20 Weeks :)

Well, I have reached my 20th week of pregnancy. Actually, at this point I'm about 20 and a half weeks and I'm finally starting to look a little pregnant. I love feeling her move around. I first felt her kick about a month ago and subsequently felt a kick or two every day or so until about a week ago and now she's pretty active. I am also enjoying that my appetite seems to be back. For some reason tortillas have completely grossed me out until just a few days ago. Considering that Tom and I rely heavily on burritos and quesadillas for dinner during the week, this has been a problem. Now I can eat pretty normally, the only aversion I still have is this orange flavored gum (we bought a box of it from Costco). I am still sleeping well and I am mostly comfortable, other than a little back pain. I guess I should enjoy it while it lasts.

Right now Tom is studying for his last final. After that he gets about three weeks of vacation while I get to go to work every day. Do I sound bitter? Maybe just a little bit. I am desperately trying to save my sick and vacation days so that I can get full pay for as long as possible when I go on maternity leave. I haven't taken a single sick day this entire pregnancy. It has been excruciating.
In the midst of all of Tom's studying we attended the Hogan and Hartson holiday party last weekend (this is the firm where Tom will be working next summer). It was a dinner/casino night, very similar to the Irell and Manella party we attended in Newport Beach over the summer. It was very nice and we had lots of fun chatting and playing craps (with fake money) with some associates from the firm.

In the above photo I am wearing a maternity dress. It doesn't really look like a maternity dress because I definitely don't fill out maternity clothes yet, but my old clothes don't fit anymore and I got some really great deals the other day Old Navy so I have given in. I actually got my first pair of maternity pants a few weeks ago so that I would have them when I needed them, but I liked them so much that I've been wearing them ever since. Plus I have only bought a couple of new items of clothing since Tom started law school, so it has been nice to have something new to wear.

I will conclude with a couple of baby pictures. The first is of Tom's sister Denise's new baby boy AJ. The second is of my cousin Sharifa's new baby girl Summer being held by my cousin Anisa. They were both born on December 6th and they are both very cute :)

Happy Day

Wow, it seems like everyone is having babies lately. On Wednesday two of my friends had their babies, and yesterday Tom's sister and my cousin both had babies. Tom's sister Denise had a little boy who they named AJ (which stands for Arnold John). He was born last night via last minute c-section and weighed 7lb. 5 oz. My cousin Sharifa had a little girl who they named Summer. She was also born last night and weighed 7lb. 2oz. It's so much fun to have our families growing so quickly and it's crazy to think that we will have our own addition in just a few months. Pictures will hopefully follow soon . . .

Oh boy . . .

We just got back from our ultrasound and found out that we're having a girl :) This is what we had both guessed, so we aren't really surprised, but we are very excited. Everything in the ultrasound looked good (which was a great relief since I'm paranoid). The yet-to-be-named baby was measuring about 19.5 weeks which is perfect. Thanks everyone for voting in our little poll; it was fun to see what you thought and it looks like the majority was right.

p.s.

If you haven't already, please vote in the survey to the right. We have the big ultrasound on December 5th and I am curious to see what everyone thinks. We are very interested in name suggestions since we can't seem to agree on any, especially family names that we could use for middle names. Please give us some ideas.

Also, I forgot to mention that while we were in Utah Tom kept feeding my mom's dogs some of his breakfast. After a couple of days, the dogs caught on. They sat like this for about twenty minutes while Tom ate his breakfast (click the photo for a larger version of the image):

Tyson's farewell/dinner with friends

Sunday morning was my stepbrother Tyson's mission farewell. I have one brother and one stepbrother and they are both 19 so I have been looking forward to them leaving on their missions for years. Tyson is going to Philadelphia and my brother, Chase, is planning on turning in his mission papers in January. Tyson goes into the MTC on December 5th.
Sunday evening Tom and I headed back down to Provo to have dinner with some friends. Tom and a few of his college friends stay in touch by playing World of Warcraft together, and his friend John and John's wife Sherry were nice enough to invite some of us over for dinner on Sunday night. As much as we love the friends we've made at UCLA, we have some great friends in Provo.
Monday morning we headed back to LA. It was nice to visit Utah, but it's nice to be back home.

Thanksgiving

Tom and I headed to Utah for Thanksgiving. Since we both have very large families (many of whom live in Utah) we were blessed to have many dinners/visits. Unfortunately, since we had so many people to visit we didn't get to see anyone as much as we would have liked. This is probably going to be a really boring post about what we did on our trip, so feel free to just look at the pictures.

We arrived in Salt Lake on Wednesday afternoon. Although we were a little nervous about traveling the day before Thanksgiving, our wonderful neighbors Catherine and Nathan were kind enough to give us a ride to the airport and the lines were much shorter than we had anticipated. My brother picked us up and we stopped by to visit my dad at work. Then Wednesday evening we were able to have dinner with my stepdad's family followed by pie with Tom's aunt and uncle (Dave and Bonnie), three of Tom's cousins (Julie, Lisa, and Dave), Dave's fiance, and Julie's friend. I had never met Tom's cousins Dave (he just got back from his mission) and Lisa (she lives in London) so it was so kind of them to go out of their way to meet us for some delicious pie. Unfortunately, we forgot to take pictures on Wednesday, but we did have a wonderful time.

Thursday morning we had a delicious Thanksgiving breakfast with my dad and two of my sisters. Since I LOVE breakfast food, this was a real treat. I was sad not to be able to spend more time with my dad, but since we were sharing a car with my brother and sister, we didn't get to do everything that we wanted.
Later Thursday we had a dinner with my mom's extended family. My grandma has had a tough year health-wise and I have been wanting to visit with her for months so it was great to be able to get together with my everyone. Some people enjoyed trying on my grandma's new wig:
I also spent some time chatting with my aunts about some potential baby names (I am very open to suggestions, hint hint).
Friday mid-morning I went shopping with my mom and my two youngest sisters. The stores were surprisingly un-busy and it was SO NICE not to have to deal with LA traffic and lines and parking. Later that afternoon we stopped by the Jackman family reunion and visited with Tom's grandparents and some other relatives that I don't really know very well. Here is a picture of Tom and I with his grandparents:
Friday evening we went out for a family dinner (going out to eat as a family is a rare treat) to celebrate my stepbrother Tyson going on his mission to Philadelphia. I was very happy to get to see my very cute niece Hailey who I haven't seen since she was born last Christmas Eve.
Saturday my parents went to the Utah/BYU game so we dropped them off at the stadium and spent some time in Provo. First we visited with Tom's grandmother who has been in a nursing home in Orem since she had a stroke shortly before our wedding. We had a delightful visit. Tom and I visited her regularly while we were at BYU and this was the most cheerful that we have seen her since her stroke. Here are a couple of pictures of Tom and his grandma. After we took the first one, she said that Tom was too tall and wanted to take a second picture.
Afterward we met up with some of Tom's friends in Provo and they played World of Warcraft while I walked around the BYU campus and spent some time in the bookstore. I'm going to end this post at Saturday and start a new one for Sunday because Sunday had very little to do with Thanksgiving.

November

Wow, I can't believe it's November already. When I first found out that I was pregnant it seemed like time was moving so slowly. I was so excited to go to my first doctor's appointment that I felt like I waited for months instead of a couple of weeks. But since then, time has flown by. I am feeling much, much better, but my taste in food has definitely changed. I don't appreciate eating out nearly as much (I think this makes Tom sad because he still enjoys eating out just as much) and I feel like I could eat fruit all day long. I have also been extremely hungry in the mornings but don't have much of an appetite for the rest of the day. I had an appointment on Wednesday and everything seems to be going well and I was able to schedule my anatomy ultrasound for December 5th so we should be able to find out the baby's gender that day. Yay, I'm so excited :)

I would post a picture of myself, but I'm not showing yet at all. My clothes are definitely fitting a little differently, but I don't look pregnant. In fact, I haven't even told my co-workers yet. I told my boss a few weeks ago, but I haven't figured out how to tell my co-workers. It's just one of those things that doesn't come up in everyday conversation. I guess they'll figure it out eventually.

This morning Tom and I went to Burbank to have breakfast with my friend Cynthia who was Southern California for a job interview at a theater in Santa Barbara. She had a couple hours before her plane left, so we picked her up and went to this really busy bakery in Burbank. Cynthia was one of my best friends in high school so it was a lot of fun to get to see her.
On the way home Tom saw this sign and thought it was hilarious and insisted that I put it on the blog. It is pretty odd. I don't think I would want to eat $1 Chinese food.
Afterward Tom and I came home and went on a walk. We haven't been walking as much lately 1) because it is now dark when I leave for work and when I come home and 2) we were wary about the ash in the air from the fires. Our normal breathing air is probably not much better; we live right next to the freeway (seriously, we live like fifty feet from the freeway), but it was nice to go for a relaxing walk.

Halloween

As some of you may know, I'm not much of a holiday celebrator. It's not that I don't enjoy Halloween or Christmas, I just don't get particularly festive about decorations and costumes. This is definitely something that Tom and I have in common (though I think that his lack of enthusiasm has more to do with apathy). But this year Tom and I attended our ward's trunk or treat which was fun even though we were pretty much the only people who didn't have our trunk decorated and we didn't have any costumes. On the actual day of Halloween (the trunk or treat was the weekend prior to Halloween) we did laundry and hung out in our apartment, so the festivities didn't last long, but it was a start.

Here's a picture of the temple on the way to the ward trunk or treat followed by a picture of Tom sitting on our very un-festive trunk:

It's true . . .

Ok, yes, we're going to have a baby and we're very excited :) I am due April 28th which puts me at about 13 weeks. I haven't been too sick most of the time, but I have definitely had a few bad days. Tom was very kind one day last week to pick me up from work because I was afraid I was going to throw up on the bus. We are definitely planning on finding out the sex of the baby and we should find out sometime in December.

We spent last night in Bakersfield visiting Tom's parents. Driving back this morning we saw huge clouds of smoke coming up from the Malibu fire and as we were passing by a fire was starting up right next to the freeway. I took a few pictures with my cell phone. By the time we were approaching LA the sky was filled with smoke. It was really eerie.

Since I have been neglecting the blog, here are a couple of catch-up things.

Here is a very forlorn looking photo of Tom in front of his office when he was working at Irell over the summer (sorry, it was taken with my cell phone). He had his own little name plate and everything.

Speaking of law firms, over the last couple weeks we have gone to receptions for both Irell and Hogan. This was the first time I met anyone from Hogan and I was really impressed with how nice everyone was. The Irell reception was really great because we got to see several of the people that Tom got to work with over the summer. It was wonderful to see how well Tom had gotten to know so many people and how well he fit in with everyone. Anyway, here's a picture from our little party favor from the Hogan reception.

coming april 2008. . .

Hurray for Tom

We are very excited beecause yesterday Tom accepted a job for next summer. The firm is called Hogan & Hartson and it is actually right across the street from the firm he worked at last summer. To read more about the firm/summer program, click here or here.

I haven't posted in a while because, well, there hasn't really been anything to post. I go to work every day, Tom goes to school every day, and we spend the weekend trying to recover from work and school. Usually the most interesting part of the day is the bus ride to and from UCLA, but that's the bad kind of interesting. Since I don't have anything interesting to report, I guess I'll just ramble on about something for a little bit so feel free to quit reading at this point.

So recently Tom and I reached our 18 month anniversary and I have been thinking about all of the random events that led to us meeting. During the spring term of 2005 I went on a study abroad to Europe. I intended to return to Provo afterward to take summer term classes, but I hadn't arranged housing for when I got back. I spent some time looking up some open contracts online and, since my sister Kara was living in Provo at the time and she owed me money, I sent her around to check out the places and put down a deposit. She chose this little house that was pretty close to campus.

Because I didn't know anyone in the ward, I decided that for summer term I would go up to Salt Lake every weekend and go to my parent's ward. By the time fall semester came around, I decided I should probably go to my student ward. At this point I had a full blown case of mono and was very tired all of the time. I got ready for church, sat down on my couch, and proceeded to sleep through relief society and Sunday school. When I woke up I still had time for sacrament meeting, so I walked up to campus and up to the second floor of the MARB. Unfortunately, I had no idea which room our sacrament meeting was in, but there were these two guys standing outside one of the doors so I asked them which ward was in the room behind them and what time sacrament meeting started. The guys were Tom and his roommate Deuce and they were late for church because they had stayed home with their sick roommate, so we snuck into the back of sacrament meeting and sat together.

This was the week before general conference, so I knew that I wouldn't see Tom again for a couple weeks. I went home and asked my roommates about him, and waited patiently the two weeks until I would see him again. We sat together at church again that week and we have been together ever since.

Sorry, that was kind of long, but I was just thinking that if my sister hadn't chosen that house for me or we hadn't both been late for church that week, I might not be sitting here typing this up when I'm supposed to be working :)

time for an update

Well, I guess it's time for an update, although there's not really much to update about. Tom has started back at school, here's a picture of him on his first day:
So far his classes are ok, but this week has been difficult because he's in the middle of interviews for next summer. So far he has interviewed at 6 firms and he has one more interview tomorrow (all of the firms are in LA). Last night he didn't get home until 11pm because he went to dinner with one of the firms. He was exhausted, but hopefully the dinner invitation was a good sign.

We are loving our new apartment, but we haven't really done any decorating. The walls are completely blank, but we just keep saying to each other how much we like being here. We have been particularly thankful for our air conditioning for this last week because it has been ridiculously hot outside (well, ridiculously hot for LA). I can't believe we survived our old place with no AC in August.

The bus is getting us to and from school, but it's amazing how different the bus can be from one day to the next. I took the bus regularly in college, but the bus in LA is a totally different story. On rare occasion there are seats available, but usually the bus is so crowded that you can hardly move and you end up standing next to someone who smells horrible and then you have to fight your way through the crowd to get to the exit. That is probably because I take the bus at two of the busiest time of the day (8am and 5pm), but we are grateful that we don't have to drive and park in Westwood. We even get to take the bus together sometimes which makes it much more bearable.

In other news. . . HAPPY 21st BIRTHDAY KARA :) My sister turned 21 yesterday. Wow, I can't believe she's 21. Also, my stepbrother got his mission call to Philadelphia and he's going to be leaving in December, Congratulations Tyson. And my two youngest sister (who we refer to as the "little girls" in my family) started back to school recently and they're both in middle school, Carly is in 8th grade and Kelly is in 7th grade. That's crazy. I feel really old.

I will leave you with this lovely image. The other day Tom walked in and sat on the couch next to me. He pulled up the leg of his shorts to reveal this. He must have been really bored.