We Have an Apartment!

At long last, after an urgent, stressful, mostly disappointing apartment hunt, we officially have a new place to live. So we won't be homeless when the baby comes. Hooray! Out of all the places we looked, this was our favorite, so we were really happy to get it. The owners really seem to like us, and they seem like really good landlords. It's a 3 bed/1.5 bath duplex in Sandy, much like the place we've been living in Provo, but bigger. Here's a picture of the front:

The nice man painting the shutters is Vaun, our landlord.
Here's our fenced in side yard, complete with sprinkler system:

And here is the carport and storage area:

Here's the living room:

And the kitchen:

We're really happy to have found it, and we think it will work well for us. It's in a quiet part of Sandy, close to Trax, and close to lots of shopping and restaurants. It also has some features we've never had in our married lives: a walk-in closet, a bathroom right off our bedroom (though it's just a 1/2 bath), covered parking, and an old basketball hoop. We're also only about ten minutes away from Stephen and Meghan, so we're excited to hang out with them often.
Hooray for a place to live! Hooray that it's not disgusting or stinky! Hooray that it's not tiny! Hooray! Here's another picture of the front because it makes me happy to think about it:

Crib Bumper

I finished the baby's crib bumpers yesterday. Hooray! It doesn't completely match the quilt I'm making because I didn't have a whole lot of foresight when I bought the fabric for the quilt; it didn't occur to me that I might want to make more and would want matching fabrics. But then again, it gave me an excuse to go out and find more cute fabrics.
I had been toying with the idea of simply making bumpers from scratch. I didn't really want to because I'm not a particularly good seamstress, but I didn't know how else I could make the bumpers be exactly what I wanted. Enter the brilliant mind of my friend Kristen: she told me that she just found bumpers on sale and then covered it with her own fabrics, which I had never before supposed. Then, Joel and I finally went and checked out IKEA, where we found a plain white bumper for $12.99. Ta-da! My crib bumper was born. I decided to sew the fabrics right onto the bumper instead of making a cover because I liked having the white piping on the edges. After some poorly pinned and crooked fabric fiascos (including accidentally sewing the ties down on one entire side), I got it all done, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out:

Here's a close up of all the different fabrics. If you look closely, you can see the decorative stitching that I used on the edge. No, I don't have a fancy computerized sewing machine, but I do have a 1972 Viking that belonged to my Grandma, and it can do all sorts of exciting things with special gears and cams. I think it's pretty cool.

I would have taken a picture of the bumper on the crib, but we're moving and everything is getting taken down and packed away. I will definitely post letting everybody know when we've finally figured out a place to live. Crazy, eh?

Growing Baby

We went in for our second ultrasound the other day, and got some interesting news: they said the baby is already 6 lbs. 9 oz., and with five weeks to go, it'll be a really big baby. That kind of freaked me out. I was 6 lbs. 13 oz. when I was born, and I was the biggest in my family. Joel was 8 lbs. even. Where did a big baby come from? The doctor asked my my shoe size, and when I told her size 5, she said, "I was hoping you'd say size 9. Small feet means small pelvis." Not particularly reassuring. She also said that the bigger the baby gets, the less accurately they can estimate size; the printout the gave me even said "6 lbs. 9 0z., ± 17 oz." Well, shoot. 17 oz. makes a pretty big difference. So we'll see.
Here's the latest picture of our big baby:

It's a profile shot, but the baby didn't want to stay still, so it's kind of hard to tell.
In other random news, I had a really weird baby dream last night. I had had the baby, but I had some sort of episodic amnesia and couldn't remember anything about the entire birth. So, I went to the nursery to try and find my new baby. When I finally found it, it was a boy, and we had named him Wtorfin. As I read the namecard, I thought "What were we thinking?"
Hopefully, I have no prophetic abilities and the dream does not reflect what will really happen.

Arizona Trip

I've been itching to blog about our big trip, but the internet has been down at our house since we got back. It's amazing how stifling life can be when you have no internet. But thanks to Joel's tech savvy cousin, we're connected once again.
We started our trip by heading down to Phoenix for Frost Family Reunion 2007. On our way, we saw the most amazing license plate:

I hope you can all see it. Joel and I were quite amused. Anyway, we made it to Phoenix way more quickly than we expected, which was great. Also, the weather was unseasonably cool, so I felt really fortunate. For some reason, I was really lazy about taking pictures while we were there. So lazy, in fact, that I didn't take a single one. Lame, eh? I'm relying on everyone else's pictures to take up the slack.
After Phoenix, we headed to Show Low for some quality family time out on the ranch. It was a great time, highlighted by some exciting adventures. Two words: fiery inferno. It really was a great time. How could it not be when there are fourteen adults and fourteen grandchildren? Here's a little taste of some of our shenanigans:

Dancing Triplets

Chicken Fighting Brothers

Wrestling Brothers (can you tell they're big into that showing-affection-through-inflicting-pain thing?)

Attempting to get a family picture:

Praying with Grandma (Makenna caught me taking the picture)

All the sister-in-laws also threw a little baby shower for me, complete with ice cream sandwiches. It was fun getting their advice on labor and parenting. We had some great times. It was sad to leave. But then we headed down to Tuscon to visit Kenta & Kendall and Kristen & Ryan! Kristen and I stayed up ridiculously late reminiscing about old times; we've been through some crazy things together. Plus, I got to finally meet her adorable little Kate.

And she made me the awesomest (most awesome?) diaper bag and swaddling blanket. What a nice friend!

The picture really doesn't do it justice. Pictures never really do. Case in point:

I had the bright idea to wait until we were leaving in the morning to take the picture.
Kenta & Kendall were nice enough to invite us over to dinner while we were in Tuscon. We had yummy pita pizzas, played a rather frustrating game of Settlers, and ate Kendall's amazing cinnamon rolls. We're really glad we got to see them and that they were willing to stay up way past their bedtime two nights in a row.

Then we headed back to Utah. For some reason, coming back took way longer than it should have. There was a lot of rain in Tuscon and Phoenix, but still. I don't know what took us so long. We ended up pulling int at 5:30 in the morning, and both of us had come down with colds. I'm still recovering. But it was all worth it. It was a great summer vacation.