Updates

So, I was looking at the most recent pictures on our camera and noticed that we just haven't taken pictures in a while. Here's what is going on:
--I go for a walk in the mornings with Emily. It has been a nice habit of getting me out of bed early and going on with the day. When the walk is over, I shower and get ready for the day, and proceed to work on my Independent Study classes: Hepe and English 314. I just finished Hepe today and requested the exam. I hate when emails tell you "If all goes well, your exam should arrive in 2 weeks". Give it to me now! Hopefully, this little guy will just come on time and I'll be able to be finished with it.
--Steve's schedule: He wakes up at 7:15am, gets ready and heads to school. He has found that if he gets going early, he can come home by about 1pm every day. Its wonderful to hear the key in the lock and know that he is home! Steve is working in research for food science right now. He likes the freedom of making his own schedule. OChem seems to be treating him well enough. He studies hard and does well and I'm proud of him! He has signed up for 2 independent study classes that he plans on getting mostly done this summer. I'd say this beats taking the second half of OChem with a newborn!
--I just finished curtains for the baby's room and I'm almost finished with the crocheted blanket that I've been working on.
--Steve and I have mastered fresh strawberry jam and we love sharing it with people and making them happy!
--We are looking forward to several weddings this summer, most especially Kevin and Kristen's on the 15th of Aug and Elise and Mike's on the 18th. They will definitely keep us busy!

My new favorite YouTube video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlokPJO2h-Y

This is SO funny! If the link doesn't take you straight there, go to youtube.com, type in "Old Lady Driving" and click the one with the lady in the passenger seat. You'll get a kick out of this, I promise.

Road trip!

Steve and I finished our finals on a Tuesday. Since we knew that we would both be ready to be out of Provo for a day or two, we planned in advance to visit Las Vegas. I had only been there once and it was to drive the strip with my family. Steve decided to show me around. Something that I enjoyed enormously was the faces of our nurses when they found out that we were taking a 6-hour long trip in a car when I was 8 weeks away from delivery. Honestly, the trip wasn't bad at all. Each time we stopped, I was sure to walk around for several minutes. Steve did a great job at driving. :D

This is the enormous castle that we stayed in: Excalibur. It was nice and cheap (thus allowing us to take the trip) and at the very end of the Strip. We unfortunately forgot to get our camera out of the car for our grand tour of Vegas, but we were able to take some the next morning.


This is New York, New York. Its much cooler from the outside.

Our favorite part of the trip was visiting the Las Vegas Temple. It is SO beautiful and extremely peaceful after the worldliness of downtown.

No pets for us!

A few days ago, Steve had gotten up early to study OChem and heard some scratching noise in our apartment. When he failed to find the source the first time, he returned to his studying. Upon hearing it the second time, he was able to locate the source of the noise: a small black bird had gotten in through our dryer vent and was freaking out at his captivity in our small storage closet.
The reason we don't want pets: this little guy pooped and peed all over our things in this room. Can you image what would have happened if we had actually had a dryer hooked up to that?

Memory lane and such

April 15th: this is what we woke up to. Kind of random. Very pretty, but random.

We were on the Mt Timpanogos grounds today. This flower caught both of our eyes. We thought it was pretty.

One year ago, we made the best decision of our lives: to get married! Steve and I drove up in the canyon to celebrate Steve's proposal anniversary.

Dear Mom and Dad, Thank you for the clothes!

For my birthday, mom and dad (actually on both sides) were nice enough to get me new clothes. (or at least some money for the new clothes!) Here are a couple of the outfits:
This one is one of my favorites: we were able to find black and tan shorts for me to use all summer long! The shirts are also wonderful--I got black and white and the pink undershirt is the only one of my undershirts that I don't have to stretch out now!

I love this green shirt. Steve convinced me to buy it. Also, this jean skirt is fun to wear--it makes me feel kind of sassy.

Okay, so I thought I was wearing my other new skirt in this picture. Here is what else I got: I now have two new skirts, a very pretty yellow blouse and a blue shirt that goes along nicely with my white shirt underneath.

Thank you thank you thank you for the clothes!

Baby Monson

We decided to take pictures of my "pregnant belly" at various holidays, since I wasn't really looking all that pregnant. This is me at Christmastime. I was 15ish weeks along.

This is on Valentine's Day. If you can't tell, I am pushing my stomach out so that I will actually look like I am prego.

Ever since we found out that we were having a boy, we kind of went hog wild on clothes. Here is what we have come up with. Since this day though, we have decided not to buy any more except for essentials until after our little man is born.

I wanted to be as cool as Sister Hancock from the Fairborn Ward who makes something for her children when she is expecting them. Since I don't favor cross stitching (which is what she does), and I don't have a quilting frame for baby quilts, I am knitting a baby blanket from dark and light blue yarn. Its coming along.

I now officially (at 6 months along) look prego. (This was taken today--Mar 7th).

Oops...Christmas and THEN Valentine's Day!

Since we were going to be in Hawaii and it was our first Christmas together, we wanted to have our own little celebration together. Steve cooked his first turkey! It was excellent and I think we gave most of the bird to Shauna and Pat since there was no way it was going to be good when we got back.

This was our little Christmas tree. We weren't expecting it to be such a bright shade of green, but it turned out to be just what we wanted. It was about 4 feet tall and fit nicely in our tiny studio apartment. We opened presents on the 23rd, which was dubbed as our 'Christmas Morning'.

Christmas Eve dinner.

On the real Christmas Eve, we got up super early to fly to Hawaii! It was a long trip, but so worth it! This was on the beach that Santa Claus rowed into.

This is a pretty spot near the Edwards' home. If you can't tell that we were exhausted...I think we were out after the festivities before Zac was even in bed.
A few days after Christmas we went for a bike ride along the coast. It was such a nice ride--until I overused the breaks on Karen' s bike and went flying over the handle bars! Steve said it looked pretty graceful for the fall! I only came away with kind of a nasty scratch on my elbow, a few small scratches on my hands, and bruises on my thighs where they connected with the bars.

This is Waimea Canyon, on the west side of the island. We took this as a drive more than a hike. We stopped along all of the little lookout points and really enjoyed driving with the windows down and the beautiful sunshine!

This was part of a very beautiful, and rather muddy hike to part of the Napoli Coast. We enjoyed the hike to the beach (where we are standing the in picture below) and I have never been quite so muddy on a hike before. As we were traveling back to our car, someone was actually putting down vines and things to make it less slippery. I'm proud to say that I didn't fall on my butt at all during any of the hikes that we did! The picture just below was by far our favorite picture that we took!

We actually spent a ton of time on the beaches! Part way through our vacation, we discovered that our camera was broken. Luckily, since Steve thought it was broken anyway, he used force to pop the lens back into place and it has worked fine ever since!

This was a pretty lighthouse that we went to see while we were there. We both kind of got super-tans! I still actually have lines from my swimsuit (2 months later...).

On one of our last nights, we got to go to the Smith Family Luau! We loved it! When we got there, they greeted us with leis of shells and then we were given this little tour on a tram around the entire grounds. They were gorgeous!

I loved the flowers, bushes and trees on Kauai. They were nothing like I had ever seen before.

At the luau, we had several people around us ask why, since we were both over 21, we weren't taking advantage of the free alcohol! We just explained that we don't drink! The punch was great, the food was great, the entertainment was amazing!

This was a sunset from Brennecke's beach on our last official night there. It was so pretty and our camera died just as the sun was setting. Boo.

There you have it! We have a bunch of pictures that Brady and Karen took, but not on this particular memory chip. :D

Belated Valentine's Day?

So--we took pictures for our Valentine's celebration, but we never posted them. Here they are!

Steve let me open my present the day before. He had gone to the Food Sciences booth that was set up and put in a tiny teddy bear, a chocolate orange (my favorite!) and a nice note from him. I got to open up a can and find all of that. It was a really clever idea!


I had to give Steve his surprise on Thursday rather than Saturday. It was the only day that I would have time at home by myself to set everything up. I cut out a bunch of pink and red hearts and wrote out reasons why I loved him on all of them before taping them all over the house.



On the floor, I spelled out this little message in caramel kisses. He was surprised! :D

My first four months of partying in marriage

Here they are! The honeymoon/everything I've done since our wedding pictures!

The first two nights, we stayed in a place called Castle Creek Inn that we found in Sandy. We loved it! The breakfasts were great and everything was themed. We stayed in Rapunzel's tower. Very exciting.


Each night we were there, there were at least 3 or 4 cars that said "Just Married" on them. Quite amusing.

This was the first picture we took of California when we got out there. It was amazing to see the difference between Nevada (dry and brown) to Cali which was lush and beautiful.
A little Mexican man had stopped at the same place we did to take a picture. We had been trying to take it of ourselves, so we know he was confused when he turned the camera towards himself and said "Like dis?"

Mallory and Monica will enjoy this one. Steve did quite a few U turns in the few days that they were with us and I think they may believe that Steve is just lost all of the time. We enjoyed that they were legal here.

After we had driven all day long, I was exhausted and carsick, however, the Redwoods were absolutely gorgeous!

The beach!

We got to camp a night in the Redwoods. Here was one of the hikes we took the next morning.


We had a set plan on where we were going, but we ended up just winging some of it and we loved it! Here was one of the hallowed out trees that we could drive through!
We absolutely loved Oregon! It is a very beautiful place!
Some of the things we did on the coast:
Sandduning

Visited the sealion caves

Explored on the low tides

Took some awesome pictures

Went to the aquarium (don't ask me to tell you where it was cause I can't remember)

Built and extremely awesome sand castle


Visited the Tillamook Cheese factory, ate as many samples of cheese as they would let us and got some delicious ice cream.


Spent lots of time on the beach! This was after eating at Mo's where they have famous clam chowder bowls. I thought it was good, but not as good as the sour dough bowls and chowder in San Fran.

Went temple hopping. We got to go through Salt Lake and Bountiful (just before getting married), and Portland. We also visited Kirtland when we were in Ohio.

Here is our Ohio trip. For some reason, I don't have picture of Spokane.
When we camped, they had this giant pillow-like trampoline that we all jumped on. Mom and the kids all came with us to Niagara.

The falls:
Riding the Maid of the Mist. It was wet.
All of us became interested in the same little picture-flippers and mom thought it was funny.


Here is our post-trip life. We live in a studio apartment that is just perfect for us. Our storage space is our deck on the 4th floor of a complex. When we first went shopping for things we needed, we didn't think about needing the hooks for a shower curtain. I thought Steve was quite clever here.
First day of school as a married couple! We had originally decided to match all semester, but it just got too hard since Steve had to wear MTC clothes everyday. We were going to try and get into the Daily Universe, but maybe a different semester.
I think Utah and the mountains are beautiful.

Here is our Halloween pumpkin. Julie gave me the idea and since we don't drink and I was expecting, we decided to entitle it "Morning Sickness". Unfortunately, we didn't win the $100 prize, but we still liked ours the best.

Our matching costumes:
Just kidding. Here they are. We went to a ballroom party for Steve's team dressed as Tahitians.
Here is Dancesport. It ruled our lives only for two days and we both did really well in our competitions.
Camille married Jason Millar in Nauvoo. It was an exhausting trip (remind me never to fly overnight again) but I was very happy to be there. Note to self: next time I go to a wedding, take my husband. I was kind of a sap all weekend since I wanted to be with Steve.

We went up to Temple Square for the heck of it. It had some pros and cons that were different from last year, but it was very nice.

Steve and I have been working to perfect our rolls. Here he is working on the first of three batches that we made for Thanksgiving.



I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas season.