Christmas

I realize I'm a little late, but better late than never, right??

Christmas this year was great! Things got a little crazy when it started snowing and we couldn't do our last minute shopping like we normally would! Just like last year, we basically lived at either of our parent's houses for the weeks surrounding Christmas and New Years, though I think we did so more this year because of the snow. But even with our two-wheel drive, we were able to do all the Christmas activities we normally would have:

Christmas Eve with my side of the family: Fancy dinner, white elephant gift exchange (Darren got a Costco thing of Jelly Belly's and I got The Sandlot DVD... which I brought!), and just hanging out with the family. My dad and Brock, however, had to help us get unstuck before we could head home :)

Christmas Eve NIGHT: Darren and I like to do this part with just the two of us. We spent the night wrapping presents while we watched Elf in our room.

Christmas Morning: We woke up bright and early to open present with each other.

I got my favorite thing: MOVIES!!! I also got a few other items and money to go shopping for new clothes after the baby gets here :)

Darren knew a few big presents he was getting, but for the first time since we've been married, I actually surprised him! I normally don't buy him clothes without having him try them on because he's so dang picky about how they fit! But I decided to go for it and actually did pretty well... if I don't say so myself! He was pretty excited :)

Christmas Day: After opening presents, we headed over to the Litchfields. Snow was already covering the roads, but as we drove, it started coming down hard... so unlike Seattle! It was fun until we barely made it through his parent's neighborhood! Darren and his boys play football on Christmas morning (along with Thanksgiving and New Years) and thus far I had managed to make it to all the games... until today :( It was snowing so hard and while I can handle being cold for a few hours, I didn't want to be cold AND wet. So for the first time since we started dating, I missed a game. And it would have been the perfect game to get pictures at too! Apparently the field was literally FILLED with snow and they were rolling around all over the place! While the boys were gone, Cindy, Lindsay and I watched Sweet Home Alabama and ate a delicious breakfast! When the boys got home, they hopped in the Hot Tub and proceeded to play in the snow in their swimsuits. (I wish I had pictures of that on my camera, but I don't.) They had a lot of fun! We spent the rest of the day playing with Kevin's new Wii, going to the movies, and getting Chinese for dinner (Litchfield family tradition), but unfortunately the restaurant didn't have their Karaoke machine up... they promised they would next year!

Christmas Night: After spending the day with the Litchfields, we headed over to the Beeson's for Christmas night. We had a gift exchange (all gifts provided by my parents... just the way I like it!) where I got some jewelry and $10 and Darren got The Dark Knight. He couldn't have been more thrilled! After that, we basically just hung out and watched a movie (all of us falling asleep before it was over I'm sure) and spent the night.

Christmas this year was absolutely wonderful. I love being with family almost every day and feeling the Christmas spirit! Next year is going to be so different with a little kid... we cannot wait!

Family Picture

So this is our second Christmas together as a married couple and we still haven't done a family picture. Not only am I too lazy to do it, but it's way more exciting to do when you have kids... so hopefully I'll get on top of that next year. My family, however, requires a picture from us for THEIR family picture so the day we left for California we scrambled to get one.

We set up a little station so we could use the timer on our camera. Obviously they didn't turn out too great. We literally took 35 pictures and I'm not really happy with ONE of them. But we ran out of time and had to settle for something a little less than perfect.

While I was trying to set up the camera, Darren was posing so I could make sure everything was in the right place.

Obviously this is the heart on the stomach pose... haha

And the model shot... (don't hate me for putting this on here Darren!)

My husband has a really hard time smiling for pictures. No matter what he does, you can tell that it is forced. I'm working on positioning his head right (though I have so far been unsuccessful) and will hopefully one day get him to smile like a normal person.

After so many shots of Darren NOT smiling I yelled, "JUST SMILE!" and this is what I got...

So anyways, it was quite an unsuccessful photo shoot. I can only imagine how much harder it's going to be with a crying kid next year!

California

Well, this month has been INSANE to say the least. It started off with finals for me. Luckily I had prepared myself and flew right through most of them with no problems :) The day of my last final, we flew out to California with Cory, Lindsay, Brooklyn, and Kevin. Naturally, our flight was delayed and delayed again. This would have been perfectly fine, but the plan was to surprise Kandi, Carson, and Maddi (who, obviously, didn't know we were coming) which was becoming a difficult task since it was getting late and we were a few hours behind schedule. Luckily, it all worked out just fine! Kandi and Maddi were surprised and shocked to see us walk into their living room. Carson, however, wasn't because a couple hours before we got there, Marci asked him if we were there yet... nice one Marci! haha

Of course, we left our camera home on most days, but we remembered to bring it with us once! We got to California late Wednesday night so the fun mostly started the next day. Thursday was the only sunny day we had while we were there so we were lucky we chose that day to go to the beach!

Yes, we desperately need a tan! This was the only picture I got of Darren and I at the beach... thanks for posing for the picture Darren...

Maddi is one brave girl! Not gonna lie Darren... that's kind of a weird face...

As I said earlier, that was the only sunny day. Apparently we brought the rain with us because the day after we left, it was hot and sunny... real cool. But we still had tons of fun! We got to go to Kandi's first ultrasound, saw Maddi's Christmas performance at school, went out to eat a lot, went shopping, watched movies (even got to see Twilight for a second time; way better than the first!), went to Sea World (got to touch a dolphin for the first time!), got in the hot tub most nights, and ate lots and lots of junk food! I know we did more... I just can't remember at the moment. Anyways, it was amazing! Thanks Ryan and Cindy for making this trip possible! You guys are amazing! Hope you enjoyed it as much as we did!

Fourth and Fourth

Ok, so a while ago, Alix tagged me and I'm FINALLY going to do it! Aren't you so proud of me Alix?! So here's what you do: go to the FOURTH file in your pictures and then pick the FOURTH picture. Post and explain. So here it is!

Nice huh? :) Last March, for our one year anniversary, Darren and I stayed in Seattle. We spent most of our days riding the bus around (my first time on a public bus, I might add!) and walking all over the place doing crazy things and taking a bunch of fun and random pictures! This is some statue in Seattle and Darren was trying to make the same face as him... do you think it worked??

Now I tag: Brooke, Kandi, Melody, and Sarah

GIRLS NIGHT!!!

So I'm a little late in writing about this (what's new?) Girls Night, but I wanted to wait until Sarah posted about it so I could get some of the pictures she took on her phone. Well, just over a week ago, Darren was having a Guys Night with a bunch of guys in the ward. They played games and went to see the new James Bond movie! I took this lovely opportunity to hang out with the girls! Sarah has been trying to get me and Bailey together to do pedicures forEVER and finally we were able to do it! Although our condo is amazingly fun... right... :) we decided to do the girls night at my parents house! We started off with some pistachio chicken salad (probably one of my favorite meals!) and then got on to pedicures. Sarah had a special kit that she was kind enough to share with us! After soaking our feet we put on an exfoliating masque which made our feet feel really cold! Naturally I had left the camera downstairs and I couldn't let this photo opp. pass me by so I went on an adventure! Since I had the masque on my feet I couldn't walk on the carpet... so I crawled. Not the easiest thing to do when you're pregnant and your feet can't touch the floor! But the girls got a good laugh out of it! This was the view I had when I returned:

Bailey's look explains it all!

Sarah kept trying to eat her feet... :)

Feet shot!

Ok so it's not the cutest picture, but you can see my belly nicely!

Washing the masque off

So after our feet were all exfoliated, we put on some amazing lotion stuff. Sarah, being the sweetheart she is, massaged my feet with it. I don't think my feet have ever felt so soft! After the amazing massage, we topped it off by painting our toe nails (I discovered that this too is no longer as easy as it used to be!). Once the pedicures were done, we headed downstairs. After gathering as much junk food as possible, we headed down to watch a movie in the theater! What a blast! Thanks Bailey and Sarah for the Girls Night! I had so much fun!

Oh yeah, see http://sarbear0616.blogspot.com/ for more pictures.

26 Weeks

Recognize this shirt? Fits a little differently from the last time you saw me in it huh??

Ok, I'm late AGAIN! But this time I have an excuse... our internet has been down since last Thursday morning. SO... this is a picture of me at 26 weeks (6.5 months), but now I am 27 weeks. My body couldn't have changed that much in just one week right?? :) Actually, that's probably wrong. However, I just looked at last months picture that I posted and I kind of look like I haven't grown that much. Well, IN PERSON you would notice the difference! Bailey (my younger sister) seems to think I get bigger every SINGLE day... and I agree with her! School is starting to get a little weird though... being that I'm not at any BYU school, I'm the ONLY pregnant person on campus. I'm finally to the point where I can't hide it under my fleece anymore. More and more people are realizing that I'm pregnant. I try to make sure I always have my wedding ring on so they don't think I'm just another teen pregnancy! :)

Things are going smoothly and I'm mostly feeling great. However, it's getting much harder to sleep and my back aches more and more every day! Luckily I have the best husband in the world! He gives me back massages whenever I ask and doesn't complain one bit! How did I get so lucky?!

Halloween Part II

It's Darren again! Since I finally got Brandi to start blogging, she took over as I expected so it has been a while since I have posted. This post is about the Halloween party we had down south with my brother and sister-in-law Cory and Lindsay and my parents. No fire alarms were set off this time! So you will notice that there are no pictures of Brandi in here. She was a really hot pirate but apparently she doesn't think that the pictures we got emphasized that so I was threatened that she would erase any post with pictures of her on it from that night...unfortunate. As you can tell all the costumes were thrown together very last minute but it was still fun. I wasn't sure when else I would use my Google stuff so I thought it would make a good Halloween costume; I made a pretty good (very accurate) software engineer. My dad was a Polynesian which brings him back to the days he spend living in Samoa as a young child. And Cory's outfit earned him an extra picture. His wife just had a baby so he was a pregnant lady this year. Wow. The last picture is of the cake that Lindsay made...yes, cake. As good as it was, it was kind of hard to stomach due to the incredible resemblance. Good work Lindsay!

So our ward had a Halloween party last Saturday. Darren and the young men were in charge of a Spook Alley so our house was very busy before it started. We couldn't think of what to dress up as, so Darren grabbed some of his snowboarding things to be a Snowboarder. I know... good one, right?? :) I was planning on being a Power Puff girl, but after searching the house up and down I realized I had given it back to my parents to put in their costume box. What a letdown! I had no idea what to do. My backup plan was a pirate, which I was last year, but with no other options, I started to get ready. I put on my pirate tights (black and white stripes) and started to run around the house to find the rest of my costume. Darren saw me and busted up laughing! He told me I looked like a Who! And it hit me. Why didn't I think of that before?! I have been a Who a number of times. In college, my roomies and I would dress up as Who's around Christmas and bring cookies to our favorite boys and sing them a little Christmas Who carol :) Oh how I miss those days! Don't worry Darren, I love these days too! But they might be better if you dress up as a Who with me :)

Side note: The party was great! We had a blast! Even though my husband set off the fire alarm...

What IS that thing?! Not gonna lie... it's a little different being a married pregnant Who...

Oh the good old days! I simply HAD to show a picture of my roomies and I dressed up as Whos! Favorite memory of this night: Tallie sticking her head out the window while she was driving because she couldn't fit it in the car :)

I miss you girls!!!

And this picture is for Brittany. I can't even tell you how excited I am to see you this Christmas! All I wanna do is play! I'm thinking we should, perhaps, try to fit in a Who outing... what do you say? :)

Getting bigger - 22 Weeks

Ok, I'm a week late in posting this, but the past week has been crazy! Anyways, here I am at 22 weeks (5 and 1/2 months)! I am now 23 weeks and I can almost guarantee that I look bigger now than I do in this picture! It's crazy how much your stomach can grow in just one week! The past couple of weeks have been a BLAST because I finally realized what it feels like to have a baby kicking inside of me. Now that I know what it feels like, I realized I had felt it a number of times before... but now, I feel it ALL the time! Darren has even felt our little guy kick and he just loves it! Yesterday was the first time we SAW him kick... what a trip! We are so excited to be experiencing something so amazing! What a blessing!

It's a Boy!!!

Ok, so we got the ultrasound last Friday. I was DYING to post and let everyone know, but Darren insisted on being the one to blog about it... well... it's Wednesday now and nothing has been posted so I'm taking action! This is my favorite picture we got (above)! He looks so cute already! :) For the first half hour or so of the ultrasound, we didn't know the sex. He wouldn't move and we were mostly just seeing his spine. So she had us go run around the office (in the hopes of waking him up and getting him to move around) so we did. We went on the elevator, ran up and down the stairs, did some jumping jacks, and got a lot of weird looks when we started dancing all over the place! Turns out that it worked! As soon as we got back he started to move and we were able to get a lot of good shots!



So she printed off all of our pictures and we were wrapping things up. Darren, being the proud future-father that he is, asked if we could get a printed picture of... his... you know. I couldn't believe he asked that! She laughed and said he wasn't the first guy to want one. So there you have it! Whether the world is ready or not, in less than 5 months, there's going to be another little Darren around!