Elder Isaac Taylor Yates

 Two weeks ago today, Barrett's brother, Isaac, left for the MTC. It was both sad and exciting for him to take this next step. He will be serving in the Mexico, Mexico City South Mission. We will miss him very much! But we have already loved reading his letters! I just wanted to share a few pictures from the big day.

30 things to do before I turn 30

Awhile ago my sister posted about 35 things she wanted to do before she turned 35 and I loved the idea! I love setting and accomplishing new things, so for my birthday I created a 30 before 30 list. Each time I cross something off I will take pictures and post about it. Here it is:

30 before 30 list

1.   Go on a backpacking trip

2.   Dye hair brown

3.   Take cooking classes

4.   Complete Spanish Rosetta Stone

5.   Sew a “quiet book”

6.   Buy a piano

7.   Visit 2 places in Utah never been to before

8.   Climb Mount Timpanogos

9.   Find 3 new ways to do hair

10.   Figure out decorating style and implement throughout house

11.   Read President Monson’s biography

12.   Go on a trip outside of the United States (even if just Canada or Mexico)

13.   Do a session in the Bountiful temple

14.   Stop working full-time and start teaching piano

15.   Use every dish and cooking appliance we got for our wedding at least once

16.   Read Your Musical Child by Jessica Baron Turner and The Art of the Piano by David Dubal

17.   Swim laps for exercise

18.   Buy a cute, unique watch

19.   Plant a vegetable garden

20.   Go on a romantic, formal date with Barrett

21.   Make a patchwork quilt

22.   Go on a long bike ride

23.   Organize Itunes

24.   Go rollerblading

25.   Visit the Grand Canyon

26.   Buy a house or have plans to buy a house

27.   Play another piano/organ duet with Barrett

28.   Find a hat that fits my head

29.   Spend a day with no plan or to-do list (not on vacation)

30.   Learn about a topic never studied before

June and July

 Barrett's Ragnar Team

Barrett ran Ragnar again with the same team and ran the same legs. Barrett's parents, sister, and I were able to see him come in on his last run.

 Waiting for Holladay fireworks on the 4th of July

 Both sides of Barrett's extended family had reunions and we had a ton of fun doing all the activities! Sadly, the only picture we have is this one from Rocky Mountain Raceway. But with the Yates we played frisbee golf, had an outdoor movie night, and played games. With the Taylors we celebrated the 4th of July, golfed, and went to Rocky Mountain Raceway. It was fun to spend time with family!

 My 25th birthday

 The numbers are a little confusing.... but the 2 and five stars are for my age and the 6 is for my nephew's.

 Barrett always outdoes himself when he makes presents for me. He gave me these two decorations for the nursery.

Spring activities

 At the end of April my mom, sisters, and I did our annual girls trip and attended BYU Women's Conference. As always, we had a lot of fun! I really look forward to spending time with them every year.

The same weekend we ran in the Color Me Rad 5K at UVU.

 This is us all clean and white before the run.

 The finish line. As you run around the route you go through different color stations and get sprayed with color.

The next weekend we celebrated my sister, Melissa's, 30th birthday at her in-laws cabin. It was nice and relaxing!

 Our baby's first 4-wheeler ride. Don't worry, we were careful.

It's a girl!

We were lucky enough to be sent to an imaging center to find out our baby's gender, which had 3D imaging! It was so fun to see our daughter moving around! Here are some of our favorite photos.

Barrett and I also celebrated our 4 year anniversary this week! Time flies by! We are so excited for all this next year will bring: new apartment, Barrett's graduation, possibly moving out of state, and of course our baby!

Barrett's achievements

Barrett has been so busy with all of the end of the year design/engineering projects! It has been fun to go to all of his presentations and I wanted to show off some of what he has done. He participated in a competition called Bench to Bedside, where engineering, medical, and business students come together to create a new medical device. His team won $3,000 to move forward with the project.

He also finished his Senior Project class that was based on research in a lab on campus. He worked with a monkey who had a brain implant and responded to auditory signals, receiving a juice reward if he got it correct. They then analyzed the data to determine the accuracy of the implant. He won third place on his presentation and got a whopping $20 reward, ha ha.

The last project Barrett worked on was in a design class where he designed a prosthetic foot for a third world country. He has really stood out in his design classes, not only for his talent of design, but because of his understanding of engineering and being able to make a product not only look good, but function very well. He was featured in a school newspaper article you can read: here. There are a few pictures of the foot there. Based on a connection he made in this class he got an internship with E-motis, a prosthetic foot company that he just started this last Monday.

Changes

 Yes we are having a baby! I am due October 10 and we will soon find out what gender our baby will be! The process was harder and longer than expected, but when you look back on it, it really wasn't that long and the timing is perfect for us. During one of our difficult nights I discovered the song, "A Thousand Years" by Christina Perri, that brought comfort and is now our "baby's song". We smile everytime we hear it (and no I didn't know it was on Twilight until way after. But I don't let that ruin our song). It should be playing right now.

 Isn't this the ugliest picture of both of us? Ha ha! But the only one we have together, so it will forever document our exciting night.

Telling both families became a lot more chaotic and stressful than planned. We decided to tell Barrett's family by decorating their house and then they would see it when they all walked in from church.  At the same time. However, it did not turn out as planned. Due to Barrett's cousin's farewell that day, only Barrett's parents went to their ward, so they all showed up at different times. We didn't think we would have enough time to decorate so we started blowing up balloons in the car on the way there! Barrett blew up balloons and I tied them and threw them in the back of the car. Wouldn't you have loved to have been the car next to us at the stop light watching us frantically blow up balloons and seeing our car slowly fill up? We had to tell Morgan and Porter to come back later and Sophie had to wait outside for a little while. In the end it all worked about and was a lot of fun. They just found out in shifts. We have videos of all three groups coming in to find out.

 Telling my family: we often play the game called Telestrations with my family, except we just use our own sentences, not the actual game. So what happens is you start with a sentence, pass it to the next person and they draw the sentence, then it's passed to the next person who writes what was drawn, etc. etc. We thought it would be really fun to tell my family this way. Great idea, but a little harder to plan and it really stressed my brother-in-law out who was right after Barrett and had to make sure the news came out right, ha ha. It was really fun to see each new person find out and add to the number that knew. It made it all the way around until the second to last person, so my mom ended up being the only person who didn't get the message, as you can see from the last sentence. So we had to wait a little longer and finally my mom understood as I shared my sentence. Here are the drawings:

 In addition to the big change of having a baby, we will also be moving to a new apartment in Murray in two weeks! We will have 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms and I can't wait to start getting our baby's room ready. We are excited to start a new chapter of our lives, after 4 years of the same. Also, Barrett's younger brother, Isaac, got his mission call to Mexico City! He leaves in the middle of August. We will miss him a lot, but are excited for the opportunity he has to serve.