Christmas Music

Oh Christmas songs... you get me every year. But because Cody won't let me decorate our house until after Thanksgiving, I'm trying to stay away from Christmas music until then too. But I fell into the trap today. I was listening to country music when all of a sudden, Carrie Underwood was singing a Christmas song. Now I don't know about you, but I just can't change the radio station when she comes on, no matter what she's singing, so I listened to the whole thing. And then right after that, one of my absolute favorite Christmas songs came on... Feliz Navidad. When that song comes on, I'm dancing! I just can't help it, it's a dang good song!


Anyways, I'm going to try to be better this next week, but as soon as we get home, the decorations are coming up and the music is going to be on! I love this time of year!

Things I've recently discovered about myself:

Weird picture, I know. This was actually my second hole-in-one while putt-putting on my birthday!

-I have very high anxiety about driving on the freeway when I'm by myself. It doesn't help that our tires suck even in the rain! (Cody says they're still in good shape, they just have a weird tread pattern. We're buying winter ones this weekend.)

-I have neck claustrophobia. I can't have things touching the front of my neck without me freaking out. Tight necked shirts get stretched, scarves come flying off, and sweatshirts get tugged at all day. Which is pretty ironic because I sell scarves...

-I can't see very well at night time. This is not a recent discovery, but I just went all the way out to Bluffdale to pick up Cody from work, and it was raining, I had to go on the freeway, and I was by myself (did you count all of those things that I hate?). Also, I wear glasses to help me see at night, and I realized that my glasses don't allow me to have peripheral vision.. That's pretty scary.

-I forget I'm pregnant on a daily basis.. Until something reminds me. I'm pretty thankful for this uneventful pregnancy so far.

-I'm not good at keeping up with Project Life. I just sent 63 pictures to Costco though! I'll get caught up with the end of July and August with most of these pictures!

-I get tired very easily now-a-days.. So much so that daily naps are almost always required. I'm not complaining though! I'll take them while I can!

I can finally REALLY post now!

You guys, the real reason that I didn't blog for about 2 months was because I found out I'M PREGNANT!! I found out on September 24th (happy birthday, Dad!) and I knew I couldn't say a thing on here unless I wanted to tell everyone already. Which I wasn't ready to do.

But, because I went public last night with this news, I can blog again!

And in case you don't check facebook, this was my adorable announcement! (Created by myself!)

We found out RIGHT away, as we were trying for a little while. When one day goes past your expected "time of the month", you automatically start thinking something's up. Especially if you're me with the most regular woman schedule ever! I took the test when Cody was at work, and I had to wait 5 hours to tell him! My goodness, that was one of the hardest things I ever had to do in my life!! I was also supposed to call Kaylee back that afternoon, but I knew I couldn't call her and keep it a secret (yanno, the husband should probably know about the pregnancy before the sister..) so I didn't have contact with anyone, and I tried to keep myself busy for the rest of the night until Cody got home. Hardest. Thing. Ever.

Anyways, we're super super excited, and we got to see our baby for the first time yesterday!! It was the cutest thing, seeing it dancing around in my belly!!

When the doctor was showing us the ultrasound, he had some really great shots of the baby with legs, arms, and body in view! But the picture he decided to print for us looks like this..

Which is totally fine with me, because I can tell that it's a real baby in there, but it definitely wasn't the best! You can see the hands, face, and little body. You guys, I used to look at other people's ultrasound pictures and think, "What in the world even is that? Boring." But when it's your own child, it's completely different!!!!! I love this little treasure, and I can't wait until our next appointment to see how much it's grown!

Dexter cracks me up.

I haven't posted in a while because my days are pretty much the same. Go to work, go to school, do homework, see Cody for a couple hours, and go to sleep. Every day. How boring would that get?

Well, today was funny. I came home from school and played with Dexter for a little bit before I was going to start on homework. Then when I sat down, he found his tennis ball and started chewing on it. It was then that I realized that he's been without a bone for a couple of weeks. So I went into the back room to grab a new one, and I know that everytime we give Dexter a bone after him not having one for a while, he chews them so freaking fast! I've been wanting to take daily pictures of his bone just to show how fast they deteriorate, so I unwrapped it and was trying to take a picture of it for the "before" picture, when all of a sudden I noticed Dexter.. He had gotten so impatient waiting for me to open it, and then it was just in the palm of my hand and I wasn't giving it to him, and just as I was taking this picture, he jumped up, about to burst with excitement, and I got this gem of a photo. And man, it makes me laugh! I love our little ball of energy (:

And now he's ferociously chewing away on his bone, having the time of his life while I have to look forward to reading 5 ridiculously long articles about Holocaust survivor's stories and experiences, and then writing a paper about it. Reading their experiences will be interesting, but writing the paper? Not so much. I'm so ready to be done with boring classes that make me write papers!! Just let me sign all day already, okay?

And, if you're wondering about Project Life, which I'm sure none of you that are reading this even care about that, I have sad news. I haven't done any PL since August!! So much for staying on track! Dang it.. I'll get caught up soon though, I just need some extra time!!

Journaling

I struggle so badly with journaling, it's not even funny. I often justify not writing in an actual paper journal by saying that this blog is my Martin journal that documents most of the important things in my life, but I'm not doing it daily. When my little sister Jaycee was in town, she was looking for journals and one of them had daily prompts in them. I loved the idea but I didn't want to spend 20 bucks on it. So I went to trusty ol' pinterest and looked upjournal prompts and found a set that I could answer a different question everyday for a wwhole year! For free too! I started doing these daily on August 5th, and I've done 34 out of the 40 days so far.

I bought this journal about 700 years ago (actually about 3 years ago) because look how cute it is!

But I only wrote in it a total of 9 times. That's not putting this adorable journal to enough use, which is why I chose this one to hold my daily writings. I have been loving it so far!  I love that the questions are not the normal "what did you do today?" questions, but that they're weird and allow me to answer questions that I normally wouldn't.

These are the questions for September that I'm trying to stay caught up on. I usually try to fill a whole page with my answer, but sometimes I run out of things to write so they end up looking like this:

Anyways, if you're struggling with journaling and want to get better, try this approach!  And if something noteworthy happened that day and you don't want to answer the assigned question, it's your freaking journal! Do whatever the heck you want! Like thee day that our car hit 123456 miles, you bet I didn't answer the question for the day!

PLT: 8th Edition

You guys, I'm just barely making the cut off on today's PLT! I actually thought it was Friday, so I was very much prepared to change the name. But, it's only Thursday, so here we go! I was able to get in a few weeks worth of pictures put in my book and finished and I'm so glad that I don't have to catch up as much as I did a few months ago!


I actually don't like this first spread, as the pictures are quite boring. But I really wanted to document the progress of our room, so I'll just flip past this page when I look through it later.

I love this one! It's only a half spread because I ran out of pictures. So now I'm looking through my pictures to send to Costco. More pages coming next week!

Things I'm loving lately

• UVU's free parking lot + shuttle
• You guys. If you go to UVU, DON'T pay $80 for a parking pass! There's a free lot, that's free, and UVU even has a shuttle that takes you all around the campus and stops at almost every building so you will be just as well off if not better than trying to find a parking spot for half an hour. You might have to wait 5-15 minutes longer to get to class, but if you just plan ahead, it's such an easy way to save money!

• Men giving up their seats on the UVU shuttle
• Speaking of the shuttle, I saw 5 guys stand up and give their seats to girls today! There were tons of people on this bus, and they all did it within 5 minutes of each other, and it just made me so happy that there are still considerate men on this earth! (Just for the record, this is not in anyway affiliated with Cody, as he is thee most chivalrous man I've ever met. It's just nice to see OTHER men doing it for complete strangers too (: ) <Haha, smile sandwich!

• Men still opening doors for me
• This goes along with the last one, and this also makes me very happy. Way to go, dudes!

• Renting textbooks
• Yet another way to save money while going to school. Chances are, every class you take isn't going to be 100% beneficial to you for the rest of your life, so you really don't need to buy it. Especially since you can get it for less than half the price by renting it from somewhere OFF CAMPUS. Your school probably rents textbooks, but try looking on half.com, chegg.com, amazon.com, bn.com... You'll save even more!

• Feeling like I belong at my job
• This is the first full week of preschool, and we've had a handful of kids that aren't doing very well when their parents leave.. Meaning they're bawling, screaming, etc. I get off work at 12:30, and the afternoon class starts at 12, meaning I get to see the afternoon kids for just a short time before I go. Yesterday, a little girl was having a complete meltdown that her mom was leaving her, and I went over to her and was able to calm her down in about 2 minutes. You guys.. this is the first time I've ever been able to do that! (Partly because most of the other kids having meltdowns are hispanic and only speak Spanish.. it's not very easy to comfort a child when they don't understand you!) I felt like I was just totally in the right career and that I was a valuable asset to the classroom. I might be overreacting a little bit, but it made me feel so good!

• My new phone
• I got a smart phone on Tuesday! Cody and I have been talking about getting me one for a while, but that would mean Cody would go back to a dumb phone (because we can't afford two data plans a month..) and I wasn't eligible for an upgrade yet, and a million other reasons. Well, we finally did it! It's a Samsung Galaxy S3 and it's beautiful, wonderful, amazing, and so fun! The battery dies a lot faster than my dumb phone, but that's understandable. My old phone could text and make phone calls, where this new one does just about anything you can think of. I know I didn't absolutely need it, but it was so so so very nice of Cody to give up his luxury to let me have a turn with a smart phone!

• A growing garden!!

  

  Our little cantaloupe!

  
  
  
• I just about jumped to the moon yesterday when I went out to our garden and noticed that we have two baby watermelons and one cantaloupe growing!! Our garden consists of two watermelon plants, one cantaloupe plant, one squash plant, and one gray pumpkin plant. We planted 20+ seeds, but these were the only ones that lived. Anyways, we're not too excited about the squash and pumpkin plants, but have been on the edge of our seats waiting for our fruit to grow!! I can't wait to eat them when they get big enough!

• Hardworking/handsome husband
  
• He's just amazing. I love him more and more every second. He works all day, sacrifices so much for me, and loves me unconditionally. Like I said in the caption of this picture, how did I get so lucky?

• This photo a day inspiration

• I have been thinking about all the cool things I'd do with a smart phone for like a month, and one of the things that I was most excited about was being able to take good photos on a regular basis. I saw this photo-a-day inspiration thing a while ago, and loved the idea of taking pictures based on what the word was that day. So, I started doing it! I decided to start yesterday, but starting on the 4th of September felt weird, so now I'm going back and taking pictures for the first three words. Here's day 3 and 4.

• Preschool
• I love being an assistant teacher, and having some say in what we teach the kids. Today was one of my days to teach, and I was able to switch our lesson plan at the last second because I noticed our kids didn't really know how to wash their hands. It might not seem like a big deal, but it just feels cool. And I love that I'm not nervous to teach here! When I was student teaching, it was so nerve-wracking every time I had to teach, but not here! I love feeling comfortable, it makes a huge difference! Also, I saw one of my cousins today! Her daughter is in one of the other classes in my building, and we just happened to be in the same place at the same time! So fun!