Elder Sweethearts

When I asked Paul if he wanted to celebrate for Valentine's Day this year, and what he'd like to do, he thought about it for a moment then came back with the sweetest idea. "We should take out my two Grandma's for dinner". I thought this was great! Paul and I get to express our love to each other daily, but why not express our love to others on this day. In the end we decided to invite both grandma's over for dinner at our apartment, and also included a pickup/dropoff service in the date. We had Hawaiian Haystacks for dinner and the Grandma's shared past Valentine memories. 

   After dinner we were surprised by a visit from Grandma Robertson's other grandson Keaton and his wife Sarah. So I thought this is perfect, let's have Paul dance with grandma Larsen and and Keaton with Grandma Robertson. It was a great Valentine's Day giving love and service to the women who are the reason Paul is in my life!

For Your Health!

     So the last week my co-worker, Peggy has been on a juice fast! Her son came home from Hawaii, had done a juice fast, and had dropped 40 lbs. So she is giving it a shot and I admire that. On that note I was at home one day with not a lot to do so I watched the documentary "Fat, Sick, & Nearly Dead". In which Joe from Australia decides to give a juice fast a try for a whole 60 days. He is in his 40s overweight and has a rare disease which causes him to break out in painful rashes at any moment. By the end of his juice fast he lost something like 72 lbs and no longer takes medication for his rash. Awesome!
     So I'm sitting here like, yeah! I want to go on a juice fast, clean out my system, reboot and feel good (disclaimer I don't feel like I need to be losing weight if that's what you were thinking). Turns out however that you shouldn't do anything extreme like this while pregnant. So I thought hey I'll do it after baby comes and then feel great! Yet again I'll be nursing for sure and I've been told it would dry my breast milk right up! So I'll have to wait like another year and a half to do a juice cleanse. But I hope if anyone who reads this is thinking of a juice fast, and their current health and situation will allow, I say at least try it for a week and see how you feel! Then tell me all about it!
    At least for now I will be supplementing my diet with tasty green juices.

Showing!

 So this post is really late, but around a month ago I really started to show my little baby bump. These are photos from a month ago, I was at week 22, now I'm on week 26, and I will have a photo for that shortly. (Sorry these photos are really yellow!)

Winter Escapades

Don't get me wrong I love the seasons, and I love Utah. However my body seems to go into a dormant stage in the winter kind of like trees, I am satisfied with little to no outside excursions. Paul on the other hand would like to be go, go, going rain or shine, warm or below 0, and I absolutely love that about him! So since we've been married he has tried introducing me to different winter activities. This time around it was cross country skiing. I was very excited. Paul's cousin Keaton and his fabulous wife Sarah came along with Uncle James. 

The day started great, I was loving it, I was plenty warm, life was good. Then we had to go back down the hill... started out great, having fun, laughing every time I fell down. Enter pregnancy hormones into the scene and... pretty soon I was starting to fear that falling down was bad for baby, and because I was going downhill I was no longer warm from body heat. Recipe for disaster. Before long I was crying every time I fell down, and getting mad at Paul for not doing more. I realized after no one was to blame and sometimes you just have to do hard things. I decided after this escapade we would stick to activities I had done before while pregnant, for Paul's sake at least. Oh I love that man.

Food Again!

So like many pregnant woman, I suffered a complete loss of appetite in the first trimester of pregnancy, I lost 6 lbs and would make Paul take me to places where they had my cravings (the only thing I would eat). Now... I am loving food! My appetite is back and kicking, almost to hard. At first I was eating junk and loving it, including lots of sugary things, which for those of you who don't know, goes against my whole diet of the last year! So I decided it wasn't worth it to feed my baby poor nutrition so I got back on track and now am looking at beautiful fruits and veggies again.

 And since Paul and I are at the low end of the budget this month with text book costs I've had to get creative. Saturday we ran out of all our rice milk and soy milk and since grocery day is not till tomorrow I've been resorting to, let's say simpler horizons. And actually a friend of ours gave us this idea that I've been experimenting with.

  -3 Ingredient Almond Milk: 
 Handful of raw almonds (you decide) 
2-3 cups water (again your own choice) 
and 2 tsp vanilla extract

 Directions: Combine in a food processor and processes till you have chopped the almonds as small as possible. Now you have one of 2 choices: a) poor over hot cereal or whatever else with almond bits intact if you like the extra texture. Or poor milk through and strainer and have a relatively almond bit free milk.

J Tree

Paul and I went to Joshua Tree for our one year anniversary. It was pretty cold down there in southern California, and I admit the camping and climbing in cold winter weather is hard, especially when you are pregnant and hormonal. However we made it through and our friends Reesa, Jeff, Rachel and Spencer Joined us. We certainly did have a fabulous time!

Little Cotton Wood

One of the most extraordinary places in Utah to Paul and I is Little Cottonwood Canyon. At the entrance are beautiful cliffs and boulder fields of pure granite. And further up the canyon are lakes and trails. a Few weekends ago we backpacked to a small lake called Ceacret lake and the next day we climbed down in the granite. This is what it looked like.