Life After Travel

So, it's been a while since I've been on here... I guess I figured that life hasn't been all that eventful since we got home from our summer fun. We've just been waiting around ever so patiently (or not so patiently really) for our sweet daughter to come along. And while we now have less than a week left before her due date she seems to be taking her own sweet time to get here. Can't say I blame her really - but we'd sure love to have her here :)

Anyway - I figured that it would probably be good to update our lives now before we become a family of three. We have some random pictures from throughout the last few months and I figured I'd post them. It's kind sad that I'll be doing such a lame synopsis of everything, but I guess that's just how it'll have to be.

This is me at about six months pregnant.
Jackie came to visit and met me at Maddock's in Brigham City so that we could spend some time together. It was so much fun to see her and I wish she lived closer so that she could actually come see the baby before she's 3 years old.

Then we have the holidays!

They were so much fun! I was so excited for Christmas and the 3 weeks off of school that Spencer had that I insisted we put up the tree about the 2nd week of November. This picture was actually taken closer to Christmas, when we had actually done our shopping and placed gifts under the tree - but I seriously LOVE having Christmas decorations and a tree up. It brings so much excitement and happiness to life. It's wonderful!

Kinda funny that the first part of our holidays started with the Christmas - I like it that way though. THEN we had Thanksgiving!
Thanksgiving is definitely up there in my favorites category for best holidays! The food is wonderful, the family is wonderful - what more could you want?

This year Spencer and I planned to have Thanksgiving with my family. Well my family has always done the every-other-year trade-off between my parents' sides of the family. This year was my family's turn to have Thanksgiving with my mom's family. So in an effort to make sure that everyone in her family had a place to go on this holiday, my mom invited everyone to our house. She figured that maybe 3 or 4 families would decide to join us and we'd have a nice quaint day together. As the weeks went on after her invitation went out it seemed that everyones' plans started to change from dinners with their own small families to one big dinner at my parents' place. The numbers of attendees went from 30 to 50 to 60 and by Thanksgiving we had 80 family members show up for dinner. AWESOME! Out of the 10 kids in her family, 8 of them came with their own kids and grandkids, my grandparents and even some of the children from a 9th sibling. It was quite the gathering! Staying the night at our house alone we had 17 people needing beds - not including my siblings and Spencer and I who were in town for the event. It was so much fun having so many wonderful family members around and I'm so glad that we got to share that with everyone this year.

After Thanksgiving there was only 3 weeks left until school got out for the semester. I was so stinking excited to have the break and have Spencer to myself for a little while.

The day of Spencer's last final, December 17th, his best friend, Trevor Nelson got married!!! We had SO much fun being there with them! They had the most beautiful wedding, luncheon and reception! I loved it! Trevor's wife, Heather is wonderful and we love finally having her here in Utah with us all.

Here's the fun group of us married couples who got to enjoy the festivities together. These are definitely some of our closest friends and we're pretty lucky to have them around.

Left to right: Spencer, Me, Kim and Rob Jepson, Trevor and Heather Nelson (the newlyweds!), Krystal and Mike Molyneux and Whitney and Ben Hillyard with their son, Tyler.

After the wedding we got to head straight to my sister, Aimee's, apartment because she'd just gotten home from having her 2nd baby! I couldn't wait to see her and her son!

These are just a couple pictures from when they were in the hospital. I was lame and didn't take any pictures with them when I was there - but what can ya do?

Such a happy family! Oaklee is such a cute big sister and, from what I hear, loves to be mommy's little helper.

They named him Porter Smoot Perkins and we call him Smoot.

He was born December 15th, 2010 and weighed almost 10 pounds!!! He's such a chunk and so much fun to cuddle with! Having him around for the holidays has not made the wait for our baby any easier. But we sure do love having him around!

After finally seeing little Smooty for the first time, it was off to Spencer's parents' house for Christmas! They threw a baby shower for me there and everything. It was such a wonderful week! Christmas in a new home was especially exciting for me. Spencer's family has so many amazing and fun traditions and I loved being able to be a part of it all this year.

My favorite tradition, by far came Christmas morning. All the grandkids sleep in the loft of Spencer's parents' house and they get to spy on Santa as he brings everyone their Christmas gifts. I can't say I was totally thrilled with the idea of being up at 5:30 in the morning to join in with the spying - but once we got up into the loft with all the excited children it was hard not catch the excitement they all felt.

Here's Santa sneaking in and getting all the gifts laid out.

Just a few of the grandchildren all looking out excitedly to find out what they got for Christmas.

Once Santa leaves, then everyone gets to run downstairs and start the opening of their presents.

I guess we were pretty good this year because Santa even left us some goodies!

Spencer got a scarf and new sunday shoes along with his long-awaited Owl City CD. I guess you can say we had it pretty good this year :)

Spencer got me the greatest boots! What a star!
Here's us opening some of our presents. Wow! Aren't we attractive at 6 in the morning!?
Our new stockings! I made Spencer and I stockings this year because I knew I didn't want to buy them. Spencer's mom used to make stockings like this out of felt for all her kids - so with a little help from Spencer's sister, Lana, I was able to pull it off. I've never felt like a very crafty person, but I must say that I was quite proud of myself for pulling this one off.

One of the presents we received from my Grandma and Grandpa Cox was their life history. It is an incredible book and was put together so nicely that when we opened it up and Marilyn and Spencer's step-brother, Dave saw it they spent the next hour or so going through it and their own family history books doing comparisons and finding links between ancestors. It was so much fun! I haven't much gotten into the family history stuff unfortunately, but seeing them get so excited about it and talking with them about it made me feel like I could actually enjoy it.

Here's Marilyn and Dave enjoying family history readings.

After a wonderful Christmas dinner and much time spent with many different family members I was entirely exhausted and tragically not feeling well at all. When we woke up the next morning and started getting ready to go to my parents' house, Spencer made me get back in bed and let him finish the rest of the work. So I then spent the next days at my parents' house feeling like I'd gotten hit by a train. It wasn't exactly my ideal vacation at that point - but it was really nice to be with my family and be able to relax in a place where I knew that Spencer and I would be taken care of.

I think the highlight of our stay at my parents' place was Dance Off 2 or Dance Party 2 or something like that. It's game on the Wii that my family got for Christmas and it entertained us for hours.

I especially loved watching the boys try to move with the beat and get all the dance more correct. I may have been sick but I could not stop laughing. Good times!

Spencer was so wonderful the whole time I was feeling gross and just a few days later he came down with the same thing... It was about this time that we decided it was time for us to head back to Logan so that we could get ourselves feeling healthy again before school/work started again and before we got anyone else sick.

We had a very chill and relaxed New Year's Eve together. We made ourselves pizza and caramel corn and watched Step Up 3d together. If it hadn't been New Year's Eve there's no way we would have made it to midnight to bang our pots and pans together - but we somehow forced ourselves to stay awake.

And that, my friends is about all there is to it right now :) We now just sit here and wait. Spencer has started his last semester of school and I've been substitute teaching and we CAN'T WAIT to have our daughter join us in this crazy thing we call life!

A Baby Story

So this Summer we left for Ghana on May 18th - about a week after we got there I started to wonder/suspect that I was pregnant. It was a bit of a scary thought being in Africa and all and I knew that I needed some questions answered real quick. Luckily, for our first week and half there was a group of nurses from BYU staying next door to us. I pulled the head nurse aside and quickly asked what I would hypothetically need to do if I did happen to be pregnant. She immediately told me to immediately get off the malaria medication I was currently using, doxycyclene, and pick up some "baby safe" pills called Larium.

I did as she said and about a week and half later I pulled out the pregnancy test I had luckily brought with us on a whim as we packed up or apartment, and sure enough... POSITIVE!

I was nervous knowing that I didn't have much access to medical help if anything went wrong - I worried about getting malaria or some other sickness and what it might do to our baby - but with a lot of prayers and faith I didn't come down with a single illness while there. MIRACLE! But really, other than being quite nauseous with the normal morning sickness and pregnancy symptoms, I was the ONLY one who didn't come down with anything while we were there.

We feel so grateful and blessed to have a healthy baby so far and know that God's hand was in this pregnancy 100%. We thank Him everyday for everything He's given us and everything He's done for us.

When we got home some our first tasks were getting everything set up and ready for me to see a doctor. Since I was already 17 weeks along when we got off the plane in Utah I was getting pretty anxious to make sure everything was okay. We weren't able to get me into a doctor for another 2 1/2 weeks after that, which was a little discouraging, but somewhat expected - and you better believe I was thrilled to walk into that office last Thursday, the 19th, to see that doctor.

He gave us our first quick ultrasound, told us it was a girl and that everything looked great and sent us on our way. WAHOO!!! It felt good to know it was all going to be alright, and especially good to know that if anything from here on out does go wrong, we have a doctor and quick trip to the hospital to get it all checked out.

So life is good! We are so excited to be having a baby girl!

On Tuesday, the 14th, we were scheduled for our 20 weeks scan and Spencer got to go in again and get a better look at our daughter. I loved watching AND feeling her do flips in my stomach while the ultrasound tech did all the fun measurements. She made sure to let us know that she is in fact a girl and even waved to us on camera.

Here are some of the more recent shots we got of her. We already think she's adorable (even if the ultrasound pictures make her look like she has weird things coming our of her head).
We thought she was chewing on her hand at first

Then we caught her waving to us and the tech made sure we noticed that all 5 fingers are, in fact, present. YAY! :)

Then she went back to resting.

As we got in the car to leave Spencer said, "I wanna hold her NOW!"

I smiled and enjoyed the thought of Spencer being completely wrapped around her finger when she's born. And upon mentioning that our baby needs to cook a little bit longer, but that he would be able to hold our friend's baby really soon he frowned and said, "But I don't want to hold THEIR baby! I want OUR baby! It's not the same!"

He's going to be such a great daddy! I can't wait... hopefully the next 191/2 weeks go fast ;)

BABY GIRL!

I left one thing out of our first year together - I'M PREGNANT! Here's the first baby pictures of our little girl.

You can see her spine in this one and then apparently right between her legs.
Here's the cute legs all stretched out - The little feet there on the left make me really happy.
Her profile
The 3D image of her. No, her hands are not just nubs - in creating the 3D image the doctor had to cut off her hand... not sure why - but she actually does have cute little fingers to go along with the stubby arm there.
So there you have it! Our baby girl! I'm 20 weeks along today and we are so excited for the new addition to come into our family.

A Whole Year!

Spencer and I were married exactly 1 year and 2 days ago! CRAZY! Saturday was our 1st, yes, FIRST anniversary. In memory of such, I have decided to go through the archives and post some pictures from some of our many memorable events from before, during and after the wedding.


DATING LIFE

Spencer and I started dating on February 21st. The next week, February 28th, we attended the Draper Temple open house and upon coming home attended an 80's dance. It was so much fun and warranted the first pictures ever taken of the two of us together.
We had so much fun together!

After the dance at Spencer's apartment - I was falling pretty fast and it had only been a week :)

We wanted to surprise Spencer with a birthday party, but weren't sure we could make it a surprise if we actually did it on his actual b-day, so we opted for the night before. He was very much surprised and quite happy!

The morning of March 21st (his real bday) we went to Golden Corral, his birthday choice :)

That night I made him dinner and we watched George of the Jungle - a movie we'd been planning on seeing together since before we actually started dating.

Not exactly sure what the date of this hike was, but neither of us had ever hiked the wind caves up in Logan (something every Aggie needs to do before leaving this school), so we set off when the weather was warm enough.

It was on this hike that we both talked about our summer plans for the first time and Spencer admitted that his plans original plans were quickly changing on account of our relationship.

I wasn't going to argue with him. The two of us at the peach days demolition derby. I still haven't decided if I can handle the purposeful crashing and munching of those cars with people still in them.

Spring formal.

Summer came and I had surgery on my feet to get my bunions removed. Spencer came to my parent's house in Centerville to visit while I recovered a little. He brought me the most beautiful flowers! I was so excited to see him!

ENGAGEMENT!

On June 10th, just before Spencer left for New Hampshire for 10 days, the ring Spencer ordered finally came in and he proposed!

All the stuff I'm holding was part of the proposal he had planned out. It was perfect!

I was so happy and I LOVED/still LOVE my ring!

The wedding date was planned for September 4th - less than 3 months away. We had a lot of work to do, apartment shopping being one of them. Spencer ruled this place out the second he realized he couldn't even sit up straight, let alone stand in the shower.

Spencer came with me to our Cox family reunion (my mom's side of the family). It was the first time he'd met a good majority of my extended family. He was a great sport and I was thrilled to have him there with me! We even got to take a ride around Wendell Idaho in this awesome little plane. I loved it!

Engagement pictures by our friend Tim Jordan. We went to first dam here in Logan for these ones.

This picture was taken by our photographer, Sarah Hatch, at Woodland Park in Farmington.

THE WEDDING DAY - Friday, September 04, 2009

Spencer and I coming out of the Bountiful Temple after the sealing. It was the most perfect day of my life!

More pictures from the wedding day.

My bouquet! I loved it!!!

The Bountiful Temple

Married for time and ALL eternity - How did I get so lucky!?

Outside the reception center, just before the reception started.

MMM... He's Hot!

My family. Korbin, Casey's cardboard stand-in, Josh, Mom, Dad, Me, Spencer, Aimee and Oaklee, Porter and Sadie and Sydnee in front.

Spencer's family! I'm not even going to try and name everyone right here. I actually could - I promise - but it would take a LONG time right now :) We were so lucky to have so many wonderful family members come to support us. We love them all!

Our car... :-P All covered in toilet paper, oreos, glow sticks and flour. Yes, a year later there still is the rank smell of flower in our ventilation system. Thanks guys!

At least we didn't have to drive away in the dirty - we got the sweet car that Spencer's brother-in-law, Blake, provided for us! The perfect ending to our perfect day!

HONEYMOON

We went to Wolf Creek for our honeymoon. Real exotic huh? We had a lot of fun though! This was the only restaurant in town. Good thing we enjoyed it!

Spencer especially enjoyed the Apple Beer.

The next Monday we took the 4-wheelers up to Monte Cristo for a ride. It was the most beautiful day and I found the most spectacular cloud formation, I just had to take a picture.

Spencer loved the 4-wheelers. He would have ridden them like this if he was flexible enough.

Before Spencer decided to eat me we decided we'd better take a break for lunch.

That was our last day of the honeymoon - it was short and sweet and unfortunately we needed to get back up to Logan for school on Tuesday. We still found many fun and crazy things to do though to keep life exciting and interesting!

AFTER MARRIAGE LIFE (A year in a couple minutes)

Homecoming dance, October 2009

Christmas morning at my parents house. Casey had come home from the mission and all of us kids were all back together at last (with a couple extra additions).

New Year's Eve party at Spencer's parent's house. They sure know how to throw a party there!

Date night with some of the couples in our ward. With it being winter - the decision was made to roast hot dogs on the gas-powered stovetop. Creative!

Spencer's birthday breakfast - March 21, 2010

He got a new watch and bright yellow earbuds - he was a happy camper.

Yes, we are still in love! :)

Pictures skipped: Anything after I started the blog, which is basically everything after this point. Our summer adventures, graduation and everything in between there.

We're so excited to be back in our same apartment though. It was so much easier to get things unpacked and put away this tim around. We already knew where we wanted everything, so it was just a matter of unloading it and placing it in it's designated spot. We even made a few long-awaited improvements to the place, including drilling a hole in the desk so we could string cords through it and not clutter up the desk anymore. Spencer did such a good job!

1st ANNIVERSARY! Saturday, September 4, 2010

Because we had such an adventuresome summer and already had quite a few outings that cost a significant amount of money for us, we decided to have a low-key, but enjoyable anniversary.

We started off by going to the temple. It was so wonderful to sit with Spencer in the temple exactly a year from when we had started our journey together. I couldn't help but feel so blessed and loved being there. It's so wonderful to know that I get to be with him forever!

After the temple we changed our clothes and decided on El Toro Viejo for dinner. Yummy!

We then went to the Wellsville Rodeo! It was Spencer's first rodeo EVER!

The bull-riding was Spencer's favorite. Can you see the man getting thrown off here?

We actually enjoyed ourselves quite a lot!

Love this guy!

We have been so blessed and so lucky to be together. It's been the most wonderful year of marriage and I'm excited that we have so many more wonderful years ahead of us!