Merry Christmas!

I have lots to blog about - cousin's wedding, parents coming into town, Messiah concert, Christmas program on Sunday, etc., etc., but I need to keep packing and getting ready since we're leaving for California tonight! We're driving about a third of the way tonight and then we'll go the rest of the way tomorrow. We're excited to see our families and enjoy a nice relaxing break.

I hope you are all safe and happy and we wish everyone has a very Merry Christmas!

I keep forgetting

My sisters have announced this on their blogs, but I wanted to share that both of my older/married sisters are also expecting! How fun is that? We were all pregnant for some of the same time last time, but not as close as this time. Eli is 4 months younger than Vanessa (Wendy's), who is 6 weeks younger than Russell (Amy's). We're going in reverse order this time. :) I'm due March 21, Wendy's due with #4 April 16 (with a boy too!) and Amy's due with #5 May 29th (?). My mom's going to have a busy spring!

It will be so fun for these little dudes and - maybe a dudette - to have cousins close to their ages. Of course it would be a lot more fun if any of us lived even in the same state, but at least when we do see each other, they'll have playmates. And just for kicks, here's a picture of all the girls in my family from my baby shower when I was pregnant with Eli. I love having sisters!

I just couldn't help myself

Merry Christmas!

Busy Boy

Eli does so many fun things these days that I thought I better blog about them before I forget! I've been terrible about writing in my journal and I don't scrapbook, so if it doesn't get on the blog, it will be lost forever! (That's how much I trust my memory).

So...here are some random, writing-whatever-comes-into-my-head interests/activities that Eli has been into lately:

• Trucks and trains - anytime he hears anything that remotely sounds like a truck or a train he perks up and says "truck!" or "choo-choo!" and gets very excited and then points to me and says "mama" so I can take him to the window and show him the trucks outside (except usually they're just driving by and gone by the time we get there). He loves Friday morning when the garbage man comes. We stare out the window until all the trucks are done and gone. That's a big highlight in his week. :)

• Books - this kid loves to read/be read to and I love that he loves it. He will often get all of his books out and pile them together and then grab my hand and bring me over to read to him. He also likes to get a blanket out to put on the couch so we can snuggle and read books. Very cute! My favorite is when he "reads" to himself. It's pretty darn adorable. He also has three books that must be read to him before bed - "Choo-choo" (All About Trains), "duck" (One Little Duck) and "book" (Little Boy Blue - it's just "book" to him).

• Letters - along those lines, he's starting to learn some letters. He knows o and s and we're working on a few others. Yesterday, while I was making dinner, he was laying on the floor on his tummy reading some books. He kept pointing to different words and I would hear "O" or "S" randomly. I love it!

• Observing - it's amazing to me (and I'm sure all mothers feel this way) how much kids see! It blows my mind how much Eli notices. He is very aware of everything we do, especially the things I never notice I even do, and it amazes me when he mimicks them. The other day I said "Okay, mommy needs to go get ready" so he ran into my room like he always does when I say that and then pointed up at the light for the vanity because he knows I always turn that light on when I get ready. Then today after I got out of the shower, he reached in my drawer and handed me my deodorant. Haha. What a kid. He loves to assist Jeremy getting ready in the morning too by giving him his razor or stealing his gel and trying to do his own hair. :)

• Helping - along with the observing, he knows how to help (when it's his idea and he's in the right mood of course). If I tell him I need to clean the bathrooms, he goes over to the cupboard and tries to open it to get the cleaning supplies out and then ways "wash!" until I hand him a towel to help me. He loves having the job of carrying the supplies into the bathroom. Very important work. (He's washing the floor in this picture - I was cleaning the bathroom. I swapped that water spray bottle for the windex I had been using)He also likes to help put things away (although he takes things out much more often!), water the Christmas tree, empty the dishwasher, put the clothes into the dryer, etc. He also likes to put things in the trash - luckily it's just been trash. Here's a picture of him helping with the trash. This was the day after Thanksgiving. Jeremy said he was going to take the trash out, so Eli went in his room and grabbed his trash can, brought it out, and took out the bag to hand to Jeremy.
• Kisses - Eli is very loving and snuggly which we are so grateful for! He's always been a bit of a snuggler (Jeremy and I both were too) and he also gives great kisses. He'll kiss anyone who asks for a kiss. How sweet.

• Snow - he is fascinated with the snow. He doesn't love to touch it with his hands, but he likes to stomp on it and he loves to look at it out the window. The entire week of Thanksgiving we heard "That's snow!" over and over and over again. (said more like "das no") He still randomly points to the window and says the same thing.

• Tupperware and bowls - my goodness, Eli LOVES getting out all the tupperware and bowls he can reach. He'll fill them with his toys and then transfer the toys from one bowl to the next or stick them in a pitcher ("juice!"). Jeremy said we should just give him tupperware for Christmas. Haha.

• Hi! - lately he just randomly comes up to me and says "hi" with a big smile. He does it like 15 times a day. It's pretty cute.

And as if this post wasn't long enough already, here's a little video I took this morning. It's not very exciting, but I thought I hadn't taken a video of Eli in awhile, so I did. Somebody put a different setting on and I didn't notice it until after, so that's why the lighting is a little weird. He wasn't in the mood for another video after I fixed it, so oh well. :)

Snow Pictures

These are a week old now, but I said I'd put them up, so here they are! This was after our second big storm. We had 2 weekends in a row (before & after Thanksgiving) where we got about a foot of snow each time. In between the storms it never got warm enough to melt, so we had a lot of snow out there! It's actually mostly gone now. You can see our grass on about half of the lawn.

Above - front lawn; snow almost level with the top of one of the bushes. Below - Also in the front. Thank you husband for shoveling the driveway!

BBQ - The middle section has the lid, but the section on the left is just a flat shelf. That's a lot of snow!

Looking out the back door. That lump is a bouncy ball of Eli's and that mound on the far right is his little motorcycle thing that was completely buried.

This picture is actually before the second storm - the day after Thanksgiving - but I thought it was cute so I put it up!

Next I need to put up pictures of our Christmas tree and some cute things Eli has been up to. Stay tuned!

Thanksgiving Recap

Well I misplaced my camera on Monday but I finally found it today so now I can blog about Thanksgiving! I wish I could blame it on Eli, but I just totally forgot where I put it.

So...our Thanksgiving was a success! Jeremy's parents were here for a week and we had a great time visiting with them. They got here at 2am Saturday morning. Yikes! They were trying to beat the storm that arrived Saturday afternoon, and it's a good thing they did! We got about a foot that night. I had my concert in Salt Lake and it went really well even though our audience was quite small because of the storm.

Anyway, so we had a nice time that week. Jeremy's mom went to the Family History Library in Salt Lake a few times and his dad spent a lot of time playing with Eli, which was great! I felt like I went to the store 17 times those few days leading up to Thanksgiving, but I think it was only actually 2 or 3.

Wednesday I spent all day baking pies and doing other preparations for the feast. Jeremy's mom was awesome and did all the dishes that day as I was going. I told Jeremy it was like heaven! I got to cook all day long and I didn't have to clean up at all! :)

Thursday was a great day and it was so nice having Jeremy off work for the 4-day weekend. I put Jeremy's mom in charge of hors d'oeuvres. Their family always does fun hors d'oeuvres on Thanksgiving and I thought that was definitely a tradition we should keep up! :) So she put together some beautiful (and sooo delicious) plates of cheese, fruits, roasted garlic, stuffed mushrooms, crackers, sliced baguette, spinach artichoke dip, etc. It was great to take a little break from the cooking/prepping and eat such delicious food!

(We also had a veggie tray not pictured)

Eli liked it too!

A few hours later, we were in full-blown prep mode as we got everything ready to serve. To my surprise (and relief), we were right on schedule and were ready to eat about 3:15. We had the missionaries over and we had a great time! The food was delicious. As always, I felt like there were a few things that could have been better, but overall it was great. The turkey was so moist and delicious (if you don't brine your turkey, you really should) and we had tons of leftovers which made for a very easy weekend! (Note to self: I probably didn't need a 20 lb. turkey for 7 people - whatever).

Above - George taking the pic; Below - me taking the pic :)
Jeremy's plate. He wanted to take a picture.

After recovering for a few hours we dug into the pies and then played some games later that night. Friday, Jeremy's parents were out and about pretty much all day, so we just had a low key morning, an afternoon nap, and then we went to get our Christmas tree! We didn't end up decorating it until Saturday afternoon, but it was fun to go get it. We also tried to get Eli to enjoy playing in the snow, but as you can see, that didn't really work out:

But he sure is cute! Jeremy's parents left Saturday and then we got to spend that night writing our talks for Sacrament meeting the next day (I dread speaking in church - so glad that's over!)

So that was our week. More to come later - I've got lots of pictures from our 3rd storm of that week that hit Sunday morning (luckily Jeremy's parents got out before!) We got another foot! Crazy.

That's one COLD Thanksgiving

For your amusement (those of you in CA) here's our weather forecast for the week.

ARCTIC air and BLIZZARD conditions are what they keep talking about. Brrr!!! If you're planning on travelling anywhere around here on Tuesday/Wednesday, you may want to rethink your travel plans. I'm glad I'll be inside baking when it's 7 degrees outside. Ahhh!!!

And here are a few pictures of our big storm the other day. This was Sunday morning:

Thank you dear for shoveling all the snow while I took pictures of you through the window.
Glad our mailbox survived.

Yep, it's a winter wonderland around here. I know I post about the weather often, but sometimes that's the most exciting news! Haha. Anyway, I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving! I'm glad we're staying here!

Thanksgiving

If you're interested, you can check out our (so far) Thanksgiving menu here.

And if I don't get on here again before the big day, Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

What's new?

I've been a slacker (again) with the blogging lately. I feel the holiday crunch already and it's only the middle of November! We have been busy and it's only going to get worse until Christmas. We discovered last week that between then and Christmas, we needed a babysitter 6 times and we had no more free weekends and very few weekdays. Oh boy. Here we go!

So here's what's coming up for the Nowlands:

• My concert! That choir I told you about? Yeah, we have our first concert this weekend! Its really going to be great. I keep trying to convince friends of mine to come along with my ward choir, but they just look at me like yeah, whatever. Thanks, guys. I appreciate that. Your loss! Friday night is in Provo and Saturday night is in Salt Lake. Don't miss out!
• Dress Rehearsal for the concert tonight.
• Jeremy's aunt & uncle come in town Thursday, Jeremy has a training at the Conference Center that night, and we take his aunt & uncle to the airport Friday.
• Jeremy's parents come in town Saturday and will be here for Thanksgiving!
• Jeremy's going out of town Sunday and will be back by midnight Monday night.
• Thanksgiving! Our first time hosting. Our menu is planned and we are super excited! (Okay, mostly me, but Jeremy's being a great sport).
• Ward Temple Night & Dinner first weekend in December
• Jeremy's work party for his team sometime in December
• Jeremy's other work party for all the managers sometime in December
• Ward Christmas Party second weekend in December
• Stake Music Fireside (that I'm in charge of) also second weekend of December
• My parents, sister & brother-in-law come in town for my cousin's wedding third weekend of December
• 2 more concerts for me also the third weekend of December (this time the Messiah!!!)
• Ward Christmas Program (also in charge of) third Sunday of December
• Drive to California and be there for Christmas!

Whew. So of course there are a million other little things thrown in there (like Christmas shopping! oh dear), but tis the season! Especially when you're a musician. Man oh man. So if I'm a little MIA in the next month or so, you'll know why. In fact, I'm sure everyone else is going through the same thing, which is sort of comforting. But life is good! We feel blessed to have so many wonderful things that we are a part of, even though it makes this time of year crazy. We love our ward & stake, Jeremy has a great job, we have a growing family, and life is good.

Beautiful Utah Sunset

I know I often complain about the weather, but I really do love it here. I think the mountains are absolutely gorgeous and I find myself missing them when we go to visit our California homeland. (Although I still think California is gorgeous too - they're just different).

A couple weeks ago when we had our early snow, the next day, the snow melted and the sunset was gorgeous! I managed to catch a picture, so I thought I'd share the beauty. It would have been even better a couple minutes sooner, but oh well. These are the west mountains, so they're more distant, but they're beautiful too. This is looking west from our backyard:

I'm grateful to live in such a beautiful place! It's been snowing off and on again today, but we're staying nice and warm in our heated house. Thank goodness for that heater - and thank goodness we don't have California prices on our gas bill. :)

3 Things

Baby Shower. Bloody lip. Tossing my cookies.

What do these three things have in common? They all happened on Saturday! And in that order. I'll give details on the first two. Sound good?

Saturday morning I gave a shower for my wonderful friend Kristin. She is due January 5 with her first (a boy also!) and I'm so excited for her! We had a great turnout and I think everyone had fun. It was pretty much just people in our ward which was fun because we all knew each other. We had brunchy kind of food like quiche, coffee cake, and fruit. Yum! My friend Laurie helped which was great - she brought the fruit and did all the games. Hallelujah! Anyway, it was a success. I'm glad it went so well and that she got so many great things.

I kept forgetting to take pictures, so most of these are from the very beginning or the very end.

Kristin opening gifts:

Me, Laurie, and Kristin:

Jeremy was sweet to take Eli and another little boy over to a nearby playground during the shower. And he even took a couple pictures. Wow. Thank you dear!

Just as Kristin and Laurie were leaving (the last of the group), Eli fell and busted his lip open. :( Poor buddy. We had the door open because they were leaving and he grabbed his shoes to go outside and was backing up and fell down the step and bonked the side of his face which made his bottom lip slam into his top tooth. There was a lot of blood and tears, but he's doing much better now. Lucky for us, Laurie is a nurse, so she took a look at it and said we'd be fine to take him in and get it stitched/glued or to just leave it. He was super tired and traumatized, so we decided to just leave it be. I think that was a good choice, and it seems to be healing pretty quickly and he's much happier now. He's been refusing to stand still for pictures lately, but he fell asleep on the way home from the grocery store today, so I snapped a shot on my phone. It's much less bloody and gross now, so you're welcome.

Anyway, so Eli zonked out about 5 minutes after the incident - he always sleeps well after being traumatized, poor guy - and we just enjoyed vegging during the 3 hours that he napped. It had been a long time since we just chilled on a Saturday afternoon. That night, something we ate didn't agree with me at all, so I was a bit sick, but once it was gone I felt great! Then we watched the new Karate Kid. It was fun! And it made us reminisce about the old one. Good times....

So that was our Saturday! Now we're enjoying our heater and our hot chocolate since it dropped about 20 degrees from the weekend. It sure feels like fall!

Smile!

Here are a couple cute pictures I took the other day. Lately when I bring out the camera and say "smile", Eli gives me this silly winky smile. He's a goofball.

And yes, he is sitting on a pizza pan holding a roll of saran wrap.

Good Boy

This morning I caught Eli saying to himself "Good boy" and then clapping his hands and saying "Yea!". I was laughing to myself and thought it was too cute to not share. He's a funny boy! And a good boy too. :)

18 months!

Our little Eli man turned 18 months last week. He is such a delightful child and we love him so much! We went to the doctor for his check-up yesterday and he's doing great! I could tell he had grown a lot lately, and sure enough, he grew more than the past few times. He continues to be a little above average for height, skinny for weight, and he's actually growing into his big head! Haha.

Last week my mom was here for a few days. We had fun visiting with her and then she went on to Idaho to see my sister for a few days. She was lucky enough to be here when we had our big snow storm! She was in a bit of a shock, but it turned out to be a pretty nice day after that.

That morning I made pancakes with Eli's help:

He loves to stand on a chair and help me in the kitchen. I'm in the kitchen a lot and he hates when he can't see what's going on. Whenever I start to get things out to make something he tries to carry the chair over and he starts shouting things like "Bowl!" He loves to help. :)

The day after the big snow was a beautiful sunny day, so we spent the afternoon outside playing. We still had a bit of snow in the shady areas of our yard, so Eli had fun making snow balls and carrying them to various spots on the patio.

(This is a little bike our neighbor gave us since they were moving. It has all sorts of buttons to push that say things like "To the bat cave!" and "Moving right!" Of course it's not annoying at all when pushed repeatedly...Eli loves it though)

We sure love our little guy! He keeps us entertained and busy, that's for sure. He did well in nursery again on Sunday, for which I'm very glad, and he's just getting so grown up! I love how interactive he is now and how well we can communicate with each other. It's so much nicer to be able to explain things to him and for him to tell me what he wants most of the time.

Oh, and by the way, the weather is beautiful this week! All the snow was gone in a couple days and this week it's in the 60s with sunny blue skies. Hooray!

Halloween Festivities

Confession: I don't like Halloween. GASP! I know. So many people go all out and love it and it's their favorite holiday and blah blah blah, but that is not me. Come on, how on earth could it compete with Christmas, Thanksgiving, or so many other better holidays? Sorry. It's just a dumb holiday.

But we tried to be Halloweeny anyway and we had a pretty good time. On Friday, Eli and I went into Jeremy's work where they invite all the families for costume parading and trick-or-treating. (Thank you Becky for the hand-me-down Tiger costume!) This was Eli right before we left. Can you tell he loved his costume?

Haha. It was mostly the hat that he hated (which was too small for his head anyway), so once that was off he was fine. So we walked around and said hi to people and then he got a cool pumpkin balloon from the balloon lady and then stood and stared at her completely mesmerized for awhile until we had to go. :)

Saturday we had a Ward Chili Cook-off and Trunk-or-Treat during the day. Holy cow, there were so many people there! I guess they counted 260 people. Amazing. So that was fun and Jeremy and I had fun being judges of chili and costumes (the bishopric judged the chili and the wives had to judge the costumes - it was hard!) That evening we had pizza for dinner along with bones dipped in blood.

See? I can be festive when I try - especially when it comes to food.

It was raining most of the evening so we hardly had any trick-or-treaters and now we have way too much candy leftover! Oh well. So it's over, and that's fine with me. :) I'm ready to plan Thanksgiving!!! Jeremy's parents (and maybe his sister?) are planning on coming to visit so we're excited to be hosts this year!

(By the way, if you missed my post below, we're having another boy!)

It's a..........

...............................................drumroll please................................................

BOY!!!

We are thrilled. Deep down, I really really wanted another little boy. I knew I would of course be happy with a girl, but I just love having a boy so much! What I'm most happy about though is that he is healthy and everything is growing properly. I've had a lot of stomach aches and issues this pregnancy (which I have now finally linked to my consumption of dairy - weird - and I feel like a new woman) and so I've been more worried about this baby's health than I was with Eli. All last week I had terrible stomach cramps and even though I knew it wasn't my uterus cramping, it still worried me. Anyway, but everything looks great! Solid heart-rate, perfect heart, arms, legs, hands, little feet (so cute!), brain, etc. It's such a relief to see all that. Yea for modern technology.

So life will get crazy around here when we have TWO little boys running around! But they will be best buds I'm sure....at least I hope. :) All four of our siblings with kids have had a boy first and then a girl! So we broke the mold. As far as names go, we have absolutely no idea, but now we can start thinking. We had a few girl names we liked, but we are pretty much empty on boys. I guess it's time to pull out that name book...

Here are a few pictures of the little guy. We didn't get a good profile shot because he turned over, but we definitely saw that he's a he and we saw all the other important organs, etc. Hooray!

Little feet:

Spine and head:
Yep, boy.

Fall? Where are you?

So I feel totally gypped this year. Fall is my favorite season and I'm pretty sure it lasted all of 4 days. It was still 90 degrees the beginning of this month. Maybe it will come back. I don't know. But what I do know is that it snowed about 6 inches last night! Craziness! We woke up with snow on Monday, but it was just a light dusting. Today - serious business.

October 27th, 7:30 am.

I can't believe this is happening already. It was still snowing the end of May this year. Remember this post? May 24 - snow.

But we are prepared! I got Eli some snow pants and boots at Kid-to-Kid and we just ripped up our garden on Friday and mowed the lawn for the final time this year. So bring on the snow! (not too much though please; I still prefer autumn) We're ready for it....I think.