Cabinet Facelift

When we bought our house, the cabinets in the bathrooms were pretty hammered.  My mom started sanding the guest bathroom for us with a hand sander when she came up to help us work on the house one day.  She only got the faux drawer done before she said it was taking too long.  Only more than a year after moving into our house, I finally finished the prep work and got it all ready to be stained.  I did the 3 coats of gel stain and since I have been all-too-tired to do much of anything, I asked Zach to do the first coat of poly for me.  The next night I came home and he had the next coat done too.  The next day, I came home to pack for our trip and put the bathroom back together before we left, and he surprised me by putting all the doors, drawers and hardware back together for me.  I think the much needed facelift turned out great.  Now, to get the time and energy to do the master!!

Before photos:

 

After photos:

Cat's Outta the Bag

We finally decided to tell our families.  I would have liked to wait longer, but my boss had been mentioning her vacation to Hawaii was in the works for August.  Well, baby is due at the end of July so...I didn't have much of a choice but to tell her as soon as we were out of the clear for miscarriage and had a chance to tell our families.

I had my first ultrasound and prenatal visit on January 15.  After I scheduled it, I told Zach when it was and that he was welcome but not required to come.  "Oh, I'll be there. Don't you worry!" I think he would have gone by himself three weeks earlier if he could have.  He measured me at 12 weeks 4 days and my best guess was 12 weeks 2 days, so we have been pretty close in our thinking all along (which was great news because if I was LESS than what I predicted, I think I might have died knowing I had extra suffering to endure than I had originally thought).

Now, I've never been one of those women that gets overly excited about every little thing or was so incredibly excited to even BE pregnant, but, there's actually not a lot that compares to the excitement of seeing your baby (or rather alien-like ball of static-TV fuzz) on the screen and hearing the heartbeat.  It makes it all a little more real.  Our baby was crazy.  S/he was doing 360 spins, hiccupping (which looked like jumping jacks), kicking, punching, etc.  We got 5 pictures of our little alien static ball and learned all about being pregnant. 

 

I also picked out my "fertility God" in Dr. Anderson's office that will be little guardian angel during the pregnancy.  She is carved of dark, almost-black wood and has some spikey hair added.  She's pretty awesome.

We celebrated by eating at Dalton's, our favorite place in Payson, and having our waitress take our picture with our ultrasound images. 

I had put together more than half of the video we were using to tell our parents/families we were pregnant shortly after we found out.  I finished up the rest after we got our ultrasound and got it all loaded to YouTube.  We made arrangements to meet my parents in Price for dinner on Saturday night.  After chatting at the table for awhile, I pulled the video up on my phone and handed it to my parents.  Tayler was with us too and wanted to know what they were watching so I had her hand me her phone and I pulled it up for her too.  My parents caught on pretty quick, but Tayler kept staring at the screen really confused for quite awhile.  I think my family is pretty excited because it's the first grandbaby in the family.

We told Zach's family the following week. We went up for dinner and Brent and Jan were watching the grandkids so Brock and Arin also conveniently showed up to get their kids. We were able to show everyone except Ali and Alex that night.  We showed Grandma Beckstead too.  She was pretty grateful we took the time to come show her. 

I had a shirt for Zach made that said, "That's Sergeant Beckstead to you, Rugrat!" which I later realized was misspelled, but too late to change because it was already on its way.  Either I'm the only person that didn't realize it was misspelled and nobody said anything to be nice, or we are all just a family of idiots because nobody else pointed it out.  Oh well...I get an A for effort.  The back also had print (NOT misspelled) that said "Dad to be July 2014."  Then, I had my own shirt with a baby inside the womb holding on for dear life and it said, "If these people are my family, I'm not coming out!"  It was really cute and fitting for our family.  We were staying at Grams' house on Wednesday on our drive out to Krisina's wedding in San Diego so we waited to tell her in person.  I think pretty much all the family members know now.  Tyler and Tara are expecting a baby like a week or so after us, so Grams is getting two great grandbabies this summer.

Here's the video we used to tell our family and friends our good news!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbEOW8bWH-Q

Thanksgiving Gingerbread House

After our Thanksgiving dinner at Brent and Jan's, we had a family gingerbread house decorating contest.  It was couples/families, and Clayton and Grandma Beckstead.  The unbiased voters chose ours. Probably because we had a sweet Santa on the top.

I Peed on a Stick

No literally, I peed on a stick!  So now, it's time for a little story that parts of the recount may be considered a little TMI.  I've never had much of a "schedule" when it comes to cycle time.  It just comes and goes as it pleases, but it always comes eventually every month.  However, when I realized it had been around 26 days and still no cramping, I started to panic. I kept telling Zach that I better start tomorrow or we're in trouble.  Well, tomorrow (day 27 or so) came and went. Nothing. Monday, day 28. Nothing. I have not gone 28 days that I can ever remember in my history of "cycles".  So a stop at the store on my way home from work for a stick or two was now in order.  As soon as I got home, I ripped on of those babies open and "full stream ahead," I took the 50/50 true or false test.  If you've ever taken one of these things, you know that the window starts getting darker as the window fills with liquid.  I set it on the counter and watched intently as the window filled more and more with the liquid.  Now, the horizontal line is always there if it's a test that shows + or - (some are just one or two parallel lines).  But once the liquid reached the point where the vertical line would be, it was already appearing.  I thought for sure I was seeing things, so I waited the two minutes and left the room for a few minutes.  When I came back, it looked the same.  I won't go into details of the thoughts that ran through my head but I will say that shock was the biggest.  We have always been more than careful when it comes to pregnancy prevention.  But...since we had planned on starting to try in January, November was only 2 months earlier. I guess God knows best and decided it was time for us to start whether that's what our plan was or not.

Since this is our first baby/pregnancy, I wanted to tell Zach in a way other than, "Here babe catch! It's a pee stick!"  I meant to tell him the next evening after I had devised my plan, but I had forgotten to email myself the printables I had made on my work computer Tuesday evening. I didn't want to try and re-invent the wheel so I waited until Wednesday evening to tell him.  I had bought a stuffed horse (there were only about 3 options and none were what you'd really refer to as cute), a farmer-type onesie and printed my papers.  I set everything out on the kitchen counter for him to find when he came home. 

I had dinner going and was doing some laundry when he came home.  I was conveniently in our office (soon to be nursery now).  I heard him walk in through the back door, then around the corner into the kitchen where everything was sitting.  About 30 seconds went by and I finally started to hear the papers rustle.  About TEN seconds later he hollered at me asking where I was, but by the time he finished his sentence he had already found me.  He was lit up like a little kid at Christmas. "Are you serious?!" he asked. "No," I replied, "I'm joking. Why would I joke about something like that?"  Then he just gave me a great big hug and sappy pappy told me how much he loved me and how excited he was. Then proceeded to ask, how far along I was, when we would find out if it was a boy or girl, etc. It was really quite adorable.

So...this is the reason I have not had a blog post in months. I've had nothing else really too exciting to blog about! Now I'm going to post all the glorious details that have happened along the way and everyone (all two people) who read my blog can catch up on my pregnancy woes of endless misery. :)

Halloween Time! Whoop whoop!

I don't think it's any secret to anyone who knows me that Halloween is my absolute favorite holiday.  I'm not entirely sure the reasoning behind it, but I have always loved Halloween.  We just did the usual and went to Brent and Jan's for soup.  Ali and Alex showed up as a molar and the tooth fairy. Very fitting! Scarlett and Londyn ended up having the exact same costume without even knowing it until both babies showed up. Can you say, "Adorable!"?

The "molar" and the tooth fairy!

Yoga for Congo Women

Chantile invited me to come to a yoga event her sister was putting on. Her sister, Ann Richmond, is a yoga instructor and does these yoga presentations all over.  I had never "officially" met Chantile, but we talked nearly every day since our meeting through working for SOS.  I agreed to come just so I could meet her and dragged Shyanne along with me.  You wouldn't believe the stories of the women in countries like Congo.  It's sad to know we live such a privileged and oblivious life here in America and take it for granted on a daily basis. I can't imagine living somewhere that I was always in fear of my life, or where there are children being forced to be soldiers for these radical groups and where gang rapes happen every few minutes on average.  When we got there, we had to pick a wristband and we were able to see pictures of the women we were "representing" while we did our yoga practice.  My "sister" was named, Neema.  Some of the stories were hard to hear or even believe, but it's a great cause.  We were glad we attended and hope our menial donation can help the women in these struggling countries in some way or another.

Shyanne and me after the event with our "sisters" in Congo that we represented during the presentation

Shyanne, Chantile, Me, Ann Richmond and her little girl (Chantile's sister and the instructor and her niece who was obviously ready for bed)

First Anniversary

I had bought a Groupon quite a few months ago for our anniversary to go up to Park City and stay at a resort up there in Deer Valley.  About a month or two before we went, I found another Groupon for the Olympic Park up there, so I bought two tickets to that as well.  Our anniversary was on a Thursday, so that day I gave Zach his gifts in the morning and made him breakfast. We don't really eat breakfast because neither of us is really a big breakfast type. I usually eat a bowl of oatmeal when I get to work and he probably eats a donut or something. Who knows? But instead, we had scrambled eggs and toast and I surprised him with his gifts that morning.

When I wrapped his gifts, I put 8 Seconds quotes on the boxes and the main dialogue from the scene I used outside of the first box.  It's the scene where they go to the grocery store and Kelly wants Lane to put everything in the back of the truck because she had his anniversary gift in the back seat.  He finds the gift and starts unwrapping saying, "Well darlin', it ain't my birthday." So I put the lines leading up to him figuring it out on the outside, then the box with his new sweaters in it I put "world's champ...time you started dressing like it. You'll always be MY world's champ." I changed it from 5th in the world to world's champ and added stuff obviously, but the gist of the dialogue is the same.  Then I had given him a watch as well and an "unspeakable" in another box.  That box said another line from the movie. "I got something for me to wear...it's for later."  We had a good laugh about it.

I knew Zach wanted me to pick out some jewelry as my gift while we were in Park City so I wasn't expecting anything on the actual day of our anniversary.  About an hour or two into work, the front desk emailed me saying I had a delivery.  I immediately texted Zach..."What did you do? I just got an email from the front desk saying I have a delivery."  I went down to get it, and he had sent me a beautiful arrangement of various colored roses.  It made our office smell so good!  Apparently, he didn't even call his mom or sister to do it for him either. He did it all by himself. I was so proud of my little "man." He's growing up too fast.

We just did a quick dinner that night because Zach worked all day and a few hours that night. He didn't even shower before we went over to Dalton's.  Saturday was when the real celebration was. We had so much fun in Park City.  We started by going to the Olympic Park.  It had snowed the night before and the Alpine Slides were wet.  We thought it was a little dangerous, so we passed up on that altogether and decided we'll do those some other time.  We did the extreme zipline first.  When our doors opened, I went flying out...then suddenly Zach goes zooming by and got way ahead of me.  I'm sure he cheated somehow.

Riding the lift up

 

After the zipline, we walked over to the new "ride" called "The Drop Tower" which is a 65 foot platform you walk off of.  You zipline over the the platform and the only way down is to walk off the edge. Of course, you're strapped into a harness, and eventually the slack is out of the rope and it slows you down and put you on the ground, but still...it's a rush.  The guy said, "Who wants to go first?" So we looked at each other and I quickly nominated myself.  He was saying that the best way to do it is just when he opens the gate to just walk straight out to the platform and off. So that's what I did. I squealed as I walked off.  I thought the rope would be taut, but it wasn't. There was slack in it, so you had to walk off with nothing to slow you at first. You free fall for the first 30 or so feet before the fan kicks in and slows you down.  It was the shortest ride I've ever done in my life, but seriously such an adrenaline rush.

 

 

 

After that we did some shopping at the outlets and I got this awesome Nike hoodie at the Nike outlet.  Zach swears he'll never take me there again because if he would've let me, I would've bought half the store.  I love that place.

 

 

We went to lunch at this little cafe my family had eaten at while we were up there for my grandma and grandpa's 50th anniversary like two years before.  It was really good. 

 

I got a necklace and a LeVian ring at Kay.  I need to take a picture of the necklace, but the ring has white and chocolate diamonds with a black back set on the front.  Really really pretty!

 

 

 

After lunch and shopping, we checked into our room not really knowing what to expect. I got it 50% off so it really wasn't that bad...and the room turned out to be sooo nice. We loved it. Definitely would like to go back. It was called The Chateaux at Deer Valley.  We had a jetted tub and a shower separate from each other.  There was a towel warmer and a fireplace.  It was a really nice room.  It was beautiful up there too with all the leaves changing.

 

 

That night, we got massages a "Knead a Massage."  Unfortunately, they didn't have a couples room and we didn't find out until right before, but hey...you take what you can get for a massage in Park City for the price we paid.  The massages were actually really good and relaxing.

 

We then had dinner at this really cool place called "High West Distillery and Saloon."  It was an actual saloon that this guy bought and turned into a bar and grill.  He loves brewing his own bourbon, so he made a distillery there too and they do their own alcohol beverages there.  It was a really cool old building, but really loud because we were seated in the part that is more of  a bar scene.  Mark Eaton was there. He was standing behind me at one point and I could see Zach's eyes looking up really high so I slowly turned and my head just kept going up and up until I felt like my chin was clear in the air. He's like 7'5".  SOO tall.

 

We only stayed one night, but the next day was pretty cool too because we got tickets like a week before to go to conference for the afternoon session. It was my first time ever and Zach's first time in the new conference building to watch. He'd sung at conference when he was like 10 or so and that was in the old tabernacle.  The 5 block walk in heels literally set my feet on fire. It was supposed to be pretty chilly that weekend so I brought my boots that have a little heel on them. After 5 blocks...I had blisters and had to take my boots off to watch conference and never put them back on. I walked all the way back to the car in my socks.  OUCH!!

 

It was Cade's birthday that Sunday too so we went over there for his little birthday party.  I can't believe he is 5.  He was turning 3 a few months after Zach and I started dating!