Best of 2007

I think that 2007 has to be my best year yet. Here are a few things that made this year great (I'm sure I missed a few things, but here are the highlights):

January 2007: We found out that Tom got a 4.0 his first semester in law school. The second best thing I found out all year (see August 2007).

January 2007: We celebrated my 23rd birthday. I don't remember what we did, but I'm sure it was wonderful.

March 2007: Tom and I celebrate our first anniversary.
May 2007: We vacationed in San Diego.
May 2007: My mom and stepdad visit from Utah.
Summer 2007: Tom worked for Irell and Manella in Century City. This was a great experience for both of us. Tom gained experience, we both met many new people, we tried all kinds of new restaurants, saw Wicked, and we took trips to Mammoth and Newport Beach. We were both very impressed with the firm.
July 2007: We spent the 4th of July weekend in Crestline with Tom's family. This was the first time I had seen several of them since our wedding and it was great to get to know everyone better.
July 2007: We moved into our new apartment. Which we love.
August 2007: We found out that we're going to have a baby :)
September 2007: We discovered our new favorite ice cream. We don't keep ice cream around very often, but this stuff is good.
Ice Cream Sandwich Ice Cream

November 2007: We spent Thanksgiving with my family in Utah.
December 2007: I started to get fat. This is me at 21 weeks (about 2 weeks ago)
December 2007: We celebrated Tom's 25th birthday with a wonderful dinner at C&O Trattoria. Yum. We sat on the patio and it started raining so it was quite an adventure, but we had a great time.
December 2007: Christmas with Tom's family in Bakersfield. This is two of our nieces, Sydney and Emma, playing with bubble wrap.
Overall, a pretty great year. We are looking forward to 2008 and all of the new things that will happen. We will become parents and Tom will begin his final year of law school, so hopefully next year will be even better than this one.

Merry Christmas

Well, we had a wonderful Christmas this year. We spent the holiday in Bakersfield with Tom's family. This was great for us because I only had a couple of days off work and we didn't have to travel very far, and it was also great because we got to spend time with our nieces and nephews who we don't see very often. Unfortunately we both got sick (along with just about everyone else), but it was nice to visit with everyone and get some rest. Best of all (thanks to our wonderfully generous families), we were able to get a couple of things that we need for the baby which is just what I wanted for Christmas :)

Happy Birthday to . . .

My wonderful husband on his 25th birthday.

What will Baby Jackman look like?

This is something that I have been thinking about lately. Tom and I actually have several similar features: we both have dark brown hair, brown eyes, and pale skin. We're both about the same height. But who knows what recessive genes could show up. Tom and his brother both have dark hair, but his sisters both have lighter hair. All of my siblings have some variation of red hair and Tom's dad has (well, had) red hair and we both have sisters who have blue eyes. Here are a few pictures (the first two are of me, the second two are of Tom) of what Baby Jackman could potentially look like (click the photo to view a larger image):
























Well, regardless she will be the cutest baby ever so I guess speculation won't do me any good. I will, however, be ok if she is spared my ears and Tom's cankles:
Tom would not let me take a picture of his cankles. Sorry.

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.