Baby Makes Three

No more font options. This is some kind of joke, isn't it.

T'was the night before James's birthday (Feb 22, 2010) and I was busily planning a surprise birthday bash and attempting to make a Baked Alaska big enough for 30 people. James was at work for the night (I'm SO glad those night-shift days are over!) and it was my only time to be sneaky.

I had no inkling that I could be pregnant, except that we had stopped trying not to be about a month before. I had a couple of pregnancy tests hidden under the bathroom sink, the temptation was too great and the timing was too perfect; I had to take them. So I read the instructions: pee on the stick, set it down for 10 minutes, if there's a vertical line, even ever-so-faint, you're probably pregnant. Ok.

And ever-so-faint it was. Probably because I was like 2 seconds pregnant and the hormones that make you crazy and sick hadn't taken over by body yet. I took the other test to be sure. Same ever-so-faint line. I started to doubt my generic Wal-mart brand, but by then the grocery store was closed and I had to wait out the night. At 6am I was up and running to the store for another test. Different brand, same result. Oh yeah.
So I made James a birthday card...
...from the fetus, of course. We had already decided that Sveinbjorn makes a nice name for a fetus, so signing it was no problem.

When James got home in the morning he ate the candy before opening the card. Who does that? I was dying of anticipation. When he finally opened it, he just stared at it for a few minutes. He finally looked up at me with a puzzled look on his face and asked, "are you pregnant?" I said, "yes". He looked like he didn't believe me for a couple of minutes, but then he had a bad case of silly grin for the rest of the day.
We had decided not to tell anyone for the first few weeks. Harder than it sounds. That afternoon, James's friend (my cohort) took him to a movie while I packed 30 people into the bedroom. When they got back, I asked him to go get some folding chairs out of the closet. Everyone screamed, "surprise!" and scared the living daylights out of him. I think he almost punched our home teacher. Oh yeah, go me. Here's a picture of my mom with Elena and Amanda, a couple of my awesome mission companions who made the trip from Salt Lake for the event. I think they were James's favorite guests because they both brought him candy.
Here's the famous Baked Alaska. It actually turned out quite well. Sure, it was a little melted on the sides, and frozen solid in the middle, but everyone ate it.

Disney!

So now the font changing option is back and all is well in Zion.

Here are a few pictures of our Disney adventure. We went there in December (courtesy of DigiCert) and had a fabulous time! I'm really glad that the company signed a 10 year contract with Disney. Yay for going back every year for free!

I'm not scared of very many things, but ferris wheels and wild boars make the list. Crazy roller coasters, yes please. Somehow I got on a ferris wheel. Here's me biting James for rocking the basket. The only thing that makes a ferris wheel more terrifying for me is having the cart rocked...no seat belts...I would make a horrible skydiver.
Splash Mountain has no lines at 8am because it's freezing cold. We went on it with Jon and Tina. Somehow Tina and I got totally soaked through (and were sick the next day)Jon was totally dry and James had 3 drops of water on his pants. How does that work?
Mickey and Pluto in the Christmas garb.
Can you believe that this is a painted mural? It looks so 3D.

I hope this video came through. There's an animation studio in California Adventure. This thing spins around really fast, they turn a strobe light on, and voilà, it looks like the characters are moving. Pretty incredible.

Honeymoon Adventures

Ok, I have no idea what happened to my cool typewriter font. There goes conformity.

The following is a photographic journey through our first few days of marriage. After making our escape from the reception, we went to a cute little bed and breakfast in Longmont. I'm pretty sure we were the only guests that night, and the owner took extra-special care of us.

See, she even made a congratulations sign for Mr. and Mrs. Affleck.

We stayed in a room called Kitty Korner. One of those themed things. It was very nice, lots of fluffy things like towels and sheets and window hangings, and a creepily realistic stuffed cat. It sat right outside the bathroom door and kept scaring us every time we came out. Finally, after several incidents of jumping backwards and screaming, we wised up and threw a towel over the cat. Problem solved.
The next day was filled with Southern Colorado sight seeing. Here's the world's largest rocking chair.
And probably the world's largest fiberglass beetle. We went to the May Museum and spent a couple of hours looking at exotic bugs. They were very nice. Looking back, it was a weird way to spend our first day as a married couple, but we both really wanted to go to the bug museum. What?
We had a nice little hike in Garden of the Gods. This shot took probably 20 minutes to perfect.
Climbing up a very windy tunnel thing. James got a lot higher than I did.
Here we are. James is wearing the Superman cape I gave him (too bad it's made for a toddler; it looked more like a bib on him) and it gave him super-human strength.
Two weeks after the wedding, we went to London (courtesy of Digicert). Every train platform has a sign and audio recording telling us to "please mind the gap between the train and the platform". There were also signs in the trains telling about the 42 people last year who failed to mind the gap and were injured. They mean business.
We arrived at 7am and had the wrong hotel information. We eventually got to the right place and still couldn't check in until 3pm. So, we left our luggage at the desk and wandered around like starstruck, jetlagged zombies until we could have a nap. Our hotel was near Hyde Park, and that's the first place we went. We found a lovely little folk dance group giving free lessons. Men in kilts, women in pants, we had to be a part of it. So we danced the Virginia Reel with skirted men.
This guy was our favorite, probably because his tie matched his kilt, and he remembered long socks. Very classy.
Double-decker bus! We never did figure out the buses in London. The tube was much easier (not to mention more fun to say). We did ride one, just to say that we did it. I think we got on 2 stops before the end of the route and everyone had to get off.
Telephone booth. Some of them actually have pay phones in them...what a novel idea!

It's the Mary Poppins guy!

Some genius of a street painter had finally seen enough tourists get mowed over by traffic coming in an unexpected direction. Almost every intersection tells you which way to look to avoid disaster. Some of them even have little eyeballs painted in the O's so you know which way to move your eyeballs.
This was at a Henry VIII exhibit at the Tower of London. It's a medieval blood pressure machine! Actually, I think it's to give you the idea of how hard it is to bend with a suit of armor on.

Bobbies

The Tower Bridge. Some poor Arizona man thought he was buying this when he bought London Bridge. Incorrect. He spent his fortune on a very small, very drab, stone bridge that has luckily done wonders for tourism in Lake Havasu City.
Big Ben (which, we learned is the clock's name, not the tower's) and Parliament. Closed until October. Boo.
This is a real pigeon on the steps of St. Paul's. No Mary Poppins or bird woman in sight, but I think it's proof that they're real.
We went to a Broadway Musical! (I don't know what it's called when it's not in New York. Same thing.) We saw the Lion King and it was awesome. We had some very nice "standing seats" which means you pay much less, but instead of a chair, you get a banister to lean on. The usher hooked us up with some binoculars though, and we saw the whole thing crystal clear. Near the end, some people left and we snagged their seats. We later found out why they had left early, as the metro was so crowded that it took us almost 2 hours to make a normally 15 minute trip.
We flew to Edinburgh on a quest to find Affleck Castle. We had to. You can't go to the UK without a quest. We rented a car, wrong side of the road, wrong side of the car, wrong kind of transmission. I've never been so scared in my entire life. This picture is just after James's first big success: parking without hitting anything.

Then, we went to find an internet cafe to print out a map and make our way out of the city. That was one heck of a wild goose chase. We asked directions from all kinds of people. Everyone seemed to know where one was except for us. One very drunk man (at 1pm) is still quotation material in our house. After giving us directions (slurred and completely useless), the following took place:
James: Thank you, sir.
Drunk guy: Don't call me sir! I hate it when people call me sir.
James: Oh, sorry.
Drunk guy: Well, don't apologize, you didn't know.

Long story considerably shorter, we finally got a map printed out, found the car before we got a parking ticket, drove around Edinburgh for 3 hours trying to get out (the whole place was under construction. Not only were all the main streets blocked, but the open ones weren't labeled until half a block down the street. So you have no idea if you've made a wrong turn until there's no going back). James was a trooper. He only turned into oncoming traffic once.

Once we got out of the city (after consulting a whole pub full of drunk guys...bartender's idea, not ours), things looked up. We found a darling little place to stay where they got us even better maps and even served breakfast.
And what a breakfast it was. Let me explain. From the poached egg, moving clockwise, haggis (mostly lamb lungs), blood pudding (not my favorite), mushrooms, bangers, and bacon (more like ham). Holy high protein breakfast Batman! Usually, I'm all for trying new things, and I did, but I sure didn't get a sticker from the clean plate club that morning.
After a little more driving, we found that streets were no longer labeled at all. We knew we were getting close though because there were signs with the name Affleck on them all over.
We talked to several locals and finally located Affleck Castle. Very well hidden, very much on private property. We got the owner's name and phone number. A Mrs. Fievey, described by her neighbors as "not exactly the most approachable person" and, "Oh, she's a horrible woman". James tried to call her a couple of times with no success. We finally decided that we had not come all this way to turn around and go home, so we did a bit of mild trespassing.
Here it is, Affleck Castle. The grounds were very nice, a few little cottages and outbuildings, peacocks, and a thick layer of dark mud. Someday, we hope to inherit it. At any rate, our quest was a success. We found the Holy Grail, so to speak, and brought home a rock to prove it.

Receptions

If we had to do it all again, I doubt we would even bother with receptions. They're so much work...mostly for the moms. Our families put together two lovely receptions for us, the first one in Loveland and the second one in Cañon City. There was also a luncheon...so we're told. We missed it. Get your mind out of the gutter; here's what happened.

We thought we'd be real smart and drop off our suitcases at the bed and breakfast where we were going to spend the night. I had gotten James a new GPS for a wedding gift, and we tried it out. Unfortunately, it had the nasty habit of telling us to make a U-turn every time the car stopped. We ended up hopelessly lost somewhere in Longmont...maybe. Who knows where we were. And then we ran out of gas. We filled up just in time for rush hour, so we opted for an "easier" route. One that took us through a neighborhood, most unfortunately roped and barricaded off for whatever reason by the police. We finally found a way out, back to the freeway (moving along at about 20 MPH) and ultimately to the reception. I'm sure our families had some fun at our expense during the dinner and first 20 minutes of brideless and groomless reception, but whatever, we got married, right? Here are some pictures of the blessed event.

The Larabees, Shannon Swiss and Amanda McCollough(on popsicle stick) made the trip from Utah to wish us well. They're some of my favorite people from the mission.
I told James that I didn't want him to smush the cake in my face and get it on my pretty white dress...I would be nice if he would

I lied.

We had to take a bathroom break to blow the cake out of our noses. Real classy.
This is the second reception in Cañon City. My cute Grandpa let us have it in his back yard.
We had a hard time thinking of gifts for our parents. We settled on framed pictures of us and, lest we appear too self-absorbed, we made the dads wrestling belts (cardboard and foil) and the moms Ms. America ribbons and crowns so that they would get proper recognition.
What? It was outdoors and fairly informal...you can do stuff like that when you're from Cañon City.

Special thanks to Ronnie and Jessi, my cute friends who took most of our favorite wedding pictures, and Theresa, who let us make the parents' paraphernalia in her house. She had fabric paint drying on ribbons in her kitchen for 2 days.

Then Comes Marriage...

Somehow all the flowers, rings, tuxes, menus, invitations, transportation, reservations, and a dress (unfortunately, for my lungs, two sizes too small) all came together for a beautiful August wedding in the Denver Temple. Of course, everything didn't go smoothly, but as the wise BYU library lady I worked with told me, "If you wake up single, and go to bed married, your wedding day has been a success". And she was right. My parents' car broke down, their phone died, my phone died and I didn't know their number, a family hosting out of town guests had a sewer back up and flood their basement, my mom disappeared just minutes before the sealing (taking pictures of flower girls, I believe), but somewhere around 2pm I married my best friend and it was perfect. That's right, we're hitched for eternity, and still ecstatic about it.

It rained for a few minutes, which made the lighting really beautiful for the rest of the afternoon.

First Comes Love

Of course, before getting married, we got engaged. Before that James wrote me 2 very nice letters (one in the IPA on Homer Simpson sticky notes) while I was on my mission. Before that, we hung out in my bomb shelter. And before that James was that kid in my linguistics class who wore the same Superman sweatshirt and hat every single day. Who knows when it actually started. The point is, there's a funny story coming, and this picture is proof.

Getting engaged was quite the painfully long process. One night, whilst watching a movie, James suddenly turned off the TV and said, "what do you think about getting married?" When my heart started beating again I think I said something about being scared spit-less and not wanting to rush into anything. Eventually, I came around. After months of diamond shopping (I was oblivious to this part of the struggle and just thought he was having really icy cold feet), he proposed (with the help of our beloved IPA) and I said, "yes".
My mom offered to take our engagement pictures. We picked a nice day and went to a pretty park in Orem. We got a couple of nice pictures before the clouds broke. It rained buckets. We ran for the closest cover, the men's restroom. The rain kept coming down, and there's only so much you can do in a park bathroom. We made faces at each other in the mirror for a while, dried our clothes with the hand drier, and then my mom started snapping pictures. We have dozens of bathroom pictures, and this is one of them. They actually are pretty good, considering the location. If we hadn't found one we really loved in a second photo shoot, we probably would have sent out something with urinals in the background to all our friends and family.

Adventures of the Afflecks

Well, here we are. I've come to realize that we are one of the only awesome little families who doesn't blog about its awesomeness, and that's downright unacceptable. I'm also attempting to redeem myself from being a hopeless slacker at journal keeping, letter writing, and keeping in touch with everybody in general. So here goes.

This lovely picture was taken just over a year ago, while James and I were dating. You can tell we were dating because my hand was purple, I was holding his, hence the purple finger-marks so prominently displayed. We had just gone to the Festival of Colors at the Hare Krishna temple. It was pretty much a disaster for the poor guy in charge of the festival. Someone lit the fake witch on fire too early, causing everyone to prematurely launch their colors at each other. Poor thing didn't even get to finish teaching us his ritual chants. Anyway, the tub in my apartment was slightly pink from that day forward, and James leaked green and pink from his ears for several weeks.