New Adventures

Because I use this mostly as a journal of our adventures (and I'm failing) let me just recap real quick
some main things that have happened in our lives :)

In late July (shortly after our last blog post), Jared and I found out that we were expecting a baby! The feeling was absolutely unreal!  We were beyond excited and so anxious to share this wonderful news with family!

A couple weeks later, in August, we traveled to McCall, Idaho and had a wonderful family reunion with Jared's side of the family.  It was seriously a blast!  We were going to wait to tell family this early - I was only about 7/8 weeks along, but my morning (really all day) sickness had started full swing by then, so there wasn't really a good way for me to hide that little secret of ours haha

Below our some photos from that trip!

Jared and his dad flying a quadcopter on a field...that is CLEARLY closed :P

Jared and his brother digging a giant hole in the sand . . . and acting tough? ;)

mmmmm love those campfires and roasting homemade marshmallows (thanks Cameron) yummy!

Shortly after this wonderful family vacation, I was starting to really soak in the fact that there was a tiny little human inside me :D  So . . . I got all excited and crocheted these adorable little booties for our little.

I'm so proud of these :) they even have cute little buttons for the sides!

Fast forward a couple weeks and I was starting to get super excited about Halloween!  I just love seeing the costumes and all the activities that come about during this time of year, plus fall in Texas is absolutely WONDERFUL.

One of the activities that we've yet to do until this year is at an outdoor mall near our apartments.  This event is called "Dog-toberfest" haha funniest thing EVER.  I'm not quite sure what it is about Austin, Texas, but there are literally thousands of dogs, and this Dog-toberfest was to have a costume contest/party for all those dogs dressed up in the most wonderful, hilarious costumes.  So we strolled around for a bit and saw some pretty awesome costumes :)
Here was my favorite

Dogs and Tacos are everywhere in this city :)

So this year, I was beyond excited about halloween costumes because we could do, not only a couples costume, BUT a baby announcement costume as well :)  I'm a fan of handmade costumes, because I can make them exactly how I want them, and typically I can do a costume that isn't super common.  I wanted to make sure it was a simple costume this year, because although Jared has been so wonderful, I've had more complex ideas the past two years. . . and he's been so good to go along with my ideas that I've had.  So I got started with brainstorming ideas and found one that not only I liked but Jared loved, probably because he didn't have to wear anything complicated :)

Pumpkin 3.14 (pi/pie)

We hadn't found out the gender of our baby at this point, so we kept the costume very generic.  Three days later we were able to SEE our little bundle of joy in our ultrasound, and again it was an unreal, yet beautiful moment!  A couple minutes into our appointment we found out that we were going to be a mom and dad to a beautiful little GIRL.  I am so excited to have a little daddy's girl - because let's be honest, this little girl is going to be all over Jared, kids just love him!

Just recently, I've started to see the movements of this little girl and sometimes I find myself just sitting down and staring at my tummy watching her move.  I had been trying for a couple days to catch her moving for Jared to feel, but she's a little stubborn ;) BUT a couple days ago he was able to feel her when I'd confirm the movements that he was feeling.  I couldn't help but smile knowing he could feel this little girl of ours move too!

Needless to say, words can not describe how excited we are!

Enjoying the adventures along the way!

Time just keeps flying by!  But along with all the time that's passing, we get to have wonderful adventures along the way, so here's a fly through those moments we had :)

Our first adventure was taking off to Utah to visit family and friends just because we could.

This is in Salt Lake City, UT and is the coolest library ever because you can go on top and have a beautiful view :)

Adventures are always the best with this guy!

This view, and this view alone, might make it pretty difficult to stay too long here in Texas... I miss mountains :P

This is Braden (brother-in-law) teaching Jared how to fly this awesome plane!

And this is Jared, concentrating on flying that very same plane :)
So fun to watch these two focus so hard.

Oh and this is just some random guy driving around a bunch of random kids,
but I mean, seriously, I couldn't miss that kind of VIEW and an awesome photo! :)

One of my roommates from college was also in the area, and we decided to ask her to take some photos of us :) Here's a couple of our favorites. She did a wonderful job!!

           

Our next experiences happened over the Fourth of July weekend:

This was our adventure to Pedernales Falls (Johnson City, tx) with a couple of our friends!

  

This was the very next day when we decided to climb a huge rock :P
It's called Enchanted Rock and is near Fredericksburg, tx
Climbing the rock is said to be similar to climbing the stairs of a 30-40 story building.

We found a Cave Entrance and this guy was the first one to scope it out :)

The first part of the cave was walkable and more open; however, once we got truly inside the cave, we realized that "walkable and open" were no longer an option.  I'll admit, it was a little unnerving considering that there were times where you had to shimmy yourself through...on your back, but we thoroughly enjoyed the accomplishment once we got out of the cave!  Getting through the cave took us about 30 minutes and was very VERY dark (even with flashlights).  There were times where we were looking for the arrows that are to help guide through the tough parts of the caves, but shining those flashlights on the rock walls had me feeling a little uneasy - not knowing if other crawling things were down there... Jared, thankfully kept me in the dark about the spiders he saw crawling into the holes in the rocks until AFTER we got out of the cave..  BUT how many people can say that they were able to crawl through the inside of a giant rock under a bunch of other giant rocks?

Jared's confident pose :)

To finish off a well planned, busy weekend, we got to go downtown and listen to the Austin Symphony play while the fireworks went off.

This view was gorgeous to watch the fireworks over the lake in front of downtown :)

This is a video of the chaos that goes on downtown during the fourth of July!

We hope you all had a wonderful fourth of July :)

Rain, Vultures and Who knows what else!

Over the past months Jared and I have just done some random things, so there won't be any nice transitions between them, so just enjoy the photo journey :)

I'll start off with March, we were invited over for dinner to a friends house of ours, and were introduced to a fabulous game called Lost Cities.  It's a two person game, so perfect for Jared and I and it's a little confusing to learn at first, but is now a favorite game of ours.

So this game consumed most evenings until we were delighted to have Jared's parents and 3 siblings come to visit us for about a week!  We were able to take them to Top Golf and to Congress Bridge to see the bats and had wonderful weather while they were here.

Our talent at golf :) I think Jared's action shot looks cooler :P

We were running out of time, so the boys decided to
gather some golf balls ahead of time :P

We also took them to Congress bridge to see the bats, and the night was gorgeous!

It's a very popular place.... ;)

We also took them to see the enormous Whole Foods downtown, which by the way has (or had) a bunch of wheel barrels hanging at one of the exits.

Jared and his 2 younger brothers

We all know that good weather/bad weather can only last so long before it switches...and well, Texas was in some deep need of rain, and well, we've been getting it.  April showers bring May flowers right?  Boy did we get April and May showers, so those June flowers better be so stinkin' pretty :P

YUP! 10 straight days of thunderstorms

However, before we received these heavy rains...

We were (and by we, I mean me) welcomed into April by this not so great friend of ours, 

Here's the story

I was sitting in our living room one afternoon while Jared was at work (it was my day off), and I heard a knocking at our sliding glass door.  We're on the third floor with a balcony, so to have a knock at that door seemed super odd...  I went over there to see a vulture knocking it's head against our door.  I then proceeded to act like anyone would seeing a VULTURE on our balcony and ran back into the living room and had a little panic attack (little).  But then I realized that I had to get a photo or no one would believe me, so I went back to the door, but by then the vulture was on the railing.  Needless to say, I'm not a fan of huge birds, let alone, ones that are 2 feet from me...

(even if there is a glass door inbetween us)

here's the proof :)

We've also had some pretty fun date nights :)

Which Jared kicked our butts....

in BOTH games...

We also went to Pecan Street Festival (6th street festival), and got a free gecko ;)

Actually it was a free cardboard Geico advertisement 
that someone handed us... ;)

...and saw some Boy Band mini's :)

Our Church ward was holding a dance that was "Take me to the fair" themed and was super fun!
There were popcorn concession stands and lots of other goodies to go around.

It only took a little coaxing to get Jared to dress up ;)

The photo booth was super cute!
The brown and blonde hair worked perfectly ;)

And for my birthday this month Jared got me a wonderful
mint chocolate chip ice cream cake :) happy day!

We're excited for our adventures this next month :)

Our surprise trip

This last month has been wonderful, and we have so much to be grateful for in our lives.

Our spontaneous adventure started in the Austin airport.  Our flight attendant was wonderful; Jared asked what she recommended as a snack (pretzels, peanuts or cookies) and she replied with "Here, try them all...it's a long flight!" Needless to say, that 4 hour flight went very well, and Jared was a happy camper flyer :)

Our flight was taking us to Pocatello, Idaho (which is the smallest airport we've ever been in - 1 gate)

We then drove to Rexburg were we were able to visit some friends!  This was our gorgeous view upon arriving that evening - the Rexburg LDS temple, so beautiful

These are cousins of mine, can you tell?  We just so happened to run into them on our walk around BYU-Idaho campus, another great blessing.

Kind of blurry....These are some great friends we were able to visit with
and play some wonderful games!

Can't visit Rexburg without eating at Frontier Pies! (no one ordered pie...)

AND we enjoyed a wonderful evening out with some friends and YUMMY oreo shakes :)

THEN our next adventure happened.  We wanted to surprise Jared's family, especially his younger brother who had just returned from his 2 year church mission.  So, off we drove to Boise Idaho (4 hour drive).  But the sight was beautiful!

(again sorry for the blur - phone cameras aren't so great for me)

The sun had an accompanied rainbow :)

Like I said before, our trip to Boise was a surprise!  No one except Jared's mom and sister knew we were coming, so you can imagine the surprise when people from Texas arrive on your front door in Idaho :)  haha it was a great surprise and it worked!

Happy surprise after 2 years!

 All four brothers together again :)

Oh and Jared had to just help River brush up on her French vocabulary...
haha love this guy!

Such a wonderful day

And then, that very same evening we drove BACK to Pocatello (3 hours) to sleep and then catch our 7am flight the next morning.  It was a very quick, but very worth it trip!  We have so much to be grateful for and are so happy we got to make this trip!