Lily turns 1!

Our beautiful baby Lily turned 1... and she quickly went from baby to toddler! And it's already been 6 months since then! Ah! Oh wait, I don't want to get ahead of myself. I can't wait until I'm done "catching up" on here. Normal life happened between Barrett returning home at the end of August and Lily's birthday on October 10. We didn't do any interesting sight seeing or special activities, at least that I can remember because we don't have any pictures, ha ha. Just regular day-to-day stuff. Although, I did start watching our friends' little boy, Cohen, 3 days a week. He is only 3 weeks younger than Lily and they love each other and have so much fun playing together and learning from each other. I do have plenty of pictures of them together, which I will post eventually. And this is why I want to catch up on here, so I can share some of the normal daily routine things rather than just the bigger events in our lives.

Anyway, back to Lily's birthday in October. One of the best parts about Lily's birthday was that my parents came to visit and celebrate with us! Then Barrett's family came in the day after my parents left! I will post pictures of this later. On Lily's actual birthday we opened a couple presents before heading to the aquarium. Most of the celebration was the next night. Here's a couple pictures from that day.

My mom bought this book and fish for Lily at the aquarium which she still loves.  

We spent a lot of the rest of the day preparing for Lily's party. I had spent a ridiculous amount of thought and time planning for Lily's party, ha ha. And of course what I came up with was time consuming. So this is what my mom and I spent time doing the night they came in: cutting confetti. Who makes their own confetti? Well, apparently I do. It was hard enough finding clear balloons, but non-crumbled tissue paper confetti was harder to find. I REALLY wanted circles, but that literally would have been insane, so we cut squares instead. Thank you mom!

Then, the next morning my parents helped me blow up and stuff the confetti into balloons. What are parents for right? You're never really done helping your children with mundane tasks :). This is what I get to look forward to with Lily when she's an adult...

 Barrett printed off some big pink letters for us and after cutting those out, taping them to the balloon, and attaching it to string, we were done! The only decoration, but it turned out great!

 Then after Lily and my parents went to sleep, Barrett and I started on the cake. I won't go into detail about the involvement of this, but I am grateful for a husband who can decorate better than I can. Since we call her Lily bug all the time, we thought a ladybug was fitting for her first cake.

Lily's birthday dinner, with her favorite foods at the time. You don't really need to see what we ate, I just thought it was a cute picture of my dad feeding Lily while we are running about like crazy finishing stuff up. Such a great grandpa!

Finally, the party began. Lily walking in to see her presents.

Lily was a little more in to the packaging, but I was really excited she got a Utah State onesie. I felt like a terrible alumnus (I think that's the word) for not buying her one yet, so my sister sent one for her birthday.

 Wearing one of the headbands I made her.

 One of the conditions of Lily's cake was that there was a smaller section that she could eat from. So maybe a little morbid, but Lily got to eat the head!

She didn't really know what to do with it at first, especially when she saw how messy it made her hands. But after we cut off a couple pieces for her to taste, she was a little more willing to touch it.

For those who knew Barrett in high school (I know there are some readers out there) this totally reminds me of his "Zoolander" face.

Feeding Daddy some cake.

A couple days after the birthday celebrations, Barrett remembered the present he had made Lily. He bought a 3-D printer for his lab so he designed and made a fun toy for her to play with. (Notice her name on the front).

With Lily officially turning 1 we were anxious for her to walk on her own, (especially since she had been walking with our hands since August!) but that comes later...

Nepal

So while Erin is off trading recipes like I used to do with Pogs, she asked me to put up a post about my travels last August. As part of my master's degree, I am required to design a medical device for both the US and developing world markets. To facilitate finding a project and really understanding the people who will eventually use the device, we were shipped off to various countries for several weeks. And while I missed the fam like crazy, I had a blast. I spent several days in Norway visiting a medical device development company that sponsors some of the global health projects. Norway is anything but a developing country, and we were treated extremely well there. A few pictures from Stavanger, Norway (fair warning, this post is going to be very image heavy!):

The last three pictures are a hike we took up to Pulpit Rock. On a good day, there is a fantastic lookout over the fjord several hundred feet below. Obviously, we couldn't see any of that and it felt strangely unalarming being just a couple inches from the edge.

After living it up for a few days, it was time to see a very different side of the world. Most people know Nepal for Mt. Everest, and the nation's capitol, Kathmandu, though not all that nice, knew how to cater to wealthy trekkers coming to visit. So we stayed in a pretty decent hotel surrounded by countless street shops all selling the exact same stuff. But this didn't last long as out work began in a rural down called Dailekh. To get there, we took a 1-hour flight to Nepalgunj, where we jumped in some 4-wheel drive vehicles and started a 6-hour drive to the remote village. But this wasn't a nice trip to Lake Powell. Most of the way was dirt roads washed out by the monsoons, and going up and down steep switchbacks. Big busses packed full of people inside and on top would come barreling around hairpin turns that could only possibly fit one vehicle. It didn't help that our driver was maybe 18. But somehow we made it.

The poverty I saw in Dailekh easily rivaled the conditions I witnessed on my humanitarian trip to Bolivia. Dailekh is a district center, and has a hospital that serves a wide region. This is the only health facility for many many miles, and because roads are too unpredictable, most people had to walk there. But getting there is only half the battle. Add an absence of electricity and unskilled health providers, and there isn't a lot that can be done. Our project was to design a fetal heart rate monitor for this type of setting. The tool that is most commonly used there to listen for whether the baby's heart beat is normal or irregular is the pinard horn (balanced between your ear and the mother's abdomen):

We interviewed a lot of people to get their perspective on what kind of tool would be most helpful and what features it should have. We have used this feedback throughout the year as we designed the device. Here's a bunch of pictures from Nepal, both tourist and work related:

 

I loved Nepal. It was humbling to go there and then return to my pathetic first-world problems. I only hope that the work I am doing now will benefit these people someday!