Babies!

Hey, it's me! Still haven't gotten the graduations pictures either from my mom (my fault, not hers) or off of my camera, so no pictures of graduation. I will put those up someday. So, several of my friends are having babies (Britt, Kellie, and others) or have recently had babies (or even not so recently) and I am really wanting to have a baby and it is just not happening. I think I am defective (again, not my mom's fault, but maybe my dad's....jk). So, instead of having cute baby bump pictures, or adorable pictures of my baby to put up, I am going to put up pictures of the baby that we do have.

I also get to play lots more with my nieces, Aria and Tayvin and that helps...most of the time. Sometimes it makes me want one more. Wesley anticipates my saying "I want one" at least once everytime we see Aria and Tayvin...and Krista and David.I have such cute nieces!

Graduating!

Wow! I can't believe that today/tomorrow I am graduating from college! It seems like I just graduated from high school, but five years have gone by and so much has happened. I moved away from home and lived with roommates, I paid for school, I had a boyfriend, I sent off a missionary, I went to Mexico, I GOT MARRIED (over a year ago!), I did my student teaching, I found a semi-real job, I found a new apartment for us and now I am graduating. All of my hard work has paid off and I get to really go into the real world. I have to be a complete grown-up. I became a mostly grown-up when I got married and had to do the car insurance, internet, utilities, phone bill, etc. on my own, but now I will had to find a real job, get real health insurance, and everything that comes with it. I am excited and nervous all at the same time. Life is pretty good and I am way excited to be graduated.

So, it's been a while since I posted. That is partly because I usually like to post with pictures and we haven't taken a whole lot of pictures since Christmas. So, general update: Christmas was okay. It was hard because Wesley had to work a full shift on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We spent Christmas Eve with my family and Christmas Day evening with his. We stayed at my parent's house so that when Wesley was at work all day, I could hang out with my family. It was cool at dinner with his family because one of his uncles was able to come who typically doesn't come to any family things.
In January, both Wesley and I got new jobs. Wesley got an internship at Novell, thanks to my dad letting him know about it, and having stellar references, (both my dad and his dad work at Novell :) ). He works in the teaming library and if you really want to know what he does you will have to ask him or my dad, because I don't fully understand it anyway. I got a job working as a para-professional at Orem Junior High School. Basically that means that I am a teacher's aide in the Special Education classrooms. I really enjoy it. There are moments that are hard, but overall I like working with the kids and I get to do a lot of one on one with them.
We are still living in the same house in Provo and will be here until April. Our whole bishopric is trying to figure out how to get us to stay here when the O'Dell's get back. We do have someone living upstairs right now and that is kind of hard, but we are working with it. Overall, life is pretty good. We have wonderful families and good friends and the gospel is true! Love ya!

Christmas!

It is that time of the year again and everybody is excited for Christmas. Thanksgiving was spent at my parents' house, partly because it was the year for a Messenger Thanksgiving and partly because Wesley had to work. How lame is that!? Only the technical support people had to work, not billing or on-site technicians or anyone else. I was not very happy. I am even less happy that he has to work on Christmas day. That is the worst! Anyway, the day after Thanksgiving is when all the decorations go up at my parents' house. I was there to help due to Wesley being at work. We didn't actually put up our tree and decorations until the day after the day after Thanksgiving. We don't have a lot of decorations, but we do have a tree. It has white lights due to Wesley's insistence. My family's tree always had colored lights, but his mom insists on white lights and so he did too. Oh well. I still love it. There are a few ornaments on it that I brought from my parents' house, specifically ornaments that I had made or been given. I think our tree is so pretty!

The tree skirt and presents didn't go up the same day the tree did. I had to go find a tree skirt and the presents will slowly accumulate. I am actually done Christmas shopping, but I haven't wrapped anything yet!

Our tree is too tall (or our ceiling is too low) to have a star, so instead I put up the Christmas spider that Aunt Lucy gave us last year. Wesley thinks it is funny because I really don't like spiders!

We are so mean to poor Wyn! I have a mini stocking and we were bored so we decided to put her in the stocking and hang her on the tree. She didn't like it much and kept jumping out. She is so small and fast that it is hard to take good pictures of her!

I didn't have a nativity set and was fairly distraught about it. I was actually pretty jealous of the beautiful nativity Brother Allred made for my family. I found this traditional set with the words painted on them and thought it was adorable. Plus, the price was great!This time of the year is so wonderful and we are so absolutely blessed. Happy Holidays, especially to our loved ones!

Sick of Being Sick!

Wow! I swear the sick season just started and I have been sick so much already! I am sick of it. First I get a sinus infection, then Wesley gets it. Then he gets the flu and then I get the flu. This is so lame! I really don't want to be stuck at home! I love teaching and I want to be at school with the kids. Instead, I am stuck at home because they don't want any sick people at school, and I am bored out of my mind! The worst part about the flu thing, for me anyway, is that it lingers in my sinuses. I can't sleep because I can't breathe and then I am grumpy because I haven't slept and I haven't been breathing. It is absolutely miserable! Grrrrr. I have been constantly cleaning my house with lysol and with bleach to kill the germs but they just keep coming back. This is so dumb. Can we just skip the sick season, please?

Our Newest Addition!

So last week Wesley and I were out on a Friday night with not much to do and so, in an impulsive moment, we decided to purchase a pet! Yay! Neither Wesley's mom nor mine were huge fans of pets, although my mom was a little more lenient (likely due to the fact that my dad had had pets growing up and so he supported the kids' desires for pets) and I had had a couple of pets. My very favorite pet that we had was a dwarf hamster named Gimli (from Lord of the Rings). Our impulsive moment was slightly propelled by my telling Wesley that I wanted to get a dwarf hamster. We went to Petco in Orem and were looking at the cute little hamsters. I showed Wesley what a dwarf hamster was and he said okay, we can get one. Yay! We had to buy the food and the fluff and a water bottle. and of course I wanted a cute little house, and he wanted to get a wheel for the hamster to run on....and on and on. My parents, or actually my brother who is on a mission, had a tank to use as a cage, so all we really needed was our hamster! We thus brought home Eowyn (another name from Lord of the Rings), whom we call Wyn, a female dwarf hamster. It took her a couple of days to get used to us and her new home, but she is so cute and lots of fun! We bought a ball for her, which mostly she just preens in, but sometimes runs around and Wesley has great fun creating mazes out of old shelves for her to run around in. She isn't very smart, as shown by the fact that she often dives off of our hands and can't stay on our arms as well as by the fact that she flips herself over sometimes when she is trying to dig her way out of Wesley's mazes. Still, she is adorable and we love watching her, especially in the evening when she has way more energy than we do and we can hear her squeaky wheel going in the living room (all night long!).This is her lovely squeaky wheel. I picked bright yellow to go against our annoying wood panels.

She looks so fat when she sits! I think she is actually fatter now than when we bought her a week ago. She eats so much!
She love to burrow down in the fluff! She has burrowed in three different corners now, but her favorite is the one behind her wheel.

So, I have been loving the colors of food! During the summer, there are so many colorful ways to prepare meals. I know, I am kind of strange, but when I make something especially pretty, I like to take a picture of it and now I am going to share my random food pictures with all of you wonderful people who actually look at my blog! I invited my husband to help me blog, but he really didn't seem that interested (as in he said "yay" in a very sarcastic tone). That is sort of okay with me because it means that occasionally I can put up pictures of him that he may not appreciate all that much and I have control over what pictures of myself go up on my blog. :)So this is the marvelous fruit salad that I made. To be honest, some of the fruit was not quite as good as it often is, but it was so pretty! It had watermelon, red and green grapes, nectarines, peaches, blackberries, and blueberries. It was yummy but huge. It took us nearly a week to eat all of it!
This I made tonight. Our garden is producing an abundance of squash and we don't really know what to do with it all. I have lots of things to do with zucchini, but not a lot to do with squash. We also have lots of tomatoes. So, I threw them together and it looked pretty but needed something green. Therefore, I added green peppers! So pretty and SO YUMMY!This is not quite as pretty as the others but it still looked cool in the pan and was very yummy as well.
Now you have seen some of the yummy and pretty food we have eaten this summer and also something of my random mind.