Dancing the night away

Our friends the Jacksons took us out to dinner at their yacht club on Saturday night. The food was really yummy! I ordered a beef fillet and it was seriously the best steak I've ever had in my life! I think it was even better than the one I had at Shula's. It was super tender and juicy; you could cut it with just a fork. Pete liked it too. I was generous and gave him half. We had a lot of fun sitting and chatting while eating for a couple hours. We ate rolls, crab cakes, salad, our main course and desert! We were stuffed afterward!
After dinner we all headed to the Winter Ball at the Northport civic center.

This is our awesome Korean friend Kimmie! She is one of the funniest people you'll ever talk to! She's also really skinny and makes me look like a whale standing next to her.

These are our awesome friends the Jacksons! They spoil us like crazy! We love them to pieces!

After stuffing our faces at the yacht club.

Pete's favorite move

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

GIRL!!!!! We went to my doctor's appointment today and I had an ultrasound. It was amazing! They showed us the brain, the heart, stomach, spine, leg bone and lots of other body parts. We saw the heart beating and heard it too! It's always amazing to me to hear the heart beat! She was wiggling around while they did the ultrasound. I don't think she enjoyed being pushed on and decided to push back.
It feels a lot more real now that we know what we are having and can plan better and start buying things. We went out to dinner tonight and then went to target. I had a gift card to target that one of my students gave me for Christmas. We used it to buy several girlie outfits! It was fun looking at all the baby stuff and looking at the girl clothes!
We are really excited! Here are some of the ultrasound pictures:

Lights on Temple Square

One night while we were in Utah Pete, my brother Josh and I drove up to temple square to look at the Christmas lights. Pete's mom and a bunch of his brothers and sisters met us up there. I love the lights on temple square. We did not have time to look at them last Christmas so we made sure to schedule it in this year. It was pretty cold out but not as cold as its been some of the other times I've been. We went into the visitors center and the tabernacle in between checking out the lights and nativities to keep warm.

Josh & Pete posing by the floating Nativity

The Temple

Me and Josh

Keeping warm inside the tabernacle

Pete and Josh on our way to look at the lights

By the reflection pond

About half the Jay family at the tabernacle

Christmas Break in Utah

We were in Utah for almost 3 weeks during Pete's Winter Break from school. We had a lot of fun visiting family and friends! It went by really fast and we were sad to leave our family and beautiful Utah.
We kept busy the whole time visiting with family. We went back and forth between my parents house and Pete's. We had different family and friends coming into town at different times throughout our time there. We were certainly never bored! We went to four family Christmas parties the week of Christmas. We drove to Ogden on Christmas Eve to go to my extended family Christmas party and then drove all the way down to Springville to the Jay Family Christmas Party within a couple hour period. I wish I would have taken pictures at the parties but I forgot! They played dodge ball at the Jay party at the church. (I didn't participate for obvious reasons but Pete really enjoyed it!)

We opened presents at my parents house (again forgot to take pictures) Christmas morning and then went to the Jay house in the afternoon to open presents at 3. Pete's dad had to work and got home at 3 so everyone waited to open presents until then.
Here are some pictures before the present opening began at the Jays:

Pete's sister Joni

Our nephew Emmett

Me with our nephew Luke

Four of Pete's brothers: Jared, Tim, Tom and Jeremy

Pete's mom and his sister Emily

Aaron playing the wii and Jared, Ariel and Jeremy looking on

We ate Christmas Dinner at my parent's house after opening presents at the Jays and hanging out there. My mom always makes delicious food and Christmas was no exception.



This picture isn't the best of everyone but its all I have. My mom, my aunt Katie, Josh showing his food, my dad trying to smile like Pete, and Pete.

Update

I went to the doctor this past Wednesday. It went really well, the visit was much shorter and I didn't have to wait an hour to see the doctor! Plus I was able to see the doctor I originally wanted (he was out of the office at my last visit and I had to see this lady who has to be a resident or new doctor because she had to keep looking at her notes to remember what she needed to tell me for my first visit). Anyway I was able to hear the baby's heart beat again which is amazing! Pete still hasn't heard it. He had a presentation during my first appointment because we had to wait so long and he had a final during this weeks appointment. He will be able to come to the next appointment which is January 14th. I will be having another ultrasound and we get to find out the sex of our baby!!! Yay! I put up a poll on the right column of our blog if you want to take a guess as to whether we are having a boy or girl.

Last night we went to the Christmas Spectacular featuring the Rockettes thanks to Jackie and Steve! (Jackie and Steve are an awesome couple that I teach at the ballroom. Jackie calls us her adopted kids.) Their daughter got stuck out of town and they had to drive last minute to pick her up in Atlanta so they generously offered us their tickets. We both enjoyed the show. I always thought it would be fun to be a Rockette and wanted to train and tryout for their show but never did. I really enjoyed the dancing and i'm sure Pete enjoyed the music more than the dancing but still liked it.

Pete finished his finals on Thursday. He is really happy to be done and have a break! I'm happy he has a break too! They give him way too much busy work in the MBA program.

We are leaving for Utah this Wednesday and get to stay almost 3 weeks! We are really excited to see all our family and friends!

This Week

Since Kira hardly ever writes on here, I guess I will. This week we had Thanksgiving. We invited some friends over and had it with them and then played some card games and watched football. We watched a couple movies this week which we usually do almost every week. Neither of them were that great. We watched "Outsourced" where someone's job was outsourced to India and he had to go there and train his replacement, and then the job is outsourced again to China, so the Indian people lose their jobs. It seemed like a very low budget film. We also watched the new X-Files movie. I like that last X-Files movie better. This film wasn't much different than the psychic shows that you can watch anytime on Tru-TV.

We also went to our last football game at Alabama, the Iron-Bowl between Alabama and Auburn. We tried to sell our tickets, but nobody bought them in time to convert them. Alabama set up a ridiculous system where students have to convert their tickets for $50 bucks in order to sell them and let someone else use them. The last day to convert this last week was on Wednesday. We got calls and contacts for the tickets after 5:00pm on Wednesday, which was too late, even though the game was still three days away.

The game was pretty cool though, so we are glad we ended up going. We've been to a bunch of Alabama games, but this one was one of the most intense for the crowd, because of the Alabama-Auburn rivalry. I thought I was going to lose some of my hearing, it was so loud in the stadium. There were a lot of Auburn fans there. Alabama hadn't won a game against Auburn in six years and this year Alabama was number 1 in the nation. We went home during the third quarter and watched the rest on TV, because Kira has been a little sick the last few days.

(This is a picture we took from an earlier game)

We had to do the primary program at church today. The theme of the month is being grateful to be a child of God. We played a game where we put a number on the back of each of the kids. The kids were supposed to try to get close to the kids with the highest numbers on their backs and stay away from the kids with the lowest numbers on their backs. We then read the book "You are Special" by Max Lucado, where wooden Wemmicks spend all of their time putting stars on Wemmicks that look good and do good or impressive things, and putting gray dots on Wemmicks that are unattractive or mess up and do dumb things. The theme was the theme of the game and the book that as children of God He loves us no matter what we look like or what mistakes we make or no matter what others say just because He is our father and he created us. I thought it went pretty well.

Put Up The Christmas Tree and Lights

We put up the Christmas tree this week. We just used white Christmas lights with red and silver balls. Kira doesn't like using colorful lights on the tree, so we put them out on our balcony. It does look pretty good though with the white lights.


Here's a picture of a our tree. We'll have to keep using this one that we got at dollar general for our first Christmas until I finish school and we can start using real trees.