The Happiest Season of All

I love December! And this December I had a lot to be excited about. I would finish my student teaching, be officially graduated from BYU, and get to see my family for the first time since I was pregnant (or since I was really showing). And every year I love December because of all of the wonderful Christmas things you get to do! And this year I had a big list. :) There were a lot of cool things to do in Seattle for the season that I wanted to try because I had never been in a big city for Christmas before. But first, there was a tradition that I wanted to do. That for years I had been begging Rusty to do with me and somehow every year he managed to get out of. But not this year! When I was growing up we would go into the mountains and cut down our own Christmas tree. They were ugly, but the memories were great. So this year we bought a permit and headed into the forest to cut down our own tree! But after how it went this year I don't know if I'll be able to ever con him into this again.

It started great! I brought hot chocolate in a thermos and we listened to one of my favorite Christmas CDs- SheDaisy Brand New Year. Then we got to our predetermined spot and then headed up the bumpy four wheeling road. Only here is the problem: I'm a super anxious worrier. And I spent the entire pregnancy trying so hard to make sure the baby would be healthy and safe. And I knew that they weren't supposed to be bumped around too much. So when the road got bumpy I got nervous which ended in a few ways. 1: With my pregnancy hormones I started crying thinking that I had hurt my baby. 2: I got out of the truck and walked. But I forgot to mention that it was raining. And that my belly was too big to fit inside my jacket. So there I am walking behind the truck crying in the rain with a soaking wet belly. Rusty kept trying to tell me it was ok or that we could just go back down but I didn't want to leave without a tree now, and I didn't want to go back down the bumpy road. So we were stuck and I was not leaving, but I also was not going to stop crying. That poor man.

Eventually we got to a good pull off spot and started hiking around. But the truth is I've never really paid much attention to the kinds of trees up here. It's called the Evergreen State. There are a million evergreens. But the only kind we could find looked weird and were not the kind I grew up having. Also there are so many different kinds of trees that it is actually really hard to find one that could be a Christmas tree. In Idaho everything is dead but these trees, here everything is still green and it all blends in. So we hiked around for a while and then eventually decided to go to a different place and try there. That place didn't work either. So we abandoned the idea of cutting or own tree down, decided to do it next year, and stopped at a tree place on the way home and picked it the most beautiful tree I have ever had. Later that night or friends came over to watch Christmas movies and we had to tell them that we sold out and bought a tree instead of funding one in the widened of Washington. :) I know none of it worked out how it was supposed to, bit it seriously was a beautiful tree. And once you have a Christmas tree, who even cares where you got it?

The Broadway theater here also did a production of The Grinch! We weren't really sure what to expect but decided to try it with some of our friends. We went downtown and ate at The Cheesecake Factory and then headed over to the show. It was interesting with all of the new songs they had to add, and they did some crazy colorful scenes that made me think of the psychedelic 60s. Overall, not my favorite play I'd ever been to, but it was as really fun when they would get back to the real storyline and definitely got me excited for Christmas!

My student teaching continued to go well as I started giving more and more of the lessons back to the teacher. It started to get really hard to bend over and tie shoes or pick things up off the ground, so I was glad to be able to have more time sitting and relaxing. Also my belly got so big that I accidentally knocked a kid down during singing time. Literally to the ground. I needed to stop before things got out of hand. We had our school music program which talked about celebrating all over the world. All of the teachers rid me to get really excited about it and that people go take early to get seats and the seats run out because it's so great, and I didn't believe them. But seriously. If every school music show was like that parents would never complain about going. It was amazing! I definitely didn't feel like I was watching elementary school students. The last week I got a huge surprise! While I was observing in another classroom my teacher, kids, and parents set up a surprise baby shower for me! When I walked in all of the kids came and have me hugs and then I opened some presents before we played games and ate cake. It was so sweet! I seriously fell in love with these kids. When my student teaching was over I took the last few minutes of the day to tell them goodbye and I just started crying. Those sweet little kids came up and gave me hugs before they left. I'm going to miss them so much!

As far as the pregnancy goes, things were going well and progressing great! Rusty and I even attended a newborn basics class with our friends who are also pregnant and due just a couple of weeks before us. Now that student teaching was over I was hoping that I could start focusing on getting things ready for our little man!

There was a special date this December: 12-13-14, all in a row! Rusty knew that I had a while list of Christmas things I wanted to do and suggested that we do them on this day! It was awesome! We started by going to see real live reindeer! I had never seen them before, but they are so cute! And there was a camel named Curly which was obviously a bonus.

Then we drove downtown to finish the rest of our things.  Our next stop was the Pacific Center, which is like a giant mall with a huge opening in the center of it. The shops are all pretty ritzy so we would never actually go there to shop, and neither of us like shopping anyways, but they were having Santa come visit while they played Christmas music and dropped fake snow inside the center of the mall at a certain time each night. We decided to go and try it out! We ate dinner at a little seafood joint and then waited for the time to come. It was really fun! 

The mall  had red and green lights shining on the wall

Snow is falling and Santa came!

Hooray!

Then we walked a few blocks further and visited Westlake Park. It is an outdoor center in the middle of downtown that had a giant Christmas tree, a carousel, music, and food vendors. We had heard that the mini donuts were delish so we got some of those while we walked around. It was really low key, but it was a lot of fun to be walking around with all of the lights and music.  

YUM!

Our last stop on this busy night was a little place called Candy Cane Lane. I have no idea how this got started, but one area of a downtown Seattle neighborhood takes it upon themselves to really decorate and get festive for Christmas. All of the houses look like adorable gingerbread houses, and you can walk through or drive through and just admire the decorations! We brought some hot chocolate in a thermos and walked through the neighborhood. It was so cute!

It felt like we were in one of those little cities that you decorate with at Christmas time. 

To end the night we went up to our favorite park overlooking the city to see the Space Needle. During the Christmas season it has a Christmas tree on top! On our way home we took a little detour over by the zoo because we heard that they had a cool light display too. We didn't want to go in, but there were tons of light up monkeys lining the streets that lead to the zoo. It was fun to look for them on our drive!

Another fun Christmas thing in Seattle is Bellevue's Snowflake Lane. It's kind of like a big parade where they have fake snowflakes falling down and lots of dancers and singers, but they stay in one spot. It was really cool! I've never seen anything like that and they were all really talented. Add on some bit chocolate and cinnamon rolls and we pregnant women were happy :)

I know I say this a lot, but I don't know how I got so lucky with my husband. Seriously. He knew that I was a little but worried about us becoming boring and stagnant after starting a family because it would be harder to do the things we like. And this far in the pregnancy I was also just not feeling that great about myself in general. So he came home from work early, told me to get dressed and then put me in the car. We stopped to pick up lunch when he told me that he was taking me downtown to the Nutcracker. For a few years Seattle had been doing a version created by the author of Wild Things and this was their last year. He gave me the tickets and the story book for our baby. He is the absolute sweetest man I've ever known and I love him with my whole heart. I cried the whole way to the ballet and Rusty just kept saying, "You're supposed to be happy!" Little did he know, he had made me incredibly happy.

They had pink ballerina cupcakes that were famous and delicious!

Then it was time for Christmas! Went went to Boise to spend Christmas and New Year with my family and spent a lot of time hanging out with them, going to movies, and having lots of fun. The boys went snowmobiling and Jessica and I went for a little hike up by Bogus. It was great to get to see my family, and the first time that they saw me with my big belly haha. It was fun to play around with the baby and show them his kicks.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Haha, so this looks creepy but Rusty hates those stuffed animals with the GIANT eyes. Beckie and Olivia found out (Olivia has a bunch) and put them all over our room so that they were staring at him haha. This was our retaliation... A little morbid but that's alright. :)

Hikes, Floods, and Thanks Anyways

Rusty gets a lot of great suggestions of fun things to do in the address from the people that he works with. This is how we have found some of our favorite things! For the fall, one of the things that was suggested was the Mountain Highway Loop. And because I'm getting pretty big we thought it would be a great way to get out but easy for me to do. It's a drive with some fun things along the way, do we could do as many or as few as I felt up to. First stop was hiking at Old Robe Trail. The weather was beautiful and sunny (what's all this nonsense about it ALWAYS raining here??) and the hike weaved through forests of moss covered trees. We didn't know anything about the hike but it ended up going down by a river. It was really pretty!

There were a bunch of horse tail weeds and Rusty was absolutely ENTHRALLED with how tall they were.

Like seriously.

ET!!!

We continued the beautiful drive and stopped to drive up to Mt. Pilchuck. This home is really intense and takes all day, but you can drive up to the trail head and see a view over the whole Snohomish valley.

We drove through some old, small towns and ended up getting some hot chocolate and later stopping for dinner. At the Mexican restaurant, Rusty want really hungry so he got a taco salad and I was starving so I got a huge burrito. The lady brought out our food and just assumed I got the salad. It was a little embarrassing to reach out for the giant burrito but hey, I'm pregnant. And honestly I would have ordered that when I wasn't pregnant too so oh well. :)

Something a little less exciting also happened. One night really late, around 2AM, I woke up to Rusty jumping out of bed and running out of the room. I was certain I was going to due because there was a murderer in the house. I got out of bed and peered out the doorway and saw water coming down from the ceiling in the kitchen as if it were raining. Our apartment was flooding! So we both stated grabbing towels and bowls and puts and pans to try to learn the damage. Rusty canned the people upstairs and it turned out that a tube for their sink bring and water was just pouring out. It was a pretty big disaster. ~As an just, they had to tear out the entire ceiling and put awful, giant fans in everywhere to try to dry it out. We didn't have a ceiling again until January.

There is a town called Leavenworth that we visited when we were here for Rusty's internship. It's all Bavarian themed and so cute! It's on the other side of the mountains too so the weather is hot and sunny. It is a great place to look at fall colors. We went with some of our friends and it was so much fun to walk around the town, look the colors, and eat at a legit German restaurant. I think it was the best Reuben I've ever had!

November was also spent with us being sick a lot. Like almost the entire month, and especially me. A low immune system due to pregnancy and 24 little germ carrying machines are mostly to thank for that. We spent a lot of time at home sleeping, drank a lot of hit water with lemon juice and honey, and read a lot of books. It wasn't fun to be sick all the time but it did force us to relax and take it easy.

I also finished my big capstone project called the Teacher Work Sample and turned in my last assignments of my undergraduate career. Woohoo! I will be officially graduated in December. Student teaching continued to go well this month as I taught full time again for the entire month. I really am so blessed to have the class and mentor teacher that I have. I am learning so much and loving it! This month we had our Gingerbread Man Play. It was so adorable! I love those kids!

This year we went to Colorado for Thanksgiving. We spent time with Rusty's family and looked through family pictures which I loved because it gave me a chance to see more pictures of Rusty growing up and what our baby might look like. We went to his Granddad's for dinner and had a ton of delicious food! We also did some exploring around Boulder where we were staying with his sister and brother in law. They explored Park Street one day when I stayed home not feeling well, and we also went on a Celestial Tea tour and visited a cool park. Colorado is a really fun place! I love visiting family there!

Or beautiful attire for the tour

The second trimester of pregnancy is so much better than the first! I feel a lot better, although I am starting to get a little uncomfortable because I'm getting pretty big. I love being able to feel him move! He is getting so big that we could actually see my belly move all over from him kicking so much. :) Love this little guy.