Words cannot describe the happiness...

I know I wasn't going to include any words to discuss the happiness of the little guy being in his toddler bed, but I do have one anecdote which is kinda funny. A few nights ago we put him to bed and we heard him playing and messing around in there, but we don't mind, as long as he doesn't come out of his room. Usually he grabs a couple trains or cars and plays with them while laying down in the bed anyway, since it is dark in his room. Anyway, we heard him in there talking and playing but he didn't come out so we just let him play himself to sleep. We went to check on him later when we were about to go to sleep, and he was laying asleep on the floor by the bedroom door, with his little fingers reaching underneath the door. He had been pushing the chalk from his chalkboard under the door piece by piece, and fell asleep amid all that fun. We popped him in his bed, and he stayed there for the rest of the night.

More Christmas Eve

While I took few pictures, I can always count on my sister in law to catch some cute moments of Charlie playing with some of her kids. Here he is with his cousin Corban:

And trying on a baby sister for size (his cousin Penny). He seemed to like her, and he was as gentle as possible. He really likes to point out all the body parts though, so we had to keep removing his paws from her eyes and mouth.

Christmas (yes halfway through January)

I really didn't take any good pictures of Christmas this year. However, here are a couple of Charlie in his Christmas jammies at least, and playing with the pièce de résistance of his Christmas morning. Between Mom, Dad, Grandma, and Santa, he got a Thomas the Tank Engine set.


He played with it all morning and then has been playing with it every day since. First thing in the morning he says "I want choo choo" or "I want momas" (We are working on the T in Thomas).

After Christmas morning at home, we got to visit with tons of family, so it was a wonderful couple of days (between Christmas Eve, Christmas, and the day after Christmas we got to see everyone). We were all very spoiled by loving relatives - Thanks!!! Charlie loves everything he got for Christmas especially and we love all of our wonderful grandparents, cousins, aunts uncles, and friends.


Finally, I do have a little bit of proof we were around on Christmas morning:
No pictures of me because I am NOT a morning person (and because I take the pictures AND I do the blog, so I get to choose, so there!). Poor Greg is a morning person anyway and he loves Christmas morning (we did it late in my house growing up, so I have never really woken up at 5am to open presents.) so we had to negotiate. I said we could do Christmas morning whenever Charlie woke up, which is usually right around 8. Charlie did wake up in the middle of the night around 3am and Greg insisted that it was time for Christmas. Nice try! He went back to sleep (he was still having some leg/foot issues at the time, so we were still having to give him painkillers every few hours, so that is why he woke up in the middle of the night) and woke up at 7:30 (since I was asleep myself I cannot prove or disprove that Greg had anything to do with the hour at which Charlie rose).

Anyway, we had a wonderful Christmas and I hope that all of you did as well!

Changes!

Something exciting happened last week at church. Greg got released from the scout program (quick church background: all the various positions are filled by regular joes; there isn't a paid clergy in our church. Therefore, you just get asked to do various things, and it only lasts a temporary amount of time, depending on what you do.) He has been in the scout program in this ward pretty much since we moved to California, so it has been 2 and a half years. He has loved every part of it, especially the boys (12-13 year olds) who are good and (mostly) sweet young men. However, it was his time, and he has been called into the nursery. He has really felt a weight lifted from his shoulders with all the work that was required with the scouting program, and he is also thrilled that in the nursery (with the 18 month olds to 3 year olds) he will get to engage in snack time. Charlie is very happy to have daddy in his class, also. When I saw him after church he pointed at dada and told me all about how they played. (By the way, just an anecdote, Greg likes to say that he has actually been in the scout program the whole time he has been a member of the church. He joined the church when he was 13, so he was a scout at that time. After we got married, he was in with the scouts and young men in Provo for the time we lived there. Then, he got called into Scouts almost immediately upon our move here.)

Regarding the pregnancy: still going strong! I hit the halfway point on Christmas Day. My health has been generally good, although this week I have had various minor symptoms that have made me a little cranky. Poor Greg gets the brunt of that I think. I dreamed last week, for example, that I was being operated on by a mad scientist (I think they were torturing me for information actually, which I would have gladly given up but I didn't know what it was) and I woke up in some significant back pain, just where the scientist was poking me. She kicks all day long, which is a blessing to know she is doing healthy in there. Sometimes I just have to remind myself of that. =) We are still undecided about names, but have some front runners. I actually really liked the name Violet for a few days before someone pointed out that then both of my children would be characters from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and unless I was going to commit and have a Willy or Augustus, I better not do that one.

Charlie's foot is almost completely better. He isn't in as much pain (I think he is still a little stiff in the mornings, but doesn't complain) and we haven't had to use the Motrin too much since just after Christmas. I think the Motrin was partially responsible for his drastically decreased appetite over the last couple weeks, which also lead to him waking up in the middle of the night crying. So, the Motrin is gone and the eating is back, so he is sleeping again!! Hooray! (I might be in trouble when I don't sleep again for a year starting in May. I love to sleep. Although a friend with brand new baby #2 pointed out that there is just something that keeps you going when there is a little one around that you don't have sustaining you when you don't have a brand new baby.)

In other Charlie news, he is just having fun with all his new Christmas presents (he seriously has a lot of grandparents. Why did we even get him anything?) He wakes up every morning asking to "choo choo" and then runs to his train set. He has picked up new phrases such as "take it to the hole!" while playing with his little basketball hoop. Every morning he and I count down how much more time until Mommy gets to be home with him all the time! (I will take 2 weeks off before the baby is due, so I will be working until the end of April. Tomorrow I go in to tell my bosses that I am not coming back after this baby is born. I am sort of terrified. Cross your fingers for me.)

Anyway, Christmas pictures to follow at some point. Charlie and Greg got me a new computer for Christmas since mine broke back in October, so I am still figuring things out with it and it therefore doesn't have all the photos. I love it though. =)

Four Years Ago Today...

...I married my sweet husband. Happy anniversary to us!

We have sort of a fun "story," which some of you have heard, and some haven't, but I am going to share it here either way!

We met in 1999 or 2000 or sometime around there. I knew him through friends, and neither of us was terribly impressed with the other. (I actually didn't have much of an opinion on him, but he didn't like me, and it showed, so we avoided each other.) So, we didn't have too much interaction until later.

In July/August 2001 I was a junior and Greg was a senior in high school, and my 16th birthday was imminent (background, if you don't know: in my family, and in most families in my church, kids wait until they are 16 to date). We had our lunch period at the same time, and we sat together with several other mutual friends. He decided that he had been wrong about me, and that he in fact was interested in me. He flirted with me so much that even I could tell that he liked me, and I had never been terribly savvy about that kind of thing. So, when a mutual friend told me (we were in the bathroom at church, ditching Sunday School, to be exact) "I know someone who likes you" I knew it was him. However, a friend of his and I sort of liked each other, so I didn't expect much to come of it, as I supposed I would start seeing his friend when I turned 16.

Towards the end of August, Greg was walking me to class after lunch, as he usually did, and he said "I want to ask you out, but I have to ask my friend [the friend referenced above] if it's okay, but if I were to ask you, do you think you would say yes?" I still tease him about that. Way to sweep me off my feet. I want to ask you out, but I am not doing so right now, but I want to get some encouragement for when I do. Anyway, I sort of stuttered that I would say yes, but internally I was slightly concerned because of this other guy. Either way, I wasn't allowed to date for another few weeks, so I didn't worry too much about it. However, he has always been a champion of follow up, and a few days later while walking me to class he asked me to go to the homecoming dance with him, which was on October 6, 2 weeks after my 16th birthday. I said that I would, and he said "Okay, great. Well, I am not going to walk you the rest of the way to class because otherwise we would be awkwardly silent, so I'll see you later." We still laugh about this too. We were winning conversationalists in high school.

On my sixteenth birthday, Greg approached me before school and gave me the hugest bouquet of pink roses I had ever seen in my life. I was totally mortified carrying them around for the rest of the day. People came up to me and said things like "Oh, did Greg Ashcraft give those to you? I thought he was going to propose to random girls in the quad." So that gives you a little bit of an idea of what a goon he was in high school (albeit a sweet, darling, lovable goon).

A couple weeks went by and he took me out on my first date. We went to a restaurant in Temecula on a double date with a couple friends, and then headed over to the dance (in Greg's iconic PT Cruiser. Half of my high school memories involve that car, which I used to make fun of so much. But I missed it when he sold it before his mission!) During the dance, (I still remember it was while they were announcing the homecoming court) he held my hand, and I don't think let go of it for the rest of the night (we couldn't clap for the court because we were holding hands. Although I just remembered that he did let go to clap for one guy because they were friends. Ha! Funny the things you remember years later...) Later in the night he asked me to "go steady with him." I took issue over this for a number of reasons, one being that it was 2001 and no one had used the phrase "go steady" in like 40 years. Also, because it was my first date and I thought I would play the field a little. However, I didn't want to be mean, so I tried to blame it on my parents and say that I wasn't allowed to have a boyfriend (which was basically true) but that I did like him and wanted to go on dates with him (also true). He said that I didn't have to answer right then (I thought I had already answered...?) so I hoped that maybe we just wouldn't have to bring it up again.

And we didn't.

And so we got married five years later.


Okay, it didn't happen quite like that. But after that first date, we were just sort of inseparable for several years (one bout of "break up" the summer before I was a senior that lasted about 6 months while he re-focused on preparing for a mission, but ended when I went on a date with this other guy and Greg decided he didn't like that too much. That is, the break up ended, but don't worry, the mission prep did not.) We didn't really define the relationship for a while there at the beginning, probably because Greg figured out that if he insisted on being my boyfriend I might not, but as long as he didn't bring it up, he basically was. I still remember this conversation I had with my best friend. She said "are you seeing each other, going out, dating, boyfriend and girlfriend, or...?" I had no idea. At some point though, we were together enough that he was my boyfriend. (My parents weren't thrilled with the idea of a boyfriend, but they did like Greg. And my brothers adored him because my parents mandated that we weren't allowed to go places by ourselves until I turned 18, so one of them would have to "chaperone" us all the time and he ended up getting hooked up with countless movies, ice cream cones, and fast food.) Greg was in a band in high school, and I was an official groupie. Some songs he wrote for me still exist to this day on amateur recordings they made! (Including one mean one from aforementioned break up - but we don't need to bring that one up.) Eventually Greg went on his mission, and I waited (and dated, for the record; I don't condone waiting at home for two years while a missionary serves). When he got home, I was headed up to college, and I told him that I was going to date and all of that when I got there, unless he had something to say about it. We decided to get married instead. I remember he got home on a Wednesday, we decided we were getting married on Saturday (and I think we picked out the ring that day too...we are very task-oriented), he asked for my "hand" from my dad on Monday, and my mother woke me up at 6:00am on Tuesday morning with the temple on the phone scheduling the wedding. (I am fairly certain my mom had the wedding planned in about 48 hours.) The next day, Wednesday, I shipped out to BYU for the semester, and we barely made it through, but we managed (I don't think my roommates were thrilled with my love sickness though). We got married December 30, 2005.

Life isn't perfect and I think I probably drive Greg crazy most days (he only drives me crazy some days, but he is much easier to live with than I am) but I am happy to say that after 4 years of marriage and many more years of togetherness, I am still just as sure about Greg as I ever was. He really is my best friend and I am so glad that I married him. I think we have the best family ever, with us, and Charlie, and baby-to-be-named-later, and our annoying little cat. Happy anniversary to my wonderful husband, thanks for marrying me, and thanks also for our wonderful family, and all you do for us.

Santa

Santa visits the Town and Country Hotel (where I work) every year and invites all the employee's children and grandchildren to party with him.
When we first sat on Santa's lap Charlie was smiling and laughing but I couldn't get the camera to focus properly. By the time I got a picture to work he was sort of upset. Still, he was happy to get his candy cane.

Cheeeeeese

After we saw Santa Charlie and Greg came back into my office (Charlie was eating a hot dog, his new found favorite food; he kept yelling DOOOOOOOOG!). I was putting the camera away and Charlie kept saying CHEEEEEEEESE, so I had to take some pictures. Too bad he wasn't cheesing it up when he was on Santa's lap.