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.

Christmas

I love the Holidays! Mostly I love the time we are able to spend with family, immediate and extended. But I thought this nativity they put in the reflecting pool at Temple Square was beautiful! It is the perfect representation of what Christmas is all about: the simple, yet profound, birth of the Savior.

Barrett and I slept over at his family's house on Christmas Eve and it was a lot of fun to be there right before bed and first thing in the morning. The next two pictures were on Christmas Eve after opening the new Christmas jammies.

Barrett's family does a stair picture every Christmas morning and we were happy to be a part of it this year. Next year Isaac will be on his mission.

I was proud of this present my Dad helped me put together for Barrett. Barrett is always doing design projects and because we have no space in our apartment he ends up using a corner of our counter, the table, or the coffee table in our living room. So my Dad helped me find a cool "workhorse" that can be folded up and stored easily and then we just screwed on a piece of wood. It will work great until he can get a real work area.

Barrett bought me a Nook! I was so excited and love reading with it!

We got a couple of great pictures of Barrett's parents. We don't seem to get too many of them because they are always behind the camera.

After church and opening presents at the Yates, we spent the rest of Christmas day with my family.

My Mom wanted each family to share a talent this year. The Duckwitz family changed lyrics to a popular song and sang it for us.

Jeff read a Christmas story.

We played a piano piece.
And the Bradshaws brought pipes they had made and played a Christmas song for us. We had fun trying out other songs after.

This is where my parents sat to enjoy the talent show.

I love these pictures of my parents with the grandkids. Not only because they are cute, but because it so funny to try to get all the kids to sit still, look at the camera, and smile. At the same time.

The next day we rode Trax to Temple Square.

Sadly, Jeff was working, but the rest of the gang was there.

It's hard to believe that we are already so far past Christmas. But I love all the pictures so we can have the good memories until next year.

Barrett's Birthday

We celebrated Barrett's 25th birthday last week.
He had a final the next day, so we kept the celebrations low key and stayed home for dinner, presents, and cake.

One of my not-so-brilliant ideas was the decorating of Barrett's cake. We didn't have icing for the writing, but I did have gel food coloring from work and thought that would work great for letters. First of all, it was hard to make the letters and by the time I was done all the food coloring was gone.

Then when we ate more of the cake the next day I realized the repercussion of my food coloring. I looked at Barrett and my dad as they ate and couldn't help but laugh at their blue mouths.

We were able to go the Mormon Tabernacle Choir concert the next day then celebrated again on the weekend with Barrett's family. I am so grateful to be married to Barrett and love having a day where we can celebrate him. I love you honey!