Summer Fun in Oregon!

Due to the many, many things that keep us in Utah, we don't get to visit Oregon nearly as much as I would like. The past two Thanksgivings and Christmases have been spent in dear old Provo, and that won't be changing this year with a baby due on Christmas Day (my midwife changed my due date back). Because of this, I like to take somewhat "extended" vacations to McMinnville during the summer. I went home for a month while I was pregnant with Tilly two years ago; last year we stayed for two weeks; Matilda and I went for 10 days in August of this year. Sean couldn't go with us because we are trying to save his paid days off for when Baby Two comes. It wasn't fun to be away from Sean for so long, but we did have fun hanging out with my side of the family, especially Tilly since she has 11 cousins in Oregon. We were especially glad to be with my sister Allison and Sam, her son. Ally has been in Provo with me since I was a freshman at BYU, but they moved back to Oregon in May and we miss them a lot! Sam and Tilly are best friends and she still asks to go play with him everyday. Anyway, here are some pictures from the trip!

Matilda got so used to having Sam next to her in the car, she kept wondering where he was when we got home.

A day at the beach! It wasn't sunny, but it was fairly warm and not too windy.

She thought it was hilarious to shove her face in the sand and go "nigh-nigh."

Matilda, Kale, Sam, Jake

Playing at the beach with her cousins

These are two of the four pictures of me from our entire trip.

Tilly enjoyed counting the kites. Her counting currently includes saying 2 and 3 over and over, although sometimes she pulls out 8 9 10 or something.

Reading with McKenna and Zach

Matilda and Andrew had a joint birthday party. Andrew turned 2 just five days after Tilly. She was so excited to get outside and go swimming!

With "mama" and "bapa"

Every time Tilly sees these pictures, she says, "Ewww...yucky!" She likes to be clean these days.

Andrew's mom, Annie, brought a pinata to the party. The kids loved it! Matilda didn't quite get it though. While everyone else was grabbing handfuls, she was quite content with the first piece she picked up.

After the party, Tilly got some quality time with Sam and Andrew. She wants to play with them everyday, so we named a couple of her stuffed animals Sam and Andrew.

Drawing with Handsome Samson the day before we left.

We love you, Rudens! I can't wait to bring both of my girls out to play next Spring or Summer!

Bangs

Just in case American rap is a little too racy for you, I wanted to introduce you to some wholesome Sudanese-Australian rap. Enjoy!

Floored

Over two years ago, when we first saw the house that we eventually bought, we fell in love with it. I am still in love with our little 111 year old house. The bathroom, although very small, has a big clawfoot bathtub that, again, I love. The previous owners had bath mats that covered the whole floor and we just never thought to look under them to see what the floor was like...and then we moved in. We came to discover that the bathroom floor looked like this:

I'll bet you wish you had linoleum that looked as good as this. Not only was the floor thoroughly discolored, scraped up, peeling off, and ugly, but the subfloor beneath the toilet had rotted, and while the toilet was stable, it was slightly tilted to the right, which was quite the surprise the first time I sat on it. While my dad was here for my graduation in April, he graciously gave up one day of his vacation to help us fix this disaster. Here are a couple pictures after we took out the tub and toilet:

In this picture, you can see the slanted floor under the toilet

In the morning, I helped my dad measure and lay down the new subfloor.

Sean got off work early, so in the afternoon he and my dad worked and putting down the new laminate flooring. I say new, but really it had been sitting in our garage for at least two years. Luckily, the previous owners had extra flooring from remodeling the kitchen and there was just enough for the bathroom. Really, there was just enough. We only had about a foot of flooring leftover that we didn't use.

Now really, which one looks better?

No More Back to School

For almost twenty years, I never realized the importance of "back to school" days in the resetting of my yearly life-cycle. As I am sure many people would agree, it feels even more absolute as a new beginning than New Years Day, and so the absence of the event is making me feel a bit incomplete. I use to LOVE back to school shopping, and I don't mean clothes shopping, although that was nice too. I loved picking out all of my new pencils, notebooks, crayons, and boxes of tissues. When I got home, I would carefully organize each item exactly how I wanted it, whether it be in a pencil pouch, binder, or backpack pocket. I would then repeat this ritual every night until school started. The night before the first day of school was always restless for me. In fact, I had my first migraine on the first day of my junior year of high school because I hadn't slept enough the night before. I do not remember ever hating school like some people do. Even when I complained about it, I loved school.

This year, the only things that let me know it is Back to School time again are the ads in the stores and the influx of students in Provo. I am not making last minute changes to my schedule. I am not buying my books or any other supplies. I am not moving into a new apartment or figuring out babysitting for Matilda. Life is just continuing as it has been for the past several months, which is wonderful because I really do love my life, but Autumn is going to be very different without school.

So, the whole point of this blog post (before I turned nostalgic), is to blog about my graduation from Brigham Young University, which occurred in April. This won't be incredibly detailed, but I do want to post some pictures and tell a little bit about those couple of days.

First Day: Commencement

Commencement, which includes all of the graduates, was long and boring, but luckily I found some of my dance friends to sit with. It was pretty cool walking into a packed Marriott Center during the processional. Here are some pictures:

Very full Marriott Center

Sister-in-law Caitlin, mother-in-law Jill, my mom Judy, Matilda, and Sean (we didn't realize until later that the settings on the camera were weird, but it was also very sunny)

Second Day: Convocation

Convocation was a lot more enjoyable and meaningful for me. It included about a third of my college (Fine Arts and Communications), so it was much shorter than some of the other college convocations. One part that made it especially special for me was that the main speaker was Mary Bee Jensen, founder of the BYU International Folk Dance Ensemble. Anyone who knows me knows that folk dance is a huge part of my life and my heart since attending BYU, and so it was incredibly inspirational for me to have such an important woman making the closing remarks of my college education. Now for pictures:

Can you find me in the front row of graduates, over to the right? Notice how I'm the only one who looks genuinely interested in what Mary Bee is saying?

My sister, Allison, came with Sam. We miss them a lot.

My parents drove down from Oregon for a few days.

On the morning of convocation, Sean and I found out some exciting news for our little family and we wanted to tell our parents in a creative way that would get a reaction. After Sean counted 1,2,3 to take this next picture, I said "I'm pregnant!" Sean's mom was the only one who believed me at first.

Once everyone believed me, we got a better reaction shot.

Here are just a few more pictures

And to finish things off, here is a profile shot of our newest little girl, due 4 January 2011.

I'm Making a Comeback

My last post was about my upcoming dance concert, which is now long past, so I think a couple pictures are overdue. I'm so happy that I was able to be a part of such a wonderful piece during my last semester at BYU.

Giving our wonderful choreographer, Marin, some flowers for being awesome

Ready to go onstage

Random dancing shot

Now rewinding back a couple of months to the end of December. Sean and I had our 3rd wedding anniversary on December 30, so we decided to take a trip. We decided on Disneyland since we had never been there together, so we dropped Matilda off at grandma's house for a week and hit the road. We spent two nights in Las Vegas and five in California, so we treated ourselves to 3-day park hopper tickets at Disneyland. I'm assuming that most people have seen the pictures on facebook, so I'm just going to put a few of my favorites on here.

Hanging out in Vegas for our anniversary

New Year's Eve at Disneyland!

We loved being there while the holiday decorations were up!

Tarzan's Treehouse

Thunder Mountain Railroad

One of my anniversary gifts was lunch at the Blue Bayou at Disneyland (you know, inside Pirates of the Caribbean). My husband makes dreams come true :)

Carousel at California Adventure

We had a lot of fun, although it was hard to be away from Tilly for a whole week. The end.

Faculty Works Concert

This weekend marks my last performing opportunity at BYU (for real this time). The concert is the Contemporary Faculty Works Concert and it is tonight and tomorrow night at 7:30. I auditioned for the show back in September, which seems so long ago, and now it is finally here! The contemporary division of the dance department decided to have this concert available for any faculty member who would like to choreograph and the audition was open to all students. Instead of being put on a team, we were selected for a specific piece, and I am lucky enough to have been selected for Marin Leggat's piece, Hold. I am only in one piece, but it is 8 minutes long, so I'm ok with that. Anyway, I would love to have as many people there as possible, so here is the info:

Faculty Works Concert

26-27 February 2010

7:30 PM

Dance Studio Theatre (169 RB at BYU)

$6: tickets available at HFAC ticket office, 801 422 4322, byuarts.com

Potty Talk

As I mentioned in my last post, Matilda has been talking a lot lately and actually enunciates several words pretty well. She is sick with a little cold right now and didn't sleep very well on Friday night (which meant Sean and I didn't sleep at all, and I had a 7 AM rehearsal in the morning, blah), and since she was so sad and miserable on Saturday, we gave her a bath even though she had had one the day before. As Tilly was sitting and playing in the tub, she "tooted". This was not a small toot, it was loud and long. When it was over, she looked to Sean and said, "Poop bubble?" Yes, Matilda. It was a poop bubble.