catching up.

I have been at my sister's house for almost a week now and it has gone by really fast. We had a really good christmas this year-- angie and I woke up hours before her girls did- excited for christmas. I don't think I will ever grow out of that. It has been good to hang out with our whole family here, except for my little brother. Speaking of Ta, he decided not to call home until 8 pm! We were all trying to talk my parents into calling his mission president because it was getting so late. He was only allowed to talk for 40 minutes so we just put him on speaker phone and all listened/talked. He sounded really good and spoke spanish really fast.
Jeff & Derek's parents gave Ang & Der's family a Wii for Christmas so we have all been playing that for the past couple of days.

Really though, I feel really boring because we've just been hanging out mostly.

Good news: I am not feeling nauseas anymore. Except for a bad experience with a bowl of taco soup and jeff's bloomin onion at Texas Roadhouse tonight-- I haven't been feeling sick or making any mad dashes to the bathroom.

I'll post pictures soon.

Jeff's proving better at domesticity than I'll ever be...

Sunday we found out that Jeff's oldest sister (Jen) who is pregnant with kid #6 is really sick, having a difficult time breathing/moving/thinking/talking so we came down to help out with their 5 kids. Jeff has been running circles around me since we got here. Granted, I do have a stupid head cold that I can't take medication for, and I forgot my earplugs so Jeff's snoring has been pretty fantastic, but still. I just get finished patting my back for getting the youngest to sit down and watch Little Einsteins for 5 minutes when I hear him vacuuming upstairs, and that is right after seeing him put the 10th load of laundry in the washer. And yesterday every time I looked at dryer to see if the cycle was almost finished, it wasn't. Then I realized that he was managing to take a load out, fold it, and put a new load in without me even realizing what had happened. I better go "check" on him-- he's making spaghetti sauce in the crockpot for dinner tonight. I love that man.

But before I go, PICTURE THIS:
If we lived in the 1940's/1950's and Jeff was a woman he would be the kind that vacummed designs on the carpet while wearing a dress, heals, and pearls (all matching) with hair perfectly set and dinner just out of the oven when his spouse came home.

I, on the other hand, would probably be an alcoholic.

The Forgotten Carols

Last night we went to see Micheal McLean's play, The Forgotten Carols, with some of Jeff's family. It was really good. My grandma gave me the book when I was younger but honestly I flipped through it but never actually read it so I didn't know anything about the play/story going into it. They did a really good job. Micheal McLean played one of the parts and there was a choir and then there were just a few other actors/singers. There was one singer named Jordan Bluth who made the show for me. His voice was amazing. I don't know if it's the being pregnant, therefore more hormones, therefore more emotional or what but I cried like 10 times during the show last night.

ocd. again.

I realized tonight that my brain can't handle someone humming, mumbling, or singing the words to a song incorrectly. Jeff likes to hum/sing/mumble/whistle songs while we are in the car. When the radio is off. Often, I don't think he even realizes that he is doing it because the words are so far off and in the wrong order that there is no way he is really devoting many brain waves to the activity. BUT, I'm wound up so tight so much of the time that I can't just let it go. Before I even realize what's happening I am rehearsing the entire song from beginning to end, including the chorus, correctly, in my head. And if I get interrupted, the song starts all over again.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I cannot carry a tune to save my life. So, no one but me has to hear the song, from beginning to end, correctly.

dumb computer games

Time management has never been one of my strong points. Jeff is a little better most of the time than I am, but definitely not enough to even us out. There are probably plenty of productive things that we could do together. However, lately our time has been spent playing Super Mario Bros. on Super Nintendo or watching old BBC reruns of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares.

Tonight on the way home from Cedar we decided to take a step up on the graphics scale and bought a game that we can play against each other on our computers. Except it has now been downloading for over an hour and is taking FOREVER.

Hopefully it's worth it but at this rate I will be so tired and ready for bed the last thing I'll feel like doing is play good guys/bad guys on the computer. We'll see.

shrek baby

Okay so Jeff has been called Shrek more than once in his life. Read this if you don't believe me.

Tonight was SUU's baseball team's Christmas Party so we drove up to Cedar for it. Once again I wasn't thrilled to be going (starting to see a trend?) but it's just one of those wife things so over the hill and through the snow we went. *SO GLAD WE DON'T LIVE IN THE SNOW!!!* (sorry ang). It's a team tradition that they all draw names and get each other gag gifts. Although, I don't think that any of the freshman got the memo about the gag part, so they got sort of nice gifts, which was kind of sweet really. Anyway, back to my point about Shrek. We knew who had picked Jeff's name and it was one of the guys on the team who tends to be a little scared of Jeff. He was nervous around him as a teammate when Jeff was a Senior and this kid was a Freshman and I don't think that has changed especially now that Jeff is a coach. During the dinner part I kept looking at this kid because he looked so nervous. So I started to get nervous because I was almost certain his gift was going to be bad-- and that I would end up bright red during the "presentation" of the gift. (Each player has to stand up and "present" the gift to the recipient, explaining the thought behind it, etc.) Finally, it came time for Jeff to receive his gift, and it wasn't bad at all. Kind of cute actually. He had stenciled on onesies. One said, "My Dad is Shrek" and the other said "Team Ogre" with "Junior 18" on the back. Then he had written on a couple of bottles "Ogre Formula HGH", etc. on them. I will post pictures after I take some. I don't know why he looked so nervous-- it made me wonder if he was worried that he would hurt Jeff's feelings- rather than just embarrass him- and that was scarier.

Either way, it's good to know that all it takes to stop the sex jokes is getting your wife knocked up.

gender specificity

Today my in-laws had Jeff and me meet them at Target so that we could point out the baby stuff that we like and the baby stuff that we don't like so they have some sort of idea what to get us for Christmas. There was a really cool car seat that I liked and it was different shades of gray. Jeff was really concerned about getting a gray car seat because he didn't think gray was appropriate for a girl. Then later there was a different stroller/car seat combo that we liked, but upon closer inspection jeff saw that it had lions (along with other noah's ark/jungle animals) on it.
His response was, "we can't get this, it has lions on it, if we have a girl, she can't have a car seat with lions on it!"
We had this same type of discussion about practically every item we looked at such that poor Kevin (my father-in-law) who walked into target "not believing in gift certificates" started to repeat over and over, "we just need to get a gift certificate."

Not surprisingly, Jeff assured me that if I woke up with a completely new personality and wanted to dress up our (possible) baby girl in all sorts of pink lace poofiness- he would be totally okay with it.

I still think it would be cool to wait until the baby is born to find out if it is a boy or a girl. But at this rate, Jeff's head might explode from all the pressure to find things gender neutral.

Live Nativity

Last night Jeff and I went to our ward's live nativity. The YM/YW did it at the Tuacahn amphitheater. The narration was really simple and I the music that went along with it was really good too. I was kind of being a scrooge about going because I was afraid of getting cold and then getting sick but Jeff rounded up a couple of blankets, hat, scarf, coat, and gloves for me so that I wouldn't get cold.
My favorite part was the shepherds because they had a couple of goats and sheep on leashes that they walked across the stage and then there was a little corral thing by the stable with hay in it for them. Well when the shepherds started moving in that direction the animals knew where they were headed and a couple of the girls got dragged down some steps and across the stage. The second time around there was a little tiny goat and it was so excited to get to the hay but not strong enough to pull the girl holding its leash so it's legs were running in place really fast- zero traction.

I obviously missed a great photo op.

Christmas shopping

8 kids, 1 parent, and 2 siblings down.

3 siblings and 3 parents to go.


I bought 2 of my nieces Barbie cars. Sort of having a moral dilemma about it because I swore I'd never buy anything Barbie. I wanted to buy a bob the builder set complete with yellow hard hat to even things out. But didn't.

should I be feeling bad?

After my ranting blog Sunday night about our sleeping situation, Jeff's snoring was at sonic boom level and I guess I asked him to change how he was laying one too many times because he got up and left the room.

I fell asleep before he came back.

But that's because he didn't come back, until he came to kiss me on the forehead good-bye this morning before he left for the day.


I SLEPT THROUGH THE ENTIRE NIGHT WITHOUT WAKING UP ONCE.

And Jeff was on the couch.

finally got a response from Ta

Ta is on a mission in Massachusetts. I am not very good about writing him every week but I do write him somewhat regularly. When we found out that I was pregnant I took a picture of the 3 positive pregnancy tests and then wrote a letter and sent it in the mail to him. Here is his response that we got in the mail two weeks later (the italicized is in cursive):

TINA & JEFF

YOU CRAZY NICKAS I KNEW YOU WAS GONE GET A BABY CAUSE I BEEN PRAYIN FO YO OVARIES LIKE CRAZY MAH NICKAS!!

HOLLA BACK!!

I'm thoroughly excited

Put your hands in the air if you think you're a player.

I'm so stoked- HIGH FIVE ME NICKAS.
GOTTA GO- PEACE!!!

P.S. AND NO I WASN'T BEING SARCASTIC- I LOVE IT HERE

And then on the back it said:

WE BABTIZED SOMEONE LAST WEEK

______________________

Is it possible he took up smoking illegal substances while serving a mission?

one night's rest in peace

Sleeping has not been an easy thing for me since Jeff and I got married. Before we were married I took for granted how amazing my sleep was once I actually feel asleep. When we were first married we had a queen size mattress. After I was sick for the first three months due to lack of sleep we finally got a king. (Jeff is a big guy, he also has a tendency to do "hi-ya!" type knee, elbow, and fist moves in his sleep-- so I was waking up to a fist and or elbow to the face and a knee to the tailbone many times in the night). The king size bed is fantastic. Except that it doesn't create a sound and smell proof barrier between us. I have my fantastic hot pink ear plugs so that helps with the sound, but before we switched sides I would wake up to feeling his hot sleepy-breathe puffing my face at regular intervals. After getting him to rollover many times in the night to face the other direction (which also greatly improved my leg space because he also like to put his leg at a diagonal in my direction such that the only way to move it was a swift kick downward on my part or a very obvious passive-aggressive bounce down the bed as I got up to go to the bathroom) he told me that laying on his left side was his "natural side" so we needed to switch sides. We have. And it is great. There was a few elbows and fists to the face the first couple of night and he doesn't have a death grip on the blankets like I tend to so they keep falling of his end of the bed, but all in all I am pretty excited about the new arrangement. Now I get to sleep facing both directions which is great because for the first time in my life I wake up due to aching body parts in my sleep and his "natural side" has him facing the wall, not me.

I am almost positive it was a man who thought it was a great idea to get rid of two twin mattresses. Unless that was something that no one ever did, they just showed it that way on television. Regardless, I think it would be pretty great most nights.

**part of me feels really guilty writing this because Jeff is the best husband I could ever ask for. He woke me up yesterday morning to a gigantic breakfast in bed (even though I couldn't really eat it) and really does his best to make me happy. AND I understand that he doesn't hi-ya karate chop me in his sleep on purpose- at least I hope not.

busy signal

I have been trying to call my parents all afternoon. I keep getting the busy signal. The first time I called, it totally threw my off-guard because I don't think I have heard that noise in years! I'm guessing that they took the phone off the hook for some reason because both of their cell phones are going straight to voice-mail too. Heaven forbid they aren't accessible to me 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But still. That stupid busy signal is driving me crazy!