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: