Year-End Cheer

We had a lot of reasons to be happy at the end of 2009. First, we had a warm and cozy Christmas with our family, eating chocolate, playing games, watching football...napping while everyone else is watching football. We spent Christmas morning in our jammies opening presents with my mom and dad in the same room where I had opened Christmas morning presents on the twenty previous Christmases. And it was wonderful!

Roo got me this:

It is a drawing pad that you use to draw and paint digitally--that means on the computer. I've never used one, but Roo knows I aspire to be an artist so it was a very clever gift on his part.

I got Roo a surround sound system to make the orc snarls on Lord of the Rings even louder and more grotesque. He got to hooking it up right away. But what he really wanted (but unfortunately didn't get) was this Plush Taunton Sleeping Bag because, as we all know, Roo aspires to be a Jedi. And if you get to sleep in a plush Taunton when you're a Jedi, who can blame him? The zipper pull is a light saber and the inside lining of the bag looks like Taunton intestines--and you thought they smelled bad on the outside!

Lando and Chase got to run back and forth through the house as fast as they could, since Christmas had overloaded their senses and running back and forth and barking seemed to be all that they were capable of doing.

Leia got to sleep on the jigsaw puzzle:

We watched Harry Potter (love it!) and Sherlock Holmes (liked it, especially how authentic it was. It had me craving London for a week) and Avatar (which had Roo scoffing for a week), we (mostly just Roo) played volleyball, we went shopping, we slept in the family room (that was actually a mistake and we deeply regreted it the next morning), we visited all the grandparents, and we finally got someone to play Settlers of Catan with us (we got that game for Christmas last year and hadn't convinced anyone to play with us since).

But none of that was the best part. For me, the best part came at the doctor's office when he put a cool wand to my tummy, and Roo, my mom, and I got to hear the miraculous pulsing of a tiny, racing heart coming from inside my body. The hearbeat belongs to our baby, which by now is about the size of a lemon and almost four months old. About four months ago, I had just had a miscarriage and consequently decided to put off trying to have a baby until next year or so...or forever. And it seems that's all it took (well, that's not all...) to get me pregnant again almost immediately. I was initially flustered/annoyed/afraid of what could potentially happen again, but with each day my hope grew a little bolder until that day in the doctor's office when I heard proof that the little embryo was becoming a little person and my hope bloomed. This is my third pregnancy and the first time I've ever heard a heartbeat coming from my body that wasn't my own. I don't regret the other two pregnancies, the ones that didn't work out. It was those experiences that taught me about the power and peace of the Atonement. And I am as grateful for that as I am today for my ever burgeoning belly.

So here's to a new year and hoping that the third time is a charm!