Fun Surprise

So Derrick picked me up from work yesterday and had these waiting for me:

Derrick rarely buys me flowers so this was a really fun surprise. He didn't tell me he bought flowers but had fun waiting for me to notice them. We usually have 3 vases, each with a fake flower in them, where these flowers are so they were a bit camoflauged. Derrick made a few attempts to get me to look at them without realizing he was trying to get me to look. Luckily it didn't take too long.

Easter Grand Junction Weekend

Derrick and I drove to his parents' house in Grand Junction, CO for Easter weekend. It's only a 3 1/2 hour drive but it's getting a little harder to sit through as I'm getting farther along. Derrick's siblings Tyson who lives in Boulder and Tonja and Rob who live in Boston came for the week.

Here's the basic rundown of what we did. I decided to just write it down in list form since it was mostly just a nice relaxing weekend. On Saturday we walked the river trail walk, played tennis in the backyard (Rob making great comments/yells throughout), had good food complete with Rob's special dessert (brownie, chocolate pudding, vanilla ice cream, chocolate fudge, whipped cream, and jimmies/sprinkles - basically really bad for you) and watched a movie. On Easter Sunday we got to go to church, see our nephew Ryan and his mom Christa, and then have more good food before Derrick and I drove home.

Here are a couple of pictures of our cute nephew Ryan from when he came over:

With Christa his mom

With the wagon Tonja and Rob bought him

Ryan with Tyson his dad

Ryan reading with Grandma

From Zero to Two

Today was my first official day as a part-time teacher aide in a preschool for children with autism. This preschool is part of Farrer Elementary school in Provo and luckily is only a few blocks away from my secretary job. (This is very helpful since Derrick and I share a car.) It's pretty weird going from being unemployed for two months to having two jobs. Now I'll be working 33 hours a week. At least 20 of those hours are pretty low key and at a desk. I don't think I could handle any more than that with being pregnant. The kids I work with are Monday-Thursday are really cute but pretty high maintenance. We'll see how this goes.

On a side note: this job finding experience has been a big answer to prayers. I really needed the break after a crazy Fall semester. Having to pull a couple of all-nighters for projects is not pleasant but is especially hard when pregnant. It was frustrating to wait so long for things to work out because I didn't know how long it would take to work out and finances were getting tight. When the secretary job finally worked out things started happening with the preschool job opportunity. I really wanted to do both but wasn't sure how since there were scheduling conflicts. I didn't know how it could be done but prayed that somehow it'd work out to do both.

The opening I was interviewed for at the preschool were for the afternoon and didn't fit with my work schedule. I did become a substitute aide though because it was much more flexible. I substituted in various classes Monday to Wednesday of this week and a morning position opened up yesterday that needed to get filled quickly. I was asked to fill it. It's amazing how small things can fall into place and prayers answered.

Married to a nerd

I decided that since a lot of these posts end up being about me, I'd dedicate this post to Derrick and give people a heads up about what he's up to. Derrick is really good with computers and gets really excited when he thinks of ideas to network different things together and customize the way things look on his laptop or the family computer (here's where his interest in graphic design comes in). I love my nerd!

Recently Derrick's worked it so our laptops can access anything on the external hard drive from anywhere in the apartment and for his laptop, anywhere that has BYU internet, like campus. Exciting, I know :). He loves that sort of thing so we know he picked the right major.

In BYU's information systems (ISYS) program, most of Derrick's classes are integrated. This semester they are working on a project that is pretty complicated and very time consuming. Derrick's been learning how to set up a computer program/system that can do everything a venue would need to do: sell tickets, configure auditoriums, make season ticket packages, set pricing, etc. They're also making a user interface that employees can use to sell tickets and make it so the program can be used so people can buy tickets over the internet. Every other week they have a piece (milestone) of the project due. This means that every other week I get to try to find ways to entertain myself every night so I don't distract Derrick too much. The picture with this post is one I snapped of him while he was in the middle of last week's milestone.

Derrick is in his Junior year in BYU's Information Systems (ISYS) program. He's in the process of applying for the master's program which he can do concurrently with his senior year. It's nice that they work it so Derrick can get the first half of the masters program out of way while he still has his full-tuition scholarship. If he gets accepted, we'll be here in Provo another 2 years.

23 Weeks

So I figured it's about time to do a pregnancy update. I am now part way into my 23rd week and starting month 6 of being pregnant. Here's a picture from after church on Sunday.


With the 2nd trimester, I've found that I've felt tired a lot more than sick and I'm definitely okay with the difference. A couple of recent developments are: I now know what heartburn feels like, people now notice that I'm pregnant because they can see the bump, and I have now experienced seeing a book I was reading and balancing on my stomach bounce around a bit because the baby was kicking it - that was weird and pretty funny.

We're getting close to picking our baby's first name and have narrowed the choices so far to 3. I told Derrick yesterday that I'm becoming pretty attached to one in particular so he needs to speak now or forever hold his peace because I most likely won't change my mind.

Last Friday I had one of the regular doctor visits and found out that everything is going along as it should. I'm growing on schedule and the heartbeat sounds good. We've been very blessed to have a complication free pregnancy so far and I really hope it stays that way! Lately, I've also been realizing that there are so many things I need to learn about how things will happen at the end of this whole process. I think I'll sign up for a prenatal class or something.

Mom Bowen came to town

So Derrick's mom came to visit us here in Provo this last weekend. We get to see her relatively often and it's always fun for us.

On Friday night we had dinner with Mom Bowen at Derrick's grandparents house (they live by the stadium). After dinner I visited with the family that was over while Derrick got to be anti-social and work on the program he had to turn in Monday morning.

On Saturdays, Derrick is a temple worker so Mom Bowen took me shopping for my birthday even though my birthday isn't until April. She was incredibly generous and bought me several pairs of maternity capris and a few shirts that while not made to be maternity, work as maternity ones. The dressing rooms at Motherhood Maternity were really funny. Inside there was a "fake belly" you could put on so you can see whether the clothes you're buying will fit you after several more months of expanding! How weird is that? I couldn't pass up trying it on though...now I know what I can look like once my belly pokes out about 6 more inches and if it becomes really lumpy. Sorry, I didn't bring a camera so there'll be no pictures of that. Another big stop was at Mervyn's. Mom Bowen couldn't pass up the baby section that was having a huge sale. We had fun looking at little boy clothes and she generously bought several cute outfits for our little guy. Yeah for grandmas!

I had a lot of fun getting to spend one-on-one time with my mother-in-law. I really lucked out when it comes to in-laws. Thanks again for everything Mom!

Change of Plans

This blog entry has more detail than most people will care to know and it's ended up being pretty long. I'm mostly including so much so I can look back on it all later.

So as some of you know, I graduated this last December from BYU-Provo with a Bachelor's degree in Communication Disorders (Speech Therapy). In order to do anything with this major I need to get a master's degree. When Derrick and I first got married (4/28/07) we were planning on waiting at least a full year until starting a family so I could be most of the way done with my master's degree before the baby came. After talking with the Lord, He let us know by the end of the summer that our plan regarding our family wasn't the same as His. He changed our plans so we would be starting our family more than 6 months earlier than we thought at first.

With this change of plans I decided I would just graduate and maybe think about graduate school in the distant future. I wasn't even going to try to apply, but after more thought and prayer I learned that I needed to apply for a master's program. This was a scary idea and would be a lot of extra work with having a baby at the beginning of the program, but I knew we could manage since we were trying to do what we knew to be right. Throughout fall semester and January, I took the GRE (sort of like and ACT only for grad school), got letters of recommendation, wrote an essay, etc. I only applied to BYU-Provo's program because Derrick still goes to school here and there was no way I was going to try to commute to SLC with a baby.

After I finished applying I had to wait over a month to hear anything back. This year was a lot more competitive than other years because BYU was only letting in 10 new students when the usual amount is 20. I felt relatively confident because test scores and my GPA were above the average that have been accepted in the past. At the end of February, I found out that I made the top 20 out of 50 applicants and that I was invited to be interviewed by a group of professors. This interview happened on February 28th and was a bit intimidating. I got to sit in a chair in front of 6 professors who each took turns firing questions at me. They told me I was doing well and seemed to like me so that was a good sign.

Two weeks later (March 8th) I got my letter from BYU. It turned out that I did not get accepted to the program. I was shocked and upset to say the least. I felt very qualified and it didn't make sense that I wasn't accepted (sorry if this sounds cocky or something...it's honest). I had Derrick give me a Priesthood blessing to help me calm down and I felt a little better. It wasn't until after letting the words from the blessing sink in, getting over the shock, and praying a lot that I was able to feel good about the situation (luckily this all happened by Sunday morning). I received a strong witness that not getting accepted was for my good and that Heavenly Father is in control. The applying process has been a big growing experience and not getting in gives me the chance to take a break from full-time schooling to focus on my growing family. Surprisingly, I can say I'm now grateful for the experience.

So what now? While I was wondering what I should do next with my life, I felt very strong
that I should start learning ASL again. I've taken 5 ASL classes from BYU and loved it. I only stopped because BYU's program isn't very good (they don't even offer it as a minor). Right now I'm looking into taking some ASL classes from UVSC and becoming proficient enough to become certified as an interpreter. Their program is really good and offers probably about 6 times more classes in ASL than BYU. Some perks of pursuing a license in interpreting are: I will only be taking a few classes at a time so my schedule will be much more flexible than it would have been in grad school, I don't have to do a master's thesis, I love doing and learning sign language, this would be a very flexible profession, the pay is relatively good, there is a high demand for interpreters and...I feel really good about it.

This is all still up in the air but I'm pretty excited about it. I guess I'll just have to see where this change of plans takes me now. I'm very grateful that Derrick has been amazingly supportive and loving throughout all of this (he made a good shoulder to cry on). I have a strong testimony that while it's hard when plans we make don't work out, things will work out for the best when we truly seek to find out and follow what the Lord would have us do. He knows us and our futures and can bring about amazing things in our lives. He loves each of us, is aware of all the details, and while small and maybe large things may seem to be going wrong, the Lord is really laying down the foundation for a great future.

Olive Garden

For Christmas, my Jones grandparents gave Derrick and me a gift card to the Olive Garden. We didn't use it for awhile after we got it because I was just finishing up with the first trimester of being pregnant and didn't really like food at the time. Also, around that time I had a weird but very strong aversion to most bread products. I usually love the all-you-can eat bread sticks they serve so we wanted to wait until I could enjoy them again (and no longer feel sick at the thought of them). Luckily, I have been able to enjoy eating since the end of January and recently got to the point where I felt I could enjoy Olive Garden's bread sticks again (though I still can't handle anything related to Rhodes rolls). After deciding we didn't need to wait for a special occasion, Derrick and I finally decided to go tonight and had a really great time together. The food was delicious (the bread sticks tasted great), I didn't have to cook, and I didn't need to do the dishes! Even better, the food is enough for lunch tomorrow. Thanks a lot Grandma and Grandpa! We love you!

Finally!

So over 2 months after graduating and stopping my job (it was a student job and since I was no longer a student...) I am finally working again! It's been quite the process. During most of January and part of February I was job hunting and writing out tons of resumes and letters of intent. At the beginning of February I got a call from my old job (the student one) and my old boss said that he had a spiritual prompting that he needed to help me find a job. He wanted me to come in that day so they could see what they could do to help. Wow! Only at BYU would that happen.

When I went and met with the two bosses they made some calls to different connections they had with people in my major (speech therapy) and even offered me my old job as a secretary/research assistant back. They hadn't been able to replace me and had decided to try and hire me on as part time staff employee so I could work as a non-student. After thinking and praying about it, I decided to accept my old job back. Sadly, there have been a lot of complications and I didn't get approved to start working until yesterday (Monday). I'm so excited to finally be able to work and not have to try and find productive ways to keep busy all day (like making curtains).

Though this job is somewhat tedious at times, there are a ton of great perks to working at a research branch of the McKay School of Education:
- Derrick started working there as an assistant technical support person in January so we get to pull faces at each other at work and carpool (very nice since we only have one car).
- I get to see Tara a lot more and get "story time" (basically where I hear about boys and roommates, etc.) since she is also a secretary/research assistant there. For those of you who don't know Tara, she's been an amazing friend since freshman year, a roommate, and the maid of honor at my wedding.

Here's Derrick and me surrounding Tara and pulling cheesy faces while waiting for the midnight showing of Pirates of the Caribbean 2.

- Since I stopped and came back I was offered a very nice pay raise.
- Even though today kinda felt like my first day on the job, I was able to remember everything that stayed the same since I left and even train one of the other secretaries. I think it's funny to be the one doing the training especially because I'm now the new person.
- It's a really fun atmosphere to work in with social and friendly co-workers.

Curtain Project

I've had a lot more free time on my hands since I graduated with my bachelor's degree in Communication Disorders (speech therapy) last December. Derrick still has homework so I get to find ways to entertain myself so I don't distract him too much. One of my recent projects has been to make curtains to help hide the really ugly blinds in our front room. It took me a little longer than I thought it would because I made up the pattern as I went along.

Ugly blinds before curtains
(we had to bend wire hangers to attach the curtain rod because of our
"lovely" cinder block walls)

With curtains
(Derrick was great - he attached the rod and helped me put up the curtains)

Gimpy and Numbskull

So this post will probably only be of any interest to anyone who knows my parents. I'm basically including this info in the blog for my own documentation. My parents had doctor appointments today and yesterday and both came away bandaged and/or wrapped up.

(This picture was taken a year ago at my aunt and uncle's cabin in the mountains)

My mom went to the doctor yesterday and found out that the reason her foot has been hurting for so long is that she somehow broke it at our wedding! That was 10 months ago! Being broken definitely explains why it took until 5 months after the wedding to get to the point where she could walk on it without a lot of pain. It was only finally caught because she did something to aggravate it. Now my mom gets to hobble around with her foot wrapped up and in a walking boot while she waits for the swelling to go down to see whether or not she'll need to have surgery on it. Yikes!

This morning my dad went to the doctor to have a minor surgery on his face. He's pretty funny when he's on pain meds and trying to make the best out of a situation. He sent me a few text messages while in the waiting room that said things like: "Just finished round 1 of the surgery. The score so far is: me 1, cancer 0" and "Right now I'm sitting in a waiting area with a bunch of other people with strange bandages on their faces. It'd be funny if I weren't one of them". It sounds like everything got taken care of but my dad got to leave with a large bandage and 2 inches of stitches. He's the one who made the bad pun about being a numbskull because of the local anesthesia :).

Luckily they still have one kid at home who can help out and run errands for them to help with the recovery. Good luck you two...and to Garrett. We love you!

GJ Slideshow

Grand Junction weekend

So it's been a little while since we've posted on here. We started out good but I guess once we get out of the habit it's harder to get back into it.

During the last weekend in February Derrick and I drove to his parents' house in Grand Junction, CO. Meesa (sister), Andrew (Meesa's boyfriend), Jamon (brother), Jean (sister-in-law), and Tyson (brother) all were going to be there for part of the week so we thought we'd join the party.

While there we had great food, played games (pig mania), got to see Christa and Ryan, went hiking up to Devil's Kitchen and the lemon squeezers, played 3 on 4 basketball and around the world at the church gym, and even got Mom and Dad Bowen to play some DDR (dance dance revolution).

It was really nice that I'm past the nauseous stage of pregnancy so Derrick and I could join in all the fun. I have noticed that things tire me out a lot faster than they used to and that my center of balance has changed. Good times though definitely more enjoyable than being sick all the time!

We headed back here to Provo with Andrew on Sunday morning and made it back just in time for church. We pulled into our parking lot 10 minutes before church was starting, rushed upstairs to our apartment, got changed, and walked to church arriving at the beginning of the sacrament hymn.

It's fun having family so close by and love the memories we get to make with them. Thanks for a great weekend! (We'll be posting pics from the trip in a little while).

Baby, Baby, Baby ...

So we went in today for the Ultra-sound. They checked for Spina Bifida, makin sure all the limbs were there, looking at the four chambers of the heart, and checking for a "package." Turns out he's a he. Woot! We're pretty excited.

Because our minds change fairly often, and the fact that we like keeping secrets, we've decided that we're not going to tell people if/when we've picked out a name. (We gotta keep some surprise) So if you hear something, it's probably something ridiculous we made up to throw people off the track. Our current misnomer is "Gottlob Maynard."

Cheers!

Commentary on teaching in church

Does anyone else find it hard to teach people in a church setting? It feels like I've been asked to do this a lot lately - at least for a person who doesn't teach for their calling. First, Derrick and I were asked to give talks in church last Sunday. The most eventful thing that happened with that was that when I went to print off my talk 15 minutes before church by laptop freaked out. 15 minutes later we had managed to get my talk from my laptop that kept freezing to our computer and printed out. Luckily our church is 2 minutes walking distance away but there were some very relieved looks on the faces of the bishopric. Second, I was in charge of joint-teaching a mini-workshop on how to teach for my ward's visiting teaching conference. Nothing too eventful there.

With these teaching experiences I noticed that I have a lot more fun doing the research and that getting the information across to others is not my strong point. While reading up on the sacrament I kept distracting Derrick from his homework to tell him all kinds of random facts I was learning. For example, I never realized how much the ordinance of the sacrament does to help us weekly apply the atonement in our lives. I had only really thought of it as a way to remind us of our Savior and all He did for us. There were several others relating to the passover and such that I won't go into here. After finding out so many cool facts I have a really hard time condensing and piecing things together in a way that makes sense. If I can't sit with the teachees I'd much rather lead a discussion or be able to read a list like: Cool fact #1, cool fact #2, etc.

Hopefully for the next little while Derrick and I will be able to stick to our usual Sunday routine of sitting near the back and pulling faces at the babies.

Props to our ward

So Derrick and I really love our ward here in Wymount. There are so many families who are so friendly and fun. To name a few:

I love the people I work with in primary. That calling is so fun and I end up laughing a lot of the time. Today one of the activities was follow the leader with the leader holding a picture of Christ above their head for all the followers to see. The purpose was to teach the children about following Jesus. I thought it was a great way to teach that important message to little kids. Jenn definitely does great with primary. One funny thing with the game was that the oldest kid just turned 6 and several are only 3 so many of the kids really didn't understand the game. They followed around for awhile and then the game turned into a lot of random running and funny actions.

Our hometeachers, Josh Dickinson and Jared Chandler, came over this morning. We definitely get some good conversations going before and during the spiritual message part. Another great part is that they're not just our friends once a month so they can get their hometeaching checked off the list. Josh and his wife Cierra had us over for dinner tonight with Cierra's twin sisters. One definite highlight was playing Isaac Asimov's Robots Mystery Game. It involved an 80's VHS tape and different packs of clues. The video part was amazing with terrible acting, cheesy graphics, and really funny looking robots. It was pretty classic and we were successful in figuring out the clues and determining the culprit. Mission accomplished.

I Guess There Really Is a Baby Inside Me

So I'm now part way through my 4th month of pregnancy (19 weeks along now) and the baby seems to be doing great. We've been very blessed that this pregnancy has had so few complications. I felt pretty sick at times during the first trimester but now I like food again and getting sick is more the exception than the rule.

Last Friday I went to the doctor for one of the regular visits and got to hear the heartbeat again. I was surprised this time because from the past visits I've come to expect the heartbeat to be more of a swishing sound. This time the heartbeat was a lot louder and sounded much more like a real heart beat. It was pretty exciting. According to the doctor, everything is going great and is right on schedule! She also told me that this is the time where I should start feeling the baby move. I'd probably already felt him/her but it was so faint I didn't pay any attention.

Last night as I was trying to sleep I noticed that I started feeling weird little bumps in my stomach. After a little confusion (I was pretty tired) I realized that this was the baby moving around! I finally felt the baby move. I was pretty excited and sadly Derrick was already asleep so I couldn't share this new development with him. After a little while the excitement wore off because I was ready to sleep and the baby obviously wasn't. It's hard to fall asleep when someone is moving around inside you. Luckily I did finally get to sleep.

My next appointment with the doctor is this coming Friday and Derrick is definitely going to be there. This is the one we've been looking forward to for a long time. We to see our baby for the first time on an ultrasound so the doctor will also check to see how well the brain, heart, etc. are developing. Also, we finally find out the gender!!!!

Valentine Fun

So one thing about having a blog is that it gives Derrick and I more motivation to take pictures and document the things we do. They're definitely fun for us to look back on! We had a really fun day yesterday. I woke up early and for the first time made Derrick a hot breakfast before work. Usually I just wake up in time to have some cold cereal with him but this morning we had homemade waffles. The waffle iron we got for our wedding works great!

It was nice for me that Derrick didn't really have class (I think it was just a help session) so we had the whole day to spend together from noon on. One thing that we noticed when we were starting to date is that we have so much fun together no matter what we're up to. Lately, I've really wanted to get or make curtains for our apartment because the big window in our front room just has some really ugly blinds. In order to justify spending the money on the curtain project, we decided that they could be a Valentine's day present Derrick could give me. (Romantic huh?...right). Last night we went to Wal-mart to get the materials to make curtains for our apartment. Once I get around to making them we'll have to let you know how that adventure goes.

While at Wal-mart, Derrick passed by the strawberries and they smelled so strong that he couldn't resist getting some. They're definitely a favorite of his. He also got some Martinelli's to go them. Back at our apartment we were able to pull out our fondue set for the first time since we got it and try our luck with chocolate dipped strawberries. We weren't sure how well it'd work but it worked great and we had a lot of fun. I guess part of the excitement had something to do with having fancy little sticks to use.

Valentine Fun Pics

At 18 1/2 weeks

So in response to email requests to show a picture of my pregnant belly, I had Derrick take a picture and here you go. This is me at 18 1/2 weeks pregnant (a little over 4 months along). Megan, you can now compare.

Garrett, the volleyball pro

I just had to take a moment to say that my little brother Garrett is an amazing volleyball player. Yesterday, he was invited by one of the assistant coaches who either plays for or coaches at CU-Boulder to practice with the college players on Thursdays. He's only a junior and getting attention from college people. Yeah petit-frite!

Grood dinner times with the fam

So I'm definitely loving having so much of my family in Provo. Tonight Derrick and I decided sometime after 6 pm that we should probably start thinking about dinner. Derrick really wanted to make shepherd's pie. Since lately we've been catering to my cravings and more to my food aversions it was about time Derrick got his meal choice.

We figured that since we were making real food and that Melissa had a late class tonight, we'd invite her and Nate (or as Derrick would say: Natey Batey) over. While we were inviting siblings over, we figured we'd also invite Jason too. This turned out to be a good thing since Jason's dinner was so far consisting of Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch. Well-balanced meal planning such as this has led us to know better than to suggest Jason bring a fruit or a vegetable when he comes over to dinner since he never buys such things.

Well, about an hour later we were all together and it was a blast as usual. It was pretty funny to find out that Melissa used to be afraid of shepherd's pie because she had somehow associated liver with it. Apparently her roommate Laura was able to correct that thought earlier this year though it would have been pretty funny if she showed up afraid she was going to be served liver. Also, I'm glad to see that Nate fits in pretty comfortably and can joke around with the rest of us. He'll be a really fun brother in law. Congrats again Nate and Melissa!

Cabo Slideshow

This is a work in progress. Hopefully we'll get around to posting some of the fun pictures from the trip.

The First Edition

Yes, we have no bananas. Okay, that's a lie . . . we have two bananas. Welcome to Derrick and Jen's blog. As our peer group has matured, we've caved into the pressure to blog, rather than to facebook. We plan on putting all sorts of great content on here, like videos and pictures, as some of our friends and family aren't on facebook to see those sorts of things we have over there. Anyways, those bananas are a little ripe for Jen's taste. (mmm smoothie time)