Uncle Lu's Visit!
My brother Brigg had an interview at a Pharmacy school in Erie PA and decided to fly into Detroit to spend some time with us! It was so much fun :) I don't know if I've ever seen Hyrum take so fast to anyone in his entire life, he just loved Brigg the second he saw him and was always chasing him around, holding his hand and sitting on his lap. We went downtown to look at the Christmas lights and enjoy some hot chocolate and we spent the next day relaxing and playing at home. Erie is only 4 hours away so needless to say we hope they end up coming here, but we'll have to wait and find out--no pressure Lu! :)

Home Sweet Home

I have been meaning to do a post on our house that we moved into on July 31st of this year, and I guess it's better late than never eh?! I actually cleaned our entire house yesterday, which doesn't happen often, so I thought that would be a good time to take a few pictures. (The outdoor ones were taken back in October before the snow and 20 degree weather kicked in of course.) We now have a lawn to take care of and Jeremy faithfully mowed with a push mower in the nice weather. I was especially excited to purchase our very own washer and dryer!!! It is SOOO nice to have. One of the best things about it are all the windows, there are at least one window in every room and it made me realize how very much like a cave our apartment was. So anyway, there's our "hallway" kitchen, Hyrum in his bedroom, two shots of our living room, the baby room-toy room for now, and dining room. We have a partially finished basement with a big room for laundry and storage, a smallish room where we put the treadmill and a carpeted room where Hyrum can throw balls and where we have put some of his bigger toys. Despite it's many faults and quirks I love this house and hope we can stay here for the next 3 years.

Happy Turkey Day Ya'llWe had a great holiday, but we forgot to take pictures (except for the one above). We had a white Thanksgiving, the first real snow of the year! Thursday, we spent the day with our friends the Halls. Laura's Mom and brothers came up as well so we had a full house. Thanks to Laura we had tons of delicious food to eat! Friday we decided to do our own Thanksgiving feast so we baked a turkey and did all the yummy side dishes. I made an apple caramel pie and Jeremy made a chocolate meringue pie and we have decided that pie has been sadly and sorely missing from our every day lives and that we need to remedy that. So we have a new goal to make more pies and lots of them, the first two on the list to attempt are coconut cream and strawberry rhubarb. But the best part, of course, was that Jeremy had five entire days off of school and spent only a couple of hours on Saturday studying-hooray!!!!
Hope all of you had a wonderful holiday!!!

A Yummy Discovery
This afternoon we found a delicious and scrumptious pizza dough recipe on line http://www.fabulousfoods.com/recipes/breads/yeast/pizzadough.html It was so thick and soft and yummy! The recipe we have used since we were married calls for no yeast and consequently was always thin and crunchy, and I not being a fan of the thin and crunchy pizza dough, we didn't make home-made pizza often. But now things will be very different-why didn't we do this sooner???

Hyrum has been into games a lot lately, he is always wanting to play a game. Almost anything consists of a game, whether running in circles or throwing a ball on the floor, so he was very excited to play Candyland for the first time yesterday and we have now "played" it about 4 times.

We swapped babysitting this weekend with the awesome Richards family so Friday night we were able to go on a double date with the Halls. We went glow in the dark miniature golfing and there were two highlights.

1. listening to music I haven't heard since I was that awkward 15 year old standing by the wall at the stake youth dances
2. Brian got a hole in one on the 18th hole which won us a free pizza at a local pizza joint! Nice.

Today at church there was a special two hour visiting teaching conference so all the women went to Relief Society including us in Primary. The Elder's Quorum took over (thanks Jeremy for doing sharing time!) in Primary and I had actually forgotten that it IS really nice to sit in Relief Society and just be uplifted by everyone. But I really do love and prefer Primary (or young women's).
Jeremy and I have this cool thing on our DVD player that blocks out swearing in movies and we have been highly enjoying our much wider selection of movies to watch. Yesterday we watched "Stranger than Fiction" and I just have to say I think that is such an awesome movie! I LOVE the way it ends and I love the message and it was so nice not to hear a single swear word!

32 weeks...and counting
OK, so this one is for Lu, so you better read this post :) My family has asked for pictures of my increasingly large middle section, so here they are. The only thing I worry about is that I still have 8 (or maybe just 6 if I'm lucky) more weeks of growth to go so I'm not so sure I like that thought.



Hyrum and I celebrated my 32 week mark by going with some girls in our ward to a local fire station and checking out the awesome fire trucks! Actually he was a bit more interested in the gravel outside and throwing the rocks in a drain but we did get a cool hat out of the deal!

Of cider mills and haircuts
We had a very nice weekend! We have started swapping babysitting with a family in our ward that lives really close so Jeremy and I were able to go out to dinner and bowling Friday night. We realized we haven't been out on a date just the two of us for a month or two. Saturday, Hyrum got a much needed haircut as you can see from the before and after pictures. We were also able to finally go to a cider mill!!!! I have been wanting to go since we moved here last year. It was the day before this cider mill closed for the season so we were just in time. We were able to go on a hayride (minus the hay, unfortunately), drink the most delicious hot cider in the entire world, split a donut three ways, see lots of farm animals and take lots of cute pictures of Hyrum. I couldn't decide which was cutest so I posted them all. Today has been really relaxing, seems we always have a couple of things going on after church but not today. We all took a long nap and have played the rest of the day away :)

Here is my new favorite video of our happy Hyrum-enjoy!

Happy Halloween!!!
We've had a great time this Halloween. Our ward had a party last night complete with a carnival and trick or treating at all the class room doors. They had a cake walk, ghost bowling, fishing, donut eating contests, and our friend twisted Hyrum a monkey balloon. It was a blast. Today there was a parade at the library and then a lot of stores downtown had trick or treating around lunch time so we met up with the play group in our ward and scored lots of candy! Hyrum has really been loving the fact that people are giving him candy all over and that he is actually able to eat it. Tonight our friends the Skousens threw an awesome party for all the kids. As you can see Hyrum found other monkeys at both parties. We were going to go trick or treating in the neighborhood tonight but just got back too late.

Oh and sorry for the gross pumpkin picture but you can see we carved our pumpkins WAY too early this year and they didn't quite make it to Halloween....we'll remember next year :)

But the best part of this Halloween were my boys costumes. Hyrum went as Curious George of course since he is a favorite and Jeremy went as the man in the yellow hat, wearing a complete yellow outfit-what a guy!!!! I must say he is the coolest for dressing up like that. A lot of people got a kick out of the outfit. So thanks to Natalie for letting us borrow Brayden's monkey suit and thanks to Laura for the great idea for Jeremy to be the man with the yellow hat!

What...football??














I know that anyone who knows me well, especially my family, would be shocked to know that I went to a football game and willingly too! And even more surprising, it was a lot of fun :) Our friends the Costley family generously gave us tickets and offered to watch Hyrum for us. It was fun being on a date with Jeremy and fun being with our friends the Halls. Michigan won which made it even nicer and even though it was chilly it didn't rain and it was awesome to finally see the stadium from the inside. So, if we ever get offered free tickets again I think we would go!

One side note about Hyrum I have to mention, he has been saying prayers a lot, which means he will repeat the last word or two of every sentence Jeremy and I say for the prayers. The other night Jeremy said "please watch over us" and Hyrum enthusiastically repeated what HE heard "watching pooh!!!" I was crying I was laughing so hard. Hyrum does like to watch movies and the word watch, no matter the context, he hears it in reference to movies. Obviously one of his top choices is "Winnie the Pooh" :)

Our little piano player

Punkin Head
Last week on a cold, drizzly Saturday we braved the weather to go to a pumpkin farm with our good friends the Halls and we picked a couple of the biggest pumpkins we could find! Last night we carved them and they are now sitting on our porch. I definitely feel more fall-ish now. Hyrum really likes them a lot and is fascinated with the top he can pull off and put back on. Now all we have left to accomplish is to go on a hayride and drink some special Ann Arbor apple cider we always hear about so I hope there's at least one more nice day this fall!!!

New Camera!
So sad, our camera has officially been declared dead. I think it would have lasted longer but Hyrum has gotten a hold of it one too many times and I am not always quick enough to snatch it back! So, once you go digital camera it somehow becomes a necessity instead of a luxury to have so we lasted about 4 or 5 days before rushing off to Best Buy after some thoughtful research. We came home proud owners of a nice little Cannon that we have vowed will never fall into Hyrum's hands! We keep it locked up in it's case whenever not in use so hopefully that will prolong this one's life :)
Here are some pictures we have taken with it this week. Hyrum enjoying some pudding and having fun playing in an old diaper box with Daddy. Hyrum also went to his first birthday party this week and you can see from the picture what he thought of the party hats. Besides the hats though he had a grand old time.