2010 Highlights

JANUARY

The main highlight of January was going through the temple with my brother Nate and sending him off on his mission to Little Rock, Arkansas. Without this experience, we wouldn't be able to get hilarious letters home like this:
Sunday was unremarkable, except for Bro. Heres bringing a talking stuffed animal to class and have it lecture us on the true meaning of Christmas. Elder Smith and Elder Graff had to excuse themselves to avoid making a scene. It took me a solid 5 minutes to recover. Insanity knows no bounds.
and this:
Well its almost been a year since we all flew to Hawaii. Arkansas is a lot like Hawaii, minus the beautiful beaches, warm weather, charming local culture and tourist attractions and plus THE RAZORBACKS.

FEBRUARY
Ben turned 25- a quarter of a century old!
We had a fun party with our friends from our apartment complex-the Goodyears, Caldwells and Alders. We did homemade Cafe Rio salads, which were delicious. And this is the infamous birthday cake I had to make twice after the first one blew up in our oven.

I also got a chance to spend a weekend on Coronado Island with my mom, sister, aunts and cousins. It was a blast.

MARCH
We celebrated my Dad's 50th Birthday with dinner at The Roof
APRIL
We celebrated Easter and General Conference with our favorite family, the Bradens. This included our EPIC Easter Egg hunt (see picture of Clyde below)

This is the obligatory post priesthood session picture. The boys now know the routine, as soon as they get home they line up right here so Jana can snap their picture.
Clyde was delighted every time he found candy, exclaiming "It's candy!"

Our other big highlight of April was finding out that our baby Chase was on his way!

MAY
The highlight of May for me was going to Washington DC with BYU's nursing program. I had an awesome experience there, and I'm so glad I got to share it with my friends.

JUNE
June(and the second half of May) for me can be summed up in two words: "morning sickness". Thus, Ben's life during that same time can be summed up in the words "waiting on Courtney hand and foot". Hence, no pictures from June. That's okay, because July was awesome!

One exciting thing did happen in June, although we have no pictures to document it. Ben interviewed for and was officially accepted to medical school!

JULY
We went to Europe

Then two days after we got home, we found out our little sweet pea was in fact a
BABY BOY!
We picked out a name, started shopping for little boy things, and started watching my belly grow.

AUGUST
I walked at graduation.

And we went to West Yellowstone for my cousins wedding
SEPTEMBER
We started our last semester ever at BYU.
My belly got bigger.
That's about it.

OCTOBER
More general conference fun with the Bradens

NOVEMBER
We had a fabulous time in San Diego with the family for Thanksgiving
DECEMBER
Ben and I both graduated from BYU.
We packed up and moved out of our little apartment.
And we spent a wonderful Christmas together- our last as a family of two!

Happy Birthday Mom

Today is my fabulous Mother's birthday! She's an amazing women and I sure love her. We didn't do anything super exciting to celebrate today (last year we surprised her with a trip to Hawaii). My dad has been telling me for the past nine months that it would be awesome to give her a grandchild for her birthday- unfortunately the little one isn't quite cooperating with that. We did make her breakfast and then a little later went out to lunch at my dad's pizza restaurant. I kind of like that her birthday falls on Christmas Eve so we get to spend the whole day as a family.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that my mom is my role model. I hope I can be as good a mom as she is.

The Hospital Bag

I went to the doctor on Monday and he said the baby could come any day now. He could come any day, or I could still go another two weeks. Either way, I probably should have already packed a hospital bag. I've been putting it off, which isn't really like me, usually I love to plan ahead. Here is my dilemma in packing a hospital bag:

• I don't have many clothes that fit me right now, so I don't want to waste them being packed away for the next two weeks until the baby comes (that is unless he comes tonight....)
• Things like my make-up, toothbrush and our camera I am going to be using a lot in the next few days, these seems like things I'll have to throw in at the last minute anyway.
• I don't want to take a lot of stuff to the hospital with me. When I was working on labor and delivery I hated it when we were packing 5 bags with us just to transfer the lady to postpartum. I want one, small, simple bag. Hence, I don't want to pack anything that isn't really necessary.
• I have picked out in my mind what small, easy to carry around bag I want to take with me, but I have yet to locate it in my parent's storage room. (This is mostly from lack of trying

So I have a favor to ask of all of you who have done this recently, or haven't done this recently but still have an opinion on the subject: What should I pack????? What things did you pack, and then realized you didn't need? What did you wish you had when you were at the hospital? Help please?

Christmas Traditions

I really love this time of year! So many fun things going on, and it brings back wonderful memories of Christmases past. Here are a few of my favorite Christmas traditions:

Our Christmas Box
We use this box to count down to Christmas. It worked out well in our family, since there are four columns and we had four kids. We took turns choosing something to put in the box each day, then once it was full all of the ornaments we chose lined up vertically. Now it's not as big of deal of "whose turn it is to choose", but I still love seeing the box fill up during December.

Decorating Cookies- Heidi and I made these for our family party on Monday. Heidi's pretty fancy with the decorations, I just put on frosting and some sprinkles. Heidi's are the cookies with the pretty white designs. And they taste absolutely delicious.

Every year during Christmas time my mom plans a family outing- to some play or concert and then we go to dinner as a family. This year we went to A Christmas Carol at Hale theater- it was wonderful. We usually go to a fancy dinner with the event, but this year Training Table sounded good to this pregnant girl, so that's what we did. It was a wonderful night.

This is probably our weirdest family tradition. At the White family party we sing the song, "The Holy City" all together. If you've ever heard a professional choir sing it, we pretty much sound like that, minus the fact that no one can hit the high notes and there's lots of laughter during the song, but we do sing it very enthusiastically.

We call my Aunt Sue, and any other family members that can't make it to the party, so they can hear it over the phone. My Aunt Connie is a fabulous pianist- we couldn't do it without her.

I'm excited for Ben and I to start our family and carry on these traditions, as well as starting some others. What Christmas family traditions do you have that you love?

I'm dreaming of a White Christmas

Monday night we had our White family Christmas party- the White family being my mom's family. This party is always so much fun, fabulous food, wonderful company, and unparalleled entertainment. This year we hosted the party at our house. We had a fun day of baking and decorating to get ready and everything turned out delicious and beautiful! Mostly I just enjoyed spending time with my aunts, uncles and cousins who I don't get to see nearly enough.

Three-fourths of The Hot Babes Quartet, just missing our Eleanor (plus Ian, who is apparently attacking Kelly)

Erin and Heidi, or Mary-Kate and Ashley
as they used to be called
(those nicknames were self-inflicted by the way)

Half of Kelly (thanks to Ben's awesome photography skills), Heidi, Me, Ella and Erin

Eve and Addison

Kelly, Erin, Me and Heidi

My dad and baby Ian, he's holding the standard high for Chase.
He's quite the adorable baby!

Addison and Eve doing their favorite thing, attacking Patrick (no worries, there are pictures of Patrick's face later on).

Rob, Georgia and Dick

Ben and Will

Ian and Ella

Amanda, Dan, Georgia and the top half of Patrick

Will, Marshall and Luke, these three spent a lot
of the night talking football. These boys know their stuff.

Taylor, his girlfriend Bree and Uncle Rick

Kelly, Patrick (is there any wonder that Addison and Eve are IN LOVE with him?) and Heidi

Donny, Me and Ella

Adam, Erin and Sarah

Georgia and Heidi Georgia

My dad and Eve the Reindeer

Me, Ella doing her special face and Kelly

Also, my mom gets the prize for being the fabulous photographer and hostess. Somehow we ended up with no pictures of her, but she did an awesome job throwing a fabulous Christmas party!

My apologies

Will is pretty offended that I didn't include this tidbit of information in my last post:

Will knew Sarah Nitta when she was "Sister Hill" down in McAllen, Texas. They were on the same mission at the same time. He knew her before I did. Just wanted to make that clear.

I know her! I know her!

(Read title like Buddy the Elf, "I know him! I know him!")

This news has had me happy and excited for the last two days, ever since it was announced. My friend Sarah Nitta is on the cast of The Biggest Loser that starts this January. (The season actually premiers on my due date, sounds like a good thing to watch while in labor right? Motivating, yes? Actually, I've never seen the show before so I don't really know what I'm in for) . Anyway, I'm so excited for Sarah and to watch her in this adventure. Sarah is one of the most friendly, charming, beautiful, talented, spiritual, funny people I know. I first became friends with her when she was assigned to be my visiting teaching companion in March of 2009. I think I got more out of it than any of the girls we visited did. After visiting teaching I would just talk to Sarah for hours. She is so wise, has such great perspective on life and is always so encouraging of others.
She has had a lot of challenges in her past. After coming home from her mission she was involved in a horrible car accident, losing her ability to walk. When she met her husband a few months later she was still in a wheelchair. She recovered enough to be walking and mostly healthy by their wedding day. However, I'm not sure if she's ever totally recovered from the trauma of the accident, which has made exercise difficult and painful ever since. Sarah and her awesome husband Jason have wanted to have a baby for years, but it has never worked out. They have had several painful miscarriages, but still remain optimistic and hopeful that one day they will be able to have children. One of the motivating forces behind Sarah trying out for the show is because she wants her body to be healthy enough to hopefully carrying a child.

Sarah is just wonderful and I'm so excited to watch the show this next season!

(She's the cute girl in pink in the front row)

Chapter Closed

I feel like a whole chapter in my life has been closed, the BYU Provo chapter. This past week, Ben and I both graduated from BYU and have officially moved out of Provo. Moving itself was quite the adventure. We have loved the apartment we've lived in the last 2 1/2 years, and really we like the landlord (and luckily have stayed on her good side the whole time). However, we started hearing a few months after we moved in how AWFUL and TEDIOUS the checkout was when you move out. She has very high standards of what "clean" entails. We scrubbed our apartment from top to bottom for a day and a half (and it's only 500 square feet, thank goodness it wasn't bigger). After about 8 hours of cleaning, I started to feel really overwhelmed.

Being full-term + scrubbing floors on my hands and knees = lots of pain.

Thank goodness, a few angels came to help us on Wednesday. My ever faithful visiting teacher came to help (who is also pregnant, due about 5 weeks after me) and brought us the most delicious dinner (which was a total life saver since our entire kitchen was packed at this point). She also called the relief society president (who I had never met before Wednesday due to us being in the singles ward this past year) who came to help along with another girl in the ward who I had never met. Those two cleaned our whole bedroom- what a blessing! A few other friends stopped by throughout the day; I literally put Meghan and Caitlyn to work scrubbing our floor with a toothbrush (that's what the landlord specifically instructed). By 9:30 Wednesday night we had finally finished the cleaning. It couldn't have happened without all this help and I am so grateful for every person who came!

Thursday morning my dad and Will came down to help us move. We had a few guys from the ward there too and in about 40 minutes they had our entire apartment loaded into the trailer my dad borrowed for us. I'm sorry we chose to move on the coldest morning of the year. I think it was 10 degrees outside when we started. I gave the apartment a quick once over with the vacuum and waited for our landlord to come for the dreaded checkout. Luckily, she took a glance around, told us everything looked good, we gave her our keys and were on our way! Apparently all that anxiety over the checkout was worth it, she kept telling us how good everything looked. The process took about 15 minutes. She warns you that if you haven't cleaned well you could be there for 5+ hours checking out.

I know this is kind of long and boring to most of you, but I wanted to publicly say THANK YOU!!!!!!!!! to all the wonderful people who helped us clean and move! We couldn't have done it otherwise (and I've vowed to never move being 37 weeks pregnant again). Ben and I are both so grateful for such supportive friends and family!

Now we are mostly moved in and settled in my parents basement in Kaysville. We are living here until April when we move away to med school. The set up works out pretty well: we needed a cheap (as in free) place to live, and they want to hold their grandbaby as much as possible before we move away. Win-win. Well, I guess right now my parents don't have their "win" because the grandbaby isn't here to hold yet, but I think we can all be patient for a few more weeks for that one.

Now that we have the stress of finals and moving behind us, let the Christmas celebrating begin!

It's over

My college education is officially completed. As of about 10:00 this morning when I turned in my last final, I am officially a college graduate. I can't even explain how happy this makes me. Equally as exciting, Ben is just a few days away from being done. He has a few finals next week, so he's busily studying away on campus right now.
The only thing that makes a me a little sad about graduating is that I won't see my wonderful nursing friends nearly as often. One thing I have loved about the nursing program is that we got to move through it as a class, so I've been with the same group for the last 2 1/2 years. During that time we've all become really close. Somewhere in between carpooling to Salt Lake while it's still dark in the morning and practicing IV starts on each other we've bonded. My nursing class is full of beautiful, smart talented women (and three funny guys) and I feel so privileged to call them friends.
Last night we had a dinner party with all the people in our class. Here I am with just a few of my nursing friends, Melissa (who was my partner in crime this semester in our painfully boring and irritating Community Health clinical), Erin, Karli and Lisa.
Any post about nursing friends would be woefully incomplete with the mention of my friend Corinne. We joke all the time about how we have been living the same life. We've been friends since we were 4. We grew up in the same neighborhood, went to the same schools. Then, somehow, we ended up in the nursing program together at BYU. Last year after Corinne got married, she moved into our apartment complex and ward. On top of all that, we are both redheads and our names are so close that people have gotten our names mixed up pretty much our whole lives. The picture above was taken in Washington DC last Spring, we are both about 5 weeks pregnant in this picture. Our little boys are due 1 day apart. Basically, Corinne is awesome. She was the best study partner/carpool friend/emotional support to help me through this program. I'm pretty sure, given our history, that we will cross paths throughout our lives and stay friends.

The Challenges of Christmas Card Pictures

This year we had several factors working against us in taking a Christmas card picture. The first of which was that we didn't take one in the first few weeks of January before Nate left, so we don't have one picture of the whole family during any point of 2010. The second is the general yearly challenge, which is that some family members (mostly all the men-folk) rebel. Thirdly, I was a little picky and didn't want my large stomach in the picture (we'll include Chase next year when everyone can see his cute face).We tried to take a few shots while in California.

Ben and Will took turns not smiling in the picture:

They went back and forth like this basically every other picture. It's like they planned it.
And then a few turned out blurry. Finally we got one that worked.
It was a Christmas miracle!

Thanks to our good friend and computer genius Mike Caldwell, we were able to put together a Christmas Card with decent pictures of everyone in the family!
Mission Accomplished.

3 years ago today...

... Ben got down on one knee and changed my life forever.

We like to celebrate December 7 as kind of a "half" anniversary. We don't buy each other gifts or anything, but we do go out and do something fun together that we wouldn't normally spend the money on. With our current hectic schedules of finals and moving coming up next week, and with my current enormous belly, doing something super fun and adventurous like rock climbing just wasn't in the picture (that is what we did last year). Today we met up in between Ben's classes and went to lunch at a yummy Chinese restaurant on Center Street in Provo. I thought it was the perfect way to celebrate. I'm always up for food these days!

I can't believe how much our lives have changed in the last three years, especially since in the next month we will be 1. moving away from the first home we had together 2. graduating from college and 3. adding another member to our family (I'm officially 36 weeks today!!!!).

Basically, I love Ben and I'm glad I said yes on that beautiful, snowy night 3 years ago.