It's a...

Joseph and I have been thinking about names a little bit since we found out I was pregnant, but we mostly just thought of girl names we both liked. We were struggling with agreeing on boy names and decided we might as well just wait until we know what the gender of our little peanut really was. Well, on Friday Joseph and I went to the doctor for an ultrasound and found out we are having a little boy! The nurse said that's pretty much a guarantee if you only have girl names you like. So, we're back to the drawing board for that, but we really could not be happier. Here's a picture of our little guy at 17 weeks, weighing in at a whopping 7 oz. I can't believe he's going to gain at least 7 pounds before he arrives.

Trunk-Or-Treat

For Halloween this year we participated in our ward Trunk-or-Treat party. We haven't done much for Halloween other than carve a pumpkin since we've been married, so it was fun to have a party to go to. Joseph and I did have to dress up for our mutual activity the week before (Joseph was a hippie and I was a 50's girl), and although we had intentions to dress up on Halloween night, I wasn't really feeling up to it so we justified our way out by saying we had already dressed up this year. We didn't get a picture of our costumes this year, but here's a picture of Joseph in his costume about 2 years ago. (One of the beauties of costumes as an adult is you don't grow out of them like you did when you were a kid.)
(Pretty hot stuff huh? And yes, I am the person cut out in the photo, not some "other woman"... it's just that my costume there was irrelevant to this post.)

We teamed up with some friends in our ward to decorate our trunk. We went shopping the night before and got some great stuff for it. We wanted to find a pumpkin to carve, and unfortunately we found out that shopping for a pumpkin on Halloween eve (not a baking pumpkin, but a pumpkin large enough to carve) is about as impossible as trying to find a Christmas Tree on Christmas Eve. We honestly went to at least 5 grocery stores looking for one... everyone was out! Finally, at our very last grocery store, without much hope I asked a worker if they had any left. She said no, but then her face got an excited look and she said, "Wait, we do have one, follow me." So we followed her over to the flower cooler where amid the bunches of bouquets there sat one lonely pumpkin. It was the perfect size, and though it had a scar on one side and what looked like warts on the other, we bought it and took it home to carve. It was so nice to have success after all of that looking! Our pumpkin was carved by a rather large group effort, and it was the perfect touch to our Halloween festivities. The trunk was complete with blood drippings, spiderwebs, large spiders and caution tape.
I guess things just aren't quite as scary as an adult, but we threw an MP3 player in the trunk playing a Mannhiem Steamroller's Halloween Monster Mix to add some life to our trunk and attract people down to the end of the parking lot where we were. Our friends told us at one point the music was so scary that some of the kids were afraid to reach in to get the candy from the bowl. I guess that means it was a success! It was a very fun Halloween celebration.

Family Fun

Last weekend my siblings and I all congregated in Provo, UT. You see, over the years we have all attended BYU but we were never all in Provo at the same time. We are also all big college football fans, so we thought that it would be fun to get together and watch BYU play TCU.

We spent the weekend hanging out and enjoying our favorite local places. We stopped by J-Dawgs, Cafe Rio, Iceberg (this was new for me, but they have great shakes!), BYU campus, the "Y", and Lavell Edwards Stadium. We also stayed up way too late rekindling childhood rivalries of Mario Kart.

We had a great time despite the fact that TCU appeared to be the only football team that arrived at the stadium.

What at the beginning felt like it would be a classic game that we would be able to look back on and gloat about being present,

turned into a game from which everyone was fleeing by the end of the third quarter and already trying to clear it from their memories.

We, however, stuck it out, and even took a picture to help us remember; because after all, the weekend was not about BYU football, it was indeed about family.