Our baby is no longer an "it"!

Hooray! We went to our ultrasound appointment yesterday and we learned that our baby is very healthy and strong and....

It's a Girl!

In honor of this next baby being a girl, here is a girly picture of Emma dressed up as a princess:



We are very pleased to finally have some identity to associate with our new little one. It makes it all more real and exciting. And now our planning can really start to begin as well. We've also chosen a name, but you'll have to ask me individually to know what it is. Ben and I lean towards the opposite of secretive when it comes to baby names. With Emma we decided on her name the day we found out the gender... and it seems the same has occured with this one as well. I guess if we tell people a name that we've already decided on, they can't try to discourage us against it or give us too many of their own opinions. I already have so many opinions regarding names, if I included everybody else's we'd never be able to make a decision. ;) We hadn't even discussed names until we were going to bed last night, but we started to talk about it and a name came together extremely quickly. Anyway, we're not keeping this name a secret, but I guess it's just too impersonal if I just post it right here on my blog.

It's been a while since I posted because Ben is on Thanksgiving Break and we've been busy playing and running errands together. We had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner last night. It was a rather early Thanksgiving dinner, yes, but we wanted to prepare a nice feast for ourself and our friends before everyone left out of town to see family. We love to visit our families during the holidays, but we realized that we do miss out on doing our own holiday traditions. For example, Ben and I got to cook a turkey for the first time! This is our fifth Thanksgiving together as a married couple, but we've never cooked a turkey because our parents always take care of it when we go to their places for Thanksgiving dinner. It was nice to learn for ourselves and discover that we can be successful! We are such grown-ups! :)

Today is errand day before we leave to Utah tomorrow morning. We are driving and decided to split up the trip into two days. A 10-12 hour drive is long, particularly with Emma in the back seat and me all pregnant. We've been aching for a short little trip together, just Ben, Emma, and I, so we decided to spend the night near Zions National Park. We hope to get to our hotel around 3 or 4 and spend the afternoon and evening eating out and relaxing. The next morning we'll go through the Park some and take some pictures and then we'll leave to finish the drive to my family's house in Sandy, which I believe is another 4 hours or so. It should be a pleasant trip.

Family Goals

Our family has made some goals recently to help us become closer to one another and more spiritually-minded. One of these goals is to do Family Home Evening every week. We've accomplished this two weeks in a row now! Yippee! Great rewards can come from even small accomplishments. I already feel a difference in our family unity just from successfully having a couple of FHE's. So far I've learned 3 things that help make our time together more enjoyable and something to look forward to. I'm sure this may not be the same for all families, but for us, a successful FHE needs the following guidelines:
1. No longer than about 15 minutes. Especially, now that Emma is joining us, she can only take a brief moment together before she starts to get much too distracted and then we all get frustrated. I guess, of course, if we were doing an activity outside of the home this guideline would change; but, for in the home structured FHE time, we need to keep it short.
2. Keep it centered around Emma. If Emma is entertained, than all of us are happy, so I've been focusing on things that Emma would enjoy, with maybe one short quote that Ben and I can benefit from.
3. Have a treat! We love treats and this is a fun tradition to have a quick dessert for the end of our FHE, like cookies or something. Emma also enjoys helping make the dessert sometimes.

Anyway, I don't have much else to talk about. I'll leave you with an odd Emma picture. She's been enjoying playing with this Halloween bucket in the bathtub. She recently discovered it can be worn as a hat.

It's November!

Happy Day After Halloween! Halloween is one of the few holidays in which I may actually be more excited the day afterwards then on the holiday itself. That's probably because of the even greater holidays just around the corner! I've always found it extremely appropriate to start listening to Christmas music after Halloween. Christmas is too fun to only celebrate for one month... I think it deserves 2. Not to overshadow Thanksgiving, however. I love Thanksgiving as well. It's an enjoyable time. Lots of good food, the last of the pretty fall colors, and time with family, AND the "official" and possibly more socially-accepted-beginning of Christmas! I guess I've made it clear what my favorite holiday of the year is. Why do I love Christmas? This is a good question. Here are some things that come to mind, in no particular order:

1. The holiday music!
2. Snow (Good thing we will be visiting in Utah during the Christmas holidays, otherwise, this most favorite of traditions would be lost... I fear that no snow will be coming to Arizona anytime soon).
3. Christmas decorations
4. A twinkling Christmas tree (I especially enjoy lying underneath the Christmas tree at night with only the tree lights on. It's so pretty to look up through all the lights!)
5. Temple Square outings... always way too cold, but full of great memories!
6. Advent (a tradition from Ben's family that I've particuarly been happy to adopt as one of my own... Over the years, Ben and I have really enjoyed inviting friends over and spending time with them reading scriptures, singing Christmas hymns, and eating awesome desserts!)
7. Getting up early on Christmas morning with the family and fishing through stockings.

There are many more, but I will bore you (if I haven't already) if I continue any further. This last one I mentioned, though, made me think of something else. I have extremely vivid memories of getting up EARLY (like 4:00... and we would have gotten up earlier if mom and dad hadn't started setting rules... later on, I remember we weren't allowed to peek downstairs until 5 and we couldn't wake up mom and dad till 6 or 7). Anyway, my siblings and I would have a pact to wake each other up if were still sleeping so we could go downstairs all together. We would be soooo excited to see what was hiding by the Christmas tree and under our stockings. This makes me realize what a good job my parents did of making Christmas exciting, magical, and memorable for us kids. Now that Ben and I are parents of a growing family, we were now realizing the fun task we have of making the holidays exciting and worthwhile for our children. It was soooo fun to go trick or treating with Emma! I've been way too old for trick or treating for quite some time now and it was wonderful to be able to get away with going out again! I get to relive all my childhood fun all over again through my own kids. How exciting! And this time I get to watch Emma (and other's to come) have fun like I did when I was little. Speaking of having fun, Emma is once again wearing her Tinkerbell costume this morning. She loves dressing up and loves to wear her wings and tutu. She's such a girl.

So, I took some pictures of what the Morning After Halloween looks like. First, is Emma dressing up again (but not in her full attire) and enjoying a taste of her loot from last night.

Speaking of loot, here is a good chunk of the candy Emma has collected over the past few days. Obviously mom and dad will have to help out. Darn. ;)


The last of the pictures is frightening indeed.... and that is of Moldy Pumpkin Man. A thing I've learned is that pumpkins don't last very long in Arizona. It's just too warm, even at the end of October, to keep pumpkins preserved. Poor Pumpkin Man. We will need to dispose of him quickly before we scare the neighbors.