utah or bust!

Right now I am sitting in the middle of stacks of boxes and piles of clutter.

I never thought I'd be so grateful to say that sentence.  But it's true.  After two of the craziest weeks of my life, we are finally in Utah.  And we finally got our U-Haul unloaded.  And even though everything is a crazy mess, I am just grateful.

Grateful that one of my best friends and my sister-in-law planned a spur-of-the-moment baby shower so that I could have one before we moved.  Grateful that my sweet mom and friends stayed to help me pack up our kitchen.  Grateful that my dad and brother were willing to drive down and help us load up the U-Haul.  Grateful that Tim's dad helped us load the U-Haul, drive it all the way up to Utah, and then unload it again once we got here.  And grateful that Tim's brothers and their sons spent an entire morning helping us unload the U-Haul.

By the time we finally got to our new home on Wednesday, it was the middle of the night, which meant unloading the next day.  Tim and his dad woke up early the next day to start unloading [I was up, too, don't worry!  I just didn't carry much...], and Tim's brother Jeremy came, too.  But early in the afternoon, the unseasonably cold temperatures [or so everyone keeps reassuring me] had turned into a good, old-fashioned blizzard, which made unloading especially difficult, as you can imagine.  The short of the long of it is that we didn't get the van completely unloaded until Saturday [and getting the van out of the icy, steep driveway is a story entirely unto itself].

I haven't even listed all of the ways in which people have served us over the past couple of weeks, and I am already in tears.  I am just so thankful.

To be completely truthful, however, not all of my tears over the past couple of weeks have been out of gratitude.  Part of me cries because I am pregnant.  Part of me cries when I feel our baby move around and I am just so thankful for the evidence that she is healthy in the midst of all of this.  Part of me cries because I already miss our families in AZ.  Part of me cries because the cold temperatures make me irrational.  Part of me cries when I am overwhelmed.  And yes, another part of me cries because I really am so thankful.

It sounds a bit like I need medication, doesn't it?  Well, I promise that in the midst of all this crying, I have been doing a lot of laughing, too.  Mostly at myself, and mostly after the fact.

Like that time after I walked around Temple Square with my friend and her baby and Tim came to pick me up and I almost started crying because I was just so cold.  He laughs when he tells people that I said hysterically, "Do you hate me?!" once we got inside the car, in reference to his moving me to another state with temperatures below zero when I was 34 weeks along.  [But I'm not bitter.] [Jk I'm really not.] [Ok maybe just a little.]

Or that time in church when the speaker said that her favorite musical was "Fiddler on the 'Ruff'" and I turned to Tim and said with tears in my eyes and whispered dramatically, "Did you hear what she just said?"

Or that time after church when I was trying to put on my socks standing up [because there was literally no where to sit] and I fell over into our bookcase, after which I tried putting on my boots but couldn't because it hurt my stomach, and then I walked out into the hallway to ask for Tim's help and somehow knocked over a stool that I hadn't even touched, and said shrilly, "I hate this!"  We still laugh about Tim's look of shock after this entire sequence of events.  Poor guy.

And now that you're all convinced that I really do need medication, I'll tell you a story about someone else who maybe needed medication.  We now live in a teeny tiny town just outside of Brigham City, UT, which means that the US Post Office is also very teeny tiny.  I walked in yesterday with the intention of opening a PO Box, and there was an employee who looked somewhat similar to Burl Ives talking on the phone.  After about five minutes of standing there during his call, I surmised that this was probably not a business call, but I wasn't in a hurry, so I just kept waiting patiently.  After about another five minutes, the man looked at me and said into the phone, "I have more information to pass on to you, but I can't do it with listening ears around."  He really said that!  Cross my heart and hope to die.  If I hadn't been in such shock, I might have burst out laughing right then.  What I should have said was, "Umm...do you want me to go wait outside?" and then pointed to the snow flurries through the window.

I think I'm going to like it here.

On an entirely different note, I'll post my two most recent "bump" pictures for posterity's sake.

Week 30

Week 33

And here is a picture of our new backyard [pre-blizzard]:

And another of our picturesque new church building:

Stay tuned for more of our adventures!  [Because who doesn't like a good story about irrationality now and then?]