It's the Final Countdown!

We officially know the baby will make his appearance sometime in the next two weeks!

We know this because at our Dr appt this morning, where he informed me I have had absolutely ZERO progress, doc said he wouldn't let the baby cook past Christmas. How comforting. Oh wait, nope, I forget, I was totally distrought. Just the last few days, I think I've been having a pity party for myself. Not that I'm completely miserable being 10 months pregnant, because it really isn't that bad. I think it's just hitting me that I won't be here:

with any of these guys:

for:and that's never happened before.

It depresses me to think of Nate and I (and maybe a brand new baby that we won't know what to do with) in the desert, with no snow, by ourselves, and nothing to do.

Or perhaps I'm depressed because this weekend we are supposed to be here

at Utah State, for Nate's graduation. I cried when Nate told me it was this weekend. I'd like to say it's just crazy pregnant hormones, but it felt like the cherry on top of nothing going my way. He has already been mailed his actual paper degree, and he says that's all that matters, that paper got him a job. But I really, really wanted him to get to go to his own graduation. He says it wouldn't be any different than mine, but it is, because he would be getting hooded for his Master's also, and I think that's pretty special. Plus, I'm quite sure this is the only time he will be graduating from college! Although it is currently about 2 degrees in Logan, I would give anything for us to get to be there. Even if Nate says he doesn't care, I'd still appreciate the closure I'd gain from watching him graduate. An engineer's wife should get a degree just to say their marriage survived (all nighters on campus, never having dinner together, etc).

I'm not trying to gain any pity votes, I'm just hoping getting this off my chest will brighten my attitude a little. Yoga, long walks, and even holiday treats only temporarily satisfy. Perhaps if I were better at keeping a journal, I wouldn't have to bore unexpecting bloggers with my woes. I really don't have anything to complain about; we have a good life here in Ridgecrest, and are so thankful for all that we have. There is a healthy baby about to change our lives forever, and I should be greatful to be able to experience this life-changing event at such a special time of year. I'm sure I will look back at this post one day and scoff at how silly I seemed. This could very well turn out to be the most special Christmas we will ever have. I need to just remember that we were blessed to get pregnant when we did, and the Lord has everything in sight for us. So here's to me bucking up. Hopefully.

We're kind of a big deal.

Since the beginning of our time here in Ridgecrest, we have heard about the train man. A retired engineer who REALLY loves trains, and has over a mile long track of train you can ride in his backyard. He decks out his land at Christmas time and gives away "tickets" to come for a ride. A little while ago, Nate started a class through work, where he gets to go the train man's garage once a week and learn about machinery, or something. A few weeks ago, Nate told me we were in! Train man had given him a "special invite" to come to the train ride in December. We felt pretty darn special, since we'd heard so much about this train. And I was so excited to put something to look forward to on the calendar! A few days ago, Nate brought home The Ticket, and as I was reading the rules on the back (yes, there are rules), one of them said: No pregnant women allowed. What kind of crazy train is this?! I was so bitter. But wasn't going to miss out on this, because it's such a big deal! We had tickets the same night as our friend's The Hill's, so I decided I could be the designated photographer for the evening, while they all had their train fun. Ashley, Kendall, Tyson, and Nate waiting in line. (Don't worry, it's not snowing. I was just on a strange setting on my camera).

The place was LINED with cars, and we waited in line for probably atleast a half an hour. It seems that everyone in Ridgecrest had a special invite! And here I thought we were a big deal.

We really weren't trying to make this a belly shot, we just wanted to show the lights in the background. But when you're 9 months pregnant, every shot seems to be a belly shot. It kind of becomes a focal point. Nate just wore a t-shirt, because he was going to mutual to play volleyball afterwards, and strangers were making comments to him about freezing, so Ashley took Tyson's extra blanket and made Nate wear it, just to save us from embarrassment. :) It was a little chilly, but it just felt like a brisk fall night to us, definitely not winter, as these Californians claim it to be. I was in a track jacket and sandals and felt great. We passed some friend's from our ward, and they said, "You can tell who just moved from Utah!" Too funny.

Here's the crew finally on the train. Ready and SO excited! Tyson really was excited the whole time we were waiting, but when we got closer to the lights and on the train, he was completely mesmerized and couldn't take his big eyes off any of it. At this point, I was bitterly making my way to the elderly and handicapped bench, where you could wait for your famiily to return from their train ride, since you couldn't ride it yourself. A man Nate works with was running the train they were going to ride, and to make a long story short, I got to ride the train too! He broke the rule, not us. It was a Christmas Miracle!!!!! I felt like a little kid; I was so darn excited that I wasn't getting left out.

The light displays around the yard were fun. They have all been donated from community members over the years.

The pirate ship shoots steam cannons at you when you ride by.

There has to be some toy soldiers in order for it to be Christmas.

We took this next picture while riding over a bridge at mach speed!

Actually, you can pretty much walk faster than the trains go, but the bridge part did make me a little nervous. I kept wondering if there was a weight limit for the trains, and that's why they don't let pregnant ladies ride...

The loch ness monster light display was my favorite. I just thought it was way funny.

The train ride probably lasts a good 10 minutes. I think it's a fun tradition. It's just neat to think that this man loves trains so much, this is what he wanted to do with his retired spare time. And it's something to look forward to in Ridgecrest! It was fun for us to think that next year, our little man could enjoy it, too.

There were probably 20 or so workers helping run the whole thing. I think there are three trains that all go at the same time. It's more impressive to think about all of the work and effort that took place to get the 5200 feet of track intricately designed through his entire yard, than the actual displays. Though we did really enjoy the little village we rode through, mostly because there was a brothel and we all couldn't stop laughing.

A Christmas tradition isn't complete without Santa scaring small children.

Here's Tyson looking at his mom like, What on earth have you done to me? Classic.

We had a really fun night and glad we could share it with friends. Even though we learned we probably aren't as big of a deal as I thought we were. :)

Presents!!

Well, Christmas came early to our house last week. It all began when I got my email confirming that the pack-n-play had arrived at my local Walmart and I could go pick it up. Yippee! Nate likes that it monkeys, I just like that it's so cute. We had some leftover money from the baby shower, and were so excited we could get this.
The next day, the UPS man dropped off a VERY large box on the doorstep. I had no idea what it was and I couldn't handle the suspense! I finally mustered up some energy and dragged it just inside the door (so it wouldn't get stolen, cause who wouldn't want a big giant box?!), but it was on it's side and it was too heavy for me to turn, so I had to wait for Nate to come home to even see what it was. Much to my surprise...

A beautiful new rocker!! My dear parents were thinking of us. It's very comfy, has cushy arm rest, and a footrest; all neccessary things to make for the perfect rocker. It was such an exciting surprise for me, and Nate loves it when he gets to put stuff together. So all in all, it made for an awesome evening. Thank you, thank you padres!

While Nate enjoyed sleeping in with his long holiday weekend, I decorated for Christmas. I am usually in no hurry to do so, but was just downright bored. I don't really sleep all too well these days, and was just waiting for Nate to wake up so we could play.

It's mde it feel a little more like home, to have more stuff in the house with all the Christmas decor. And I do think it's pretty great to have a fireplace for the stockings. Besides, if the baby comes anytime soon, atleast the house will be ready for Christmas and guests. :)
Our week of presents was topped off with the ultimate present...a new tv

Nate has been doing extensive research on tv's since we've moved here, because having a bigger living room has made our tv seem very small. After a LOT of thinking and comparison shopping, we finally got one on a great after Thanksgiving day sale. Nate was SO happy. He kept calling it precious all night, and still gets giddy everytime he walks into the room and see's it. So there goes our Christmas! We also purchased a new dresser, but I don't have a picture because we had to order it and it won't come in until next week. But that's definitely our whole Christmas!! All the presents under our tree will be for other people. And they may not be very elaborate presents, because we got a new tv. ;)

We're happy for the Holiday season and expecially happy it's December, because the baby WILL arrive sometime this month! Here's to hoping the Dr apppointment tomorrow tell us it's sooner rather than later...but I'm not holding my breath.

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!

Marvelous Mini Meatloaves

I don't remember how I recently came across this recipe, but I decided I need to share my wealth with my friends. Since finding this treasure, I think I make it once a week for dinner. This whole pregnancy, my #1 craving has been meat, especially RED meat (which really isn't like my normal self, thought I can't even really remember what "normal" me is). So I'm constantly searching for new, easy ways to curb my little guy's protein desires. Speaking of that actually not so little guy, we are at

I remember at the beginning of the pregnancy looking down the list to these last couple of months, and being so excited for the cool food comparisons. I love honeydew! Now that I'm actually experiencing being 8 months pregnant, I don't really think it's that cool anymore to have a belly the size of a honeydew. It's exhausting growing this thing!

Anyways, back to the meatloaves:

You will need:

1 lb ground beef

1 package 16oz stuffing mix

1 cup of water

The greatest part of this recipe is the variety you get to do with it. Choose a mix and match theme that sounds good to you!

Mix-N-Match, Seasonings, Add-In, Cheese

Italian, 1 tsp Italian Seasoning, 3/4 cup spaghetti sauce, shredded Mozarella

Fiesta, 2 tsp Chili Powder, 3/4 cup chunky salsa, shredded Mexi-mix

Mediterranean, 1 tsp Oregano, 3/4 cup chopped roasted red peppers, crumbled Feta

BBQ, 1 tsp Garlic Powder, 3/4 cup BBQ sauce, shredded Cheddar

Preheat oven to 375. Mix water, meat, stuffing and Seasoning of choice until well blended. Press evenly into 12 muffin cups, or if no liners, spray muffin pan well. Make an indentation in center of each meat cup with back of spoon. Spoon in Add-In evenly into indentations. Bake 30 mins or until cooked through. Top with choice of Cheese and continue baking for 5 mins. (For a little kick, add 2 Tbsp of A1 steak sauce to meat mixture before shaping into meatloaves.)

We love each of the different Mix-N-Match's. Depending on what kind of mood I'm in, and what we have on hand, the meatloaves determine our food theme for the evening. I especially love this because it's prep time is SO quick, and if you have muffin cup liners, there is virtually no clean-up. Plus, it's MEAT!!!! Hope you enjoy it as much as we do. Let me know if you try it!