Pregnancy!

So I always had this romantic idea of pregnancy.



We'd get pregnant right away, I'd be glowing, no morning sickness or other symptoms (since my mom and sisters didn't have any), my tummie would be nice and round, everyone would treat me like a queen, , food would taste so wonderful, I'd be able to rest when I wanted, I'd have extra energy, I'd do pregnant yoga and I would be at home knitting and sewing beautiful things for our baby...

Ha! Yeah right!!!

So far it's been pretty much just the opposite. I'm currently at home right now with my 3rd cold in the past 4 months. This one is a doozie! I've been sick for 2 1/2 weeks now and it hit me really bad about a week ago. I have a throat infection that turned into a sinus infection with discharge coming out of both eyes, sore throat, sore face, coughing, sneezing, congestion, runny nose and I feel like I coughed a little bit of my lung out through my ribs. Oh, it's so painful every time I cough.

The morning sickness! Although finally over, it lasted for about 12 weeks straight. Everyday, sometimes twice a day. It was horrible. Sometimes even projectile and a few times even through my nose.

My stomach isn't nice and round as you would imagine a pregnant woman who is in her 4th month. It looks more like a spare tire with it's own spare!

I haven't had energy to do anything! All the things I love to do are now seeming like such a bothersome chore. I haven't cooked a real homemade meal for us pretty much since mid March. I used to cook dinner almost every night! I haven't really taken any pictures. I don't even know where my camera is right now. I haven't blogged in over a month. I haven't even wanted to go out for date night.

Pregnant on the first try! As most of our family and friends know, it wasn't so for us. We had tried for 12 months! The doctor kept telling us to relax and it would happen. Finally we decided to start some testing to see if we'd even be able to get pregnant on our own. Well this was in early March, right after Ben graduated and passed his state exam, we had an appointment to get the results for our testing. Three days before the appointment, I had missed my period. Even though it was just one day, I just had this feeling. I took the test and sure enough there were 2 lines! Although one was very light, there was still 2!!! I had been waiting to see those 2 little lines for 12 months!!! Finally there it was! So I took 5 more tests and all came out positive! We were so excited and when we went to get the results of our testing (which all came out normal) our doctor screamed when she found out that we were pregnant! I'm so grateful that it happened naturally. This was really important to me.

So, so far, this whole pregnancy thing hasn't turned out to be this beautiful romantic journey I had been dreaming about, but I am still so grateful for this opportunity to finally be pregnant. To finally start my family with my wonderful husband. Even though it's been rough, especially with me being sick and Ben still not being able to find a job, we really are grateful and excited. We've had a couple of really special moments talking about our little baby girl who will be here in December!

Nothing Says Lovin Like a...

Ingredients:
1 Happy Husband
1 Happy Wife
Lots of Patience
Lots of Fun
LOTS OF LOVE!

Instructions:

Preheat Oven to: 98.6 degrees

Bake at 98.6 degrees for approximately 9 months.

Bun removes itself from the oven when good and ready,

but this one should be done by mid December

Easter Weekend!

Okay, so in the past 2 weeks I've been sick twice! I don't know what's up because I never get sick. So now I'm on my second really bad cold. It's been so bad that it's like my poor little nose is just crying. I went through 2 boxes of tissue in the past 2 days! The big boxes!!! Thank the man or woman who had the brilliant idea to put lotion into tissues! It made this cold so much easier. Now they even have tissues with Vick's, Aloe Vera and even Anti-bacterial tissues!
Anywho... We had a really great weekend. On Friday we all went over to Papa and Naynay's (my dad's) to hang out and color Easter eggs.

Me and Brooke

Me and my 3 youngest nieces - Mc Kinley 2, Maddison 9 months, Brooke 5 months

Mc Kinley and Uncle Ben

An Afternoon Bike Ride

Stopping to pick some flowers for Papa and Naynay

Reagan 6, pretending to be a Little Indian

Reagan - the 1st Grandchild

Wild Flowers

Hangin out

For some reason I thought this photo was so funny

Kerry 5 and Reagan 6 - Crazy Girls

Mc Kinley - She is one of the sweetest and funniest kids I know

So Silly!

Then on Saturday we went to Salt Creek Beach. This is seriously one of my new favorite local spots. It was mine and Ben's 3rd time there in the past month. The beach is kinda secluded, the sand is really clean and soft, it's never crowded, there's great waves for surfing and body boarding, it has a great little picnic area with a basketball court and there's trails where you can bike or walk. This time we took my sisters and their families. We had just planned to go out there for a picnic since the weather was so ugly but when we got there it was perfect beach weather! All of us rolled up our pants and our sleeves and played in the water after our picnic.

Salt Creek Beach

Picnic Area

Salt Creek Golf Course

One of the walking trails

Me and Otis

Ben and Peanut

Kerry and Daddy

Ben and Me

The Baran's - Todd and McKinley, Kim (my oldest sister) and Maddison

The Lam Family - Brenda (my second oldest sister), Brooke and Son

McKinley and Daddy

Ben and Me

Me, Kerry and McKinley

Then on Easter Sunday after church we went to my dad's. Ben's dad and little brother were over again and all the kids had a ton of fun. Across from my dad's house is a big open field. Dad mows a path through it and we always go out there to play. For Easter we hide the eggs all through the field and the kids really love it. We usually have rules on which eggs which kids can collect to try and make it fair for everyone. This year we just counted all the eggs and divided them by how many kids we had. So each kid got 18 eggs and once they found 18 they were done. It actually worked out really well. I started getting sick on Easter so I stayed inside most of the day.
Brooke

So Sweet

Maddison

Brian and Eric

Kerry and Brooke

Maybe there's more chocolate inside!!!

It's a Chickie!

Tweet, tweet, tweet

A fun craft from Family Fun magazine

Happy Easter!

I love spending time with my family. I look forward to Sundays so much. It's such a wonderful day to spend time honoring our Savior and keeping in touch with family.

The Lam's Photo Shoot

So back in January my sister asked me to do my nieces "5 Year Old" pictures. I told her of course then she asked if I could do it the next day and throw in the family pictures too. Ha! So below are some of my favorites. This is the first time I did family pictures but it was a lot of fun. I love taking pictures but just messing around with my little nieces as models. I did a few engagement photos for friends and my sister a long time ago. It was so long ago that it was all on 35mm film. Ha! I'm still trying to learn how to use my camera so all the photos I took were with the automatic setting. I just couldn't get the lighting right. If anyone has any tips please feel free to share. I'd love to learn to use my camera with the manual settings. Like I said, I had a lot of fun doing this but I felt totally amateur. The funny part to me was that my sister loved the pictures. I guess it's not too hard to get good pictures when your working with such beautiful girls...oh and you too Son!

The Lam Family

Valentine's Day and My Birthday....Yeah, I Know It's Late!

First of all, I know this is late. I know I’m way behind in my blog posts. I work at a college and it’s just been crazy busy because the Spring semester just started. When I get off work at 7pm and drop off all the Samoans, I finally get home at about 7:45 and make dinner for Ben and myself. After that I just totally want to veg and spend time with Ben so I haven’t had time to blog or even facebook. Well we just started our 4^th week so it’s a little slower now, so I finally have time (and energy) to show off some pictures and brag about how wonderful my husband is and how cute my nieces are. Ha! I’ve been wanting to post our wonderful Valentines Extended Weekend and my special Birthday present from Ben and some cute pics of my nieces, so now I finally have the time!

I hate blogging like this though. I don’t like reading blogs either where people blog about 50 million things in one post. But it’s information I want to document so I’m going to do it….again!

Well Valentines day this year fell on a Saturday. At work we just happened to have the Friday before and the Monday after off for President’s day. Then I asked for Tuesday off also. So my Valentines weekend turned out to be 5 fun filled days with my wonderful hubby.

On Friday we went to the Getty Center in Malibu. It was really rainy but it was beautiful! Then we sat on the beach and watched the sunset.

On Saturday we went to the Ronald Reagan Library. That was really neat! It was interesting to see how our country’s current financial situation is similar to what it was when Reagan was president and how our current administration is doing the complete opposite of what Reagan successfully did. I’ll stop there. That could be a whole other blog. We had a lot of fun there too.

They do this fancy Valentines day dinner with a live band and dancing. The room they had set up was beautiful!!! Red, black and white, and it over looked the valley. President Reagan’s, Air Force 1 was in there too. Ben said maybe next year we could make reservations for the dinner!

For this year we went home for dinner. I had a special Valentines dinner planned. We started with salad and mini heart shaped pizzas with heart shaped pepperonis. Then we had coconut shrimp and heart shaped steak with blue cheese and broccoli. For dessert I made him a special chocolate raspberry cake. Dinner was so good, if I do say so myself! I love cooking! I just wish I had more time and money to do it. I wish I would have taken pictures of everything else. The pizzas came out really cute.

Sunday we had church and dinner at my dad’s. Fun as always!

Monday we stayed home and vegged because it was really rainy.

Tuesday we drove up to our favorite spot in So Cal. Nojoqui Falls. It was a rainy weekend so the falls were more beautiful than ever.

I’ve blogged about these falls before. It’s on the way up to Solvang through a windy back road.

It’s a short hike about 15 minutes to the top and it’s a calming and peaceful hike. Then we stopped in Solvang and visited our favorite antique store and went to our favorite bakery for our favorite chocolate cake. Then we went down to the beach and watched the sunset again!

It was such a great 5 days off and it was so wonderful to be able to spend those days with my hubby. It was really hard to have to go back to work on Wednesday.

Two weeks later for my birthday Ben planned this whole day of surprises. He just told me how to dress for the day and off we went. Well first we went to Dana Point for a breakfast smoothie. Then we started walking down to the dock and the next thing I know we were on our own private yacht for a 2 hour cruise! It was so much fun!

Our captain was cool and let us pretty much do anything we wanted. He even offered to let us drive the yacht. We saw a bunch of seals and about 10 dolphins. At one point the captain started racing the dolphins so they were swimming and jumping right by our boat.

I tried to get some good pictures but it was more amazing to see without the viewfinder of the camera to my eye.

After our 2 hour cruise, Ben had planned a picnic lunch at Salt Creek Beach. I had even more fun there than on the cruise!

I had never been to Salt Creek before but it’s like my new favorite spot. We sat on the grassy cliffs right above the beach and had a lovely picnic lunch.

Some curious little squirrels started coming really close to us.

Then all of a sudden there were about 15 squirrels all around us. Ben started feeding them chips and then they became our new best friends.

That night to we went down and watched the sunset again on the beach. There’s nothing more comforting to me than to sit in my husbands arms on a cool night watching the sunset on the beach. Sooooooo peaceful!

We don’t have enough money right now to go on extravagant vacations or cruises’, which I would love, but we do have a lot of fun visiting the various locations here in Southern California. There’s so much to do for a very low fee, if not free.

Oh and in case you read this blog but are not on facebook, Ben passed the nursing state exam and is now finally a licensed Registered Nurse! I just pray now that he can find a job soon!