February 2015

Our trip back from Oregon included an overnight stay at Thomas' sister, Elizabeth's place in Idaho. We got to see their brand new, just-a-few-days-old, baby boy.

Thomas sent me flowers :)

I got together with a girl in our ward and made sugar cookies. Way fun!

We went to a Valentine's Day dance. I didn't do a whole lot of dancing! :)

My darling visiting teacher threw a baby shower for me.

We borrowed a slide scanner from Thomas' brother and cleaned up some old negatives we found in the box of letters I scanned in January. Thomas scanned those for me.

I crocheted a baby cardigan and beanie.

We got to attend You Can't Take it With You, directed by Thomas' cousin.

We acquired a nice little chest freezer that I've basically filled with additional homemade freezer meals! It feels like quite an accomplishment to build up our food supply in this manner while sticking to our grocery budget. Plus, it feels great knowing that if I don't want to/have time to cook this next little while (particularly after the baby comes), we can just pull out homemade pizza, lasagna, quiche, egg rolls, chimichangas, etc. and have a home-cooked meal in a fraction of the time it would take from scratch! 

Anyway, we think we're about as ready for baby as we can be... Now we are just awaiting his/her arrival!

oxox

January 2015

January was my first month as a full-time homemaker! We are both excited about this and that our situation allows for me to be home (a) now to prepare for the baby and (b) as a stay-at-home mom when the baby is born.

I've spent my days working on various projects -- mostly things I've been wanting to get to before the baby is born. I finished scanning a box of old letters & other documents that belonged to my great-grandmother (a project I started about 3 years ago...). I re-finished the inside of a silverware box. I finished sewing a couple things for baby. I've gone through & tried to pare down a bunch of our stuff. I finally read Preach My Gospel. I've been putting together some freezer meals to have on hand.

We attended a wedding reception for my cousin Will.

Thomas' grandfather passed away and we drove to Oregon for a memorial with Samuel & Sarah. It was a whirlwind trip but we are so glad we were able to be there.

oxox

December 2014

During November, I started to have some pretty debilitating hip/pelvic pain. Blessedly, our home teacher is in the physical therapy field and recommended a physical therapist he knows. He diagnosed a rotated pelvis (something like this) and worked on my muscles, which offered some relief the same day. He also gave me some exercises to do to help, and I am happy to report that I am repaired! :) What a relief!

Thomas' birthday was a busy day for us both. He had some Elders Quorum duties to attend to, and I went to a friend's baby shower. I also made 2 Bûches de Noël, one for the baby shower, and the other for our ward Christmas party, also on the same day. In the evening, we helped with and attended the Christmas party.

We kept the ice cream cake I made especially for Thomas' birthday to ourselves :)

I made some really yummy gingerbread cookies this year to give to some friends. The recipe I found worked really well for my Williams-Sonoma Message-In-A-Cookie cutters. It was fun coming up with Christmas sayings to stamp into my cookies.

Later in the month, we got to go to the Bradshaw Family Christmas Party. Good food, good company, a good time as always! :)

For Christmas, we had our Christmas miracle: we woke up to snow! It snowed most of the day and it was really nice to actually have a white Christmas. We stayed home and watched The Bells of St. Mary's (loved it!) before delivering some goodies & getting to work on turkey dinner. We had a couple from our ward over for dinner and ended up making a few plates up for some other friends, too. I guess we didn't get pictures of the whole ensemble, but we put together basically all the fixings (green bean casserole, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, steamed broccoli, cranberry sauce, pineapple, rolls).

After Christmas, we met up with some good friends who moved out of the ward this summer for dinner & games. They are also expecting, due 2 weeks ahead of us :) They and we had kept the news quiet for a fairly long time, so it was really exciting to find out about them!

My family came into town on the last day of the year on their way to take my sister off to college! We had a good couple of days with them but only got this picture, and technically this was January 1:

We're excited for Morgan's university experience and we're so glad they could stop and visit us on the way! They came bearing lots of gifts & hopefully enjoyed their time here. My dad worked on our car a bit and I got to talk baby stuff with my mom and sister :) It was simply nice to be together.

oxox

October 2014

The first weekend in October, my dad & sister came out to visit, and so did Thomas' dad (with some youth from their ward), for General Conference.

Unfortunately for my dad, the night he drove down to Provo, traffic was horrendous because of a BYU home football game and a free Neon Trees concert both in Provo. We braved the concert and he found us there once he got into town :) It made me respect my dad on a whole new level the way he actually seemed to enjoy & be interested in the concert :)

Fictionist

Neon Trees

On the Saturday of General Conference, I experienced the worst "morning sickness" of my entire pregnancy. We stayed home and kept the whole day pretty low-key. Morgan joined us that evening (she had stayed with friends the night before).

On Sunday, Dad & Morgan got to go up to the Conference Center for a session of General Conference. Thomas & I stayed home to get dinner ready for them & his dad, fellow travelers, and Samuel & Sarah.

Thomas got an unexpected email saying he'd been selected for another film shoot for the church's Bible videos. It was prior to his shaving off his beard, so he went for it!

Later in the month, his dad was back in town for a conference.

We went to Octubafest this year, as a throwback to our first "date" 6 years ago.

Thanks to a little help from our friends, we were able to put these cute things in our windows for Halloween:

oxox

Announcement

Perhaps you were sly, and caught it in our September post, but we suspect you might have missed it.

We are absolutely over the moon about this!

After 4 1/2 years of marriage...

...2 years of infertility...

...suspected hormone issues...

...losing 30 lbs...

...a cabinet full of prescriptions...

...4 different doctors...

...completing the C25K running program -- twice...

...lots of blood & lab work...

...even more tears & frustration...

...an HSG...

...one consultation with a fertility clinic...

...one official diagnosis of "unexplained infertility"...

...one closely monitored cycle of COH+IUI...

...and unnumbered prayers...

...we are finally expecting! Baby Bradshaw is due in March 2015.

September 2014

September was a good month! The weather started to turn more autumn-like & we got a fair amount of rain. We had a couple of "weird" Sundays (stake conference & a temple dedication) that convinced us we could get used to just 2 hours of church at 10 AM. We also got to enjoy harvest a little.

We went to a u-pick raspberry patch south of Provo (you can see the Payson temple if you look closely at the next picture, taken just around the corner from where we picked berries):

About 5 lbs of raspberries!

We went to a Bradshaw wedding:

We saw Sterling's band at their 9/11 memorial performance:

Sterling's family allowed us to glean their peach trees. We processed about 30 lbs of peaches (with the help of our canner, purchased that weekend!):

Coincidentally, we also announced to our families that our own little "peach" will be here in March.

We bottled 8 pints of peach halves and 10 pints of peach jam, froze a few pounds of peach slices, and used the remaining fruit for 2 9*13 pans of peach crisp!

We spent the following weekend up at the cabin, with a family from the ward joining us for one night & a day trip to Cascade Springs:

We decided mid-September is the ideal time for the cabin. The surrounding trees were turning their fall colors, the nights were cool, we got a day of sunshine and one of rain... it was really beautiful and the perfect start to autumn.

oxox