Tax "Planning"

As a tax accountant, I do a lot of tax planning for my clients. However, I have not done the best "tax planning" with my own life.

Steven and I were married on January 3rd.

Little baby girl is due on January 25th.

Even though my "tax planning" was a little off, I think that I will definitely have to get our little girl one of these.....

I love it.

Fall Colors

As I typed the title for this post, my Canadian and American sides were at war. If I followed my Canadian roots, that would have been "colours," but I guess I've just been in the good ole' USA too long and "colors" won out. Anyways, that was a tangent.

My mom has been in town this past week visiting. She came to bring us a car (more on that later. My parents are very generous and we are very blessed), visit her sisters, and spend some time with us. We had a ton of fun. My mom and I went shopping for baby girl and that was a blast. Today, we went for a drive/walk up by Midway and the colors of fall are just beautiful in the mountains right now.

Steven also loves to take pictures of any wildlife/gross bugs that we find. Here is a spider we found outside of the Wallsburg house. Ick. I don't like bugs, but he finds them fascinating.

And, what would a fall walk be without deer?

The camera and I are not really friends right now, and probably won't be for a while. But, I do want to document the belly progress, so here we go (almost 22 weeks). I'm going to be huge.....:

I love fall. I can't wait for cozy sweaters and crunching leaves. 

Pink or Blue?

I had my 20 week ultrasound today, and according to that, we are definitely looking at......

PINK!!!

Baby Foote is now officially Baby Girl Foote. We actually think we might have a name, but we are only about 75% sure, so I'll keep that a secret a little longer. 

Our baby girl was definitely not shy and showed us that she is pretty much 100% for sure a girl.

Everything is looking great and healthy, and the baby is measuring exactly on my due date, maybe even a couple of days ahead. The ultrasound tech said that our little gal was difficult to measure because she was just moving everywhere. Here is her kicking me. I've been feeling a lot of this lately :). 

I think this is one of my favorite pictures. Here are her dainty little legs.....

.... And cute little face. 

We are already proud parents and she isn't even here yet!

For Mom

When I talked to my mom on the phone last night, she said she wanted to see some photos of the growing baby bump. Since my mom is awesome, I of course took some pictures. I apologize, because I can't imagine my expanding waistline is that interesting to many other people. But, it is also fun for me to look back and see, so here they are!

We tried a couple of backgrounds. With a whopping 600 square feet of living space, there is really no good place to take a picture.

And, while we are on the portraits, today was Steven's LAST first day of school. He was a good sport, and even let me take a picture of him this morning. Yeah! I just went to work instead of school, but I think we are both celebrating this milestone.

THE Ikea Table

When Steven and I first got married, we went shopping for a table and chairs. After looking around at a lot of places, we realized that these things were expensive. Then we found THE Ikea table and chairs. The same set that 50% of other new married couples buy because you can get the table and all four chairs for $129.

Well, after two and a half years, I was bored by the table. All our other furniture was dark wood, and I like that look. Oh, and one day about a year ago Steven cut a pizza on the soft wood of the table and so we had a pizza outline to eat every meal with.

So, last Saturday's project was to paint the table black. I was the official sander and supply purchaser. Steven dealt with the fumes and spray-painted the table. We LOVE the final outcome. I am also proud of us, because I was tempted to just buy a new table and this really saved a lot of money.

One thing we learned is to always buy more spray paint than you think you need. I went back to buy more not once but twice. Finally, $25 worth of sand paper and spray paint later, we have a new table!

Beach and Tech

Tomorrow, we are getting up really early and starting the 13 hour drive back home. I figured that I should blog about the rest of our vacation now, since I have no responsibilities except to relax. Once we get home the laundry, shopping, cleaning, going back to work, etc. will take over again.

We spent yesterday at the beach as promised. It was fantastic. We went to two different beaches in Santa Cruz. The first beach, Natural Bridges, was very un-touristy, and had amazing views. It was also pretty chilly. Don't I look like I just want to jump right in the water?

After that, we went to the main beach in Santa Cruz, saw the famous boardwalk, and just enjoyed the sun and water. Much warmer here. We had a great relaxing afternoon. 

 

Today, we went to the Tech museum in downtown San Jose. The museum quite honestly was one of the coolest I have ever been to, and it was really cheap. We spent 4 hours there and it didn't seem long at all. Steven loves anything to do with creativity and technology, so he was especially in heaven. They had so many neat exhibits with interactive simulations and games...

One exhibit that I thought was really interesting was where you stood on a platform and it showed the hot/cold areas of your body. When we were at the beach yesterday, I missed a pretty good portion of my leg and some of my upper arm with the sunscreen. Since I pretty much go from white to red with nothing resembling a tan in between, missing sunscreen is not a good idea. You get a pretty good idea from this picture (notice the bright red leg).

And this is how we showed on the heat sensors. Technology sure is fun.

On an unrelated note, since I am often better at blogging than journal writing, I started to feel the baby move this week (17 weeks). What an amazing, funny, exciting feeling!

And, we find out whether we are having a boy or girl on 9/9/10. I think it is a boy and Steven thinks it is a girl. I guess one of us will be right. However, I will be 100% happy with either. Steven thinks that a boy might be easier on our budget since I seem to get sucked into all the cute baby girl clothes at every store. 

The City Trek

We are here in San Jose and having a great time. The past few days have been mostly "business" as we have been looking at TONS of apartments, and meeting with E & Y staff. If you want to test your husband's patience, just try touring apartments for 2-3 days straight. He will love it :)

However, today was the start of our "vacation" vacation. We really planned on this vacation being relaxing, since I came home from New York more exhausted than I left. But, I guess Steven and I are not great at really just doing nothing. Today, we decided to adventure into San Francisco to see the sights. We took the Cal Train, and thought that it wouldn't be such a bad idea to just walk everywhere from there. Exercise is great, right? Our initial trek into Fisherman's Wharf was very far. So far, that I stopped counting the blocks. Below is a map of our walk into the city. Click here for a better look.  

And, do you want to know what is really fun to do 17 weeks pregnant? Make that trek where every other street has hills like these......

I survived. And from there we enjoyed the sights.....

Ate authentic clam chowder and sour dough bread....

And, just enjoyed spending time together.

I think we will recover with a beach day tomorrow.