Graduation!!!

Oh graduation, the day I thought would never come.

But it did!!!!!

Well, I shouldn't say that, technically I still haven't graduated, but I'm done with everything, I have a letter saying I have my master's degree from the program, and I got to walk across the stage so I'll say I'm graduated.

My parents came into town for the event, which was so much fun! It was also fun to get to celebrate with my husband this time around.

We did all sorts of fun things throughout the weekend, such as hitting up kneaders for breakfast, going bowling at the provo beach resort (although i got an all-time low score of like 45 or something awful), watching the olympics, and just chatting and catching up. It's so nice having them close by to where they can drive up and visit us.

Here are some pics from the day:

Richard "surprised" me with some flowers!

 (I may have suggested ever so subtly that I wanted them...)

i was lucky enough to graduated at the same time and place as my cousin Elizabeth! here we are with her parents and my parents. My dad's sister Dixie (in the blue) was the one who introduced my parents to each other, she and my mom were roommates when they were at BYU!

 Speaking of roommates... this is my lovely former roommate Teresa! we lived together for 2 years before her mission. she was also graduating at the same time and place as I was, which was fantastic!


And here's my robe. You know, you look at the robes and you think they're the same as the undergrad ones with a little extra hood on the back. then you put one on. then you notice the bat wings/fake arm holes that hang down below the actual arm holes. then you notice all kinds of other weird pieces of fabric draping around in all sorts of places. i had to wait to put the thing on because i couldn't figure out where to put my arms! the hood thing is kind of cool though. it felt pretty dang good to walk around in this thing, just to know that I had finally finished my master's degree.

 fb cover photo!

 the lovely girls in my cohort (a few of them). there are 15 of us total, but some graduated already and some will graduate in the next few months.

 and here we are with all of our faculty. got to know these guys very, very well. maybe a little too well, some of them. my thesis adviser was the guy who looks like red riding hood on the left. it's always so fun to me to see all the faculty in their weird-looking get ups. makes me feel like i'm at hogwarts.

it was all-in-all a great time! so grateful to have made it through such a tough program. I even got a little emotional when they played the opening song and throughout the day when I thought of that graduation song by Vitamin C.

thank you to all of you who helped me get through it! I definitely couldn't have done it on my own.

July

This is what we've been up to for the last few weeks:
 

We went to Benihana for the first time ever for my birthday celebration! I guess the fact that I'm debating putting my age on here means I'm finally old enough that it might be time to start lying about it!

 there's the chef doing his magic. if this speech pathology thing doesn't work out I would love to do what he's doing...

  

Yes, I ate sushi in addition to my regular meal. Richard hates it so this was my first time eating it since I ordered some on our cruise for our honeymoon. Mmmmmmmm

And then there was this time we went to the Spanish Fork carnival with our friends the Malones and I risked my life on this death machine formally known as "the zipper". It wouldn't be too bad except for that it lasts for about 10 minutes. That's 10 minutes of being flung around in a cage.

 That's Rachel and I waiting to get on because our husbands didn't want to ride it.

 

Does anyone else feel a little bit nervous about a ride that gets put up in one day? Also note the rust...

  

And there was this other time that I defended my thesis! Unfortunately it continues to haunt me and the process isn't over. But this was a good day nonetheless.

 And the next day we got to go to Richard's twin sister's wife's family's (did you catch all that?) cabin and ride rhinos and shoot guns! Richard's sister Wendy and brother Chris were there too!

 I got in trouble because I wasn't holding my gun right. What, I can't shoot my gun like that?

Richard loves guns. Not many people know this but he dreams about being a sniper. I'm not kidding, it's his dream job. I thought he was kidding when he first told me. He wasn't.

 That's Richard's twin Jeremy behind us and his wife Katie at...

the DEMOLITION DERBY

 it was real fun except for the parts when they had to pry people out of the cars with the jaws of life. that made me a little nervous.

 After that, I attended a week-long (45 hour) lactation conference (yes, i said lactation) in South Jordan where I learned things I never wanted to about breastfeeding. Complete with pictures. Did you ever know you could talk about that for 45 hours??

And all that culminated in this weekend when we babysat my sister-in-law Amy's kids while she and her husband had a weekend getaway to Vegas! We got ice cream one night. The kids got waffle cones and the workers looked at us like we were insane. Maybe because they thought we had 4 kids and I often get mistaken for a 16 year old.




We're living a busy life trying to look for housing and work full time and turn in my thesis and graduate this weekend but we have fun in between all that!

Highlights

Well it turns out it's been about a month since I posted anything on here, so here are some highlights from our life lately.

Highlight #1

 warning: this is not a baby bump picture even though it looks like one.

Yes, that's right, the husband and I joined an intramural softball team! It's honestly one of my favorite things we've ever done together. We're on a team with a bunch of other old married people like ourselves and no one has really ever played before so it's a lot of fun. Richard, of course, has been a baseballer all his life

what a stud!

 that's my boy! he was quite the pitcher in his day

and i played too, you know. it was more just social for me, i was on a team with all my little bffs, but we bobcats were a name to be feared in the world of pre-teen ymca softball

would you wanna come up against this?

no way. richard and my team is 2-2 right now so we'll see how this thing goes!

Highlight #2

So, I recently started a new job! I'm doing early intervention with the Provo early intervention program trying to help the little kiddos ages 0-3 talk better/talk more/start talking. I mentioned that I wanted some books to read with the kiddos (books are great for language for all you mommas out there!) Well one day Richie comes home from work with books in hand. This is the book that he proposed for the kids I work with:

This isn't a joke. Richard actually brought this home with the intent for me to take it to the kids I work with (ages ZERO to three). It was a very sweet gesture! Let's take a look at some of my favorite pics from the book:

hey, anyone want me to come over and give your 2 year old nightmares for a few years? he's a funny boy. i'll save it for him to read to our kids..

Highlight #3

July 4th of course! Being the food network junkie that I am, all I wanted to do was create some yummy parfait things for the holiday. I don't like blueberries so these were red, white, and black. And yellow from the pudding.

We also did some grillin'

 We were pleased to spend the holiday with Richard's brother, Chris! Quite the master on the grill, I must say. Don't you love the corn on the cob? Richard tied the little corns up into those little corn bundles shown above.

 grenades!

 In spite of the fact that our entire state is on fire, we had a great 4th of July!

 Highlight # 4
Speaking of fire, the day after the 4th of July we were blessed with a rain storm. I thoroughly enjoyed it, as I always do rainstorms. we had some killer ones in texas that I miss dearly so any time there's a terrential-ish rainstorm here in the desert (guess how often that happens?) i like to take advantage. I knew Richard was watching, but was unaware he was photographing me. Excuse the fact that I look like the phantom of the opera in this pic, there's some sort of weird mask looking thing on my face. In this pic I was probably celebrating the fact that the bird poop got washed off of my car, which is making an appearance behind me in this photo.

 Aaaand after about 30 seconds it was too cold.

Can't wait for the adventures that are to come this month!

Surprise!

Today I completed my last final ever, and my last day of school, ever. "unless I wanna get my PhD", I told Richard. but that was just a funny joke and will never happen

let me just tell you that I went out with a bang. I was on campus from before 8 this morning til 6:30 p.m., 3 hours of which was taking a timed final that literally left my body shaking when the time ran out (it was really stressful...okay?).

and I also managed to squirt water from the water fountain directly into my eye, which hurts a lot more than you'd think. like imagine shooting a hose in your eye. it's a bad deal.

and all I brought to school today was a bag of granola- bad planning.

and some random Idaho number called me twice last night, once at 1 am and once at 2. I'm tempted to do the same to them tonight and see how they like it. and I had weird dreams about killers all night so all in all I didn't sleep too well last night.

because of those factors, I was kind of a grump/generally checked out today. even after the school day was over.

but then as I'm driving up to my house, I see this on someone's door:

but wait a second, that's MY door! (notice the "over the hill" decor)

and then I opened the door and found this inside!

my cute husband set up about 5 balloons, streamers, flowers, all kinds of stuff around our apartment, all because I finished grad school today.

well you better believe that frown turned upside down and I'm a happy girl now!

thank you to my sweet husband for all you do for me!!! he is the b-e-s-t! i love fun surprises

here's to no more school (or I should say no more classes...) and moving ninja-style through our apartment for the rest of the day :)

Staycation

for the last two weeks, I have been holed up in my room every night working on my thesis/relief society lessons/other relief society stuff for my calling/reading hundreds of pages of articles for my exams/working on group projects/working my new job/working my other job/going to class, etc. Richard sat down with me one night and wrote out everything I had to do for me so I could figure out when I could possibly get everything done and not get overwhelmed and go insane (thanks babe!).

lucky for me, tomorrow marks my LAST DAY OF CLASS ever. EVER. it's been a long road, and I am ready to see it end. of course I'm still not done with my thesis and probably never will be, BUT at least I don't have to go to my classes anymore. They're 2.5 hours each. wooof.

due to the stress i've been under lately and general lack of time, not a lot of fun has been had. it is for this reason that today, I blew off my client (sorry buddy) and studying for my exam tomorrow (B's get degrees) to go here with my dear husband, who had work off today:

to lagoon! probably one of my favorite places in Utah! I love roller coasters almost as much as I love desserts. almost.

so naturally we went on some roller coasters, which was great fun.

the first one we went on, I screamed bloody murder as I always do and my throat hurt. I was a little afraid to talk/scream on any rides after that for fear my vocal cords would end up looking like this:

(I took a class on voice disorders in my master's program where I saw pictures of vocal trauma like this daily. would you ever forget an image like this? no, you wouldn't. and you're welcome for sharing the disturbing photo)

I was a little nervous to drop some serious $$ to go to lagoon because when Richard came with me to Idaho last summer to meet the fam, we went to the state fair and he wouldn't ride any of the rides because he gets sick. he assured me he could handle these though.

well after a few roller coaster rides, poor Richard wasn't feeling too good. after a few hours of dizzy spell, he was ready to go for it again and tackled this bad boy

 

I thought he was gonna jump ship before the thing took off because he was really nervous but he did it!!!!!! I was nervous getting on this one too, but it was because my seat had a puddle of something on it when I went to go on the ride...I spent some time trying to figure out what it was, any ideas? it wasn't raining or anything...

In addition to the rides, we saw a peacock wandering around the grass (I'm honestly not sure if it was supposed to be there or not.. it wasn't even fenced in)

 took a little ride through the park

 and enjoyed each other's company, of course.

also we finished the experience with one of these. mmmm

it sure was nice to have a break! here's to working full-time and getting to go home and just relax!