Birthdays

We spent two wonderful weekends with family in Centerville celebrating Bryan’s, Lori’s, and Gordon’s Birthdays. We were able to get together and play games, eat food, listen to conference, and chat. I am so glad we have family close enough to spend so much time with.

Here’s some pictures from Lori’s birthday.

Of course Zackary was a big help opening the gifts. Carson and Bryan correlated their gifts to match.

Bryan got a nerf gun and so they pulled out all the other ones in the house. You had to be careful walking from one room to another.

Gordon got some cookies and being grandpa he shared them with the kids.

Research

So my paper that was accepted in February has been officially published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry. This is really an amazing thing to be a first author of a published paper and not even have a bachelor degree yet. So since that is finished Dr. Martini has had me helping a PHD student named Megan. We finished a portion of her project and made a poster to take to a Food and Technology Expo. This was the first time I had made a poster. Luckily she did all the talking.

13 weeks!

Most of you who read my blog will probably already know but I am 13 weeks pregnant as of yesterday! I am excited to be officially past the sick stage although I had it pretty easy. The one time I threw up was yesterday and I think that had more to do with drinking gatorade first thing in the morning instead of something more basic. Now I am just hungry every few hours and very thirsty. We had our first ultra sound at 11 weeks and at that point the baby was 4cm long. The doctor checked the heart beat and then was chatting with us when the baby just started bouncing around like crazy! We like to call him/her our mexican jumping bean. We have come up with two names that we like: Kevin and Kaelynn. My next appointment is in the end of April but we probably won't find out the gender until May.

Accepted!

My paper for the Journal of Agriculture and Food Science has officially been accepted! We still have one more review to do but the only thing we can change is grammar mistakes. We are almost done!

Update :)

I see it has been a long time since I have posted anything, at least not since we moved. Nothing too exciting has happened. We love our new place and are constantly over at our neighbor’s apartment or there are at ours. We eat dinner together a lot and play games like hand and foot, name five (Christmas gift from my parentsJ), and in a pickle. We spent the holidays with Bryan's family which was a wonderful break from life. I might post some pictures later.

School is going really well. Besides my nutrition courses I am taking piano lessons and really like it. My instructor is focusing on what I want, which is sight reading, instead of just learning pieces. I am also taking the second half of the first year of Spanish. I needed to fill in some more credits for my scholarship to apply and it seemed like a good idea. There is a lot of homework but the class is fun. Bryan likes his courses except for English-Business Communications. He doesn’t like to write to much and so finds it difficult. His advanced database class is proving to be somewhat of a challenge so he’s learning lots of new things. He is also taking C++ but finds it slow because he had already taught himself the basics last summer but that class is where he will learn to write code so it will pick up.

Bryan still works at Best Buy and loves it. The newness of it has worn off so he doesn’t come home talking about great deals they have so much anymore; only when there is something really cool. I still have my job doing research on campus which slowed down over the winter months because I was between projects but has started to pick up again. We are putting the finishing touches on the paper I wrote so it should be published in the next few months. I am also doing a small project for another paper which I will be listed as an author of. So I should have two papers under my belt shortly after I graduate. I am doing a couple presentations on one of these this semester. One at Weber State, kind of a practice run for me; a second at a local competition so I can do some networking in my field; and a third in Cincinnati, Ohio at a national chemists’ society annual meeting. It is four days during finals week so I have to take all my finals early. There are two graduate students going with me and we will each give a 20 min presentation sometime during the conference. It is a very exciting opportunity and I am glad for the practice runs I will get beforehand.

We made freezer jam for the first time last week. Strawberry, mixed berry, and mango. Our stake put on a food storage bazaar. So each ward was responsible for a type of food and was supposed to provide information on how to store it, recipes, and samples. The food was really good, there was enough that we didn’t have to eat lunch. The winner of the recipe contest was a chocolate cake made from black beans. It may sound bad but it tasted really good, kind of like brownies. All the recipes are posted on a blog: bearallthings.blogspot.com. If you need some good info on emergency preparedness this is a good place to go.

That’s what’s going on right now.

New Apartment!

We moved into a new apartment on November 1st but I haven’t had a chance to post about it. It is a bigger apartment with two bedrooms, no stairs, more space, and washer and dryer hook ups.

We got our washer and dryer for free from a friend of a friend. They are old but they work, although we did have one mishap: on daylight savings I woke up at 5:00 in the morning and asked Bryan why the washer was still going. One of the hoses had cracked and flooded half our bathroom, the hallway and a little into the two rooms adjacent to the washer. Luckily it was clean water and we just spent the next few days letting it dry out. So we bought new hoses for the washer and now it works great, but I don’t leave the water turned on unless I’m doing laundry.

Here is a picture of the hallway, the bathroom door is open on the left. In front of that is a closet, behind it is a second bedroom and across from the bedroom is our room.  I am really glad to have the shelves and cupboards at the end of the hall, it’s a good place to put decorations.

 

Above is our kitchen with a dishwasher and lots of cupboard space! Below is our living room with our Christmas tree. The toys in the bottom left corner are for Aiden who is 14 months and comes over a lot.

Last week we went to a friends’ apartment and helped them decorate their tree so this week they came and helped us decorate ours. Here are some pictures of us decorating our new apartment.

Bryan and Nephi set up the tree and put on the lights. It took them a minute to figure out which was the bottom portion.

Thumbs up! The lights are on and we’re ready to decorate.

Hannah put up a nativity scene while Nephi helped me hang some garland.

Bryan decided he wanted to be decorated too. You can see at the bottom corner where he is plugged into the wall. Hannah and I love our charming husbands.

November

November has gone by pretty fast and all of a sudden we’re looking at two weeks left of school. We spent Thanksgiving in Centerville, UT and had a great time for the time we could be there. Bryan ended up working late Wednesday and early Friday so we couldn’t be there very long but Thanksgiving Day was a relaxing day. We went to Layton for some family pictures and then back to Dad and Karen’s for dinner.  There were about 30 people there, which means lots of food and lots of left overs.

Here are some pictures at Gordon and Karen’s having pie.

 

 

 

 

Carson, Emily, Kimberlee, and Bryan.

Karen and Dad; Kelley and Daphne.

This is some of Karen’s family: her sister and brother in-law on the left and niece and nephew and friend on the right.

They had a lot of fun playing with the nerf guns although they weren’t very good at playing baseball with them.