Nesting Instinct

I've read a little bit about this pregnancy symptom, so to speak, called the 'nesting instinct'. Basically its the need to prepare your home for your baby in every way possible. I don't know if this is what I have, or if my need to home-make is more based upon my realization that we will probably live here longer than I originally planned. Either way, I have been going crazy trying to re-organize, decorate, clean, and beautify our little home. Sean and I were extremely blessed when we got hooked up with our little townhouse. His Uncle's sister, who used to live here, passed away a little over a year ago. She was in her late 50's and single so her brothers and sisters were kind of responsible for her belongings, etc. Probably the day after her funeral, Sean's aunt called to ask him if we had found a place to live. We hadn't and were a little desperate for guidance. We came to see it, told them how much we had been looking to pay for rent, and they accepted. We have seriously been so fortunate. We have two bedrooms, a garage, and a little backyard. They also didn't have a place for her furniture so they left us a couch, la-z-boy, a beautiful kitchen table, and two king size beds with dressers and nightstands. Our bed has a solid wood log-style frame and matching furniture. It's beautiful--and way out of our budget! All this furniture was a life-saver considering we only had Sean's desk to claim as our own. Now we have Sean's desk and a TV/entertainment center! Making progress. Anyways, when we first moved in I didn't really do much to decorate probably just because we had no money and I also didn't really feel like we would be here long. But now, we're planning to be here til Sean graduates from UVU. We still don't have a lot of money to spend on decorations, but that 'nesting instinct' has kicked in and I've been getting really creative as to how to add some simple things to turn our townhouse into our HOME.

This is what the outside looks like from the front. And then below is a picture of our backyard. Sean's uncle's other brother is a landscape architect, so he did all of this for his sister before she passed away. It's beautiful!

I made pillows for the couch downstairs as well as bought these frames to put wedding pics in. This couch isn't exactly my ideal piece of furniture . . . but it is about $1000 cheaper than a new couch. Also, it has two recliners as well as the middle coushion folds down and becomes cup holders and a little table. Sean only discovered that about 3 weeks ago--it was a big deal! So all in all, we like this couch, and I like it a lot more with the blanket, pillows and photos above it. It's a keeper!

I also improvised with all of these black frames I already had, but never put up. I got the Family Proclamation for free at the bookstore, and then I cut up chunks of these photos of flowers I had from last year's calendar. The temple photo is actually a card someone gave to us when we got married. Haha. And then I spent a total of $1.50 on the 8x10 photo. Not too shabby.

Other things I've used to decorate have been stuff I've snagged from my old room in my parents house or from old decorations my mom had kept. Nobody has noticed . . . hehe. And my next project for a wall in the kitchen involves another 'borrowing' from there as well! :)

I'm super excited to keep going especially when we get a little further on setting up the baby's room. We have a crib, a dresser, a rocking chair, and a full bed that will all be in there. So far I've made his blanket for the crib and a cover for the rocking chair. Pillows are on my to-do list still. And we'll see how creative I'll be able to get when it comes to hanging things on the walls . . . But this is a pic of his blanket and the monkey I had that someone gave to me when I was a teenager. His room will be jungle themed and mainly yellow, blue, and green. I've been sooo lucky to get furniture from our parents. This pic is my fav! I love the jungle fabric! So fun!

Yogurtland

About a month ago I took Sean to one of the popular frozen yogurt places that seem to be popping up all over the valley. This brilliant idea I had is costing me big time. HE LOVED IT! And now we might as well as sign our date night budget money over the franchise every month. I've never been much of a frozen yogurt lover--ice cream is where it's at. Part of my true Forsey blood I guess. But, I love that I get to put whichever toppings and as much of those toppings as a want on my frozen yogurt. So I guess it's a good trade off. Sean is there for the frozen yogurt as much as he's there for the fresh fruit which he heavily dumps onto his dark chocolate cake batter yogurt. We've decided that Yogurtland, over across from the University Mall, is our favorite one. Maybe you'll see us there!

My Main Squeeze :)

It's July

I love July! It's my birthday in July! The 4th of July is in July! This is the first year my anniversary will be in July! The likelyhood of it snowing in Utah is basically zero (can't always count on that in June), and the heat actually feels good (unlike August when you get slightly more tired of it).

The past week for us was really fun! On the 4th we went to the parade in Provo, which was really awesome! I think we might make that a tradition! Sadly, my camera battery was dead, so I didn't get pictures of us sitting in our little chairs along the curb, but it was a great time!

Thursday was my birthday! Neither Sean nor I had to go to work so we just had fun all day. After we got up we got ready and went up to my parents house to have Cafe Rio for lunch as well as to celebrate with cake and ice cream! Afterwards I went to the salon with Melissa and McKayla and got a pedicure! Then Sean and I came home and relaxed for a while before we planned to go out to eat at PF Changs! I had honey crusted shrimp--very tasty!

I definitely felt like I was spoiled because the day was wonderful! A few days before my present came in the mail--a sewing machine! I have been so excited about it! It is a basic machine--just what I need! Cuz at this point I still don't know how to work the button hole feature . . . but I've been able to sew a cover for a rocking chair we were blessed to have given to us that will be in the baby's room. My other projects include his blanky for the crib, pillows for his room, and also pillows for our couch downstairs! I'm having a blast with it so far!

This here is the current size of my belly . . . and it's only going to get bigger! Here's to surviving August and September in the heat! :) By then I doubt I'll ever want to have another baby in October! ;)

I Can Relate to This

This totally cracks me up . . . because it's sooo true! One time I peed like 4 times in two hours . . . so weird.

I wanna talk about Math...

So, Math. I've always loved Math. It was probably my best subject growing up. I took Calculus my senior year, but didn't pass the AP test due to a severe case of senioritis. So then, at BYU I took Math 119 to earn the college credit. And that was it. My math days were over. I do remember though that there were a lot of returned missionaries in my class. All of them were trying to get into the business school. I was 18 years old, and cruising in this class since I had learned everything in high school. Then I would watch my fellow classmates struggle and look to me for answers, which I thought was strange because they were a lot older than me. But, they had also not looked at a single math problem for potentialy 4 to 5 years depending on their situation. So this brings me to my point: Sean is one of those guys. 5 years later, he's taking a math class, but it's not just a review of stuff he learned in high school, he's expected to remember everything from high school and then build upon it. The difficulty of taking math in high school and spending an entire school year on 12 chapters pales in comparison to trying to do it in 6 weeks or even an entire semester. To make it worse, I'm not very useful. I took calculus and did great in the class, but now I look at a slightly more complicated algebra problem and stare at it blankly with no ideas as to how to solve it. The last two weeks I've tried to help him more to help him feel like he's not totally on his own in this battle, and my skills have gotten better, but I'm still running into problems that go something like this in my head, " Wait, do I add or multiply these exponents? How exactly do I get rid of this square root? and Is this allowed? or did I just make that rule up?" I've also realized that Sean and I also have different ways of making sense of the problems we solve. So he'll try to explain things to me, and I to him, and both of us feel like the other just said something in a different language. But in the end, we'll often come up with the same answer to a problem. haha.

I remember at BYU that the general education requirement titled "Languages of Learning" had two options for fulfillment. #1: take Calc or Stats or #2 take a 205 level of a foriegn language. I was always so lost as to why math and languages would fulfill the same requirement. What the heck do they have to do with eachother? Now, I've made the connection . . . Once you've stopped studying them they basically leave your brain as quick as they arrived. I would know, I've studied quite a bit of both and I'm pretty sure my ability to remember Spanish is about as good as my ability to remember math. Or maybe I should say that my ability to remember Spanish is about as bad as my ability to remember math. Either way, they're both deep down in there somehwere. :)

TGIF

This has been quite a strange week. It all started Sunday with an odd occurance involving our swamp cooler. We tried to start running it to cool things off, but it was blowing out hot air instead. Sean asked a neighbor if he knew much about them, and we realized that there was a cover over the swamp cooler on the roof that Sean would have to take off. In the process of getting on the roof Sean burned his hand on the tar/shingles, it blistered immediately, and then tore off all the skin. The burn is on his right hand and covers about three inches of his palm. It's nasty. After realizing we were not capable of handling this type of injury we went to the Urgent Care where they numbed it, cleaned it, and cut off all the skin. So that whole chunk of his hand is just open flesh that even still, 4 days later, has blood on the surface. Not good. So he's been unable to work--since working at Texas Roadhouse requires a more dependable use of his hands than most jobs. But luckily, tonight was his first night working with his bandaged hand. After we got back from the Urgent Care we realized that as the swamp cooler had been running, it had started to leak. There were drips of water coming from the ceiling in our bedroom. We shut everything off and didn't really have time to worry too much about it because we were on our way to my parents house to stay for the week because Melissa is in California and my dad had to go out of town. The next morning when we got back down to Orem, Sean got a hold of our landlord, who had someone come inspect everything. The verdict: water damage. They took out the whole ceiling in our bedroom, and will now be replacing it because it was drenched with water. Lovely. I was just kind of ignoring the whole situation because I was at work and worried about taking care of everyone at my parents house, but also of Sean considering he was taking pain killer for his hand. And I don't even want to talk about what the upstairs looks like right now. Everything in our bedroom is basically strewn between one side of our room, the bathroom, the hallway and the guest bedroom. It's psycho. If I thought our stuff was getting disorganized before, now I really have my work cut out for my once this ceiling gets fixed.
Anyways, so then Tuesday my mom had to be admitted to the hospital because she had a fever that they realized was also being caused by an infection. She had not been doing very well Monday, and Tuesday and Wednesday were also rough days, but finally today after some antibiotics and good rest she has perked up even just slightly and seems to be feeling a little bit better. Chemotheraphy seems to take quite a toll on her body. Watching her deal with cancer and also watching doctors try to treat it makes me realize how much information about the human body and diseases is unknown. I wish there was just a quick fix to everything. Some kind of miracle vitamin or something. But I guess there's not. It's a lot more complicated than that.
We're trying to keep our heads above water over here. I'm just glad it's finally the end of the week so I can get everything cleaned up and feel more prepared for a week of work next week. Yay us! :)