Rocking Around the Christmas Tree

We put our Christmas tree up a a few weeks ago. B was right in on the action, as he usually is when I am doing things around the house. He is a good supervisor.

The tree is good and sturdy!

All the lights appear to be working

And now, the final touch!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Say What?!

B and I were at the grocery store earlier this week when we were stopped by an elderly gentleman. It isn't super unusual for people to stop and admire little B (what's with people touching his face though? How would you like it if a stranger came up and stroked your cheek?), but I was surprised when he said, "Well isn't someone underfed?!" with a jovial grin. My initial thought was, "well, it isn't you!", but I plastered on a smile to match my forced laugh and said something a long the lines of "oh I guess we better work on that!" before pushing the cart away. We then spent the rest of our trip avoiding aisles that this man was down.

Seriously? What kind of comment is that? He was probably going for something more along the lines of "He's just a little guy!" but even then, how does he know? Sometimes you just have to shake your head and laugh.

"Holy Pacifier Batman!"

As I've mentioned before, I've always seems to have grandiose visions of spectacular Halloweens, but then it is just way too much work to actually make it happen. Before B was even born, I started feeling the pressure. Now that I have a kid, I can't do that anymore (ok, I know i probably technically have a few years before he can remember enough to be too emotionally damaged, but still). I was blessed with an extremely talented mother who made pretty much every costume that me or my siblings have ever worn. She has great ideas and the ability to make us into whatever character we wanted. I want to be like her, so I decided I had to get my craftiness on (attempted craftiness seems to be a reoccurring theme of this blog).

Early on I thought Batman would be a great costume. With the release of the most recent Batman movie, I figured it would be fairly easy to find a onsie with the Bat logo and then I could easily make a cape, and if i was feeling super ambitious, a mask of some kind. I shared my idea with Matt who quickly decided that HE should be Batman and B should be his sidekick Robin. Seeing how Robin's costume would be more complicated to make, I laughed the idea off and try to stick with the original plan. Matt was pretty excited about his idea though, so i eventually decided to give in and at least attempt the Robin costume. I about had a panic attack when I found out the law school's big Halloween Parade and Carrel Trick-or-Treating (our main festivity) was going to be held the week before the actual holiday, but with some help and a lot of guidance from my mom, all was well in the end.

We were worried about the mask, but the kid actually seemed to really enjoy wearing it.

Last minute, Matt decided to be Bruce Wayne instead of Batman, if you look closely, you can see the Batman emblem under his shirt and tie. I decided to take the easy road and be Catwoman, wear black and a pair of cat ears, easy right? Wrong! I could not find cat ears anywhere. I guess costumes are a little more complex then when I was a kid. I finally found these, but they were covered in silver sequins and look more like bunny ears, oh well. We still had a good time!

"A Couple of Days"

Since Matt is completely opposed to growing and/or sporting facial hair, Baby B had to step up and represent our family for Movember (did you know that this isn't just some thing guys do, but a pretty big and real deal? Who would of thought? See here).

This seems appropriate seeing how people have commented on what a "Little Man" he is since his birth.

So how does one go about blogging again when it has been such a long time? There are been a few times I have tried to start back up again, and just don't know how to go about doing so. I felt like I had to finish my Europe recap, but then I felt silly because it had been so long. Funny thing is, I finished writing about everything because I made a book for Matt as a Christmas gift. I guess I just have to do it and come up with a post. The first one should be the most painful, right?

Here's what we've been up to this last year plus (or some of what I can actually remember...)

Sept.-- Matty started his second year of law school. It was a good time with one down and one to go
Nov.-- We announced to our families that Little Cox Baby was going to make his debut come summertime! Wahoo! I was lucky. That first trimester was rough in that i never felt good and had a hard time staying awake, but I never actually threw up and for the most part was able to go about my business as normal.
Dec.-- Who doesn't love Christmas! Work's Sub for S was interesting in that we had no trouble at all finding sponsors for our 5,000+ kids who needed help. It made for the most calm Christmas season since I entered the adult working world.
Jan.-- We brought appetizers of little smokies to Sunday's family dinner, letting everyone know that Little Cox Baby was a boy! (ok, so we were too excited to keep things a secret until Sunday, so we actually told everyone before). This is also about the time I finally felt comfortable letting people (mainly work) in on our happy news. Good thing, my belly wasn't going lie much longer.
Feb.-- We traveled to San Diego for a preliminary competition (see explanation below) that Matt participated in for school. While we booked a Camry, the rental car place was all out, so we ended up cruising around in a Camero. This was a fun and exciting thing until we actually had to use the thing. It wasn't exactly the most practical, but it was a good experience and made for a good story.
March-- Matt made me one happy girl and took me to my second home, Vienna, Austria. He was on the school's international moot court team, and lucky me, the competition was where I did my study abroad. While I don't recommend flying overseas in your third trimester (after sitting in an airplane chair for 12 hours, I could not move the next day), we had an awesome time running around one of the greatest cities ever, visiting my host family (love them!), and stuffing ourselves with bread, pastries, chocolate, bratwursts, kabaps, and ice cream. Matt's team was BYU's first to ever actually advance in the competition. Another bonus was we did a 24-hour layover in Frankfurt and got to visit with some of our missionary friends and our dear friends the Kopischkes. Overall it was a great experience except for that nagging feeling i had that I would need to blog about it when I hadn't even finished blogging about our other Europe trip...
April-- One more year of school down for Matty!
May-- Baby watch begins! I didn't want him to come until June, but it was starting to look like my body had other plans. Matt started his externship with Utah's bankruptcy court in Salt Lake. Despite his 6:15 bus each morning, he really enjoyed the experience and  decided if he does practice law, bankruptcy is the place to be!
June-- I had work pretty much wrapped up. Despite the (very) early labor signs in May, there is a change of plans and baby's due date comes and goes with no incident. Both Matt and I continue working and waiting. Five days later, I am induced. While checking in, about 5 actually in labor women come in, so we are sent home. At 6 p.m., we finally start the induction. Things were zipping along, and we all thought baby would make his appearance in a few short hours, but he decided to that he wasn't ready. After pushing for 2 hours, my doctor said because he had turned and appeared to be stuck in the same place he was when we started pushing, she recommended a c-section. At approximately 3:30 a.m., Baby B was born via c-section. Besides him being kicked out of the nursery the first night and taking a few days to figure out the name (i hate decisions, especially ones with such a long-lasting affect and don't even get me started on the sudden popularity of my beloved name Jackson...), we had a smooth hospital stay and easy recovery.
July-Current-- We are all doing wonderful. Little B is adorable, hilarious and basically the greatest addition to our little family. Matt has started his last and final year or law school and is trying to figure out that tricky question of what to do with his life. The fact that the student life will quickly be coming to a close is a weird thing to think about, but we're excited for our new adventures. I officially retired from UW in August (gotta love finally cashing in on 4 1/2 years of sick days), and am now attempting to figure how in the world to get things done while still taking care of and enjoying an infant.

Phew! Now that I finally have that out of the way, we can return to posting more than every couple of months!

Alright, this is getting ridiculous. It has been way too long since I've been a blogger, and I definitely want to get the rest of our European adventure documented. So here it goes!

The Asplunds and Paxtons invited us to head over to Heidelberg with them one weekend. I had read about this little German town and its castle before heading over and wanted to see it, so we were excited to have some tour guides take us over.

We met up with everyone and headed out. This was our first experience on the autobahn. Yes, Germany does have some roads that don't have speed limits. For the most part, it is like driving on any other freeway, but we had a few iffy moments with people speeding by to pass and get places. They very much follow the stay out of the left lane unless passing.

After a few wrong turns down the steepest and skinniest roads ever, we arrived in the Altstadt. One of the things that surprised me about Frankfurt was how different it was from Vienna. Heidelberg reminded me a lot of Vienna. It had a the same charm and great feeling. We wandered around the town and made our way up to the castle.


While the missionaries decided to take the tram up the mountain, Matt and I opted to make the hike up (exercise and save money, alright!) We climbed up the trail, which was pretty much a 90 degree angle. Once we made it to the top, we realized that we went up the place and made it in the back of the castle. No wonder it was so steep. We finally met up with the missionaries and started exploring.

Castles seems to be everywhere in Germany, but I'm really glad we made it to this one. It is huge and in great shape considering. They started building it back in the late 1300-early 1400s and kept adding on for the next few hundred years. It is huge!

We went into one of the building and read about how important wine was to one of the princes who owned the castle. He had quite the storage system. We were pretty surprised when we came across this barrel.

Us and the Asplunds

Pretty big, right? That's what we thought until we went around the corner and saw this baby.

It was so big that you couldn't even really get a picture of the whole thing! You could go up those stairs and then walk across the back before heading down another set of stairs. That's a lot of wine! I was up top exploring when I saw Matt frantically motioning for me to hurry down. At first I was a little worried something was wrong with one of our senior missionary friends (just kidding! They aren't THAT old ;) ), but I got down, and he kept pointing at me and saying "Meine Frau..." to an older German couple. Gotta love Matt Man, he's got that German thing down. It turns out that nothing was wrong with them, they simply wanted to know if it was worth climbing the stairs. Since he couldn't understand them, he had them wait for me instead of asking pretty much anyone else there who could have communicated with them, haha.


We wandered around exploring some more before Matt and I somehow convinced everyone to go down the mountain with us instead of taking the tram. We were pretty convinced if we headed down this trail, we'd make it. It took a little longer than we anticipated, and we had to sneak through a under construction section to get back, but we finally made it.

Old clock. This was pretty cool, but it didn't have the right time. We couldn't figure out what we were doing wrong...

Matt and I wandered around the gardens while the rest of our party rested. It was definitely a little slower paced than the rest of our weekend trips, haha.

This was pretty cool. Part of this tower's wall just separated and fell down. You can now see inside the tower plus the part that came off.

Me, Matt, Sister Paxton, Sister Winley, Elder Asplund, Sister Asplund, Elder Paxton

Other trip highlight includes stopping at multiple ice cream shops and getting a few scoops at each place, seeing a wedding part come out from the city hall and hearing the crazy bands that played and seeing some great traditional goodies.

Delayed

We've been home from Germany now for 18 days now and we've had 0 nights without something going on. Things have been crazy, but it is good to be home.

Did I ever mention how the night before we were leaving, my computer got a nasty virus. Talk about bad timing, right before I left and had to use it every day for work. Luckily, my office had an extra one that I could take in its place. Because of the said busy-ness, our computer is still not fixed. This means a lack of blogging. One day (hopefully very soon) I'll get to the rest of our trip.