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.