reminded me that her mom was there when I came in and I had even given her a hug when she left. I then remembered that, but when I asked I didn't even realize I had seen her.

I'm sure there are other things that I have done like these, but I have already forgotten them.

Tie Dye

2010-10-14T09:44:00.000-07:00

Sadly we didn't take any picture while we were doing the actual tie dying, but we were all covered in dye and were very focused on the task at hand. I made a pair of thermals and 5 newborn sized onesies. The onesies were super fun because I got to do something different on each one of them and I think they turned out really good. This was a much better tie dye adventure than the last one because the colors stayed more vibrant even after we washed them.

Photoshop Artwork

2010-10-04T09:19:00.000-07:00

DISNEYLAND! and random pregnancy thoughts

2010-09-23T18:49:00.001-07:00

We took our trip to Disneyland this week with the Ware family. It has been a little less than a year in the making, and it was very fun.

At about 5 a.m. Sunday morning I was woken up by my phone ringing and hearing Melinda tell me they were here to pick us up. I jumped up, threw on my clothes, gathered all my stuff, woke up Jon, went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, grabbed us some breakfast and we were out the door in about 15-20 minutes. We weren't planning on leaving like this, but the alarm that Jon set ended up being too quiet to rouse us from our slumber. After leaving we realized that we had forgotten a few things like our free Disneyland passes and the battery and plug for the mini dvd player. Luckily Jon had saved the pdf of the passes to his computer, so we didn't have to drive back an hour to get them and one of the other dvd players had a cord that worked for the one we brought. We made it to St. George and met Jennifer and Phil at their hotel for breakfast. The breakfast was delicious pancakes and bacon etc. After breakfast we got back in the car and drove to Anaheim to our hotel that was within walking distance of the parks. The drive was pretty uneventful except for the fact that we had 8 of us all packed into a Honda pilot. Mike drove the whole way down and Melinda, Jon, Kent, Karen, and I shuffled seats a little bit around Cole and Dallin's car-seats. It was full, but I think we all managed to still like each other by the time we made it to California. I guess I can't speak for anyone but myself with my last statement, but there were no major fights to report. To pass the time I read, tried to sleep, and knitted. Karen had made little goodie-bags for the four boys with toys and stuff to open every hour or so and this kept them entertained and happy. I shouldn't forget to mention that the toys and stuff in their bags were all Disney themed and where ever possible the gifts coincided with a specific Disney character for each boy. It was amazing all the work and planning that went into these. That was pretty much the first day. That night we did walk over to the parks and downtown Disney area, so that we could see what the walk would be like. There were also fireworks that I think everyone except me watched from the roof of our hotel that night. I was exhausted from getting up early and not being able to sleep in the car, so I went to bed at like 9.

Monday morning we got up and packed up the kids and walked to the parks. We bought our tickets and then headed into Disneyland. We started out in fantasyland and went on the Peter Pan ride, carousel, Dumbo, Alice in Wonderland, and probably some other rides that I can't remember.

Fantasyland was great because I was able to go on all the rides that the kids wanted to go on. We then went to toon town and saw a bunch of characters and got pictured and autographs. We also had lunch there. Food is ridiculously expensive in places like Disneyland but Kent was paying for the food, so we actually bought food in the park. It was crazy because I was raised in a family of cheap-os (and am proud to be one myself) so eating in the park was a rare and exciting thing. I just had to try not to think of how expensive things were and just enjoy them. Up until after lunch I had been so good about not going on any rides that would potentially rip my placenta off the wall of my uterus, but after lunch I had a moment of weakness. I went on splash mountain. This was probably really stupid, and I was kind of freaking out as we were going up the hill for the last big drop. Luckily baby, placenta, and uterus all seem to be fine. After that I was pretty wet and more cautious because I realized I would be very distraught if I unintentionally killed my unborn child.

We went around a few other places in the park and went on some rides then we went over to California Adventure to pick up our dinners and tickets for World of Color. My dinner was pretty good, it was a vegetarian wrap thing and had some pasta salad type stuff and slightly lemon flavored strings of veggies that were probably some type of squash. After eating we waited in a clump of people to go stake our claim on a spot for World of Color. World of Color was a water show with lights and music and even Disney animations projected onto walls of water all shooting up out of the little lake thing by the ferris wheel and California Screamin' roller coaster. This was really cool. Before the little show started Jon was joking that it probably wouldn't be as good as the "dancing waters" we saw in Taiwan, but it was dancing waters times 5,000. Even though we weren't in the "wet zone" we still got pretty wet. After the show was over we made our way out of the park and walked back to the hotel. I was quite worn out and not up for the walmart trip to get food and stuff so I went to sleep. Sadly I was woken up at about midnight by my body feeling yucky. I spent the next hour getting whatever my body didn't like out of my system via both ends. After that I felt a bit better and went back to bed.

Tuesday was the day without children in the park.

Kent and Karen entertained the boys for the day while Mike, Melinda, Jennifer, Phil, Jon, and I went to the parks.

We started off over in California Adventure and went on Soarin' over California and grizzly rapids. We went on the rapids twice because we were already wet and figured it wouldn't hurt to get a bit wetter and there was like no line.

Melinda and I got soaked and everyone else got pretty wet too. After that where and when we did everything I can't remember exactly. I know I waited as everyone went on California Screamin' and the Tower of Terror and we went on the ferris wheel with the swinging gondolas. Then I think we went over to Disneyland. I think everyone felt bad that I couldn't go on all the rides, but it really wasn't that bad.

We went on Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted mansion. I also went on the jungle cruise while everyone else went on Indiana Jones. We saw the Captain EO tribute, a 3D movie that originally played at Disneyland from like 1986 to 1997 with Michael Jackson in it. It was very cheesy and kind of gave me a headache with the 3D and bouncing chairs. While in tomorrow land I went on the Buzz Lightyear ride with Jon while everyone else went on space mountain and then went on the Submarine with Phil while everyone did space mountain again. We ate peanut butter and jam sandwiches that we made that morning and had snacks and free tortillas from California Adventure to hold us over so we didn't have to buy the expensive food. We did buy a few things like some dole whip floats and Phil got a cream cheese filled pretzel that he shared with us. I don't think my jeans ever completely dried from the rapids that morning, but I did my best to dry all our stuff by spreading it over the fences and such when I wasn't going on rides.

By the time the day was over we had been from California Adventure to Disneyland and back to California adventure again. We walked a lot and my feet were tired and I was wishing that someone had brought me a stroller so I could sleep while someone pushed by home like the little boys did the previous night. It was a fun and tiring day.

Wednesday we all went to the park again. We started with California Adventure and this time I got to do the kiddie rides with the little boys in Bug's land, which was actually really fun. I think one of my favorite parts of that day was going on the caterpillar ride with Lincoln because he LOVED that ride. He would point out all of the different foods that we were going by and he thought the part where Heimlich burped at the end was so funny. We spent the rest of the day back and forth between Disneyland and California Adventure hitting the highlights from the previous days and seeing the Pixar play parade, which was cute and fun. When the park closed at 8 I was again tired and my feet hurt from walking around all day, but I managed to make it back to the hotel. When we got back to the hotel our room smelled like nasty burning yucky something, so we opened the windows and tried to air the place out. We never figured out exactly what it was but the smell was outside our room in the hall and could be smelled downstairs in the other room but not as strong. It was yucky, but we survived and managed to sleep despite the stench.

This morning we woke up bright and early and packed up our stuff and headed out around 5:30, so we wouldn't get stuck in any awful California traffic. I didn't notice any bad traffic, but I was actually able to sleep this time so I could have missed it because of that. Again the boys had their goodie bags loaded up with new surprises to open to keep them occupied. This worked for most of the way, I think Dallin thought he wasn't getting enough attention so he kept calling mom every few minutes until Melinda looked back or until we figured out what he wanted from us. Again the ride back was pretty uneventful- no big fights to speak of or any car trouble. I finished one hat that I had started on the way down and I started another. We made it to our place around 6 which was great because I was able to unpack a little, lounge about, check my email, and write this blog post. It was a good trip and I had a lot of fun.

Random pregnancy thoughts:
- I realized while in Disneyland how often I need/feel the need to pee. I noticed mostly on Tuesday because on Monday and Wednesday we at least had children that were randomly needing to pee all the time.
- I would really not like to get hemorrhoids. Pregnancy kinda messes with your normal body stuff, and I only went poop once on the trip and that was when I was up in the middle of the night feeling sick.
- Sometimes I still think I don't look pregnant, but then I see a picture, walk by a mirror, or look down and realize that I definitely do.
- I'm really glad I feel good right now. I'm glad I am not feeling sick all the time and I'm glad that my girth has not yet gotten to the point where I feel like I can't do normal things.
- I realized that a lot of my selfish wants will probably have to take a backseat most of the time because I will have a child that relies on me for practically everything. I noticed this when I was all freaked out because I went on splash mountain and its going to be worse when the baby is on the outside and can cry and stuff.
- Sometimes I feel like a fat old man when I scratch my stomach. I don't know why, but I get this image of some old guy with a pot belly scratching his gut when I scratch my belly. Random- I know.

- I don't think my bellybutton has ever been so clean. I still have an innie, but it is less of a cave than it was so it is nice a squeaky clean now.

- I sometimes imagine the baby breakdancing when I feel weird movements inside that aren't the normal poke here or jab there.

Laboring

2010-09-07T13:18:00.001-07:00

Over the long weekend I was feeling very domestic. On Saturday I did a bit of cleaning in the morning and then went to my parents house to do laundry. While I was at my parents we went over to a neighbors house and picked a bucket full of plums and then I made two batches of zucchini bread. After I was done with the bread I went to a movie and Color Me Mine with my friend Rachel for her birthday. The movie wasn't up to much. It was called "Eat, Pray, Love" and I didn't really like it. Color Me Mine was fun; it is a place that you paint a ceramic something and then they fire it for you. I painted some salt and pepper shakers and I'm very curious to see how they look once they are fired. I hope they look as good as I expect them to. On Monday I made jam using the plums that I picked on Saturday. I learned a few things about making jam, because this was the first time I have ever attempted this on my own.

1) I learned that cutting plums is a pain. I had to cut the fruit off from around the pits and this was the longest part of the jamming process.

2) I also learned that it is easier to cut plums that are not as ripe. If they are really ripe they just mush in your hands and get juice all over the counter and the floor. Luckily I didn't have to peel the plums or that probably would have taken even longer.

3) Another thing was to measure and prepare everything I could before I started cooking stuff. Once you add the pectin you need to keep stirring the jam, so I was really glad I had measured out the rest of the sugar into a bowl and had my jars and lids set out and ready.

I can't decide if I would want to do plum jam again. If I get more free fruit I probably will, but I might enlist the help of someone to do some of the cutting because that part was just tedious.

I have been waiting to publish this post until I uploaded some pictures, but who knows when that will be. I will just publish it now and maybe add pictures later.

Oh my gosh!

2010-08-26T14:44:00.000-07:00

I totally just felt the baby move. There have been a few times that I have thought maybe I felt something moving around in my guts, but I wasn't really sure if it was a baby. This was definitly not normal. I got poked from the inside by something. I was so excited I nearly cried- I can blame the nearly crying part on the fact that my hormones are way out of whack (for example: I now avoid driving on the freeway because I get really angry. I have pregnancy road rage).

Snow Family Reunion 2010

2010-08-17T12:53:00.000-07:00

Thursday to Sunday the 12th-15th the Snow family converged on the small town of St Anthony Idaho. It was pretty fun. I think I can best sum up the trip with a top 10 list and a few pictures.

Snow Family Reunion Top 10

10. Relaxing and reading Fablehaven. (Reading at the sand dunes was difficult because the wind was blowing and kids were throwing sand)

9. Watching Michael flail through the air at the sand dunes.

8. Eating delicious food (I gained like a pound and a half)

7. Seeing Shooting stars

6. Playing on the giant squishy blocks with Jon, Michael, and Carrie.

5. Taking a canoe trip with Jon and a mouse.

4. Favorite Scripture Devotional

3. The Talent show. The whole thing was just classic.

2. Floating down the snake river with the scouting party. Bottoms up!

1. Hanging out with the family and seeing people I don't see very often.

Here is a video clip of the Westover contribution to the talent show (can you tell which one is me and which is Jon?)

Provo River Half Marathon-I'm probably a little crazy

2010-08-07T16:20:00.000-07:00

This morning we got up bright and early so I could be on a bus at 5 am to take me approximately 12 miles up Provo canyon. The fact that I was I even would sign up for something that would require me to get up at such an insanely early hour was my first indication that I might be crazy. I decided that I wasn't planning on running it very fast or being competitive in this race at all because I'm 3 and a half months pregnant (surprise! if you didn't already know) and the desire to sleep has trumped any desires that might have been inside me to train for a race that I signed up for before the option of being pregnant even crossed my mind. Lets review- super early in the morning + pregnant + lack of training + 13.1 miles = Crazy.

While I was at the top waiting for the sun to come up and for the race to start I started talking to a girl that was standing by herself. We had a nice chat- she lives in provo and is a nurse at Timpanogos hospital and this was her first half marathon too. After a while a girl form my previous ward Holly Theodore walked by on her way to the toilets and said hi. She ended up coming back and talking with us while we all waited. I ended up waiting at the top in the cold dark canyon for about 2 hours until the race started and the sun came up more. The race started a little after 7 and I started out the first three miles right next to Holly. It was nice to have someone to run with that I knew for a bit. At about three miles she picked up the pace (or I slowed down... but I think she sped up) and I wasn't quite feeling like keeping up; I tried for a bit and then caught up with the other girl I had been talking to before the race started. I ran with her until about mile 4 where we parted ways so I could take a potty stop at Vivian park. I took a quick stop and grabbed some water then was back on my way. I was doing pretty good to keep up about a 10 minute mile pace as I plodded down the trail by the provo river.

I told Jon he should come and cheer me on at about Bridal Veil Falls because it seemed like it would be easily accessible and around the middle of the race. I got to mile 6 which was pretty close to the falls and this is where I started to realize I probably will need to walk. I tried to keep running because I knew I would probably see Jon in the parking lot of something, so I ran and saw Jon handing out water with the Eatough (not quite sure how to spell that) family. Jon told me afterward that he had recognized them from my dad's 50th birthday party. I thought it was kinda cute that Jon was passing out water to the runners with my parents friends and their family. The next part of the course turned back toward the falls on a road that leads to some campsites and stuff. I walked a lot on this part out past the falls and then back on the same road. At this point I still was running quite a bit though.

The course then went through Nunn's park and rejoined the trail that follows the river down the canyon. I stopped here for my second potty stop. Walking down the stair out of the potty nearly killed me. My joints were just aching from ponding along the mostly down hill trail. I ran for a bit but I reminded myself that I didn't want to kill myself or my unborn child so from about mile 9 to 12 I pretty much walked the whole way. I would run up any uphill parts of the trail (which weren't many) and then if I felt like running (which wasn't very often at this point). While I was walking this part I kind of just wanted to stop and lay down and take a nap, but I figured I probably wouldn't get up for a few hours if I did that and Jon would be very worried.

At about mile 12 I decided I would try to run a bit more. At around this time, maybe a little earlier, I was starting to feel very hungry and was looking forward to the promised fruit and pancakes at the end of the race. I had got water at all of the water stations along the way, there were probably 5 or 6, so I was well hydrated but the bagel I had eaten on the bus ride up was no longer sustaining me. I jogged and walked the last mile and finished the race with a time of 2 hours and 55 minutes (the stop watch I had been timing with said 2:51:58, but the big one at the end said 2:55 so it was somewhere in that range). I was happy to be finished and see my hubby waiting there for me. I grabbed a huge slice of watermelon and had Jon grab me some pancakes. The pancakes were kinda flat but they tasted amazing. I had Jon feeding me bites of pancake between bites of delicious watermelon. After I finished my watermelon and pancakes I grabbed another large piece of watermelon and got super sticky with juice as I ate it while we walked to the car.

We stopped at Borders and Jon got a free "glitter ball" (bouncy ball with glitter in it) that he found a coupon for online. He picked one with purple and silver flower shaped glitter pieces for me. He then dropped me off at home and I limped across the lawn and up the stairs to the bathroom to shower. Jon had gone to buy a bag of ice because I wanted some to ice my aching joints. I showered then took a nap.

I'm still pretty tired and my joints hurt, but I think overall me and baby are ok. I don't have any other races planned for the up coming months, but right now I am perfectly fine with that. I would probably consider doing a shorter race in the near future, but I don't want to think about that right now.

Motivation

2010-07-15T19:04:00.000-07:00

So, I think I'm feeling motivated... well I thought I was feeling motivated to do something before I sat down in my cold-haven (aka the bedroom, the only room in the house with air conditioning). I haven't been feeling super great for the past little bit so a lot of the things that I would normally do haven't really gotten done. Mainly: the dishes. I decided I would force myself to do the dishes last night and I did. Part of the reason I felt inclined to force myself into this task was the fact that we were out of bowls and every utensil except knives and small forks. I felt like an archeologist digging through the sedimentary layers finding the more ancient fossils and artifacts the deeper I went. I have gone back to being mad at my dishwasher because it has been leaving this white powdery layer of something all over everything, so I washed all the dishes I found in my archeological dig by hand. After I finished the dishes I even scrubbed down the sink a bit. It was crazy. Tonight as our pasta was cooking I emptied the dishwasher (currently being used as an extremely large drying rack). And... it doesn't stop there. After visiting one of the sisters I visit teach and having my presidency meeting I washed all the dishes from today and put them in the dishwasher to dry. Wow. I'm pretty proud of myself for my accomplishments and I was contemplating expanding my circle of cleaning beyond the dishes, but I'm currently enjoying not being in the inferno that is the rest of the house. Maybe I'll try to clean up our bedroom a little; this way I can enjoy the cold and feel productive. Brilliant.

Dominion

2010-07-08T23:20:00.001-07:00

Have you heard of it? Have you played it? Join in on the sensation that is sweeping the globe and play Dominion today!

So Andrea's cousin Teri and her husband (Mike) Draper have this game and have invited us over a couple of times to play it. I thought it was fun and all but I didn't quite catch the dream... until this week. I was chillin' at a 5th of July party at Andrea's G-parents and we were all sitting around so I said to Draper, "Hey Dummy, you up for a game of Dominion?" and he said, "yeah" so we played, and then we played again, and again and again.

The next day Andrea had a girls night with her friend April so me, Draper, and Jon Davis had a dude gathering and we taught Jon D how to play. When I got home that night I thought, 'I gotta get me some of this action!' so I put dominion on my Amazon wishlist and then started googling frantically for an online version. Fortunately I'm an awesome googler (or G-man) and I came across this gem of peculiar beauty: Brett Spiel Welt don't let the german scare you because there's a lot of english and the game itself is in english.

So basically I've been playing a lot these last few days. I've made some friends (okay, only one tbm22... he's german) and have taught my sister Jennifer and my brother-in-law Mikey how to play and discovered that my crony Kyle Wayne knows how to play and so does my homedawg Alex (he served in Germany)

Let me know if you want to play and we totally will!

2010-06-29T06:45:00.000-07:00

a.m.a.z.i.n.g.

Who wants to watch it at midnight with Andrea and me?

The watermelon is dead and other thoughts of a frazzled me

2010-06-28T18:39:00.001-07:00

Today I came home to find Jon watering the garden, and he had some sad news: the watermelon plant is pretty much dead. I looked at it and it is kind of a shriveled little yellow dry crusty thing, so I don't think there is any way we can revive it. Luckily most of the other plants are doing ok.

This has been a crazy day. I get a text from Jon this morning telling me that the previous bishop of our ward called him and wanted him to let me know that a girl in the ward (who is 2 weeks from her due date) was in a car accident earlier today. I called both her and her husband and left messages, but didn't hear anything until later this afternoon when the woman who is our representative from the stake relief society called me. She had talked to the girls husband and found out that they were monitoring her and her baby at the hospital, and they thought they would both be alright and they would probably be able to come home tonight. I have been worrying about them all day, and I hope everything is still ok. I called one of the girls on the compassionate service committee and she said she will help with meals and to find babysitting for this family's 2 year old girl if they need it. I wish I knew what was going on, so I can help more. I just pray that everything will be ok for them.

"I'm a worrier I guess. That's why my friends call me whiskers"

Extreme front room makeover and life in general

2010-06-17T20:11:00.000-07:00

When we got home from Taiwan I was very excited to be home, but I was surprised to find that our apartment was not quite the same as we had left it. While we were gone Karen Ware had re-decorated our living room. It is super cute and it is very nice to have a room where things match and it is all decorated and stuff.

This is the table Jonathan made in his wood working class at BYU. He worked really hard on it and did a really good job. The three cactus on top of the table are our practice children. So far they have been thriving and survived being transplanted from their original pots into these slightly bigger pots. Despite my best parenting efforts the one on the right still refuses to grow straight. I haven't given up on it yet.
This hardly recognizable piece of furniture is the shoe cabinet that I got from someone that my mom works with. Karen repainted and put new handles on it and it looks so much better. The "e" on top of shoe cabinet doesn't really stand for anything, but that doesn't matter because I like it anyway. It came from a Deseret Book store sign from a store that moved or something. From the makeover we also inherited a new child: the little ivy plant in the mug. This child is much more needy than the cactus. I will often find it looking sad and wilty and realize it has been a while since I watered it. After I water it it usually perks back up pretty quick.
This is the new couch we picked out with Jon's parents before we left for Taiwan. Oh, that reminds me that Jon was in on this whole redecorating thing from the get go. I guess he helped pick out some of the pillows and okayed teal as the accent color. I think the teal looks good with all the browns and blacks.
Opposite the couch are the bookshelves and the tv. I love the bookshelves because all of our non-cute crap (dvds, games, books, magazines, etc) is hiding in sleek black boxes with little teal labels saying what is inside them.
Here is the view of the whole wall with the bookshelves and tv. I like all the cool stuff that is on the shelves like the picture frame full of little silver ball-bearings. I also love all of the old cream with teal trim suitcases that are in the room. Lets just sum up by saying I love the way the living room looks and it is nice to have a room in your house that you absolutely love.

So here is me looking happy next to my cute new bookshelf, but there might be a little fear in my eyes in this picture because we took this the morning I was being sustained as Relief Society president. This was crazy. The Sunday I got back from Taiwan the Bishop gave me the calling, by the next sunday I gave him my counselors, and the next Sunday I was sustained, set apart, and taught the Relief Society lesson. Today was my third week as Relief Society president and I still feel like I have no idea what is going on and no body tells me anything that is going on in the ward. I found out that a girl in the ward had her baby earlier this week when the Bishop announced it in Sacrament meeting and looked at me for confirmation that the baby was a girl. I knew the girl was really pregnant and looked ready to have that baby at any moment, but it was news to me that she already had it. Hopefully once I have figured out more how to do my calling people will feel like they can tell me what is going on.

Another thing that we have done since being home is we planted a few more things in our garden.

The two little plants in this picture are the melons we planted. the one on the right is a watermelon and the one on the left is a crenshaw. I have never had too much success with melons in my parents garden, but we're trying it out.
This is our cucumber plant. We picked one that looked pretty lively and thick, so hopefully it will do well because i love cucumbers.
These three are tomatoes. The first one is an early girl, the second is a better boy (or a big boy I can't remember now), and the last one is a yellow pear tomato plant. It will be interesting to see what grows in our garden because the soil is really rocky and I don't know how good it is.

This weekend was Shop Hop, so I went to a bunch of quilt stores with the Ware women and started making a Christmas tree skirt from a pattern the Kent Ware helped me design (and by helped me design I mean that I told him kind of what I wanted and we sketched out a drawing and then he figured out the measurements and did all the hard stuff). I would have been able to do more on this but I was trying to make tags for the father's day gift that I was in charge of for the men in the ward. Jennifer brought her cricut and everyone helped me cut, tape and glue the little things together.
This was the finished product. All the men in the ward thought they were great. Jon told me after church that he saw a member of another ward with a can of Dad's root beer and he felt far superior because they only got a can and each brother in our ward got a bottle. I thought that was pretty funny (my root beer could beat up your root beer was one thing that came to mind). Life is feeling a bit crazy, but I'm figuring it out.

Day 12 (part 2), 13, and the trip home

2010-05-20T20:59:00.000-07:00

I need to finish the posts about the trip to Taiwan before I forget or get too busy doing things here. The evening after the last time I wrote they had a lady come who was going to thread the hairs off our faces. I didn't really understand why, but they think it is very healthy and attractive to rip the peach fuzz off your face. This hurts way way bad. The first thing this lady did was pull our head hair away from our faces with a hair net/band thing. After that she covered our faces with this chalk stuff that smelled kind of weird that she said would help the hairs come out better. She then wrapped a long piece of string around her fingers and went to work.

The part that hurt the worst for me was around the edges of my face by my normal hairline. I don't know if this was because she was getting longer hairs that she didn't intend to yank out or if that is just a more sensitive area on me or what. I was trying to summon strength from within, go to happy places, and clenching every muscle I could think of to stop myself from jumping out of the stool I was sitting on. Luckily I made it to the end of my turn and she plucked out a few of my stray eyebrows for good measure.
After me it was Jon's turn. The process went down the same way; hairnet and chalk
Then hair ripping.
He was doing all that he could to summon strength etc., but I could tell this was hurting. I don't know how I looked when she was plucking me, but the winces and groans were probably similar. After he was done I knew he was not happy. He was a very good sport about it because Lloyd had wanted us to try this for some reason. I thought his hair looked funny when the lady pulled the hairnet thing off so I took a picture.
Jon wasn't too happy for the rest of the night after this because it hurt him way way bad. I don't really think that either of us will ever have our entire faces threaded again. I would consider it for doing my eyebrows or something but ripping of my invisible peach fuzz seems pointless. After this we pretty much just went to bed. I managed to get a picture of the other room that we stayed in for a few night when some of the family was there for the wedding. You can tell from the picture that it is quite a bit smaller than the other room.
The next day we packed up our stuff and went out for a little bit to grab a few things that we decided we wanted to bring back. After that we went back to Lloyd's made sure everything was packed and didn't weigh too much. We ate some food that Lloyd brought us. This was kind of scary. I ate a soggy sandwich thing with strange meats and vegetables in it that I couldn't tell what they were because it was all crammed in the hogie bun and covered in some sauce stuff. I ate most of one of those and then tried some soupy stuff. The soupy stuff had a clear brownish broth that was kind of sweet and it had chunks of something white and ice floating in it. I ate some and the white stuff made me think of mayo for some reason and that thought kind of made me lose my appetite because the idea of mayo in a gelatinous blob kind of grossed me out so I made Jon finish that for me. Lloyd and his girlfriend drove us to the airport and waited as we checked our luggage. They even took a picture of us with the tomato head man. I have no idea why his head was a tomato, but his shirt said I heart Taiwan and he had a laptop so we took a picture.
They didn't hang around at the airport for too long with us because Lloyd's girlfriend had class that night. We went through security and as we were walking to our gate I heard someone saying our names. A member from one of Jon's areas who works for the airport had found out our flight information and met us on the other side of the security check. I thought that was really cool that he would do that. He took us up this secret restaurant lounge place and told us we could eat whatever we wanted. I wasn't really hungry because I had forced myself to eat the most of the sandwich and Jon wasn't really hungry either. I still ate and apple and had some juice and Jon had some ice cream and soda. It was pretty cool to be in this little fancy pants place, but I felt bad that we had just eaten because this guy had probably paid for us to eat. We chatted with this guy for a while and when it was about half an hour before we could board the plane we headed over to the gate.

We waited for a little bit and then got on the plane. I stayed awake the whole flight and watched some random movies and episodes of TV shows. I also listened to music and crocheted a hat. It is a little too small for me so maybe I will give it to Alexis or something. They gave us dinner on the plane and the options were pork or fish. Jon went with the pork, so I went with the pork (both options didn't sound too great to me). The pork ended up being a very good choice. I didn't eat any of the meat but I stirred the meat around with the noodles and veggies it came with and ate the noodles and veggies and it was good. They also gave us breakfast toward the end of the flight. This time I got the omelet because I knew the porridge was a bad idea. The omelet wasn't anything amazing but it came with yogurt and fruit and it was edible. We landed in LAX earlier the same day we left from Taiwan. That was kind of exciting because we went across the dateline and just met the sun on the other side of the ocean.

We got off the plane and went trough customs and got out luggage x-rayed. This took forever. I was kind of worried that we might not make our next flight, but it as fine and we ended up getting to the gate of our next flight with like 45 minutes to spare. We got on the flight back to Salt Lake City and I listened to this guy and girl flirting pretty much the whole time. We made it to Utah and my mom picked us up from the airport and drove us to Jon's parents house where we picked up our car and drove home. We were tired, but we made it and I was able to sleep well because I didn't sleep on the plane, so i think I got over the jet lag... hopefully. We also had a surprise waiting for us when we got home but I will have to write about that later because this is already long enough and its late. It is nice to be home.

Day 10, 11, & 12- The beach and Taoyuan

2010-05-16T23:23:00.000-07:00

Saturday we went to Yilan (this is pronounced ee-lawn) to go to the beach with Lloyd and his girlfriend. It was super fun. We left his house around 9:30 then picked up his girlfriend and drove to the coast. We got to drive through the longest tunnel in Taiwan. It was really long I doubt anyone could hold their breath while going through it because it took us like 20 minutes to drive through. When we got to the beach it was cloudy but really hot and kind of stuffy feeling because of the humidity. We walked over to a surf shop place and Lloyd rented surfboards and told us that we were going to have a surfing lesson. I was pretty excited because I had never been surfing and I thought it would be fun to try it out. We put on the yellow shirt things they gave us and walked back out to the beach where we picked up our surfboards and got the first part of our lesson while still on the sand. This guy showed us how we were supposed to get on the surfboards and how to get up on them. Jon translated the lesson for me because of course it was in Chinese. Luckily he was showing us while he was talking so I was able to catch most of it without needing it translated. The surfboards they had us use were huge because i guess that makes it easier for beginners.

After our dry lesson on the sand we went out to meet our instructor in the water. He showed us a few things and then just had us go at it. I was surprised because it wasn't really that hard for me to stand up on the surf board. True we weren't tackling any monster waves or doing anything crazy like that, but i was able to get it pretty quick. The beach was actually pretty crowded so we tried to go where there weren't really any people. I found out that there weren't really any people over where we were because the water got pretty choppy because waves came in from two different angles. This probably made it harder on us as we were trying to learn, but I only ran in to one person with my surfboard and it would have been more had we tried somewhere else. Sadly my ability and desire to surf came at a price. As you can see from the picture my board was really big and so getting it out into the water and hefting that thing around was pretty difficult. I have a pretty good bruise on my hip from trying to hold it. One time after riding a wave in I jumped off the surfboard and landed kind of weird on the sand and sprained my ankle. It didn't hurt too bad at the time so i just kept on surfing. Among my other wounds from surfing was a pretty bad rashy thing on my legs. I think it was from the sand and laying on the board and the water some how. Now it looks a bit better- it is more like a bunch of red dots scattered across my thighs and it only hurts if I touch it.

I think the worst battle wound, besides my ankle, was my knee. I can't remember exactly how it happened but somehow a wave caught my surfboard and the fin on the bottom of the board whacked me super hard in the knee. I have a pretty good bruise from that too. After surfing until we were really hungry we went in and had some lunch. Jon and I shared a box lunch thing with rice, meats, veggies, an egg, and some tofu. I didn't really eat any of the meats because I didn't want to, but I ate enough rice and stuff to be satisfied. After eating lunch we went back out to the water again to surf some more. This time I had Jon bring the camera so we could try to get some pictures. We switched off who was surfing and who was taking pictures so we wouldn't get the camera wet. Jon, Lloyd, and his girlfriend all had a pretty hard time getting up on their surfboards, but I did manage to get this awesome picture of Jon where it looks like he was an awesome surfer.

Sadly, when we went back out to the water after eating lunch I was pretty tired so I had a harder time getting on my feet and getting the board out where i wanted it. Jon did get a few good pictures.

Even though I was tired we did manage to get one video of me riding on a baby wave. Surfing was way fun and I think I would like to try it again sometime.

After we were done at the beach we dropped off our surfboards and got back in the car. We headed into town and got some ice cream. Jon and I both got pineapple because the other flavors were weird things like purple rice, taro, and red bean (taro and red bean can be good, but I just wan't in the mood). After ice cream we got some scone-type things. I really liked these. I can't remember what they were called but it was a fried round flatish scone like thing with an egg and green onion omelet thing on it. I don't know if it was because I was really hungry from the beach or what but it was FANTASTIC!

After eating Lloyd took us to a spa where you put your legs in a pool and fish come and nibble at you. The camera died at the beach and we didn't have any spare batteries so we didn't get any pictures of this. At first when I put my feet in and the fish came it tickled like crazy. I got more used to it after a while. The fish in the pool just looked like goldfish, so i don't know if only special fish will nibble your dead skin off or if any goldfish would. The fish liked nibbling at my ankles because there was some nice dead skin there for them to feast on. Once the fish were done nibbling we left the spa and drove back to the Taipei area.

We dropped off Lloyd's girlfriend and then met his mom and aunt for dinner. We went to a steak place and it was pretty good. The steak wasn't anything amazing, but there were a few appetizer type things that they gave us before the steak which were very tasty. One was a soup thing where on the bowl there is a bread/pastry dome covering the soup and you smash that down into the soup and eat it in the soup. This was delicious. The soup reminded me of a thin corn chowder. Another one of the appetizer things that was really good was this little bowl of casserole stuff. On the bottom there were some penne-type noodles and it was cheesy and had little shrimp in it. Yum. Honestly this was probably the best meal I have had in Taiwan. I was glad that I ordered a sirloin steak because on the menu it didn't say how many ounces the steaks were or anything and I figured sirloins are usually smaller and have less fat than other steaks. My steak still seemed pretty big, but with my appetite from a day at the beach I was able to conquer my steak and all the previous courses. Jon and everyone else got these massive steaks that I would not have been able to finish half of. The way they cook their steaks must be different than we cook them because they have less flavor and a different texture. Even though the steaks weren't the best I've ever had I really enjoyed that meal.

After dinner we stopped at the house for Lloyd's mom and aunt to grab their swimming stuff because we were going to go to some hot pools and they wanted to come with us (we were still in our swimming stuff from going to the beach earlier). We drove up into the mountains and stopped at a few places but their hot pools were under construction luckily we found a place that had some open that we could go to. We told Lloyd that we wanted to go to the ones where you wear swim suits, so he made sure we didn't end up at the naked ones. At first when he was talking about them I thought that these were natural hot springs but after going to them I don't really think they were. There were a bunch of pools of various temperatures with bubbly seats and high pressure shower things. It was pretty fun and relaxing, but I realized that the hot water was not doing good things for my sprained ankle so I put my leg in the really cold pool at the end to try to get the swelling to go down. One of the cool parts of these pools was that we got to wear swim caps. The picture is kind of dark but it is us wearing our swim caps by one of the pools.

After the hot pools we drove back home. When we got here we took showers and I packed while Jon and Lloyd figured out the details of our trip to Taoyuan for the next day.

Sunday morning we got up and headed to the train station with our backpacks. We got on the MRT (this is what they call the Taipei subway trains MRT=monorail train) and went to Taipei main station and got on regular train to Taoyuan. When we got to Taoyuan we worried and waited for one of Jon's friends to pick us up. She had said the previous sunday she would be at the train station at 8:30 because our train would get in about then and church starts at 9:00. We got off our train around 8:20ish and waited and wandered around the front of the train station. At 8:50 when we still hadn't seen her or been able to get a hold of her on her cell phone we thought that we might have to take a taxi. We decided to give her until 9 when church was supposed to start and if she wasn't there then we would take a taxi. She called us at 8:59 to tell us she was coming. We made it to church in time for the sacrament hymn. A lot of people in this ward knew Jon and were so happy to see him. We had tons of people coming and talking to us after sacrament meeting and after church. It was kind of cool that a lot of people remembered him and really liked him. During relief society I was able to sit by a sister missionary from Washington and she was able to translate the lesson for me. I have been really fortunate that both sundays here there have been people that were able to translate for me. After church we went to our hotel which conveniently allowed you to check in as early as noon, so that worked out perfect. We were both tired from being up late and getting up early so after eating the bagels we brought for lunch I propped my foot up on some pillows and we took a 6 hour nap. We woke up at about 6:30 and made the bowls of noodles we had brought for dinner. The noodles were good but they were a little spicy for my liking. We watched Ice Age showered and went back to bed. Sunday was very much a day of rest. We woke up this morning and got ready for the day. This was our hotel room.
It had two little beds in it that I kept forgetting weren't soft until I went to sit on them. I am getting used to sleeping on not so comfortable surfaces, but I'm excited to sleep in my own bed again.
The no shower curtain thing is still kind of weird to me. I guess they don't really care if the whole bathroom is wet all the time. The hotel wasn't bad for only being about $40 and there were some pretty great complimentary items. In the bathroom there were razors, shower caps, and toothbrushes with little tubes of "whiteman" toothpaste. On the table between the beds there was a little cup with q-tips, teeth flossing things, and condoms (very classy- I guess that is what you would expect from a hotel that not only rents rooms for the night but rents them in three hour increments). After packing up our stuff, and some free goodies, we went down to see what the "breakfast" included. After looking over the strange meats and veggies we decided to go for the toast option. We toasted bread in a little toaster oven and then I put some peanut butter and strawberry jam on mine. It was tasty. We walked around Taoyuan and Jon pointed out some places where different things happened or where he used to eat this or that etc. We did a little shopping and some of the stores that were open and because it was swelteringly hot Jon got a bingsha and I got a lemonade thing with chunks of aloe in it. All the walking around wasn't doing good things for my wounded ankle (I had hoped that it would be completely healed after staying off of it all sunday afternoon), so we decided we would head back to Lloyd's so we could just relax. Had we not come back so early we could have had dinner with a member in Taoyuan that offered to feed us, but I don't know what we would have done all day waiting around in the heat. We took the trains back to Lloyd's and now it is Monday afternoon and I'm laying on the floor with the fans on. Tonight Lloyd is going to have someone come and thread the hair off our faces. It'll be interesting to see how that goes. Tomorrow is our last day in Taiwan and then we fly home. Jon just told me he wants to eat Cafe Rio when he gets home. We have had fun, but I think we are both about ready to come home.

Day 9- Failures and Successes

2010-05-14T08:23:00.000-07:00

When I wrote this morning I mentioned that we slept in for a long time and the fact that it was pouring rain didn't help get us out the door any quicker. We took the train to an electronics store and walked around but Jon was disappointed because he didn't find what he was looking for. We ended up just walking back to the train and going to another stop and wandering around this mall place for a bit, but it was a mall full of expensive stores like Chanel and Armani so we decided to take a bus. Taking the bus was kind of an adventure because we had never been on this bus before and it was kind of a spur of the moment decision to take the bus and we pretty much just got on the first bus we saw. I was getting a little worried because the bus map said that this bus went to Taipei main station, but we had been on the bus a long time and we still weren't at the station. On the way we did pass a Nu Skin building so we took a picture out the bus window.
We did eventually make it to the Taipei main station on that bus. When we got to the station we looked at train times for the train that goes to Taoyuan (this is not in Taipei county so the subway type trains don't go there). The next train wasn't until about 5:30 and after some deliberation we decided that we would want more time than just a few hours tonight to spend in Taoyuan. Since we were already at Taipei main station we decided to walk around the Taipei underground mall. This is a mall that is literally underground so they were pretty creative in the naming of it :) This mall was a lot better than the expensive mall because most of the stores weren't expensive. We walked around and bought some stuff. We found some pretty cool stuff at the underground mall, so in the end it was a successful day but we did a lot of wandering around the city. We did also decide that we are going to probably stay the night in Taoyuan from Sunday to Monday because Jonathan wants to go to church in Taoyuan and if we stay there Sunday night we can do the stuff there on Monday that we wouldn't want to do on Sunday. Because tomorrow is Saturday Lloyd ( I don't know why I just thought of this but his nickname in Chinese means little dragon) has the day off and is going to go with us to the beach so that should be fun. It probably won't be sunny, but I have learned that just because it is raining or is cloudy doesn't mean it won't be really hot. It is weird that it is already Friday and we are leaving on Tuesday. It doesn't seem like we have been gone that long. This morning when Jon told me it was Friday I didn't believe him and I had to think of what we did each day/ate since Monday (I remembered Monday was when I threw up). It has been nice to be on vacation but it will be nice to get back to my own bed. Oh that reminds me I took a few pictures of where he have been staying.
This is where we have been sleeping half the time we have been here. This room is a bit bigger and the floor has these mats on it that makes it a little more comfortable to sleep on than the wood floors- I know because the other room didn't have them. I'll maybe try to get a picture of the other room, but I don't know if I'll be able to because the one Aunt that lives here is sleeping in that room. To give an idea of the size the width of the room was about the width of the blanket things that are our bed. This room is quite a bit wider because we can fit all of our crap on the one side and still have some space on the other.
This is the bathroom. It is the kind where the entire bathroom is pretty much a shower so the floor is constantly wet. They have a pair of slip on sandals that you can use if you don't want to get your socks/feet wet when you go in the bathroom; they stay on the mat outside the bathroom door so they are always there if you need them. That reminds me- you don't wear shoes in the house. Everyone takes off their shoes before they come in. On the back of the door there are some more sandal slippers that you can wear if you do want to wear shoes in the house, but outside shoes stay outside and the sandal slippers stay inside. Kind of a interesting cultural thing, but it probably helps so you don't have to sweep and mop the floor as much. I'll try to get a picture of the living room later- when I was taking the pictures of the bathroom and our room Jomama and the Aunt that lives here were in the living room area and I thought it might be slightly awkward if I just randomly took a picture of them sitting there and couldn't explain why. Well I think that might be all I can think to write about tonight. Because today wasn't very eventful we didn't take many pictures but the other picture we took while we were out was this one.
This was in Taipei Main Station and it was pretty busy so Jon took a picture. You can't really get the whole scope of it from this picture- just know that Taipei main station is the busiest station and it is busier at night.

Day 8- The Zoo

2010-05-13T20:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I slept in pretty late and while I was sleeping Jon played a computer game that he found. When we finally got up and left we decided to skip breakfast and go straight for lunch. We got some potstickers and this was probably the first time that Jon said he was kind of ready to be back in America because he didn't know if he was supposed to give the waitress the paper with our order on it or wait for her to come get it. He ended up giving it to her but he thinks that might have been wrong. After lunch we got on the train and went to the Taipei zoo. I absolutely loved it! We had fun taking pictures with some of the crazy statues that were in the zoo.

The first animals we saw in the zoo were the ones that were indigenous to Taiwan. We saw some wild boars, deer-like things, little jungle cats, and rodents, but the coolest things in this section were the monkeys. Some of them were playing king of the branch- one monkey would climb up on these branches and then one of two other monkeys would climb up and try to wrestle all the other monkeys off the branch. Some monkeys were picking at the other monkeys and eating the bugs they found. One of the most interesting things was a kid had some bubbles and had been blowing them and the wind blew one all the way to where the monkeys were and one monkey stuck out his hand to catch the bubble and it popped and the monkey seemed so confused about where it had gone. It was interesting to see how the monkey interacted with the bubble. After the Taiwanese animals we went to the insect house. One of the coolest parts of this building were the rooms with butterflies flying around. When we got into the first of these rooms there was this Taiwanese lady jabbering away and pointing to these two butterflies that were obviously mating while hanging on to a branch. The lady then started shaking the branch and was confused as to why they were flying away. Jon told me she was saying things like "what are they doing?" and "are they sleeping?" Really? They were obviously connected at the butt with some white goop... anyway moving on. The butterflies were really cool and were flying around and eating fruit and stuff. After we left the room there was a group of girls pointing at a butterfly that had escaped from the room. Jon was able to catch it and take it back into the butterfly room. This is him letting it free (it kind of flew at his face after he opened his hands so he is making a pretty good face).
Most of the other stuff in the insect place was kind of icky and insect like, but this is Jon with his head in a bubble that made it so you could get a closer look at some crickets. He tried to get me to go in there before he went in because he didn't see the crickets, but I saw them and didn't want my face that close to them even if it was behind plastic.
After the bug place we went into the panda house and saw some cute pandas. The first one was sleeping and this one was rolling around on its back and scratching its tummy with its back legs.
After this I can't remember exactly what we saw next but I will just mention all the different things we saw. We went to a really cool nocturnal animal house where they had trained the animals to think that the day was night and the night was day so that we could see the animals when they were awake. There were some adorable little owls (half of the owls I saw I would think of what Hogwarts student had that type of owl. The little ones were like the owl Ron gets later in the books pigwidgeon. Wow I'm a nerd.). We saw some bigger owls eating mice and we saw a little cat thing eating a whole rat. We saw some sugar gliders and other little nocturnal squirrel like things. I kind of think the little owls were one of my favorite things we saw at this zoo. After the nocturnal place we saw the Australian animals (kangaroos and other marsupials along with some big horned ibex thing), Asian animals (we saw some Asian elephants that looked like they were dancing and I think this is where we saw the tiger. The tiger was right up next to the window so that was really cool), the desert animals (pretty much just some big camels), and then the African animals. The African animals were pretty cool because not only did we get to see giraffes eating and lion cubs playing we got to see elephants from really close up. I think this was Jon's favorite part. He was very excited that we were going to see the elephants and kept asking when we were going to get to them. Also by this time he was getting kind of tired so I think seeing the elephants re-energized him a bit.

After the african animals we went to the amphibian and reptile house. We saw some snakes and lizards and frogs and stuff that were pretty cool. As we were in there the lady came around saying that they were closing and to hurry through. I didn't realize that the zoo closed at 5 and it was a little before 5 so we tried to hurry to go up to the penguin house, but we didn't make it before 5 so I had to be happy with a statue of a penguin.
We then walked down from the top of the zoo back to the exit. I probably wouldn't have mosied as long at some things if I knew the zoo closed at 5 and it was nearing closing time. I had a lot of fun at the zoo even though we didn't get to see all of it. We had someone take this picture of us in front of the zoo after we got out. I didn't mention this before but it was raining pretty hard off and on at the zoo so that is why we are looking a little soggy in some of the pictures.
After the zoo we had some dinner at McDonalds (I will probably not be losing weight on this trip if I keep eating McDonalds) and then we went on the Maokong Gondola. Jon wanted to go in the gondolas because he never went on them when he was here before so we did.

We had a good view from the gondolas because we were going up a mountain. This picture has Taipei 101 in the background (almost every time we see Taipei 101 now we say "another great place to view Taipei 101" because the audio guide we took there kept pointing out great locations to view Taipei 101 from).
It was kind of scary riding the gondola because it would have been a long way down if something broke and we fell. It didn't help to abate these fears that Lloyd had told us that a year or so ago some people died because there was a typhoon and some of the gondola cars broke off. Luckily I didn't feel too unsafe, but I did pick out the place that I did not want to fall the most. The trip up to the top of the gondola took about 45 minutes and when we got there we got off and had no idea what to do in Maokong. There were some hiking trails and there was a tea place, but it was a little late for hiking and the tea place didn't sound too great either so we wandered around for a few minutes and then got back on the gondola. When we rode down it was getting dark so we were able to see the view at night and that was pretty cool.

When we got to the bottom of the gondola we got off and saw signs pointing to the dancing waters, so we decided to check it out. It was 7 when we got off the gondola (I knew this because there was a clock thing that was playing some crazy music and had some dancing animals on it) and we sat by the fountains for about 15 minutes when we found out that the fountains do their little shows every hour on the half hour. We decide that we would wait and it was pretty cool. There was music and lights and dancing water- What more could you want? There were, I think, three songs that the waters danced to. I can't remember what the first one was but I think it was a classical piece and then the second one was The Swan and the last one was some asian one with singing. I took a video during the last song. This is my first video that i've posted to the blog so I hope it works.

I had a pretty smart moment while watching the fountains- Jon said that his favorite parts of the fountain were the ones that spun and I said that those reminded me of sprinklers and then I looked at the other parts of the fountain and said "actually a lot of them remind me of sprinklers." After the dancing waters we went back to Lloyd's and he took us to go get foot massages from blind/mostly blind people. This massage hurt like crazy. The part of the massage that felt the best was when it stopped. I was trying to relax because they told me it wouldn't hurt so bad if I relaxed, but it wasn't true it hurt just as bad. I guess there were a few parts that didn't hurt and felt pretty good but overall it was a pretty painful experience. We then came home and I watched Jon try to beat the game he had started playing that morning. I showered and got ready for bed and Jon still hadn't beaten it so I went to bed. This morning I had some crazy dreams that I was in the hunger games and all the other tributes were from my elementary school and the arena was at a playground/park. It was a very bizarre dream. I think that today we are going to some place that is supposed to be very beautiful and has a lake with paddle boats should be exciting.

Day 7- Taipei 101

2010-05-12T08:38:00.000-07:00

This morning we slept in then took the train over to some place that I can't remember the name of and we walked around the shops and bought a few things. Jon has made sure that our food choices have been more American since the other day, so for lunch we stopped by starbucks and got a roast beef and cheese croissant. We saw a movie theater and Jon has wanted to see Iron Man 2, so we looked at the movie times then walked around more shops to kill time until the movie started. It was a pretty good movie- lots of action and fighting type stuff, but it was a great excuse to sit down for a while and do nothing. After the movie we took the train over to Taipei 101. Taipei 101 was the tallest building in the world for a little bit, until another taller building was built. It is called 101 because it has 101 floors. They still do have the world's fastest and most high tech elevators though. The elevators were pretty impressive and the building was cool too. Just kidding.

The building was cool because it was very clear weather today and we could see a whole bunch of stuff in all directions from the top.

Besides having some cool elevator technology they had this really big heavy ball thing that helps absorb the wind and any earthquake shaking so the building doesn't feel like it is swaying in the wind. I remember watching some thing on tall building in one of my science classes (probably in junior high) and they talked about these things, but I had forgotten all about that until I saw this one today. It was pretty crazy and big and expensive according to the free audio guide we got.
Our ticket to go up 101 included the observatory floor 89 which had the audio guide and windows that could look out in all directions, floor 88 which was another place you could see the big ball thing, and floor 91 which was where you could go outside and look off the building and feel the wind blowing.

After checking out the view from the top we went back down the fancy elevators with their pressurized cabins and speeds of 1010 meters per minute. We then had dinner in the bottom of 101 at the Subway (this Subway wasn't really any different than the ones in the US no corn or anything like that).

It was good and my tummy is feeling good. After that we went back to Lloyd's and went to play badminton with him and some friends. I'm really bad at badminton, but Jon is pretty good and I don't give up easily. Luckily we were just messing around and weren't playing for real or keeping score or anything.

After this we scootered over to a night market to grab some food for some people. This was the first time since Monday that I have been in a place like that and it wasn't too bad. I caught a whiff of stinky tofu but it was pretty far off and I was able to hold my breath so I didn't hurl instantly. Its been a pretty good day, but I realized this morning that my bum is sore from the bike seat yesterday. I can't believe I have been here for a week and I'm still going to be here for about 6 more days.

Day 6- Danshui

2010-05-11T06:55:00.000-07:00

This morning when we left we stopped by the Mos burger for breakfast. I was a little worried about eating because I didn't know how my stomach would deal with having food in it again, but it was ok. At Mos burger I got a breakfast sandwich that was similar to an egg and cheese mcmuffin except that it had lettuce on it. It was pretty good but I wasn't feeling quite hungry enough to finish it so I made Jon eat the rest of it. After that we got on the train to go all the way up to Danshui. Danshui is the northern-most stop on the train and where Lloyd lives is one of the farthest south so it was a train ride of almost an hour to get up there. I took a picture of the trains. They remind me a lot of the tube in London. We have little cards that we beep to get through a little gate and then we go down to the train and we beep again when we leave the train station. The train wasn't too full when we left this morning. It hasn't been too busy most of the time when we have been riding it. There was one day when we were going home at around the time lots of people were getting off work so there were lots of people standing, but we weren't really packed in too bad.

When we got to Danshui we walked around some of the shops and bought some stuff and then we went to McDonald's for lunch. I think Jon wanted me to have some food that wasn't like the stuff I had thrown up the day before. I was pretty grateful for this and I had chicken nuggets and fries and Jon had a Big Mac. The next thing we did was my favorite thing we did all day- We rented a tandem bike for two hours and rode around on some boardwalks and bike trails next to the ocean (they call it river, but really it is just like an inlet because hardly anything is flowing into it and going to the ocean).

We rode the bike down to this bridge and then back up. Luckily there were only a few hills that we had to go up. I had never ridden a tandem bike before so that was really fun and I got to sit in the back and relax while Jon did most of the work.

After our bike ride of approximately 20 km we got some tall ice cream. It wasn't amazingly tasty but it was pretty good and it was cold.

We then took a boat ride up to the fisherman's warf. This is us on the boat ride up there.

The main reason we went up to the fisherman's warf is because there is this cool bridge that is called lovers bridge so we took a few pictures. I think Jon felt really awkward taking a picture while kissing because Taiwanese people rarely kiss in public.

We got some giant smashed out breaded chicken things for dinner. They were pretty good and I didn't feel bad that I wasn't able to finish the whole thing because no one was watching me eat it. Also because we didn't eat all of it we tossed a few little pieces of chicken to a little dog that came up to us while we were eating. (In this picture you can seen some of the cool new earrings that I got earlier today)

Here is another shot of us by the bridge when it was lit up. You can't really tell in this picture but the lights on the tall part of the bridge were mostly green and there were also some pinkish ones.

After we were done up at the bridge we got back on the boat and went back down to the main part of the city. We walked around a few more shops and looked to see if this place that Jon went on his mission that had amazing mango ice things was still open because we walked by the one in Taipei and it was closed. Sadly this one was gone too, so I will probably not get to have one of those. We got back on the train and rode the train back to Lloyd's. We decided to stop and get a mango bingsha because we didn't get to have the other mango thing. Bingshas are kind of like a slushy/icy drink and they are pretty tasty. We are now home hanging out in our room and waiting for Lloyd to get home so we can show him the stuff we bought today. Oh that reminds me of an interesting Taiwan fact: They don't have the same work-type laws that we have in the US so they can ask you to work crazy hours and not pay you overtime and if you won't work the crazy hours then they will probably just fire you. That is why it is almost 11 pm and Lloyd isn't back from work yet.

Day 5- Reader Discretion is advised

2010-05-10T16:51:00.000-07:00

Monday morning we got up and had some breakfast. I had a sandwich thing that was pretty much like a spicy chicken sandwich with a fried egg on it. Breakfast foods here are so weird to me. After breakfast we drove with Lloyd (he was able to get the day off) and the twins to Neihu where his brother lives now. We met Lloyd's brother, his wife, and the other two kids at a breakfast place and waited while they finished eating. After that we drove to the hotel that his brother had stayed at the previous night and met one of the uncles and aunts and waited while his brother packed up their stuff. When we left we had all of the boys with us, and the car was very full. Lloyd has a toyota sedan and we had Lloyd, me, Jon, the twins, and another cousin in the car. Jon got to be the lucky one in the back seat with the three boys. We drove up to the northern coast of Taiwan to what used to be a gold mining city and walked around the shops and bought a few things. When I talked to my mom she told me to take lots of pictures so I held the camera today and took some pictures. Here were some of the places we went in the gold mining city.

I just had to put this one first. I have had to use a couple toilets like this- luckily I'm really good a squatting.

This is me and the boys and Lloyd at lunch. You can tell a lot about the kids personalities from this picture- the older one next to me was more mature and well behaved, but you can tell that the twins are a bit less so because the one couldn't even pay attention long enough to take a picture and then the other one is laying all over Lloyd and just being crazy. It made for an interesting day having them along with us.

Look at my amazing chopstick skills. This is probably how i look before I eat most things- slightly worried. Luckily this was pretty good it was a ball of pork from my soup.

Now this place was just freaky. As we were walking along we came to this little mask museum. All the walls in three rooms were just covered with freaky-looking masks. We are trying to make faces like the two masks in between us.

Next to the freaky mask place there was a little museum type place that had a bunch of old stuff. They also had a place where you could put on clothes and take a picture, so we did.

We didn't just take one picture we took two.

We took this picture in the same museum type place and that dragon smelled old and gross. That reminds me- I have not yet mentioned how very fragrant Taiwan is. I don't know if it is just because of the humidity that it makes smells more powerful or what, but smells seem more intense and they are constantly changing. As you are walking down the street you will smell good smelling food, sewage, flowers, and nasty smelling food all in about 30 seconds.

This is the view out to the ocean from the city we were in. It was up on the mountain so there were a lot of stairs. This was taken out the window of a place where we ate some blocks of white and orange flavorless goo with red beans and green beans and ice in it. I hope my description accurately captured the weird and sliminess of it, but despite its appearance and texture it wasn't too bad.

After we had walked around the shops and weird museum type place we drove to the gold mining museum. Sadly the museum is closed on Mondays and we didn't know this. We still walked around and took pictures.

Because the museums were closed we hiked up the mountain. It was pretty steep and the fatter twin was practically yelling sounds of exhaustion the whole way up. Lloyd shut him up for a few minutes by saying that I wasn't having any problems climbing and I was a girl.

We stopped at this place because we were tired of climbing and we could feel like we accomplished something because we made it somewhere rather than just turning around in the middle of the stairs.

This is us in front of a big rock thing at the top of our climb before we started back down. Jon and I are looking a bit tired.

After we hiked down we got back in the car and the little boys were so worn out from hiking that they fell asleep in the car. A few minutes peace. Oh that reminds me on the way from Neihu at the beginning of the day Jon was saying he didn't think that they could be quiet for 5 minutes; they tried but even in their being quiet they weren't very quiet. It was funny because he pointed out to them that I hadn't said anything for probably 20 minutes, which was true. I had just been looking out the windows and listening to them ramble away in Chinese that I didn't understand. From the gold mining city we drove back to the Taipei area and stopped at a night market to grab some food. Jon got some fried chicken, so I ate some of that, and Lloyd got a bunch of stuff and had me try some of it too. We then stopped and got some ice cream and walked through some more of the market. One of the most foul smelling things in Taiwan is what they call stinky tofu. They know it is stinky, it is called stinky tofu, but they still eat it and they think it is good. I don't understand how something that smells so nasty could possibly taste good. The reason I thought of stinky tofu was because two of the boys got some to eat. Gross. We walked back to the car and drove back to Lloyd's house. We sat in the living room for a little bit with his family and then went to our room because the one family member that Jon really doesn't like because she is really loud and really rude got here. We were laying on floor and I started feeling kind of queasy, so I decided to try to sleep and see if that would help. I fell asleep for a bit until Lloyd came in and started talking to Jon. ***WARNING*** READERS WITH WEAK STOMACHS SHOULD NOT CONTINUE. I realized that this was not just going to go away on its own so I quickly left the room and headed for the bathroom. Lucky for me, and everyone else, it was unoccupied. I sat on the toilet because I wasn't sure what end was going to be the lucky exit of whatever was making me feel so gross. I was just thinking about how I know how to say exit in chinese and the second part of the word means mouth and it just so happens that everything in my stomach made an exit through my mouth. As I was sitting on the toilet shaking (pre-vomiting) I prayed that I could just get this over with and then the thought of stinky tofu entered my mind and everything was quickly removed from my stomach into the garbage can. Besides the nasty taste in my mouth, the burning in my nose, and the tears streaming down my face I felt much better after throwing up. I tried to wash my mouth out a little in the sink without drinking any of the water (I didn't want to get a parasite and have this joy continue). I then went to our room and told Jon what had happened and he asked me if I had told anyone... Of course I didn't tell any one how was I going to do that sign language? He was very sweet and went and took care of it for me. I brushed my teeth and went to bed because I didn't feel too great. Now I feel much better. We'll see how I feel after breakfast. While I was sleeping Lloyd helped Jon plan out the rest of our week, so today we will be going to Danshui and doing stuff up there. I'll try to take lots of pictures.

Day 4- Mother's Day

2010-05-09T05:55:00.000-07:00

Happy mother's day again to my mom and Jon's mom. We called both of them earlier today (which was about 10:30 Saturday night for them) and wished them a happy mothers day. This morning we went to church with Lloyd and Relief Society and Priesthood was first. Luckily there was a nice girl who had gone to BYU Hawaii that translated for me so I was able to understand the lesson. After that we had sunday school and then sacrament meeting and Jon translated for me for those. I was glad I had people helping me out so that I could still catch what was being taught. During sacrament meeting the stake president released the second counsellor in the Bishopric and then they called Lloyd as the new second counsellor! That was pretty cool and very surprising. He is such a good guy; he has been a member for 3 years now and he has already been ward mission leader, Elders quorum president, and now he is in the Bishopric. We ended up bringing 3 of the kids to church with us (the others didn't wake up), and by the time sacrament meeting came the twins (they are 10) were pretty restless luckily when Lloyd went to sit on the stand the primary president came and sat where he had been sitting and kept them from going too crazy. At the beginning of the meeting they had Lloyd give his testimony and that was really cool because even though Jon got distracted listening and wasn't translating I could feel the spirit very strongly even though I couldn't understand what he was saying. After church we sat in while Lloyd got set apart and ordained a high priest. Then we walked home with the boys and this is when we called our moms. After that we went and talked with Lloyd's family a bit and shortly after we started talking to them Lloyd got back from his meetings. We then had lunch and after lunch Lloyd was going to take a nap, so I decided to nap too. While I was napping Jon played on his computer then we got up went to a fireside. Elder D. Todd Christofferson and his wife were here and they were giving a fireside for the single adults. Lloyd is a single adult and we figured we would like to hear an apostle speak and we would probably see people that Jon knew from his mission too. Sister Christofferson talked about how she decided that she should marry Brother Christofferson and then Brother Christofferson talked about having faith and not fearing things like getting married and raising children. He also talked about how this generation needs to bring more people to the gospel so there are enough righteous people to welcome the Savior when he comes again to the earth. It was a good talk. Also it was cool to see how they do the translating for things like that (they have the speaker give a sentence or so and then the translator will translate it and they go back and forth like that). When that was over we found quite a few people that Jon knew and talked to them. He had a lot of fun talking to people that he knew from the wards he served in. He then showed me around the church building and told me about how they have 2 sister missionaries that are assigned to the temple and church block- kind of like a mini temple square and they use that building like they would a visitors center. After that we came back home showered and talked to Lloyd family again. They seem to think it is really funny to try to talk to us in English when they are drunk, so they kept telling us how handsome we were. It must be hard for Lloyd not to have any family that are members of the church. I'm grateful for the good family and examples that we are surrounded by. Again Jon is already asleep (which is surprising because his family is really loud- they kind of remind me of our family in that way). Here are some picture from the wedding yesterday-

Ok not the most flattering picture of the two of us, but this is us at the wedding.

Yes, they had swan ice sculptures. This was at the end when they were taking them down, but they were pretty awesome.

Day 3- Cultural experience to the max

2010-05-08T09:01:00.000-07:00

Wow, so the wedding... where to start. So the marriage itself wasn't too different than a marriage in the US; the bride walked down the aisle with her dad and the dad handed off the daughter to the groom half way then some old guy married them. Here are the things that were different:

Lloyd has 2 younger brothers. I only thought he had the one younger brother that was getting married, but no he has two. We met the other brother before the wedding. Lloyd introduced us to a guy and said it was his brother and Jon thought he was just saying that because he will often call his cousins his brothers etc, but it was his actual brother that his mother had birthed. The parents gave their youngest son to his uncle to raise because they couldn't have kids. That was some crazy-biblical-like child trading stuff that I didn't know really happened. I did think that was pretty cool though and it kind of makes sense.
The bride's parents are Buddhist and the mother of the bride wanted to not have any meat at the meal because they don't eat meat. This in itself made for some interesting dishes and a never ending joke about the lack of meat by Lloyd's family (most of his family members are Taiwanese aborigines who really like eating meat). The meal was probably ten courses of different strange vegetable things. I ate almost everything, but none of it was that great. The thing I liked the best was the very last course it was a mango soup type thing with little tapioca balls and some grapefruit in it. It was fantastic. Sadly most of the other stuff was not so great. My second favorite was probably the lettuce wraps that had pine nuts in them. The other dishes were things like really bland soup with strange vegetables and sea plants in them, a wooden cup with rice and bean like things, and a variety of things that I had no idea what they were and tried to block from my memory because eating them was difficult.
Besides the jokes about the lack of meat- the facts that me and Jon weren't drinking, were mormon, and were American were the next favorite joke topics. Luckily I couldn't understand half of this, but Jon was very patient and very polite and filled me in on what they were saying. I think one of my favorites that Jon told me about was in the middle of dinner- at the beginning of dinner one of the uncles had made a joke about saying a prayer and then later in the middle of dinner one of the other uncles tried to make a similar joke but no one laughed because it made no sense to say a prayer in the middle of dinner. Luckily by the end of dinner the uncle that had been the rudest at first was so drunk that he was inviting us to his house and was now our best friend. I'm so glad that we don't drink. I was also glad that the way we sat at the table me and Jon were on one side of the table with Lloyd's younger cousins sitting on both sides of us and then the aunts and uncle's were across the table. I think this helped so we didn't feel obligated to talk to the adults as much, and I was much more comfortable sitting next to the kids that weren't drinking.
This wasn't really part of the wedding, but one of Lloyd's relatives had a little baby girl and they brought her around wearing a necklace made out of cookies. I watched as other family members made comments (I assume about how cute she was) and then break a cookie off the necklace and try to feed it to the baby. When they brought the baby to me I followed what I had seen broke off a cookie and tried to feed it to the baby and everyone thought it was great. Jon asked the kid sitting next to him why they were doing this and he told him that when a baby is one month old they feed it cookies. I'm not quite sure why they do that, but I tried to feed the baby cookies too.
In Taiwan rather than gifts all the guests just give the couple money. We saw some of the pile of money and it seemed like a ton. That might be because about 30 Taiwan dollars is one US dollar, but still it seemed like a lot.

I think those were the main things that I thought were pretty crazy about the wedding and the goings on of it. After the wedding we drove back to Lloyd's and his girlfriend ended up driving because Lloyd didn't get much sleep (besides the fact that we were out until 2 getting massages his brother got him up for some thing and he ended up only getting probably 2 hours of sleep). It was pretty funny having her drive because Lloyd and her were kind of fighting about her driving- it kind of reminded me of my parents :). When we got home we took a nap. We napped for a long time. We decided that we probably shouldn't be allowed to nap longer than 2 hours or past 7 pm. I guess here the people stay up pretty late, because when we got up from our nap at about 8:30 we went to a BBQ place for dinner. The part of Lloyd's family that had been sitting at our table at the wedding was there. We just could not seem to get away from that one uncle. The place was an all you can eat thing where you go grab chunks of meat from the buffet thing and then you grill them over the hot coals that are under a little grate in the middle of all the tables. They like a lot of fat on their meat here, and I found it easier to swallow bits of meat that i would have usually only eaten five percent of than to swallow slimy seaweed and some of the weird veggie dishes from the wedding. It was quite the contrast no meat for lunch and pretty much nothing but meat for dinner. My favorite part of both meals was probably the parts that involved fruit. They had some good watermelon and pineapple at the BBQ place that I ate a bunch of. We were sitting around one BBQ with the kids again and the parents were were sitting at another and the one uncle kept cooking us things and bringing them over. We kept eating to be polite until we were too full to eat anything else. It is crazy because we ended up taking all the kids home on the three scooters we drove there because the parents were going to go do Karaoke and of course drink some more. On the way to the BBQ me and Lloyd's girlfriend rode on one scooter and Lloyd and Jon rode on another and then his younger brother (the one that was raised by his uncle) drove another. On the way home me, Lloyd's girlfriend, and the only girl cousin were on one scooter. Jon, Lloyd, and the two twin boy cousins were on another scooter and two of his other cousins were on the one that Lloyd's younger brother had brought because he was going to stay out with the adults. Riding home on the scooters with all the kids was quite the cultural experience. Today was an interesting day. It will be nice to have a relaxing sunday to go to church- Oh, so we are bringing all the kids to church with us. I think they are curious about Lloyd's church and want to see what its like (I think Lloyd is probably one of their favorite cousins even though he is probably 10-15 years older than them). We have church in about 7 hours and Jon is already asleep so it is time for bed. I'll see if we can find some pictures from today, we didn't take many but other people did.

Day 2

2010-05-07T17:05:00.001-07:00

it is Saturday morning right now- all my other posts were written at night but last night we got home very late so I just went to sleep. Ok so yesterday we started off the day by going to the National palace museum. It was really cool. We got there just in time for the English tour, and if it wasn't for this tour the museum would not have been half as good. Our tour guide was a lady named Serena and she did a really good job showing us a bunch of different stuff from the different dynasties and telling us the stories that went a long with them. Apparently the Mona Lisa of the National palace museum is the Jade Cabbage. This jade cabbage was a cabbage made out of jade... who would have guessed. The reason it is so special is because it is made from the shiny jade that the people didn't really like much before and it uses the natural color changes in the stone to their advantage because the top leafy part of the cabbage is a more green jade and the base/stem part is a white jade. When she was showing us the cabbage she told us that this was the dowry of a girl who was married to the emperor. Her and her sister were both married to the emperor and the cabbage was the dowry of the least favorite of the two wives. The other wife and this emperor ended up being killed because the mother of the emperor didn't like how he was running things and the favorite wife was really supportive of him and his ideas of restructuring the government, or something like that. We also saw some really cool ivory sculptures. They were AMAZING! There was this one that was all these balls inside of other balls that could spin and move freely of one another. I don't really know how to describe it but it was really intricate and must have taken forever to make, and it was made out of one tusk. The tour ended up being about 2 hours but it was awesome and I would have had no idea that I was supposed to look at the jade cabbage or that all the characters written all over most of the pieces were added later by one of the emperors who really liked poetry and would have people carve a poem he had written about his favorite art works into them. After the museum we walked around the gift shop and then waited for the bus. We took the bus back to the train station and walked around there and found some food. We had some goutie (aka pot stickers) that were pretty tasty we had some regular ones and some spicy ones and I didn't really like the spicy ones too much. We then walked around down to a night market, but it was only about 2 so it wasn't open yet. We thought we might wait until it opened so we sat and people watched for a bit (we totally saw a couple break up or have a fight or something). After a while Jon called Lloyd and he said he wanted to take us to a different night market and to get massages. Jon and I decided to go home and take a nap so that we wouldn't be tired for the night market and the massages. When Lloyd got home from work we got up and went to the night market. He got us some dinner- some fried big round meat filled wanton-type things. They were pretty good, but I realized that eating makes me the most nervous because I'm trying to eat stuff that I have never eaten before and I'm trying to do it with chopsticks. I'm not too bad with chopsticks, but it is still nerve wracking. He also got us this egg thing with some pink sauce on top which I didn't think was very good. After that we walked around the night market and I bought some earrings and Jon got two pairs of shorts. I have no haggling skills in this language and Jon's are pretty bad so luckily we had Lloyd to help us talk the sales people down a bit. At this night market they have very famous chicken soup that Lloyd says makes girls very healthy. I wasn't hungry but he got some and let me try. I got some of the broth and it was super hot and burned my mouth; it was very bitter and oily and made me wonder if this was what drinking motor oil would be like. Don't worry I was very polite and told him it was good and I told him I felt very healthy. He did say that they think bitter things are good for you, so it wasn't just me that thought the soup was bitter. After the night market we came back to his house and talked to his family a bit ( and by talked to his family I mean Jon and Lloyd talked to his family and I smiled and nodded). We then moved our stuff out of the room we had been staying in to a different room because some of the family was going to be sleeping in that room. After that it was about midnight and Lloyd didn't think this was too late for 2 hour massages, so we walked across the street to the massage place. We started out the massages by getting our feet washed and scrubbed with slices of limes. I think this was one of my favorite parts. It smelled good and the water was warm and it was just overall awesomeness. After that we went and changed into some loose fitting pajama-type clothes. This whole time I have pretty much no idea what is going on because I don't speak Chinese. We all went into a room with three mats on the floor so we each had our own mat and lady that would be doing the massage. I was very glad that we would all be right next to each other and I would have some one to translate if needed. The massage was pretty awesome there were some parts of it that hurt but the lady probably spent about an hour massaging my legs and feet and this felt really nice. I realized that my right ankle is still not as flexible as the other from the time that I sprained it really bad over a year and a half ago. After my legs she massaged my arms and then I rolled over and she massaged my back and neck. The neck part hurt way bad because I'm always really sore in my neck. After two hours we were done and I was ready to sleep, not only because it was 2 in the morning but because I had just been massaged like crazy and was pretty much jello now. We walked over the the Family mart (this is a little convenience store kind of like the one that would be at a gas station in the US) because Lloyd wanted to take some money out of the ATM so we took some out too. After this we walked home and I went straight to sleep. This morning I woke up and showered and Jon says that Lloyd's family probably thinks I'm really weird because they people here always shower at night and never shower in the morning. I don't mind being a weird American because today my hair has looked the best it has since I got here because I didn't sleep on it when it was wet. We are about to leave for Lloyd's brothers wedding. I'll make sure to write about what it was like.

Day 1

2010-05-06T05:50:00.000-07:00

I guess yesterday could have been considered day 1, but I'm going to call today day 1 because this was the first day we actually did stuff in Taiwan. Today we did most of the things that Jonathan had planned for us yesterday night. I got up a little before 10 this morning (I woke up around 6 the first time but didn't want to get up that early). Lloyd's mom (aka "Jomama"-she said we could call her this the other night. It made me think "I'm not jyo mama" but hey I remembered it right? I'm guessing that she told us to call her that because their last name is pronounced jo and then mama because she is the mom... I don't know but that is what I pieced together in my head. Ok back to what I was saying before) had made breakfast for us. She made some meat filled bread thins. I don't really know how to explain that better but the bread stuff on the outside was soft and the meat stuff on the inside was tasty. After breakfast we walked to the train and went to a museum thing. It was the memorial hall for the guy who was the father of Taiwan. I discovered pretty quickly that Taiwanese people like to take pictures where it looks like they are holding things in their hands so I had Jon take a picture of me holding the memorial building.

This is us infront of the statue of Chaing Kia Shek ( I had to ask Jon how to spell that because I couldn't remember) this is what is inside the upper part of the building I am holding above.

This is outside on one of the terraced levels of the memorial hall looking out over the courtyard with the national theater buildings in the background.

After walking around the memorial hall building we checked out the grounds we sat by a pond and saw some koi, turtles, and birds. Then Lloyd called Jon and invited us to go to lunch with him. We met him over by the temple (this took us a little longer than expected because we went down the wrong street the first time) and then went to a famous xiao lung bao place. It was really good but on my first xioa lung bao I got broth stuff all over my pants. Oops. After that I was nervous about spilling on myself and looking like and idiot so I ate very slowly. At lunch we met Lloyd's new girlfriend, she was nice and she helped serve me some chicken soup with a piece of chicken that wasn't the foot. After lunch we went to the temple. This was the first time that I had to wear headphones because it wasn't in English. That was kind of interesting. They ended up asking us to do some sealings after the session so that took a while longer. After the temple we went over and talked to one of Jon's friends that works doing translation stuff for the church in the building next to the temple (her picture is in the priesthood/relief society manual she is the asian one reading her scriptures). After the temple our original plan was to go to Taipei 101, a super tall building, but because of the fog and rain that we had today we decided not to because we wouldn't be able to see anything. Instead we took the train to a night market and walked around a little and got some smoothie-type drinks for dinner (neither of us was very hungry because we had such a big lunch). After walking around there we got back on the train and got off at the wrong stop and when we didn't recognize anything or know how to get to Lloyd's house so we called him. This is when we found out we were at the wrong stop. When we got off at the correct stop we knew right where to go. Now we are here and we are tired from walking around all day. Jomama cut us up some melon tonight so we ate that and it was yummy. It was a white melon and the taste reminded me of honeydew. Jon is already asleep so I'm going to get some rest too.

We made it - a male perspective

2010-05-05T18:27:00.000-07:00

So, I'm here on the couch at the Zhou residence giving Andrea some extra time to sleep and I thought I would write what the experience was like for me. Pretty much all of the terminals were the same from when I left SLC to Taipei last time so while we were in airports I was enjoying thinking things like, 'that's the phone I used to call home from the airport' or 'that's where I sat while I waited for the flight'. Like Andrea said we did try to stay awake on the main flight from LAX to TPE, but I would say that I failed the most (probably why I'm awake now and she isn't) but I think it'll be okay, my body feels like it is morning now, and it is morning now. We'll see if I have enough energy to make it through the day. I must say that I got lucky in my meal pickings on the flight though, the only reason I picked beef over chicken is because I like beef more (turns out the beef was rather flavorful but the noodles weren't so I ate the beef first and then mixed the beef juice with the noodles to make it work) and the only reason I picked eggs was because it was the obvious choice over porridge. I forget how humid tropical islands are, it's kind of mind blowing actually. I will say that my skin is enjoying it though.

Our plans for the day are:

go to chang kai shek memorial hall

mainly because it's close to the Temple (spoiler alert!) and it'll give us something to do. Slash, it's really famous.

Go to the temple

We'll be going to the 2:00 session, it'll be fun to listen in Chinese again.

Taipei 101

We're going at night on purpose so that we can see the beautiful views of Taipei at night, we'll make sure to take lots of pictures.

Anyway, I've emptied my brain for now.

Taiwan... we made it

2010-05-05T08:59:00.000-07:00

After traveling for FOREVER we finally made it to Taiwan. We left Utah 5/4/10 at about 1 then arrived in LAX about an hour an a half later. We then waited around in the airport for three hours for our flight to Taipei to leave. After 13 hours on that plane we landed in Taiwan on 5/5/10 at about 10. I discovered that I might be pickier than I thought because the food on the airplane was super yucky. Not too long after we left the US we were served a dinner. I picked the chicken option; it wasn't too bad except for the fact that it didn't taste like anything so I didn't bother finishing it. Toward the end of the flight they brought around another meal (breakfast I guess because we left LA at 5 local time and then we got this meal 12 hours later). They had two options for "breakfast" scrambled eggs or porridge. Jon picked eggs so I figured I would try the other one. Bad idea. My meal came with tuna floss- this was my first clue that I might not like this. I didn't open the tuna floss because I associate flossing with getting things between my teeth and the idea of anything tuna flavored stuck between my teeth like that was not appetizing. I'm sure the tuna floss was probably more like tuna paste but still I didn't even want to go there. I ate the half a hard boiled egg and roll that came with my breakfast and then decided I would take a peek at what was under the tin foil that the flight attendant had called porridge. I peeled back a corner of the foil and knew I would not be eating most of this. I bravely plunged my green plastic spoon into the white goo that was sprinkled with green onions and something that might have been meat. I scooped up a little bit without any mysterious things on top of it and took a small bite. This tasted like fish and blandness. I tried to take another bite but I couldn't force myself to down the whole spoonful. After this I decided that I'm just going to order whatever Jon orders from here on out because rather than tuna paste his eggs came with strawberry yogurt and little apple pastry. Ok now that I got the whole food part out of the way- while on the flight I decided it would be better if I tried to stay up rather than sleep because we would be arriving at night and then I could get quickly adjusted to the new time zone. To keep myself awake I watched a few movies some were good some were stupid. I watched a french film called Le Petite Nicholas, it was about a little French boy and it was pretty cute and funny. Besides watching movies I knitted a hat and I took a nap. I didn't sleep much on the plane so I'm pretty tired now. After we went through customs and got all our luggage and everything Jon's friend Lloyd met us outside. We walked to his car in the humid warmth and I was getting really warm in my long sleeve shirt and jacket that I had left Utah in. Lloyd drove us to his house and we met his family. He is the only one that speaks English and I'm the only one that doesn't speak Chinese. I going to have to try to get used to not knowing anything that anyone is talking about. I can kind of tell when people are talking about me and I can kind of figure out the topic of conversation from Jon because of his attitude when he talks about things. That probably doesn't make sense, but its true. Lloyd's family is really polite and very sweet to let us stay with them. I took a shower before I started writing this and I realized that I probably won't feel dry the whole time I'm here. Putting on clothes when you still feel wet is not my favorite thing ever, but I will survive. I'm super excited for all the things we are going to do and see here. I don't think it has fully sunk in that I'm in Taiwan, maybe it will when I'm more awake. Here are some picture we took on the plane. Travel pictures are always so flattering.

This is when I finished my hat. The lights were off in the airplane so this is the best we could do with the little individual lights. (I think I look like one of Santa's elves)

Did I mention that I'm bad at this blog thing?

2010-04-26T17:17:00.000-07:00

It has been forever since I last did anything on this blog, but I'm changing that right now (this ones for you Karen because you are probably the only person who checks our blog ever). Lots has happened over the past few months but I'm just going to hit some highlights because I couldn't possibly remember everything that has been going on.

Halloween Costumes

Last October we were furiously sewing for weeks to complete our Classic Batman and Robin Halloween costumes. Luckily we finished before Halloween. We even won best couples costume at our friend's Halloween party. My cousin Ashley ( ashleyandkarl.blogspot.com) took some pictures of us in our costumes.

Christmas

This Christmas was our first Christmas as a married couple. We got our first tree and put up some decorations. It was lots of fun.

1st Anniversary

January 2, 2010 was our first anniversary. We decided to try out the Anniversary Inn in Salt Lake City. It was pretty cool because the room we stayed in looked like a train, the free cheesecake was yummy, and the wallpaper in the bathroom was fuzzy. I thought the fuzzy wallpaper was super cool so we took some pictures in front of it.

New Apartment

We had been casually looking at apartments for a while because we wanted something a little bit bigger, but we didn't want to pay too much more than we were currently paying. We saw a little house advertised on ksl.com with two apartments in it that were both for rent. We called the manager and Jon went over to see the apartment and I came down after work to look at it too. The place was a little old and ghetto but we both felt pretty good about it. We ended up signing a lease and moving in to the new place about two weeks after we saw it for the first time in the middle of February. Moving was pretty stressful and I had a melt down the first day we started moving things in because we did our check-in sheet and had to scrutinize every crack and hole and chip in the paint. It was very disheartening. Luckily we were able to get the carpets and the apartment professionally cleaned (although neither was done very well). We also found out that the tub leaked and had to have a plumber come and fix that as well. Stress. Stress. Stress. We asked the Landlord if we could paint and he said that we could as long as we did a good job. We went to The Home Depot with Jonathan's parents and picked out paint and got to work. It has been crazy because since March we have been not quite settled because I want to get things all painted and nice before I unpack everything so I don't have to move everything I have unpacked to paint. The first room we finished was the front room, then the smaller bedroom, then the kitchen, then the hall, and we are currently painting the bedroom. Once we finish painting there we will just have the bathroom left. I'll be honest there is still quite a bit of touching up to do in some of those rooms but the majority of the painting has been done now. Once we finish the bedroom I'm going to try to unpack and get more settled because currently almost all of our stuff is still in boxes or in a pile in the back bedroom.

Here are some pictures from when we first moved in and after we started painting.

I'm pretty sure this was blood.

Muse Concert

One of our Christmas gifts to each other was tickets to the Muse concert April 5, 2010. All my siblings were there and we were right at the front of GA on the left side; we had a great view and the show was really good.

Skydiving

About a week or two before the Muse concert my brother Mike called Jon and asked if he wanted to go skydiving. Jon quickly replied "No" so my brother asked if I would want to go. After a few seconds of thinking I said "Yes!" I figured that I wanted to go skydiving at some point in my life, so why not now when my brother is already going? I was kind of nervous but I didn't really think about it much until the day before. I told my friends at work that I was going to go skydiving the next day and some were excited, some were jealous, and some just thought I was crazy. On Saturday April 10th Jon, Mike, and I drove up to Erda Utah where we watched a short video about skydiving. The video talked about the dangers involved in skydiving and had some training on what we were supposed to do to. After watching the video they gave us some forms to sign saying that we were not going to sue, that we didn't have any medical conditions that would make skydiving more dangerous, and a bunch of other things that I'm pretty sure I was the only person in our group to read. While signing my life away my hands were literally shaking because I was nervous and it was cold and windy. After signing my papers I met my instructor Sam (a.k.a.the guy guy who I would be strapped to as I jumped out of a plane and who would probably determine whether I lived or died). After meeting him I was surprisingly calm (despite the fact that if for some reason the parachute and the back up parachute didn't work he would have completely crushed me flat because he was at least two times my size if not more). I got my suit and harness on, Jon took a picture of me, my brother and Joel(my brother's roommate) and then we walked out on to the runway to meet our plane.

As we were walking out a group of people was landing on the other side of the runway. We watched as they circled down and landed. We saw one guy come in to land pretty far away and he turned right as he was hitting the ground (not the best idea if you want to land nicely) we watched him as his chute deflated and fell to the ground but he didn't get up. He was pretty far away but we could tell that he hadn't gotten up. We were talking to the man standing on the runway with a walkie-talkie (the Tooele airports version of Air traffic control) and as our plane approached he told us to get on quick so he could go check on the person who crashed on landing and still hadn't gotten up. You might think that this would terrify me as I was about to get on the plan that I would be jumping out of, but I was surprisingly calm.

We got on the plane and took off. In the plane we had a girl and a boy who were jumping single (I think the girl was the instructor and the boy was doing his first solo jump), Me, Mike and Joel and all of our tandem instructors. As we were ascending Sam hooked us together at the shoulders and the waist and we practiced how we were going to count to jump out. When we made it to 13 thousand feet the girl instructor opened the door and her and the guy jumped out. Then it was my turn. I wanted to go first because I was worried the longer I stayed in the plane and the more people I saw jump out the more freaked out I would be. I didn't even have time to think I just walked over to the door and stood with my toes over the edge and my hands gripping my harness at my armpits in the "chicken wing" position ( I learned this from the instructional video). Sam counted one we leaned forward. He counted two we leaned back. He counted three and I jumped belly button first (as I was told in the video) out of an airplane. Watching the people jump out before me and then jumping out myself was a weird sensation. I saw the two people go by themselves before me and it just looked like they jumped backwards because the plane was moving but in my mind the plane was stationary, it felt stationary. As we jumped out we did a flip and a couple spin-things, but I never felt the sensation of my stomach dropping. I guess if you are falling at 110 miles per hour you don't really have that. After jumping I tried to remember to breathe like they told me in the video: through my teeth, so the rushing air didn't jam in my mouth like trying to drink water from a fire hose. When we were steady in our falling my instructor grabbed my hands and moved them from my "chicken wing" position to the "mental floss" position. Now "mental floss" was a pretty stupid way to describe where my hands were, but in the trusty instructional video they told us to think like we had a piece of floss connected from one thumb to another and the floss was going in one ear and out the other flossing our brain. Stupid. Moving my hands was a cue for me to make sure I was also in the "banana" position, this meant I was supposed to bend my back and knees so that I was curved like a banana as I was falling. We were in free-fall for about 60 seconds. I remember my eyes watering and my face starting to tingle as the cold air rushed past me. It was at this point that I realized I had actually jumped out of a plane and I was loving it. After falling for about a minute Sam pulled the chute and I was uncomfortably jerked from exhilaration to relief. When the everything with the parachute was good for us to descend my instructor loosed a few of my straps so I could sit in my harness more comfortably as we floated down.

As we were floating down he gave me the handles and taught me how to do a spiral by pulling down on one side of the chute and then letting that up while pulling down on the other and holding it down as you spiraled down. It was pretty fun. On the way down we also practiced how we were going to land. I saw Jon as we got closer to the ground and called his name and waved at him.

We then slid in for a nice soft landing right on our bums.

Jon borrowed his sister Jennifer's camera and took some pictures of us. Thanks again Jennifer I'm glad you survived without your camera while we had it.

Garden

Toward the middle of March I decided that I really wanted to plant a garden so we researched what plants can survive being planted that early and went over to the local IFA to get us some seeds. After getting our seeds and a few little tools we came home to prepare our garden plot. We cleared off the kitty litter buckets and other random stuff from a little strip of dirt on the south side of the house by the driveway. Then we turned the dirt and tried to get some of the big rocks out of the ground and then we planted some of our seed. We planted two typed of peas, lettuce, spinach, and carrots. The first phase of the garden that we planted that first night is starting to grow. We have little plants of everything we planted. I planted a second wave of these same vegetable so that we hopefully can have a more spread out harvest. I can't wait to have fresh veggies from my garden. I have never planted lettuce or spinach before so I hope they do well and don't get all eaten by bugs or anything.

Taiwan

We bought plane tickets to go to Taiwan for 2 weeks. We are leaving in about a week and I am so excited. We will be sure to take lots of pictures so I can blog about the trip in three months... hopefully I will not wait three months to write about it.

Congratulations you made it to the end of this post and are caught up on what we have been up to lately and not so lately. (I was a little worried that it might never end too).

I'm actually doing it!

2009-09-10T16:12:00.000-07:00

So I got a package in the mail today and I thought the situation was funny so I took pictures with the intent to blog about it, (note: I do this with a lot of stuff) so this time I decided I'd actually blog about it!

So here it is!!! looks pretty big right? I wonder what could be inside!

Still a little ambiguous as to what is in there, let's remove those packing bubbles.

...and these advertisements

What's that?

Oh! It's a box of paper clips!

So now you're probably wondering why I ordered a box of 100 paper clips from Staples, Huh? I was gonna say, "to make a long story short" but I don't want to! I'm gonna tell you the whole story! Staples has a printer (HP OfficeJet 8000) that's normally $149.99 but for a limited time only you can get an instant 75 dollars off. That brings your total to $74.99, you can buy $25 off $75 coupons online (e-junkies... google it) so I had to throw something cheap onto the order to bump me over the $75 line so I could apply the coupon and bring the order down to approximately $50. Next I send an old junky printer to HP and they send me a $50 check through their trade in program. What does that equal? A free printer! I love internet deals. I guess the printer was backordered for a day so it should be getting here tomorrow. I love how they decided to ship the paperclips a day early though.

Almost 3 months later

2009-08-30T19:23:00.000-07:00

Jon and I are not too great at consistently writing on this blog thing so I'll try to think of any thing new or exciting that has happened in the past 3 months.

Insurance
At the beginning of July I finally got insurance from my work. The two days where I have felt the most grown up in my life were: the day I got my insurance card and the day I sent in my credible coverage letter from when I was on my parents insurance to waive the pre-existing condition waiting period. Working at a doctors office and having to deal with insurance and people having no idea what their insurance does inspired me to read the entire book that was sent to me by select med all about my coverage and benefits etc. I didn't want to be an insurance idiot.

July 4th 5k
After getting a pamphlet in the mail about Provo's freedom festival I decided that I wanted to run the 5K on the 4th of July. I convinced Jon that he should run it with me so we went running occasionally, but not even close to everyday (probably like 2-3 times a week on a good week). July 4th came and we ran ourselves a 5K. Considering our lack of training our goal was to finish in under 30 minutes and we both reached this goal. I finished in a little under 30 and Jon finished about a minute before me. Our times were nothing amazing but I was proud of the fact that we ran the race and tried to go running during the week.

Bear Lake family reunion

Over the weekend of the 24th of July my mom's family had a family reunion up in Paris Idaho. It was a lot of fun. Some of the highlights were tubing, trowing me and Jon off the wave runner with my crazy driving, the rope swing into the freezing pond, lots of good food, an amazing game of sardines with some of my cousins, and being able to hang out with Jon because neither of us had to work.

Ware Family Camp-Out
A few weekends after the Bear Lake reunion we had a camp-out with the Ware clan in Jon's parents back yard. It was pretty legitimate camping because we had a fire, made smores, we slept in tents, I got bit by bugs, and I peed outside because I got locked out of the house in the middle of the night. We had a lot of fun making bug themed crafts that were intended for the kids and hanging out with the fam.

When we got home we hung all of our crafts on the fridge, so now if anyone walks into our kitchen they will probably think we have children.

Dress Making
I got some really cool vintage patterns when we went to an estate sale with Jon's mom at the beginning of the summer, so one of my goals this summer was to make a dress. Of the 4 patterns I got I decided on the Butterick pattern number 6141 a mid 1950s halter top dress with a jacket.

I worked on the dress off an on in the evenings and on Saturdays when Jon was at work. I was pretty discouraged for a while because I couldn't get it to fit quite the way I wanted it to. Eventually after much unpicking, resewing, and searching for a brooch or a button for the jacket I finished the dress and was able to wear it. Here are some picture of the finished product.

Update on the Quest for Coupon Mastery
Most recently in my coupon endeavors I discovered some sweet rebates and sales that went along with these rebates. In the next few weeks I should be getting about $60.00 back in rebate checks from Kellogs and Kraft for buying their products. The best part was I scoped out the sales and with the help of my friend at work I was able to get a screamin' deal on a bunch of groceries. For the next few months, or until the 15 boxes we bought run out, we will be getting paid to eat cereal.

Rebates make me happy.

New Shift
Last Monday Jon started his new 11 am to 5 pm shift at work so he is no longer working the sucky 4 pm to 10 pm shift. It has been fun to actually have a husband again and to get to see him for more than about 2 hours a day. We had FHE for the first time in months and he helped me go shopping and set up for the enrichment activity we had on Wednesday. It has been so so nice to have him around in the evenings.

Pell Grant
We were really excited when we found out that we qualified for a pell grant to pay for Jon's tuition and books this semester. Like really really excited because over the summer we paid three different tuition payments because Jon took classes at BYU spring term and at BYU and UVU for summer term. It was a busy summer for Jon. I'm really liking the whole grant thing because our savings account isn't going to be drained this semester like it usually is when its time to pay tuition.

Ice cream maker
This month we got the ice cream maker attachment for our kitchen-aid from Bed Bath and Beyond with some of the gift card we had been given as wedding presents. It is amazing. You just put the bowl in the freezer for about 15 hours before you want to make your ice cream (or you can just store it in the freezer and not have to plan ahead as much) then you just hook the bowl to your kitchen aid, attach the dasher attachment, throw your ice cream batter in the bowl, and let your kitchen-aid go to town on that stuff. No ice. No salt. No salty-watery mess and no potential for getting rock salt in your ice cream. It is amazing. I made some peach sorbet with some peaches from my parents tree and it was super easy and way delicious.

Hiking Timp
Jon and I hiked Mount Timpanogos about a year ago when we were dating from the Timpanooke side and had a fun time, so when Jon Davis invited us to hike it with him yesterday we didn't hesitate in saying yes. At 7:30 am yesterday morning we got to the packed Aspen Grove parking lot because we decided to hike from the other trail this year. This was probably not the best idea because that trail is harder, I'm probably in worse shape than I was a year ago, and I'm married to Jon so I don't need to try to impress him with my hiking skills.

I did pretty well all the way up to Emerald Lake where we stopped for a break and sat and enjoyed some little snacks and listened to a few song on Jon's ipod. From the lake we could see the summit above us, but getting there was not that wonderful.

A little bit after leaving the lake we saw a bunch of mountain goats. They were super cute and very close to us. After seeing the goats we hiked across loose rocks and snow for a while to make it to the saddle where the Timpanooke and Alpine Grove trails come together. At the saddle we ate our lunches of peanut butter and jelly on english muffins (we didn't have any bread- they were pretty good but a bit dry), craisins, and anything else we managed to scrounge together that morning. We hiked to the summit, and I was dying. Jon Davis and my husband were very patient with my slow pace and repeated breaks to ensure I didn't throw up because I was feeling pretty queasy during this part of the hike. We made it to the top and there were so many people up there. It was crazy how many people were on the trail yesterday we passed so many people hiking up and back.
This is us on the top of Timp; of the three pictures we took I thought this one looked the best and ironically it is the one that Jon was trying to be super cheesy in. Anyway, we rested at the top for a while and then started hiking back down. The hike back down was a killer on the joints. We ran out of water on the way down so when we finally made it to the bottom we rejoiced at the sight of the drinking fountain and the fact that Jon Davis' car was still on the road where we parked it because the parking lot was full. I was probably a bit of a baby on this hike, but in the end I was glad that we hiked it and that we hiked all the way to the top. I don't know if I will want to hike Timp from that trail again any time too soon.

I tried to find some pictures to make this whole thing less boring. This hasn't been everything that has gone on in the last 3 months or so, but it is a start. Maybe I'll try to get Jon to write about what has gone on for the past little bit.

I love my phone, and my double chin

2009-06-09T21:26:00.000-07:00

I love my phone, and my double chin

And this is a picture of all the loot

2009-06-09T21:25:00.000-07:00

And this is a picture of all the loot

The quest for the coupon master

2009-06-09T20:08:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I was inspired by this girl I work with who is super good with coupons. She would mention things like how she bought 10 packages of keebler cookies for $2.00; this idea intrigued me. I decided that I would learn the domestic art of the coupon. So far I have had successes and failures, moments of extreme frustration, and extreme joy. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the coupon world some frustrations can come when you miss a great sale or you don't use a great coupon and it expires (both of which have happened to me and I have been trying not to be too sad when these things happen). I have heard of the fabled woman who will get $200 worth of groceries for $13 or something crazy like this, but sadly I have not yet become this woman. In case you hadn't noticed the lure of this coupon thing to me was the fact that I could save oodles of money and because I am really cheap this spoke right to my soul. Going along with this cheap motif- I am too cheap to buy a newspaper so I can get the coupons, so my mother has graciously offered me her unused coupons (which is all of them and she gets two newspapers so this ends up being a pretty good amount of coupons).

This week I wasn't able to pick up the coupons on Sunday like I normally do, so today when I went over to cut my mom's hair I got the coupons. When I got back to my apartment I grabbed my computer to check and see if Albertson's was having any sweet deals because I had some coupons that double my manufacturers coupons. I checked my trusty coupon site (savvyshopperdeals.com my co-worker told me it was a great resource) and found the deals on things that I needed, wanted, or now wanted because they were pretty much free. I had my list all worked out, so I went to Albertson's and got my cereal, crackers, mini microwave pizza that Jon can take to work, and a bunch of pudding. I bought all of my stuff and I had saved quite a bit, but when I got to my car I was looking at my receipt and I hadn't been given the sale price on the pudding that I had bought 10 of. For a moment I debated whether it was worth it to go back in to the store and talk to the cashier because I would only be getting three dollars back, but dang it I wanted that three dollars. I went back in the store and reclaimed the three dollars that were rightfully mine and left the store feeling very pleased with myself. I ended up getting about $45 worth of groceries for about $11, but those extra three dollars are the ones I am the most proud of saving.

This too shall pass

2009-04-28T07:28:00.000-07:00

So it finally happened, due to complications with school I was forced to shave my facial growth. Instead of just shaving it all off at once I decided to have some fun with it.

Before

I was going for sabretooth/wolverine in this one

Here we have some handlebars with mutton chops, the next picture's better

I ended up liking this one so much that I wore it for the rest of the day

Here it is without the handles

Andrea said I looked like a pedophile at this stage, hence the pedosmile

Farewell mustache

It's surprising how naked I feel now

Last but not least I got a haircut to match

So there you have it! I enjoyed my time with a beard. Whenever I walked into a room people knew I meant business, there was never any visible evidence, but I could tell they feared me and my facial growth. Maybe one day I'll be able to grow it again, but that day is very very far away.

The ode to Artemisha

2009-04-25T21:29:00.000-07:00

Oh Artemisha, thou fish of all fish,
thy joy in death is my hearts dearest wish.
Your passing, though tragic, was expected by me
and now you are swimming in the vast porcelain sea.
Another fish could never replace you;
You will be missed and I say adieu.

Heeeeey!!!

2009-04-19T16:17:00.001-07:00

Yeah, so it's been a stinking long time since we posted anything on here and we've probably lost all of our followers. Shucks. So I'm gonna take a leaf from Jon Davis' book and I'm just gonna make a numbered list of things going on these days.

1. I'm now taking my motorcycle class, it's really really fun and I quite like it.

2. I start up class next Monday (not tomorrow) and I'm excited slash not excited.

3. Tonight we're going over to the King's place and we're gonna have dinner and knit. When they found out that I know how to knit they immediately decided that we would all get together and knit. It should be fun.

4. Andrea graduates this week and it's going to be awesome! Unfortunately I couldn't get Thursday off work, but I was able to get the last half of my Friday shift off so I'll be able to be there.

5. I got my media center working! To any of you who don't know what I'm talking about I took both my sisters old computers in an attempt to turn them into a computer that we can plug into the T.V. and digitize all our DVD's and watch our favorite TV shows over the internet, but... they turned out to be too old, and Jennifer told me that one day her computer made a popping noise and smoke came out of it... so I decided to go to the BYU computer surplus sale and I found the perfect little Dell, it was a steal of a deal especially since it already had the right video card I needed.

Well, it's actually time to run over to the King's (they live across the street) but I decided to be more diligent in posting on this blog, especially since I'm going to be working nights at NuSkin and I'm sure I'll have lots of no call time to blog.

Bye

Calendar

2009-02-18T20:33:00.000-08:00

I am shocked that Jon has not blogged about this yet because he blogged about us getting to level 12 on bejeweled. Yesterday Jon got a new application for his ipod and has been messing with it ever since. The application is one that will sync his google calendar with the calendar on his ipod. He has also set it up so that whenever he adds something to any of his calendars it also adds it to my google calendar. Last night he was up into the wee hours of the night putting all the immediate family members birthdays and setting them to repeat yearly, he also put our church schedule, stake conference, family parties, the phases of the moon, christian holidays, and a plethora of other things on the calendar (I tried putting an event on the calendar scheduling sleep but he disregarded this). We finally went to sleep after everything he could possibly think of was in the calendar. It is pretty funny because now every time there is something that we find out about he gets all excited and tells me to create an event on the calendar. Hopefully with this new calendar system we will be able to attend all of our various family, work, and social activities. It is surprising how it seems like you actually have stuff to do when you put everything into a calendar. Don't forget that Friday is Hoodie-Hoo day; I know I won't because it is on my calendar.

Get This...

2009-02-18T19:57:00.001-08:00

So Andrea and I have a slight addiction to playing Bejeweled (Bejeweled 2, for those of you that are Bejeweled lovers) on my iPod, and until just now our highest ranking was level 9... but guess what? we got to level 12! You should've seen it! We got through level 11 without using our two vortex balls... TWO!!! I'm still in shock and awe at our awesomeness. You should be too.

New Widget

2009-02-17T20:41:00.001-08:00

So I've been doing some searching through all of the amazing things Google has done and is doing and I'm amazed, don't ask me to go on or I'll talk your ear off. Currently I'm testing out the blogger widget on my dashboard. oh Google, I love you.

New Apartment

2009-02-11T18:07:00.000-08:00

We got our new apartment on the 30th of January and have been moving in for the past little bit. Things are starting to shape up and look somewhat like a livable space. We took a bunch of pictures so all can see our humble abode. Now lets take a tour...

As you walk in the front door and look to your left you see our lovely potted plant, our tv, some assorted boxes(these are not permanent), and our really long hall way.

Here is another view of our lovely living room. In this photo that lovely little item next to the tv is the heater for our apartment. The living room is usually quite toasty where the rest of the place can be quite frigid at times.

I know I tantalized you with seeing a small peek of the couch in that last picture so I thought I would reveal the whole thing. TA DA! Also you may notice our lovely front door seen in the right side of the photo. That is pretty much the whole living room so we will now take a walk down the hallway. If you take a look back at the first picture you will notice that there are three doorways on the right side of the hallway. What might be inside doorway #1 you ask?

A KITCHEN!!! Yes door #1 does indeed contain an entire kitchen complete with-

Table, chairs,

fridge, oven, stove, microwave, kitchenaid, drying rack for dishes, limited counter space, and sink. The kitchen is pretty good except for the minuscule amounts of counter space. Door # 2 in the hallway is just our closet so that isn't too exciting, but what is behind door # 3 you might ask.

The answer to your question would be our bedroom. This is our lovely bed with a random assortment of stuff on it.

Here is a nice action shot of Jon putting stuff away. You can also see that I am standing on our bedside table in the mirror on the wardrobe in an attempt to capture the full grandeur of our bedroom.

Now we have left the bedroom and are looking back down the hall at where we have been. But wait! There is another door here on my right(that cannot be seen in this picture). What could possibly be behind this door???

A BATHROOM?!?! I never would have guessed. Yes this is the humble commode in our humble abode. That sink is midget height- even I have to bend over to use it.

Here is another shot of the bathroom. I was attempting to get a shot of the shower, but you get the general idea.

Thus completes your tour of our new apartment. It is cute and little and perfect for us. So far everything has been pretty good(the shower didn't work the first morning Jon tried to use it, but it was fixed later that day so all is now well).

Andrea

Attempts at being domestic

2009-01-30T10:56:00.000-08:00

Last week because we still didn't have jobs or much to do we decided we would attempt to be domestic and make some bread. We started out by going over to my mom's house and grinding some wheat into flour. It was kind of messy but when we were done we had some lovely fresh whole wheat flour. The next day we busted out the family recipe book and used the a wheat bread recipe that I'm sure my mom got from some Relief Society thing about food storage and such. We got to use our lovely new Kitchenaid and it was fantastic! I love that thing.

Here is our first family photo: Jon, Me, and the Kitchenaid mixer. Aren't we so cute.

After using our kitchenaid to mix our dough we put it in the oven to cook.

We waited for about 30 minutes while it cooked and cleaned up a little, and then our bread was done.

It was super cute and very tasty.

I think that our attempts at being domestic were very successful. We might not look too attractive in those pictures because I'm pretty sure neither of us had showered or tried to get ready, but we found out that we are excellent bread makers.

2009-01-26T13:04:00.001-08:00

Dang... So last week on some wild moment of craziness I promised Andrea we could exercise on Monday. Now I'm like the rest of ya, I prefer to sit on the couch and eat potato chips but to be honest I really liked it! (gasp!) I think most of the reason I didn't used to like exercising was because I never really knew what to do. Being married to a personal trainer is REALLY nice :D

-Jon

2009-01-24T12:41:00.000-08:00

So guess what? I tried on Andrea's pants the other day. It was supposed to be a joke in that they made it to my calves or something - but they just kept on going! So I naturally took pictures... what a lucky wife I have.

-Jon

Marriage

2009-01-21T09:23:00.000-08:00

So yeah, we went and did it... we got married. Here's a picture for your enjoyment.

Who would've thought that this baby would be marrying that baby?

Anyway, I'm not to good at formatting these blog things. I know... me... not good at something? It's crazy to think. Well, since this blog is called Andreon, I think we'll have a little bit of input from the Andre of the whole mix up.

We've now been married about 19 days and the novelty of this whole marriage thing has worn off. We pretty much just live in the same place and coexist... kind of like when you live with a roommate you don't really like that much. Just kidding. So far married life has been pretty good. I am starting to go crazy though because I don't have a job and I need some structure in my life. Currently we have no income, but we don't really have too many expenses so it is working out ok. I have also discovered that since being married I have become a professional moocher. Last weekend we got 3 free dinners and a free lunch. People say that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but if you are eating your parents food then I would like to argue that there is.

Besides mooching food off of our parents- since being married we have been returning some gifts that we got doubles or triples of and we have gone to the temple once a week for the past 3 weeks. Speaking of returning gifts... With the money we got from returning some of our gifts we have purchased two very cool things: a Kitchenaid mixer and a Jack LaLanne Power Juicer. I haven't used the kitchenaid yet, but it is BLUE!!! And the best part about it is that I got it for cheaper than the white ones are regularly. I am very excited in case I hadn't made that clear yet. The juicer is also awesome. Already we have made a plethora of juices and are loving the juicer. The juices we have made so far are carrot, carrot orange, orange, and apple grape. We also bought a pinapple to juice later. Getting gifts has been one of the awesome things about getting married because all of our family members and parents friends have been very generous and given us a load of stuff. I'm working on my thank you cards right now and I was feeling like they were pretty cheesey, but then I had Jon write one and his was worse so I am feeling a lot better about my thank you card writing abilities.

The people to make sure the furnace is working good should be here soon so I think this will be all from me for now.

Andrea & Jon

2008-12-15T07:25:00.000-08:00

So the wedding is in 17 days! If it were 17 days from now right now we'd be in the temple right now! I'm getting so excited! We're hoping to get our announcements in the mail today or tomorrow and then frantically print the addresses on them and get them in the mail.

We find out today if Andrea has mono or not. Let's all cross our finger that it isn't, because I don't think we could hold out for multiple months.

In other news I'm going to the dentist today to get the little chip on my front tooth ground down. I've been meaning to do it for a long time... funny how you're more motivated to do things like that when you're almost off of your parents insurance.

I think I'm going to find a countdown little thinger to put on the blog so you can all see the time tick away

I'm also not grateful for people that add stress to an already stressful situation.

I don't know why...

2008-12-13T10:38:00.000-08:00

It just sucked me in I swear! I don't even know for what reason I would want a blog, but I figure, why not?