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.