What's Been Up.

Yikes, I feel like it hasn't been that long since i've updated, yet i'm so behind!

We sent our Elder Cloward off on his mission on February 20th. It was a bitter-sweet day! We were sad to say goodbye for 2 years, but we are also SO proud of him. He was nothing but excited when we dropped him off! He was so eager to go and get to work. He hasn't been homesick one bit! From the few letters we've had so far, we can tell he is incredibly happy and just loving everything. Amazing how he just grooved right in to it. We sure love him. I am sure he is the most handsome missionary out there! One thing is for sure, New York had better get ready!

It's hard to have him gone, but there's no other place we'd rather have him be.

I did my last few hours at the good ol' Seagull Book tonight. That was also bitter-sweet! I've worked there since I graduated high school, so the thought that i'm not coming back was hard to comprehend! But it's time to move on in life! The next time I go back to work, it'll be using my license I got in Beauty School.

 My very pregnant self in front of my store....

 My sweet assistant manager made the darling little diaper-motorcycle, and my manager made the cute dinosaur blanket. I got a lot of love on my last day! I felt very spoiled.

Can't believe it's time to switch over from sales associate to mother! Am I ready? I guess as ready as i'll ever be. My family threw me a DARLING baby shower on the 2nd. The theme was pinwheels, all the decorations were SO cute.

We had a fun time! The shower was a HUGE help in getting ready for our baby boy!

Speaking of Baby.... Looks like (hopefully) we'll be parents on the 11th! My doctor gave the okay to induce me at 7am on March 11th. So.... yeah. That's in 3 days. Almost 2. SOOOO scary AND exciting! We are almost done with our "get ready for baby" checklist! Last things to do are give the house a good last cleaning before Sunday, and get Lorne all packed for the hospital. Then, hopefully, go on one last date as just us two... I'm looking forward to spending time with my sweet husband and making new memories with him. Here's to hoping everything runs smoothly on Monday.... wish me luck! Next time I post, i'll be posting as MOM! Maybe. Maybe i'll post before then.... but most likely i'll be MOM. :)

Hopefully the little guy is ready for his nervous/anxious/excited/eager parents! He'll have to be a trooper for sure. :)

Sweep, or Blog? I Chose Blog.

Right now I SHOULD be finishing my sweeping and vacuuming, but i'm blogging instead. Obviously. I just needed to take a little "breather"... so I thought catching the blog up would be just the thing!

So.... The teryiaki sticks were a hit!! And by "hit", I mean Lorne and I loved them. :) I'm sure Baby loved them, too, but.... I think he likes all foods right now. I would most definitely make them again!

Also, those peanut butter bars really DID taste like they did when I was in elementary school. Success!

SO, we are tryin' our very best to get everything ready as soon as possible for this Baby to get here. I guess you never know if he's gonna come early, later, right on time... so I figure we need to just get everything done before February ends. I've made a master to-do list, and I think it's doable! One item is get Baby's nursery put together. We recently finished painting his room from a pale shade of yellow to a really light grey. Here's some pics of the progress....

When the room was yellow, still....

I decided to have some fun with the paint. That's the heart I drew, when I was done painting it, I looked up and noticed Lorne drew a "tic tac toe" board and was playing against himself. He covered it up before I could get a picture. It made me laugh and, I thought, kind of illustrated the difference between us ladies and guys....  

Lorne thought my heart was sweet so he waited to cover it up last... so sweet! ;) 

 So, anyway. It was fun! We're all done painting now, and i'll upload pics once we have it put together a bit more!

We have only 6 weeks left until Baby is sopossed to get here! It's nuts, thinking about how fast it SEEMS to have gone by. When I think back to the day we found out I was expecting it seems like that was FOREVER ago. The closer it gets, I can tell he's getting bigger and starting to run out of room! I'm trying to drink more water these days, (I should have been trying harder earlier. Oh well.) It's kind of torture with the size of my bladder these days, but it's worth it! My nifty water bottle the my sis-in-law gave me for Christmas has this nifty thing on it that lets me track how many bottles I've had to drink that day, so it's always rewarding when I can slide it over one more number! I need to drink at LEAST 3 bottle-fulls a day. That's roughly 60+ ounces of water. Good luck to myself!

A couple weeks ago Lorne and I went to Baby J's basketball game. He's quite the player! I thought it'd be fun to post once of his pics we got that night... we tried real hard to get an "action shot" but, I guess we need to work on our photography skills. ;)

 Baby J is the one in the blue jersey. He's so cool! Also, I think he's trying NOT to look at the camera. ;)

And this is my cute little sis, Lauren. After the game. At my parents. She's my mini-me!

Well, well, well.... I guess I'll share more SUPER exciting things about the Nelson's next time! I'd better get that sweeping and vacuuming done... ;) 

I think they call it... "Nesting"

Yeah, pretty sure I've hit the "nesting" phase of pregnancy. I don't know if everyone has one or not, but i'm pretty sure that if i'm having mine, it's manifesting itself through cooking. I'm loving making tons of recipes lately and trying different dinners. I wish it was manifesting by way of not getting enough of cleaning and organizing, but i'm afraid I feel the same way about those fun little things as I always have.... But seriously. Tonight we're having Teriayki Chicken kabobs, which are marinating in the fridge right now. So excited to try them! Who knew making your own teriyaki sauce was so easy... my hands still smell of garlic, though.

Today I made these little beauties...

Peanut butter bars! I stumbled upon the recipe on pinterest. They're supposedly the bars that you'd get at lunch in elementary school... I loved those. So we'll see how they turn out! Waiting for them to cool, while waiting for a fun wave of baby heartburn to pass...

By way of other "news", my baby "bump" is now big enough to do THIS....

Yeah, I can use that "bump" as a shelf now. My cup is literally sitting there. It also makes a nice arm rest. ;)

Only 9 more weeks to go! Wow! It's seems so far away, yet so close at the same time. I am currently 31 weeks and 3 days along. Only 61 more days to go!

Alrighty, until next time.

Happy Tuesday!

Startin' this new goal off right.... I'm already posting another post! Yippee skips!

Lorne started some new classes today. His schedule includes a lunch break, so I get to see him half-way through the day! We get to eat lunch together, and that's awesome. Today when he came home for lunch I got THIS surprise....

Beautiful roses! I'm such a lucky girl....
I get to joy these little beauties for a little while. I'm one of those girls that would take flowers over chocolate ANY day. Don't get me wrong. I love to eat, and I do love chocolate. But, I really love flowers. Especially roses. What can I say? My man knows me.

I know Christmas is over, but thought i'd post a picture of our cute Christmas tree... I've gotta have one on file somewhere, right? We love our little tree. Bought it on sale last black Friday.

Hard to believe how fast Christmas went by! While I DID just post this pic, we've already taken our tree and everything down. Time is just FLYIN'!

Hopefully i'll be posting more pics now... i'm getting more tech savvy everyday, AND my parents gave us a way awesome camera for Christmas. We love it, and i'm eager to fill up many SD cards with pics of our Little Nelson in March!

K, that's all I've got today... enjoy your Tuesday night!

Long time, no blog!

I've never been very good at keeping up a journal.... so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised that i'm not awesome at keeping this blog up, either. But, it IS a new year, and we DO make new goals at this time of year. So, I'm gonna try and do much better. I'm going to get all caught up with this post... i'll even post a few videos! Feelin' so "on top of it" right now...

So, thought i'd finally share the video we took at the "find out the gender of baby nelson" party we had. I'll fill you in on the "back" story of the party. The day before the party, we had "the big ultrasound" where the ultrasound tech determined the sex of the baby. This was NOT easy to do... so if anyone else out there want to use this idea, you've gotta have some strong will power! So, during the ultrasound, we had to look away when she saw if baby was a boy or girl. I brought a little note card for her to write on, and she sealed it up with the ultrasound picture along with it. After my appointment, I went to the store to order the cake. I asked the baker to put a filling in the cake with the color that went along with the gender. We waited for a full, painful day! The next night we got together and shared the moment with our family and friends.... So that's what you see on the video. We really are finding out for the first time in this video... It was a lot of fun. Probably, the last time we'll do it that way, though. It was rough to wait!

It was such a relief to finally know what we were having... needless to say, the nursery decor plans include a lot of blue. :) We're pretty set on a name, but we're not going to call it "official" yet. You never know if you'll hear something else that you'll like.

We made the move out of our first apartment and are living in Lorne's parents old house until it sells... It's been wonderful staying here, but we're trying not to get too attached.

Christmas was great! We had a lot of fun and tried to take it all in as much as we could, enjoying our last Christmas as non-parents! We're very excited for next Christmas, though... at that point we'll have a 9-month old.

Hard to think we only have 10 weeks left until this little baby boy comes... I think at least once a day either Lorne or I say, "I can't believe he'll be here in 'this' amount of time. It'll be so different".

SO! Let the 10-week count-down begin! Here's to hoping it goes by fast... and slow at the same time so we can be well-prepared.

For fun, thought i'd post the video we took RIGHT after we found out we're having a baby... This is not the prettiest, it was super early and i'd just woken up. But it's fun to look back on.

Until next time!

Big News about a Little Nelson!

So... Time to let the "cat out of the bag"! If you don't already know, Lorne and I are expecting our first baby on March 16. We couldn't be happier! I know it's been a long time since I've posted.... I've been trying to hold this secret in from the "net" for a while now, and I knew I couldn't blog without mentioning it! Things have been crazy! Crazy since... about July...

July 9th (ironically the anniversary of our engagement!) I took a pregnancy test that came out... positive! That little "plus" sign indicated we would, in fact, be "adding" to our family! I could not believe my eyes. Of course not too long after, we couldn't help but gush the good news to our families.

The doctors appointments have been great so far. We've got to see Little Nelson two times, now. Our big ultrasound is on the 24th! We will definitely announce if Little Nelson will be wearing lots of pink, or lots of blue!

I have been pretty morning sick up until a few days ago. I found a magic combination of half a Unisom and a B6 vitamin... it has been my cure. I feel like a normal human being now and can focus on growing one...

March can not come fast enough for us... it's crazy to think we'll be parents in just over 5 months. We are young, but it's right. I can't wait to be a mom. I'm nervous, but this is what I've always wanted to do... It will all work out.

The picture was taken by Kayla Fetters. She's amazing with her camera and I want to thank her for taking these pics!

The Funny, The New, and The.... New?

Is this funny? I think it's HILARIOUS...

Today my husband got a text message from an unknown number. The text said, " Hey Lexi, this is Zach from the gym this morning."

Before I continue... Have you caught on already? If so... hahaha! So funny!

My sweet darling answered, "Sorry dude, i'm not Lexi. Good luck man."

It's probably rude, but I laughed! Poor kid. My husband really had sympathy for him, though. You know, one guy to another. Oh, Lexi. Thank you for choosing my husbands number.

I have not done a post in a long, long time! Yikes.

We had so so so much fun up at the lake. I wish I took pics of the cabin... my family is working really hard on the place, and Lorne and I feel like slackers, never helping but taking advantage.

And have I mentioned?? New car!!! Yahoo! We purchased an 05' Trail Blazer... it's even the color we like and everything! I think... no, I KNOW, we got really lucky. More like, blessed. We got an amazing deal, probably a deal we shouldn't have got. Never the less, we have a new car that we LOVE and will (knock on wood!) hopefully last! My mom just got a kick out of the way she saw us treating our new car. She laughed and said, "that's just wrong. You were never this careful with our cars!" oops... sorry mom. The things I learn, growing up and moving away. She's so awesome.

Speaking of mom... wishing her, dad, Bretterson, and Baby J good luck on trek this week! I'm really not jealous, actually. But I love you and will miss you. I'm excited to spend some time with my lil sis Lauren, though. Kill it out there!!!!

Welp, until next time...