One thing we have become accustomed to while living in Utah has been the long drives to get to Salt Lake, or to Mama and Papa Nash's home for Sunday dinners and laundry.  It seems like to get anywhere from Provo you will drive at least 45 mins and with all the construction on I-15 that 45 min drive takes twice as long.  For my birthday week, John planned a road trip within a road trip!!!  I love going on drives with him, we just have a great time driving and talking about our future.  We started off in Madera and before we knew it we were in Dublin!!!  In Dublin we stopped by Aunt Claudia's house After which we went through Big Basin which I have to admit was a really nice drive. (One of the reason why I love him so much is because he is so easy to talk to and I think our conversations are pretty interestin,. )
He took me to his elementary school, which was being remodeled, to his High School, and to Juicy Burger.  We were able to find Juicy Burger thanks to my iphone, since they had moved to a different location.  The burgers were pretty good, I enjoyed making my own burger.  I heard kids talk about "taco bravo" which apparently is the place to be.
We headed to Big Basin on our way to Carmel.  It was a amazing going through the big trees, I had to keep my hands inside the car since we were so close to all the vegetation.  We finally got to Carmel and walked around the stores and went to the beach.  It was a nice going down, but to come up it was a little more difficult for me.  Carrying a baby makes normal hikes a bit more harder...  There were a lot of nice shops, with all kinds of stuff.  I couldn't bring myself to let John buy me stuff there.  I think it was way over priced!!!  We found some cool jewelry, but we figured since he was going to Jordan he could find more authentic stuff.
We drove back to Madera, and I gotta say California has a lot of lovely scenery.  We passed a lot of fruit and vegetable fields which reminded me of how spoiled I was growing up having fresh produce.
Baby was being really good too, since I was pretty comfortable for the most part.  I am so happy that I have been able to continue with my normal routine.

Sorry for the lack of pictures, John has them all on his computer.  I loved my road trip and having one on one time with John.  Our schedules don't line up very well so we don't get to see each other a lot.

What we did over our Summer Break 2

As we last left off on our summer adventures we were just returning from our trip to Goshen...

On June 12th we celebrated our 1 year anniversary by cutting open the top tier of our 1 year old frozen cake and finally getting to eat a piece of our wedding cake, since we didn't get any on our wedding. At first glance the cake looked just as fresh as it did on the first day we cut it; however, we quickly learned that it was not as soft as it had once been. After some good efforts of trying to cut the cake we were finally able to cut it into and divide it up between us and my parents. Contrary to what everyone said about year old cake, it was actually rather good. I can only imagine what it would have tasted like fresh. The time it took to cut the cake may have made it taste that much better.

Within about a week of our anniversary, we headed out on our next big adventure to California. We left late Thursday evening and drove 14 hours, driving all night long, to arrive at Huntington Lake at 4 in the morning. It was a really fun drive, particularly the part cutting through the foot hills seeing as how it was pitch black and super windy, fun but a scary drive. Up at the lake we spent two days lounging around in the hot tub, at the pool, playing horseshoes, and kayaking out on the lake. On Sunday we drove down to Madera where we spent the whole week with Angelica's family.

On Tuesday Angelica's sister put on a surprise baby shower for us. She was really very sneaky about the whole thing. She had spent the day with Mom out at the flea market, and then took our niece out to go shopping. Later that day Angelica's mom disappeared out at some event for the day while Dad was at work. I spent most of the day sleeping since we weren't doing anything else. Come around 5:30pm or so Dad came home and ordered Angelica to tell me to get up and get showered, needless to say I thought I was in trouble, but Dad said that he and Mom were taking us out for dinner. About 7:00pm we were in the car heading to go get Mom, but every time we asked Dad where she was he would just say, "Oh we are almost there." I though nothing of it. Eventually we drove into a subdivision of Madera, and I being completely oblivious to what was going on thought, "Oh, Mom must be at some event here at this house, and we are picking her up."  Well, she was at the house at an event and it turned out it was the baby shower. After a week full of Angelica accusing her Sister of always ditching the family when she visited, she was nicely surprised by the baby shower.

Following the Baby Shower we had a few gift certificates for stores that are only found in California or the Internet such as Buy Buy Baby, so we had to go and buy more baby stuff. After wandering around through the different sections of the store I finally found the perfect baby toy. It had everything a baby could ever want including, crinkle feet, chew antlers, plush and cuddly moose body, rattle feet, teething tail loop, and it wasn't in the least bit annoying to hear after about 20 minutes of me playing with it. As a result I decided that my child was going to have to have this extremely perfect moose baby toy. Moreover, along with the moose toy I also found several great articles of Star Wars clothing and toys that in my mind would be perfect for my son. The best however, was a plush toy of Yoda that will more than likely be bigger than our baby when he is born and for the first year or two of his life, but which will make the perfect toy to ingrain the importance of Star Wars into his life.

Keep watching for future posts concerning what we did over our summer break...

What we did over our Summer Break

Seeing as how Summer is fast coming to a close, I decided that it was about time that I updated a few things, seeing as how Angelica won't do it. So, in the spirit of back to school, here's what we did over our Summer Break.

Our summer break was the best summer break ever! Since I had more time due to not having to spend every waking moment studying my brains out learning Arabic, Angelica and I were able to do quite a bit more than normal. We spent many weekends hanging out with friends, family, and by ourselves. It was awesome!

Here's the break down of things that we did: Arches, Goshen, 1st year Anniversary, Road Trip to California, Road Trip through California, Angelica's Birthday, Road Trip to Wyoming, Family Reunion in Mona, Road Trip to Ophir, Packing up our Apartment.

At the beginning of the break Angelica and I decided that we would go to Arches as a day trip, primarily since I had never been and because I was tired of never doing anything fun. So one Saturday morning we woke up early, grabbed our stuff, and headed out for Arches. The drive there was great and within only three hours we had reached our most fabulously hot destination. Seeing as how I had never been, I was determined to hike every arch, despite the fact that Angelica was pregnant and we only had 2 water bottles. Needless to say by about 3pm I was tired, hot, dehydrated, hungry, and beginning to see mirages of not only water, but hamburgers, milk shakes and fries. Angelica on the other hand was perfectly fine other than that her hands had swelled twice as large. So we decided to take a break from Arches and headed down in to Moab to grab some food. We found this great little hamburger place off of the main road that was called, Milts Stop and Eat. It was a great little Hamburger place that was away from all of the crowds of main street Moab. After our meal break, we took a small nap waiting for things to cool down and decided around 6pm to head back up to finish hiking the rest of the Arches. Finally around 9pm or so we decided to head home. It was a great day trip.

Our next trip took us down south to the Goshen Ponds with Mel and John to do some sight seeing at the old plant there. It was a load of fun seeing as how neither Angelica or I had been there before. John and Mel gave us a great history of the location informing us of how the water there is toxic and that if we were to fall into or drink it we would be mutated into some sort of freakish animal thing, something like a half man half pig or part fish part man; unfortunately however, not the type of mutation that brings super powers along with it. Otherwise I'm sure there would be a longer line and more security at the ponds. Following our history tour of the ponds, we went and explored the ruins of the factory that polluted the water there. After an hour or so of climbing around the ruins of the silver refining factory my stomach decided that it should act up and make me sick. After about 30 minutes of trying to calm my stomach down I decided that it would be best to go find a bathroom, so we left from exploring and headed back home.

In order to keep this post short, I'm gonna break it into a couple of posts watch out for the next posting.

Are you prepared

Everyone should stayed tuned to learn more about this amazing website!!

Voices/Voces

I had a couple of "voices" tell me I should update my blog more often.  I don't think I have much to blog about, but the "voices" informed me there is so much going on at work that it would be a good time to keep you updated on all the cool trainings I get to go to.

I think you all know I am the program coordinator for a non-profit, and we have been recently awarded a grant from the State Health Department to do HIV outreach and testing.  So I get to learn and teach the transmission of HIV and offer a  rapid HIV test, as well as some STD education.

This week I am at a DEBI Training for "Voices/Voces" where we do single session intervention to get people's opinion on why they are not using condoms for protection.  We have a video for people to watch, a discussion, a condom education and then we just talk to the clients on their negotiating skills, and answer questions.

This is a 2 day training and I will complete it tomorrow.  So far we have seen one of the four videos.  They are very appropriate for the culture and really do facilitate conversations with the clients.  We have discussed the different types of condoms that are available. 

I'm glad we are doing this training because in my community (latino community) condoms are such a taboo.  No one tells you about them, and you know they are out there but it is not something that people talk about.  If you find them it is usually a sign of infidelity within a married couple.  Or if  you find them in your kids jean pocket (the wrapper that is) they have or will get a girl pregnant.  

I do want to say we do not encourage/support any sexual behavior a person is participating in, we are just trying to protect people from any STD and HIV infections they might put themselves at-risk for.  People are at risk and it is happening all over, even here in the "bubble."

I know it is also a topic that people in the church avoid speaking about, and I am not going to get into that.  Everyone has their own view and I respect that. 

If anyone needs any condoms, let me know....I am the condom lady after all

Its an Alien!

Sorry to keep you guys waiting, if any of you were. We wanted to tell our parents first and it was hard to get a hold of them. My mama had her phone off accidentally and none of my siblings were close to let her know I was calling. John is working a 16 hour shift today so he has been pretty busy. (Especially since they have EFY up on BYU campus.) Let's just say we had an early start since John had to be at work at 6 am and I had a meeting at 6:30 am.

We had such an amazing experience watching our little baby move around and show off its moves. It was even swallowing some fluid (which is basically recycled if you know what we mean). We heard the heart tones. I loved watching it move around. I can't believe we are so fortunate to be its parents and I can't wait for its birth.

This is one of John's favorite pics of our little one:

While we were waiting to learn what our baby is, all sorts of things were going through at least my head. For starters I wondered if it was going to be a girl or a boy. Every time that the doctor moved the instrument looking for pictures of the baby I kept looking for some sign that the baby was a boy or a girl. Every different angle I was looking for something to indicate it one way or the other, though I must admit that I had no idea what I was really looking for or how I would know, seeing as how I've never had a kid before. After about 10 minutes the Doctor began indicating different things about the baby, here are the feet, here is the baby from the right and here it is from the left, but she never quite got around to telling us what the thing was. Quite frankly looking at it from certain angles I really did wonder whether or not it was human, or some little parasite alien growing inside of Angelica's stomach, as it looks like in my favorite picture. Finally after another 5 minutes or so the doctor finally indicated that she was gonna start looking for anything between the legs indicating what sex it was. I personally think that the Doctor gets a kick out of torturing expecting parents. Since I know that you are all anxious to find out after reading all this I will go ahead and let you look at the picture and see for yourself...

     

BOY or GIRL?

A few months ago our good friend, Norma had a dream... a dream she could actually remember.  So when she told me about it I knew it was serious!  She saw my little cute family!!!!!!

A cute little baby girl, that was really cute. She had lighter hair and took after my good looking husband.  Not only did I have a cute girl, but she had THREE older brothers.  The boys were running around...

The last time I was told they had seen my little family was my sophomore year in college.  They had seen a little boy and girl running around in the living room.

My mom had also had a dream with a little girl earlier this year, well before I knew I was expecting.

"La Linea Negra" fortells my baby is a boy.

So what do you think?  Will my baby be a boy or a girl?  The winner will be announced next week.