For those of you who don't know, pregnancy can play havoc with your dreams. Yet another pregnancy symptom that seemingly has nothing to do with growing a baby in your tummy. I've luckily stayed away from dreams that make me wake up and not like Ryan so much. Last night I dreamed that I gave birth to one of those ugly stone prehistoric women. I blame the TV show I watched yesterday named "I was pregnant for 46 years." Her baby calcified and turned to stone before she had it taken out of her. YUCK!

What have your latest dreams been about?

My WHOLE family was able to come down this last week to California to see my nephew's baptism. My mom was able to stay in a hotel close to Disneyland and my parents paid for a day pass to Disneyland on Monday for the whole family. It was so good to see my mom able to travel like that. I hope that she isn't suffering too much for the fun she had. She wasn't able to go into Disneyland but was able to hear all of our stories about our day. They made my Niece's and Nephew's day. They got to ride a new ride for them each: Max got to ride Screamin' California and Sadie got to ride Tower of Terror. I got to show my dad, Courtney and Mandi around California Adventure for their first time ever. Being pregnant in Disneyland is rather interesting. Usually I got the whole day without sitting down and only eat like two meals. This time I had to eat like every time we got a ride and walking to things made my hips hurt so I had to sit down. I guess luckily I couldn't ride the cool rides so standing for too long wasn't ever a real issue.


The day after I got to break in my new maternity swimsuit and visit the hotel pool. The weather here was very temperate for my mom which meant it was pretty cool out for swimming that day. Kids are so fearless about things like being FREEZING! It was fun to see Gwen try to drink the water while her mom was trying to keep her face out of the water. I also got to go to the beach with my sisters and the kids and have some fun there with the kids finding sea shells and digging big holes. Ryan finally got to join us Saturday and we went and visited Chinatown in LA. That was interesting. We felt very culturally uplifted and I came away with a couple really cute hats!

As I enter the mommy world, I learn all kinds of things from different moms I run into. This one came from sister Trish. So, swaddling blankets often aren't big enough to swaddle baby very well. In California it's so hot and humid that mother's find that swaddling babies makes them hotter and more cranky after a while. These blankets made from muslin are the answer to the problems. They originated in Australia. They are on the expensive side at about ten dollars a blanket if you buy a four pack but I've heard more than one mother here in Cali rave about them. They are very light and breathable so that baby can maintain her temperature while swaddled. They measure 47"X47" so they are also great for strollers and for nursing shields so that you don't get too hot either. This is the pack i desire to get. I think it's too cute with the fishies and bugs. It's called Aden and Anais MOD blanket 4 pack.

These are reviews just in case anyone feels like searching the internet to find out more about particular companies that we've used in the last little while.

Iggy's Restaurant: As we moved from Utah, we were most saddened to say goodbye to Iggy's of all the restaurants we were about to lose. They have marvelous burgers, free fresh bread and chili water, mmmm... nachos, and their FRIES! Oh my gosh their fries win for the best fries I have ever had!

Oasis Moving: We used this moving company based out of Nevada and had an almost deplorable experience. We used some plastic storage bins as boxes and they all came back broken. We had three pieces of furniture ruined. Boxes of ours were thrown into our new apartment and I could here the broken glass inside rattling around even though it said fragile across the box. They didn't come when we were told they were coming but they were a day early rather than a day late which worked out sort of better for us. The quote we got originally was too low apparently because we ended up paying close to double that price (which wasn't cheap to begin with but we went with them because their customer service was so good) Lesson learned. We'll ask for references from other customers next time (hopefully there wont be another cross states move for us anytime in the near future!)

Stockton to Malone Honda: So, once we got everything figured out with the car and had to go through all the fine print of our agreement on our car we found out that Stockton to Malone had cheated money from us in just about every way they could including raising the sticker price on the car! (We didn't know this until we really looked through things because they wouldn't make deals with us based on the price of the car, they only wanted to tell us what our monthly payment would be) We were very upset about how we were treated as we went through the process of returning warranties and Gap insurance and it took us forever to get that money back and then even then we got copy back on what had been returned to us and they WHITED OUT our gap insurance like we never asked for it back. I'm pretty sure that's illegal to do on a signed document. So, we had to go call and go back in again to pick up a check for that.

Murdock Hyundai: So after the fiasco with Stockton to Malone, we still needed a second car, okay so we need a reliable car that would take driving in CA to Ryan's work everyday. We bought from Murdock Hyundai in Orem. Beware of internet postings that aren't very specific. We called in asking to drive their 2008 Elantra that was still new and not used so that we could get their 100,000 warranty but an almost used price on it. They told us they had it but that someone put money down on it to keep it saved but ended up buying something else so we better hurry and come in. We showed up ten minutes later and they couldn't FIND the car we asked for and we couldn't talk to the guy that on the phone told us the car was there. Seriously, four days later they call us back and say they have a car for us to test drive, that they finally found our car that we asked for. It's not the car we asked for! THEY NEVER EVEN HAD THE CAR WE SAW ONLINE! They had to drive this similar car down from a Logan dealership!
Luckily buying went a lot better this time. They didn't even try to pull the same stuff that Stockton to Malone had and we were triple checking all the paperwork this time. They didn't charge one extra cent out of us for anything ans we got them to go down on the sticker price.

We've been trying unsuccessfully so far to build shelves in our laundry room. Sigh, after four trips to both Lowe's and Home Depot (Home Depot had a saw to cut wood for us because Lowe's was broken but they didn't have the shelving brackets we were looking for) and a call into the apartment office to find out if we were going to drill into pipes or wires inside the wall, we still don't have a single shelf. Tonight is hopefully the night but these shelves have been so annoying that we can hardly stand to keep trying to get things set up in there. The fact that everything that belongs on the shelves is in my way of doing any laundry and using our dining room table.

Otherwise our apartment is coming along quite nicely. I'll put some pictures up as soon as I can but I've got family coming for the next week.