what i did this summer

people keep asking me, "so what did you DO all summer?" and since there's not just an easy answer like "an internship" or "working," it's tempting to for me to say, "i just hung out!" and while that's partially true, especially compared to my former grad student life and tommy's busy internship, i could NEVER just "hang out" for three months without wanting to die. i need to have projects and to-do lists or else my self-esteem crumbles and i feel like a slob.

so, lest i forget what i did all summer (other than our day trips and activities that tommy and i did together), i thought i would record it here.

project #1: make a quilt (with AMPLE support and guidance from my mom). this was truly a summer-long project, because i worked on it only about one day a week when i would drive down from santa monica to my family's house. i never spent more than a few hours at a time on it, which i think was the perfect way to be introduced to quilting--i never felt burnt out or tired of it. 

we started with this:

and ended with this masterpiece:

there were plenty of steps in the middle of those two pictures, of course. what? you want some action shots? okay, fine.

check me out! sewing machine master!

 i pretty much laughed at myself all summer long because my mom always used to try and get me to do sewing projects when i was younger and i HATED it. i'd get so frustrated so easily. but i guess i am growing up, because now i'm the one asking my mom if i can sew and voluntarily picking out messed-up stitches. it was an excellent project for this summer, and i'm oh so proud of it.

project #2: make photobooks for each year we've been married. i used the blurb book program, and it took weeks and WEEKS to go through all our photos, decide which ones deserved preserving, and organize them all into the books. i was pretty burnt out on this project by the end . . . but they just came TODAY and i'm so pleased to have done it!

project #3: exercise. i spent the first month of our time there jogging around the park we lived by, but my knees started killing me again, so i switched to swimming. and i worked up to swimming a mile (almost) every day. i would walk the mile to the pool, swim a mile, and walk back. it was so fun, because i'd never swum for exercise before, and it was the perfect pregnancy activity.

project #4: watch all of downton abbey. tommy and i got hooked, and dedicated several full evenings to marathon viewing sessions. (okay, this wasn't really a project, but we did it.)

project #5: hang out with siblings.

project #6: grow a baby. this is what i looked like when we got to california in may:

and this is what i looked like when we got back to north carolina:

and i did a lot of other things too, that weren't recorded in picture form: i read a good number of books, about babies and about other things; we took a childbirth class; we bought a fancy new camera and my mom and i took a photography class to learn how to use it more appropriately; i got into family history indexing; i went to costco and the santa monica farmer's market weekly to get as much fresh peaches and nectarines as were humanly possible; i checked out guidebooks from the library to help tommy and i be the best LA live-in tourists possible. 

okay, okay, and just so this post isn't ENTIRELY about me, this is what tommy was doing most of the summer, one block from the beach and working hard:

what a gem! and WHAT a summer.

a confession: birth

when i was in seventh grade health/science class, we watched the miracle of life.

it scarred me. SCARRED, i tell you . . . me and and all the other four hundred seventh graders forced to watch it. for years we'd joke about the miracle of life, and it was synonymous with gross, terrifying, the supreme evil of sierra vista middle school, etc.

well, when i saw it at the library in santa monica this summer, i checked it out. i figured it was about time to confront those inbred fears, you know?

turns out, the movie is 59 minutes long. and the first 55 minutes involve nothing more than pictures of cells moving across the screen. the first 11/12 of the movie is totally and completely boring, actually. it's just the last four minutes that so totally terrified all of us SVMS students back in the day: where they show a birthing scene.

and guess what? it still grossed me out and terrified me. here i am, a decade older and wiser and just a few weeks away from giving birth myself, and it still makes me shudder to watch a birth scene and to contemplate doing that myself.

also, on a related note: when we went to a childbirth class in santa monica, the lady showed us a quick and relatively not-terrifying birth video. and while we were walking home, tommy said, in a voice of total seriousness: "i don't know why anyone would ever want to be an OB-GYN after watching that video."

i laughed so hard. . . . because i knew EXACTLY where he was coming from.

i sure hope, for both of our sakes, that the baby takes it easy on us when he does decide to come out.

text text text

of all the texts i send, maybe half of them are to tommy. possibly two-thirds. my texting inbox is almost full, and i have 277 texts from him sitting in there as i speak (type).

i remember the first time i texted tommy. it was in early, early 2008--right at the beginning of winter semester. sarah and i were switching out of an unsatisfactory religion class and remembered him telling us how excited he was about his professor for d&c, so i sent him a text asking who his professor was.

we'd never gone on a date; we'd never really talked or flirted or anything at this point. it still felt pretty bold to text this cute guy without ever having him text me first, but i felt pretty safe because i really just wanted to get a recommendation on a professor.

and it took him about three hours to respond. which is AGES in texting time! i felt almost foolish responding to his text.

but i asked him another question, maybe about what time his class was, and it took him another three hours to respond.

that's how our texting conversations always went in the beginning--he took FOREVER to get back to me, which is exactly the opposite of how texting is supposed to go.

we figured it all out and sarah and i actually added tommy's same class. and a few weeks later we went on our first date. and the rest is history!

later, after we were actually dating, and he responded to my text messages in a much more timely manner, i found out that he would use a "delayed-response" setting in his phone to send texts. he'd get a text message and respond, but he'd set it so that it wouldn't be sent for two or three hours, so that he didn't seem too eager and so that he did seem really busy (and important).

i'm sorry, but that still cracks me up. what a smooth operator he was (and still is, as a matter of fact).

this week

tommy started back at school on monday, and i spent all week doing what i do best: making to-do lists and slowly working through them. these to-do lists include things like getting the oil changed in both of our cars, spending hours on the phone with the insurance people asking questions, finding a pediatrician, writing and mailing thank-you notes, and figuring out what baby stuff we still need.

it feels SO GOOD to be doing everything we've been putting off for months! have i mentioned how happy we are to be back in NC so we can be back to our normal lives? yes, i think so.

here's some more proof:

i also made some pesto and sun-dried tomato pizza (and spread the pesto too thin, so it wasn't as good as we expected, but still tasty). and i even wore an apron while i did it!

we went to target yesterday and spent over $600 on baby stuff . . . thank goodness for all the gift cards we've already gotten that meant we didn't ACTUALLY spend that much. but now we are (mostly) ready for this baby to come, with everything from the carseat/stroller, diapers and wipes, crib sheets, stain remover, and so many things we knew we were going to need. then we went over to babies R us, and parked in the "expectant mothers parking"--we actually had to park farther away from the store to park there, but it was well-worth it.

then we came home and crashed for the night, and watched HP5 with our new dvd player. that's right, we finally caved and bought a dvd player to go with our free tv we got from friends in our ward . . . the tv that sat unused for almost a year because we couldn't connect our computers to it and therefore had no idea what to do with it. we figured that if we were already buying all this extra stuff for the baby, we might as well spend $30 at wal-mart on a dvd player for ourselves, right?

and then today, we were craving some dessert, and made these little brazilian brigadeiros:

they have three ingredients:

-sweetened condensed milk

-cocoa powder

-butter

and they only took ten minutes to make. DEFINITELY worth it.

productivity + easy desserts = a recipe for a great week. 

3rd anniversary celebration

last week, on wednesday, we celebrated our THIRD wedding anniversary. 

and by celebrated, i mean that tommy drove from mobile, alabama to durham with dallin, and i flew from LAX to RDU with a several-hour long delay that meant i didn't get in until 1:30 am the next day. 

so we didn't really celebrate on the actual day. or even see each other. 

but tommy did buy me some beautiful flowers. (and i didn't get him anything... as usual, i am the worst.)

okay, but knowing that our actual anniversary was going to be spent apart, we DID celebrate a few weeks ago before leaving california. we spent our last free weekend in solvang and santa barbara, just 1-2 hours north of santa monica. we booked a night at a cute little bed and breakfast in solvang (not two nights--we were too cheap!) on friday and spent saturday wandering around the two cities. 

solvang is inland a ways, back in the santa inez valley (which is BEAUTIFUL) and is a cute little danish town in the middle of spanish country. tommy was very pleased to get a good danish meal of flaeskesteg (pronounced fleskastie) and meatballs, and we visited several bakeries to stock up on danish pastries all morning long. 

santa barbara isn't too far away, and we just walked around the downtown area for a while. then we rode on the harbor's little water taxi for about half an hour and spent some time relaxing on the beach. it was so nice!

other than the horrendous traffic we got stuck on both going there and back, it was a perfect little getaway to celebrate three years of happily married bliss. because of course, it has been that.

and it was also kind of a baby-moon (within a summer that was basically just a long baby-moon) to celebrate the end of our child-free existence. no more bed and breakfasts or solitary weekend trips for us for quite a while...

because ready or not, here he comes! 

we're BAAAAAACK!

in north carolina, that is. and oh, man, it feels great! i am LOVING being back in our own apartment again, with all of our own familiar stuff. we've been able to cook real meals! organize our stuff! and start tackling that giant to-do list i'd had going in my head for weeks before coming home!

yes, it really does feel awesome.

we miss the amazing california weather, though. oh yeah, and seeing the friends and family we were around so much all summer long.

we do have plenty of pictures to remember our summer, though.

also, these kids are crazy.

dallin and tommy had a great drive out here, though. they listened to two bourne trilogy books, visited the alamo, ate barbecue and cajun food and blue bell ice cream, and got a single straight razor shave at a barber's in alabama. what more could any man ask for?

i must confess, i was pretty jealous about them getting to go to new orleans. but i'm sure glad they're not there right now! good thing they did their drive LAST week and not this week, with hurrican isaac heading that way. 

they left on friday and got to durham on wednesday. i left on wednesday and got there only a few short hours after they did! hallelujah, thank goodness for air travel.

summer, baby, and cupcakes

today, we move out of our nice little apartment here in santa monica. we'll spend a few days down in irvine (with tommy commuting back up here for two more days of work) and then tommy and dallin start the drive across the country. and i fly back to NC on wednesday. there is so much to do once we get back there, but i feel like we're stuck in limbo until then. i could (and maybe should) be feeling panicky about the upcoming month(s), but i'm not. just yet.

i am totally in denial that baby boy is almost here (the due date is just 5 weeks away) (! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ahhhhh!). i feel MUCH more prepared than i did at the beginning of this summer, thanks to the ample free time i've had to read and learn everything i could about childbirth, etc., but it still doesn't feel like he's really coming. also, i've forgotten what it's like to NOT be pregnant . . . it seems like it would be weird to have a flat stomach now. i wonder if i'll miss being pregnant, miss feeling him moving around inside me all the time. because i sure do like that part of pregnancy, as uncomfortable as it can be at times.

this morning was the first time i've ever been woken up by his movements. at about 5 in the morning (i'm guessing by the little bit of light coming through the window), i woke up because he was digging his heels into my ribs. that only started happening this week, so i guess he really IS getting bigger to be able to reach all the way up there. i had a doctor's appointment and ultrasound last week, and she said that he was measuring two weeks big and has a ton of hair. taking after his mama, that boy.

in other news, we've done a ton lately: a trip up to utah to visit the leiningers and go to the murphy family reunion at aspen grove, more sightseeing around LA, a concert at the hollywood bowl, and a pre-anniversary celebration weekend up in solvang and santa barbara, but i'm too lazy and tired to upload the pictures from all of these things right now. here's one of tommy at the famous sprinkles cupcakes ATM in beverly hills (we just bought them from inside, but had to pose with the machine). their raspberry cupcake was probably THE BEST THING I'VE EVER HAD. aloha, sprinkles.

also, the sprinkles is only a block away from rodeo drive. we were standing under the rodeo drive sign and the guy taking our picture didn't include it in the picture . . . so you'll just have to take my word for it that we were there. tommy said, "i only recognize about 1/4 of the stores on this street", haha. we're definitely not the rodeo drive type.

and, that's all folks. stay tuned for more exciting news on the leininger front!