Annual Pie Night Extravaganza

It wouldn't be Thanksgiving without Pie Night. We were so happy to enjoy our Pie Night here in Cali with new friends and make it feel a little more like the holidays (70 degrees just isn't helping me get in the mood). We loved having a house full of people, and felt that the night was a definite success. I always mean to take pictures during the actual event, and this night, I even made my way to my camera about 3 times, but it just never seems to be able to happen. But I do always remember after. We had LOADS of pie leftover:

Fortunately, there are lots of hungry men at Nate's work, and I'm hoping he'll come home today empty-handed. Tomorrow we will be spending Thanksgiving with some other family-less souls here in the desert. :) Nonetheless, we are excited.

Nate finished the infamous dining room table JUST IN TIME for pie night. It is Beautiful, with a capital B:

The pictures I took just can't even begin to do it justice, but it is a gorgeous cherry color and I absolutely love it. And I LOVE getting to eat dinner at a table! The couch is getting harder and harder to get off of these days.

This next picture is for my sister, who nearly cried she was laughing so hard when I told her I was attempting to hang curtains with an extension cord and duct tape. I was pretty pleased with the result, considering I used an extension cord and duct tape:

The curtain rod I ordered online was supposed to have been here before pie night. Monday afternoon, it still hadn't arrived, and I really wanted to hang my curtain! So I got creative.

We saw the Dr yesterday and, surprise, surprise, the baby is HUGE, but apparently very comfortable and not planning on going anywhere anytime soon. According to the measurements, which really are just guesstimates anyways, he weighs 7 lbs 10 oz, his femur is the length of a baby's at 40 weeks 5 days (so he's very long), and his head and stomach diameters put him at gestational age of 38 weeks 5 days. But we are only at 37 1/2 weeks. So technically, the baby is full term and COULD come anytime. Do I think he will? Not at all, not after the visit with the Dr yesterday. He told us most of his tall ladies usually go all the way to their due date and then some, because the baby has enough room. Curse you torso. We have to speak in church this Sunday (20 mins each!) and I'm secretly hoping the stress will put me into labor. :) As long as everything is ok with the baby, of course.

S.S.S.S.

S.S.S.S.=sunsets, sharing time, shower, and scar. That's what's been going on with us lately. This beautfiul sunset the other night reminded us we really do live in California.
We had never seen such long, skinny clouds before. This must be those beautiful desert sunsets we've heard about.

I had to do my first sharing time after our Primary Program. I was SO nervous, and worked on it all week. It was supposed to be full of activity, involve a treat, and last 45 mins. That's a lot of pressure, and remember how it was my first one? Not to mention, I'd only watched two, so I just didn't feel prepared. Luckily, children are forgiving. :) And, once again, with the help of my creative, artistic husband, I survived sharing time. We learned about pie! Here is Nate's masterpiece: (though I did do the coloring)

I was so pleased. I'm pretty sure the only thing Jr Primary got from the lesson was that I love blueberry pie, but we still had a great time learning about how we can better SERVE our families. I'm so greatful for my dear husband, who always puts up with his crazy wife's antics; couldn't have pulled it off without him. Now I only have one more to do this week, and then I won't have to worry about it for a couple of months!

The wonderful women of Ridgecrest threw us a baby shower last week, and it was so fabulous! They fed me incredible homemade Mexican food, because that is all I have wanted since moving here, and haven't found a decent restaurant to satisfy my craving. Here is the cute invite:

It was such a blast to spend an evening with lots of friends and learn more about this whole baby thing! Muchas gracias to Megan and Rachel for thinking of us and putting it all together. We feel so blessed.

Here (we) are, me and the watermelon, before the shower.

I sure don't know how this can get much bigger, but he is supposed to gain about a pound a week until delivery. Yikes! I think my back is going to break.

I was SO very excited to open presents! It started to make it all feel so real!!

Grandma Susan's gift from Utah was a huge hit with Nate, obviously:

And matching Jazz blankies, of course:

This babe was spoiled with goods, for sure. Loads of cute outfits, blankets, hooded towels (which his mother thinks should be made in big people size), and cool gear like toys for the car seat, diapers, and an awesome car seat cover, just to name a few things.

I was overwhelmed by all the goodness of the gifts.

There was also a group gift, which was so completely generous, and we were able to get a stroller and car seat for the little rugrat because of it. So now he has a way to come home from the hospital!

It was a lot of work trying to decide, but we got this travel system that has all the perks we were looking for, and I think it's a pretty dang cute pattern, which is a huge bonus. Ok baby, you can come now! :)

Nate had a blast sandboarding with the scouts this last weekend on his first campout. No pics of that, but more S's for my title! It is basically snowboarding down sand dunes, and he really enjoyed it. The last S was for scar, but Nate won't let me take a picture of. He now looks like Harrison Ford, with a nice crescent moon shaped scar on the bottom of his chin. This makes the SECOND wound to come from Nate playing basketball at lunch on the Base. The first was what I thought to be a broken nose, but he refused to see a dr for it, so I guess we'll never know. With this most recent wound, I still don't understand how an elbow made a GASH in his chin, unless the guy's elbow had a dagger attached, but once again, Nate would not see a dr for it. I've tried to ban him from playing lunchtime basketball, but he doesn't seem to hear me when I say things like that. Here's to hoping the future holds less scars and sharing times, but I wouldn't mind more showers and sunsets. :)

This is Halloween, This is Halloween...

I LOVE October. I LOVE fall. I LOVE Halloween. Nate loves Jack Skellington, and The Nightmare Before Christmas, hence the title of this post. That song has been stuck in our heads all weekend.

We had a fun, festive weekend. Friday we spent time with friends carving pumpkins, eating yummy treats, and playing games. It finally started to actually feel like a holiday! Here's our front porch on Halloween night; I thought our bright orange door really added to the Halloween spirit. Maybe we can get rid of it now that the holiday is over :)While picking out pumpkins last minute, I decided I wanted to try and create a pregnant pumpkin. But I'm really not artsy enough to get any creative ideas flowing. And Nate, my creative brain, was busy. So my very crafty friend Rachel came up with the idea:

It's not scary by any means, but still pretty clever I thought. Thanks for being the brains and hand model, Rachel!

Nate whipped this good looking guy together very quickly:

I'm always impressed with his pumpkin carving skills. In years past, he's done an AWESOME John Wayne and Utah State Aggie Bull.

Saturday night our main event was the Trunk or Treat at the church. Neither Nate or I had ever been to one, so we weren't sure what to expect. I think it was a pretty darn good turnout! We had four bags of candy, and it only lasted between 15 and 20 minutes. So we shut down our trunk operation, and wandered to see the costumes. We caught a couple of our favorites on camera:

The afore mentioned, very creative Rachel and her Ghostbuster family:Stephen, Rachel, and Dexter. They even had awesome, very realiztic ghostbuster back packs.

Two of our other favorite families just so happened to be Star Wars themed, so we tried to get a pic of all the kids together. It's a little difficult to keep excited, sugar filled children still for more than one picture. This was the best we got:

Three VERY cute Jedi's, with totally awesome glowing light sabers, Princess Lea, R2D2 and:

the cutest little Yoda you ever did see.

Some of our other favorite families included the Nintendo family:Mom was Princess Peach, Dad was Toad, and the kids were Mario and Luigi. So cute! There was also a Scooby Doo themed family. I am determined from here on out to have themed family Halloween costumes. I loved it! We saw plenty of good looking witches, both scary and nice, a couple of crazy mad scientists, lots of mighty little superheroes, and a very scared Tigger. All in all, a fun evening, though it was done by 730pm and we were like, uh-oh, now what? That was supposed to be the highlight of our night! We were kind of stuck because we don't have a kid yet, to take trick or treating, but we didn't want to go to the big party in town with guys from the base, because we felt out of place being (probably) the only ones married, with child, and not drinking. So we headed to Wally World to pick up one last bag of candy, just in case we had any kids show up at our house. Our one bag was gone, again, in about 20 minutes. I think it's because we were one of the only houses on our street with the light on, but by quarter after 8, our house was shut down too.

I'm glad Nate was such a good sport and was willing to support his crazed wife and her Halloween antics. He pretty much spent his entire Saturday putting together:

Phase 1
Phase 2
Phase 3
And the final touches!

I really wanted to do something clever with my belly, since it's not every year you have an extra 30 pounds or so to work with on your Halloween costume. We had so many good ideas, but went with the most kid friendly and the cheapest to put together. We had lots of good ideas for Nate, too, but he spent so much time on mine, he didn't get to pull anything together in time for the trunk or treat (he ended up being a leaf blower-carried a branch of leaves and when someone asked what he was, he blew on his branch and said a leaf blower :). I told him he could be a three hole punch version of Nate, or that I would write book on his face so he could be facebook, but he went with the leaf blower. His favorite thing was to tell people we were pumpkin farmers, and grew this monstrous pumpkin ourselves.

We got a kick out of people's reactions; I think it was a big hit. And we were pretty pleased with the outcome ourselves.

All in all, I think it's safe to say we really enjoyed our holiday weekend. We did feel a little odd to be out on Halloween in flip flops; isn't it supposed to be wet and miserable and you have to wear a coat over your costume cause it's so cold? Though they were serving hot chocolate at the trunk or treat...maybe by next Halloween I will have acclimatized. But for now, it's still not fall to me. Now if only we could get some snow for Thanksgiving, it might finally start feeling like the holiday season is upon us!