Belated Birthday Party

Now that we've passed Grandma Layton's birthday, and little Andrew's birthday, and are fast approaching Katherine's birthday, we decided it was high time to celebrate David's birthday. We're not too far behind the times...his birthday was only six days ago. That's not even a week. By my calculations, that's pretty good.

Josie and I were going to make a cake together, but it was fast Sunday and she decided she had better not tempt herself with cake batter. So I was left to make the cake by myself. That was easy enough, and I knew exactly how to decorate it, too.

In case you were unaware, David is obsessed with yellow and smiley faces. He, himself, has what he calls a "perma-grin." He smiles even when he's upset. His background image for his MySpace page is this:


So naturally, I made his cake into a smiley face. Unfortunately I thought of this after I put the cake in the oven so it was a rectangular smiley face instead of a circular one. It took me quite a while to decide how best to make the icky grey color that I got instead of black. I didn't want to use too much dye because, let's face it, food coloring just doesn't taste very good. But I found out that if you use just red and green together, you'll get just as good of a black as if you used all four colors mixed together...it's because they're complimentary colors so they clash, making black. Or something like that.


So there's my pristine and happy cake. We don't have one of those cool icing kits so to draw his face on I put the icing in a ziplock baggie and cut a corner off and squirted it on using that. The only problem with this cake is that it rose a little too much in the middle making it a little too tall to put the lid on.

Being pregnant, I whined to my husband (this is becoming common case...I'm starting to expect him to fix everything for me, right now! or I'm bound to cry. It's a little embarrassing but harder to control than I expected). He and Josie both insisted that the lid would fit just fine, so they put it on and we went for dinner at Andrew's parent's house, leaving the cake in our car.

*****

When we got to my parent's house and I took the lid off of the cake to show it to David, my smiley dude's face came off on the lid.

Being pregnant, and unable to cope with the situation, I whined to my husband, "It's ugly..." He calmly shook the icing off the lid and did some reconstructive surgery on my smiley dude to avert my fast-approaching tears.


I'm glad that Andrew fixed it, but really, I don't know why I cared so much because after he fixed it and I showed it to David, we just cut up the cake and ate it, further destroying smiley dude's face. I do believe I am guilty of having his lower left-hand side of his smile in my stomach at this very moment.


We all ended up enjoying the cake, whether or not his face was pristine (which it wouldn't have been anyway because I cut it up). We also all got to chat with Abra for a while. She phoned from Canada to join in the birthday cheer. But she didn't try my cake--how rude!

Patrick and David

Dad talking to Abra (while pretending to pick his nose)

Three's a charm

It all started when Josie was knitting her third hat with three strands of yarn. Andrew had finished programming Yahtzee and was busy making the third side of the die he was making in Illustrator. Nancy was playing Sherlock and had just graduated down to having only 3 handicaps instead of four.

Josie said, "Man, three is hard."

"Yeah, it is!" agreed Andrew.

"Yeah...hey...she wasn't talking about you she was talking about...herself..." I said.

It was then that we realized we were all being selfish, thinking about ourselves and our respective number threes. Josie with her yarn, Andrew with his die, and me with my clues. She could have been talking about either one of us.

Josie's 3 hats

After this moment the time grew late and we all got a little hyper together. Josie started it. She knitted herself silly!

Who knows what she's doing?
And although she's embarrassed, she keeps going...
Josie continuing to do whatever it is she's doing

We realized that we were all wearing BYU T-shirts...and we happened to represent the HBLL rather well, if you ask me. So, randomly we decided to really learn why we have a digital camera (so we wouldn't waste a whole roll of film just being goofy) and we also decided to break out the tri-pod that we got for Christmas and see what magic we could work with it.

Andrew and his tri-pod
Josie and I doing what we do best: lookin' good
And here we are representing BYU
(The backs are pretty cool, too)

I'm wearing the shirt from 2004-2005, Josie has on 2005-2006, and Andrew has on 2006-2007.

And because we had the tri-pod out, we couldn't just take normal shots, now could we? It was a little difficult to get the following shots in because our house really isn't that big. That, and we couldn't see the pictures so were just guessing about where we were on the ground. It is much easier to take pictures like this if you have someone telling you where to go. That's why we have professional photographers, I guess, so things like this don't happen.

Our lop-sided, unsymmetrical picture

We would also like to point out Andrew's immense skill in finding nearly the exact same pose after jumping up, running across the room, setting the camera, and joining us back on the ground. It's pretty amazing, actually...

And to celebrate our new-found love of the number three, we played Triominoes. What else? Our goal was to only play three rounds and have each of us win, but it took us four rounds because Andrew won twice, throwing everything off.

Round 1

(Josie thinks it looks like a kangaroo...I happen to agree)

Round 2 started off rather fittingly:
Round 3 just took a long time to end

So, it's now past midnight and Josie has asked to be excused so she can go to bed. I guess we wore her out today. I never thought I'd see the day when she would beg to go to bed--usually she's asking to stay up!

That's all folks

Gayad Gidden Kosheri

Apparently I'm really jealous that Bridget will be returning to Jordan this summer. That, or I'm just on a food kick. Either way I seem to think about food a lot. And write about food a lot. And eat food a lot. Maybe I'm just pregnant. Who knows?

For dinner, we made kosheri, a lovely Egyptian meal (and thus the gayad gidden instead of jayad jidden, both mean 'very good' but Egypt likes to use a hard 'g,' while in Jordan they use a soft 'g'--kind of like a 'j').

It is fairly simple to make, but oh, so very good. Josie was a bit wary at first because the sauce is typically served cold and she thought that was a little strange. Actually, the whole dish is often served cold, which I imagine would be really nice on a hot summer's day.

First you cook up some pasta (or use leftovers--that's what we did), rice, and lentils. Mix them together in approximately equal portions.


Blend together some tomatoes (sauce, diced, stewed, or otherwise unfresh), add some spices.


Serve cold, topped with fried onions (the only kind Andrew eats willingly).


Even with Josie's unamiable first impression of this dish, she decided that if Andrew and I ever move out to Cairo, she will definitely come and visit us and eat kosheri everyday. Yes, friends, it is that good. We all had seconds but there are still leftovers, so if you're in the mood...

...On second thought, I rescind that invitation. I'd rather keep all the leftovers for myself!

Personal Progress

Feeling rather bored and a little homemake-ish, Josie and I set off to improve ourselves this weekend.

Last night, I taught her to use the nifty-knitter while I re-taught myself to crochet beads onto socks (something I haven't done since like, I don't know...grade four or so). We worked on that for a while but didn't get too much accomplished. At eleven o'clock in the evening we ended up unraveling the hat Josie was working on (she had made quite a few mistakes and it was rather lumpy) and throwing down the socks I was working on.

We decided that we would be much more successful in the morning, and we were...but more toward the afternoon.

Instead of being crafty, we spent our morning at my friend Kelli's house helping her conquer the fox trot. Josie had a fun time playing with Kelli's 4-month-old daughter, while Kelli and I busied ourselves with box steps and twinkles, trying not to trip over her two-year-old who was twirling around the room with us, only a little out of step.

Kelli and her husband will be performing the fox trot with Andrew and I (and a few other couples) at our stake "So you think you can dance" event. Other couples will be performing the polka, cha cha, virginia reel, and square dance. There are rumors that the youth will be doing some Hawaiian dancing and some other cool ethnic dances. If you want to come and see us make fools of ourselves (we haven't actually danced for a number of years), we'll be performing on April 6th and 7th at our Stake Center. It's probably at 7:00 pm, but we don't have that information yet.

After our dance practice, Josie and I came home and Josie commenced finishing a beautiful baby hat, I picked up the sock that I had given up on, and Andrew programmed a Yahtzee game for one of his computer classes. It was a very quiet afternoon. We were all concentrating a little too much. I would ask a question and Josie would say, "Yeah....oh...what?" while Andrew would not even respond. If you were lucky you might get a grunt out of him.

But we made a lot of progress. By three o'clock my socks were done, Josie had finished her hat and Andrew had worked out all the background details of his program!

The socks
The hat

The program

When we were all done with our projects, I made us take a lunch break. Andrew wasn't talking in coherent sentences so it was obvious he needed a break. We had leftover falafel and foul. We also talked about Personal Progress. Josie was wondering if learning how to cook meals and knit hats would count toward any of her goals. Since she didn't have her book with her, we broke out my old book and looked at all of the goals. We decided that we could definitely work in some meal cooking and hat making to the system. She was pretty excited about that.

After lunch we headed all the way to North Orem to do a Layton/Heiss drive-by. We stopped by my parent's house first to upload some songs on Josie's iPod and find her Personal Progress booklet. While her iPod was busying itself, we headed to the Real Heiss's to find some more yarn to work with--Karen's selection is much grander than my own. Then we headed back to my parent's to retrieve Josie's iPod and find a journal for her to write in. While we were at the respective households we got some visiting done, and my mom phoned from Pittsburgh. How's that for multi-tasking?

When we got home we again started on our projects. Andrew sat down and started drawing the dice for his program. Josie started her second hat. I started dinner and read the Personal Progress goals to Josie and circled all the ones that she liked. I'd wager that she could get done at least seven goals this weekend with all the cooking, cleaning, and sewing I've made her do! She just has to read some scriptures to go along with that and she'd be good to go!

Hat #2, phase 1
Hat #2, almost completed

Josie admiring her handiwork

Josie realizing that I caught her with the nifty-knitter on her head and two baby hats on her hands...

Speaking of foul and falafel...

Josie is spending the weekend with us because my mom is out of town at a conference in Pittsburgh. We kind of have a tradition of making food from absolute scratch when Josie comes over. It takes so long, but is kind of fun. I can totally see why we don't do it every day and am very grateful for frozen pizzas, pre-made noodles, and falafel stands (be they kosher or otherwise).

Although Josie mentioned that she was "hoping" to make another Italian dish for dinner completely from scratch (the first time we babysat her we made pasta with our pasta maker, the second time we made pizza from scratch), we decided that we would make a good home-cooked Arabic meal.

Not that we have a lot of experience making good home-cooked Arabic meals because falafel stands were all over the place in Jordan so there was never really a need to make a meal from scratch.

We kind of decided to do this while we were shopping today. Our first challenge was finding fava beans. Surprisingly enough, these beans are quite difficult to find...and they are rather pricey. We decided to go with the dried beans, even though you have to boil them for an hour, since they were half the price of the canned ones. While we were scrutinizing beans, a cute old lady asked us if we could help her find chick peas. I knew exactly where they were because we had been up and down the isle several times looking for fava beans (which only have one brand, unlike chick peas which have at least 5).

I showed her where they were, but she was confused because I showed her garbanzo beans and she was looking for chick peas--that's what the recipe called for. I had to find a can of garbanzo beans that said both "chick peas" and "garbanzo beans" before she left us alone. She was satisfied when she saw that can, although she muttered as we walked away, "What do I compare these to?" I didn't answer...because I'm quite sure I had no idea what she meant.

After picking up Josie from Andrew's parent's house, we commenced on making dinner (well, right after we finished cleaning the house, that is).

We boiled fava beans,
Mixed our falafel mix,(it's not from scratch, I know...but at least it's kosher!)

Peeled onions,
Cut onions,
Fried onions, garlic, and tomatoes,
Added spices,(L to R: curry, cinnamon, chili powder, cumin, lemon juice)

Ex-mayed the curry,(those are bugs of some sort in our curry--sorry to everyone who ever came over for curry before we discovered these weevil-y things. Extra protein, right...)

And all helped roll falafel balls.

It really would have been a lot easier with the handy-dandy falafel scoops all the falafel dudes have. I guess we'll have to get one next time we're in the Middle East. But then again, how often do we make falafel? Not often. So, do we really need a scoop? Probably not.

The most exciting part of the meal was, of course, cooking the falafel. After hearing about Jamila's exciting stories at the Arabic Reunion of setting the kitchen on fire while trying to boil the oil, and seeing the falafel mess that turned out at that party, we were a bit nervous to try frying our own falafel. Afterall, the falafel dudes have scars up and down their arms from being splattered with hot oil.

As you can see, we did okay...really, the falafel turned out great!

Except that the oil bubbled over whenever we put in the falafel balls. We decided that next time we would do it in our big pot...but then, if it did start to bubble over, what would we hold it over? This is a dilemma.

After we got the hang of managing the oil flying all over the place, Josie and I left Andrew to deal with the falafel alone while we finished up the rest of dinner.

Mashing the foul

Finally, after two hours of cooking, we were ready to eat. We hurriedly set the table for our communal meal--after smelling the food cook for that long, we were more than ready to eat it. At least, I was.

Ready to Eat

Before we could eat though, Andrew gave Josie a demonstration of how we eat communally. She had already done so in India...and with that topic brought up, we had a great conversation about Miranda and how we would never drink the pitcher of water that was always given us because the water in the countries we had been to was usually questionable, to say the least.

How to eat falafel

We ate with tortilla shells because pita bread is so expensive here! You get 8 pitas for around 4 dollars, which is really quite ridiculous considering you can buy enough pita to last a family for a week for a mere 30 cents in Jordan. Oh, well. The tortillas worked well enough, except that they were rather thin so they kept breaking on us. Next time we'll have to plan ahead and hit up the Desi Market to get some naan (Indian-style pita) because it is fairly cheap there.

Also note our vegetable tray: cucumbers, tomatoes, and pickles. Andrew actually had the pickles because, and I quote, he's "not afraid of these ones." I don't really blame him for being afraid of the pickles in Jordan...sometimes we had bright orange ones, sometimes we had bright pink ones. I'm sure they were pickled something-or-other. I tried them and they just taste like vinegar, so he really would have survived....

Anyway, after trying some tortilla/foul/falafel with a pickle he announced, "Wow, that was really good! No wonder they always gave us pickles." I think he's really coming around to this vegetable thing (not that pickles really count as vegetables either).

With all the time we spent cooking, we only ate for about twenty minutes before we were all so full of foul that we had to quit. We have plenty left over for later.

I'm just glad that we have a dishwasher and didn't have to wash the dishes by hand because we sure did mess up a lot of them (most of them, actually).

Maybe tomorrow night we'll do some kosheri!

What's for dinner?

After much deliberation, I finally decided what to make for dinner. This is getting harder and harder--for me. I just can't think of anything to make, I just stare in the cupboards thinking, "We had that yesterday..." when we really probably didn't have it yesterday but a few days ago.

Today I made stroganoff. We had it on potatoes, which Andrew thought was a little weird. I told him that he'd never been to Russia, so he didn't really know how Russians eat stroganoff and since it's a Russian dish, we were having it with potatoes. I only ever had oil or ketchup on noodles in Russia.

It was good, but I started cooking so late that we barely had time to eat and clean up before we had to leave for dance practice.

Odd...we got home early today, too, so I technically should have been able to have dinner out earlier, right? Wrong.

Andrew is little help when it comes to food choices. He's one of those "regulars" who just likes "the usual." I mean, it took him how long in Jordan to branch out from his falafel sandwich to try foul (pronounced "fool" not "fowl")? I think he finally tried the foul six weeks after we got there...and then he would just rotate between the two: falafel, foul, falafel, foul.... He went out for lunch every single day we lived in Jordan (except Friday, which was Sunday), and there wasn't even a point to asking, "So, what did you try today, dear?" because he didn't try anything new. Ever.

***

When we were on our honeymoon in Italy, I thought that he had tried a lot of foods because he would always spend a long time pouring over the menu, fooling me into thinking that he was going to branch out. Every single night we went to a pizza place and every single night he got a margherita, which is a plain cheese pizza. Although, once when we were in Venice, I convinced him to split a Viennese pizza with me (don't--they put hot dogs on the pizza). Even now, he'll look at pizza menus or talk about all sorts of pizzas only to order/make a plain cheese or, heaven forbid, pepperoni pizza.

***

As another example, Andrew took me out to lunch one day last semester because I was "having a hard day." The first trimester can be brutal. He surprised me and took me to a burger place, but when I started crying, he let me choose the restaurant (how embarrassing, I cried because I didn't want a hamburger--it's hormones, I tell you). So, we went to Taco Bell. I ordered just a regular bean burrito for 89 cents. I wasn't really in a mood for eating. Well, after I ordered, it was Andrew's turn (naturally). He was caught off guard so just said what he read last, "I'll have a seven-layer burrito." I thought that sounded really good, but I had already ordered, so I just decided to be happy with my bean burrito. I was, however, absolutely shocked that Andrew would order a burrito with a "warm, soft, flour tortilla wrapped around seasoned rice, hearty beans, a blend of three cheeses — cheddar, pepperjack and mozzarella — crisp, shredded lettuce, diced ripe tomatoes, cool sour cream, and chunky guacamole." I mean, my husband would never purposely order something with tomatoes or guacamole of any kind, ripe and chunky or not.

I told him how proud I was of him, "Wow, honey. You're really branching out today. You ordered something with tomatoes and guacamole."

"Agurhghu..." he moaned, "I didn't know it had guacamole. I was planning on giving you the tomatoes, but what am I going to do with the guacamole?"

"Why did you order it if you didn't want half the stuff the comes on it?"

"Because my turn came up so fast that I couldn't remember what I usually get so I just said something so..."

In the end, we ended up trading, which was fine with me. I didn't know that Andrew had a "usual" at Taco Bell, though. It's one of his least favorite restaurants. I mean, he would rather go to a burger place than to Taco Bell. Talk about weird.

***

Last night, Andrew's family went out to dinner with Andrew and Josie and pretty much everyone but me. I was at a meeting. Andrew told me he'd bring me some "left-overs, ha, ha." I said that he had better after a sarcastic laugh like that at the end of his sentence.

So, when I got home there was a nice sub sandwich, or, for all the Utahns, a hoagie, sitting on the table waiting for me (thanks, Karen!). It was the "classic" something-or-other with meat and tomatoes and pickles and lettuce and I'm not really sure what else because after my 3 hour meeting I was starving, so the sandwich was in my tummy in no time.

"Andrew," I asked, "What kind of sandwich did you get?"

"Some spicy Italian thing." he replied.

"No vegetables?" I asked.

"Of course I had vegetables." he said.

"Lettuce doesn't count as a vegetable. It's like, just water and fiber." I said.

"How'd you know?" he asked, amazed that I had guessed his vegetable.

"That's all you ever get on your sandwich." I said. So he decided to test my theory.

"Did I get pickles?" he asked.

"No." I quickly responded.

"Tomatoes?"

"Are you kidding me? If you were feeling exotic you might throw on a few olives, but you don't strike me as being in an exotic mood."

With that his mouth dropped open. "I thought about getting olives but decided not too because that would have been too adventurous for today."

***

And thus we see that I shouldn't worry about what to fix for dinner because my husband is just fine with "the usual."

Oh, by the way, I put onions in tonight's dinner. Andrew ate them because I made them too difficult to pick out. I took note, "Hey, you ate your onions instead of picking them out...and you didn't die!"

"I'm still waiting..." he said.

And I'm just waiting for the day when I get his death certificate (we all know I'm going to live longer because I eat my vegetables). For cause of death it will say, "Ate too many onions which his wife chopped up really small and hid in his dinner," instead of, "Old age." Knowing him, he would convince someone to put it on there before he dies just to make me laugh. Isn't he sweet?

We've got ourselves a kicker

I finally announced in Relief Society that we're having a baby. I kind of had this unconscious goal to not tell until someone noticed. I've been noticing for a while, but that's because I really am quite a bit larger than I was a few months ago and because sometimes the baby gets rather hyper-active.

For about a week, I've been feeling little "things" here and there and assumed that they were they baby starting to move. For the past few days, I've been getting poked and prodded quite a bit--I'm not even sure I'll be able to take it when the baby is bigger. Usually it's pretty good, but sometimes it just goes to town and jabs me multiple times in a row. It's hard to believe that the baby is big enough to be able to kick that hard because I'm really not that big yet either.


Today in Sunday School, the baby was having a hard time being reverent and somehow managed to squeeze itself really far over on my left side and commenced to do some kicking. After a few minutes, I had had enough of a massage right in that spot, so I kind of gave the baby a little push. It moved away (I really don't know how it does this, it's kind of like a fish in a fish tank--if you tap the glass, it moves away) and settled down for a while.

Apparently the lady beside me noticed. Unfortunately, I don't know her name, but she asked me at the beginning of Relief Society, "As little and young as you are, you aren't pregnant, are you?" I said, "Yes, I am." She said, "I can't really tell, it's just the way you looked at your stomach when you touched it today." Well, she did notice, so I did announce it. Everyone was shocked because the girls in our ward have this habit of making their announcement as soon as they find out. We usually know when people are between 6-8 weeks along. We're 19 weeks along so people were pretty shocked.

I'm not sure when I'll "really" start showing, but here's a good "pretend showing" shot.


We go in for an ultrasound next week. We're pretty sure that we're going to find out what it is. As one lady in our ward said, "It's a surprise sooner or later..."

By the way, we're pretty sure it's a boy...just for the record.

Hi, my name is...

We've been trying to think of a girl's name. The boy's name was easy. We agreed on a name quickly and without much effort: Steven Conrad. The girl's name, however...well, we haven't been able to think of anything that we both really liked, so last night while I was at a Relief Society dinner, I was making a list of girl's names, trying to remember all the ones that Andrew and I discussed. We both like Rachel, but Kristi and Ryan named their baby Rachel and...they're in our ward, so that could be weird, even though Rachel will be almost 2 when our baby is born.

So, last night I came up with the name Annalyse. That's one of the names that Andrew and I had discussed and we both liked. It happened like this: I liked Lisa and he liked Anna and so we just said, "How about Annalyse?" Last night I was thinking of middle names and I thought that Annalyse Pearl would sound alright (I know, both Conrad and Pearl are family names on my side--we'll work on Andrew's side with the next one).

I decided that I really liked that. But then I started thinking...if we did happen to relocate to the Middle East sometime, things could get really confusing. See, Anna is very similar to the Arabic word for "I." Most people that I met in the Middle East were extremely interested in children. The instant anyone found out we were married, they wanted to know how many kids we had. We didn't have any, so they would then ask if I was expecting. We weren't, so they would ask when we were planning on having children and how many. That might be considered a little nosy here, but over there it is perfectly normal.

If we happened to be out with the Slades or Palmers, everyone would croon over their blond children, kiss their cheeks, ask to hold them, and take their pictures.

So, naturally, if we moved back to the Middle East, I'd have to do quite a few introductions. I kept playing the scenario over in my head and it always went something like this:

Stranger: Oh, how cute! What's her name?
Me: Annalyse.
Stranger: Nice to meet you, Lisa...but your baby. What's her name?
Me: Annalyse.
Stranger (mumbling to a counterpart): This lady doesn't speak Arabic well at all.
Stranger (slowly, to me): What's her name?
Me: Her name is Annalyse.
Stranger (chuckling to a counterpart): She just said, "Her name...me Lisa." That doesn't make any sense.
Me (clarifying): No, my name is Nancy, like Nancy Ajram. The baby's name is Annalyse.
Stranger: So, is your name Nancy or Lisa?
Me: I'm Nancy. The baby is...Lisa.
Stranger (cooing): Hello, Lisa...
Me (rolling my eyes and thinking to myself): Probably shouldn't have named her Annalyse.

And thus we see that it should just be a boy because Annalyse is the only name we've agreed on for a girl thus far and it could prove to be problematic down the road.

In like a Lion, out like a Lamb

I realize that that is the "saying" for March. I like to think of the end of February as March because March is closer to spring. Plus, it's been so nice lately, I've been wearing sandals so it's kind of hard for me to believe that it's still winter.

In my mind it is already spring, so when all that good stuff is taken away from me, I feel a little confused. When I woke up this morning, it was nice and bright outside, so I opened the curtains:

What the coldness?

Not exactly what I wanted to see, but I suppose it will have to do for today...as long as it is gone soon. Snow simply isn't very welcome in my life. I mean, we live by the mountains. Why doesn't it stay up there? I don't care if the mountains are cold and snowy.

Anyway, our confusion about months doesn't end there. For some reason, Andrew and I were talking about the "sayings" for months. We had just finished March and were moving on to April and May (which have to share a saying). Andrew said, "April flowers bring May...wait a minute. What do April flowers bring in May?"

I think he's also hoping for an early spring. I had to dash his dreams by clarifying that April showers bring May flowers. Bummer deal, I know...

Some places in the world have flowers all year long and, oh, how I long to live in a place like that!

Ra! Ra! Ra-Ra-Ra!

The bookstore was giving away free basketball tickets if you spent $10. I got 2 tickets with BYU money (sweet deal! I had to buy some things for work), and then 1 more when I got the Valentine's gift for Andrew/Birthday present for Karen. I knew what we could do with 2 tickets (go together), but what would we do with 3?

We went through our options:
-Inviting a couple in our ward (we only have 3 tickets, not 4)
-Inviting (a) parent(s) (again, we only had 3 tickets and inviting only one parent would have been a little odd)
-Josie (into Bollywood, not basketball)
-Emily (she's in pep band in high school, but only to flirt with boys)
-Sarah (I think she's going to be too cool to really hang out with us until I'm visibly pregnant)
-Jacob (available...but we still have other options)
-Patrick (too involved with volleyball. The game started at 8:00 and he gets up at 4 am)
-David (if we were taking him to a basketball game, we'd at least want it to be a double date)
-Throw it away (hello! it's a free ticket! no way!)

So, Jacob won...we invited Jacob to come along. He gladly accepted.

We headed to the game. Jacob wasn't in such a great mood to join us that evening. He wanted $5 to take with him to Idaho. I told him that if he came over and did the dishes everyday for a year that I would give him $5. He changed his mood toward us and settled on just being upset at his "parental units." I'm so glad we'll have 15 years before our child is 15...

Jacob's first attempt at a smile

BYU started the game off right and scored a few baskets as a crowd-starter. That got Jacob excited.

They scored a goal-basket-unit

And the game pretty much just went on from there. I was really glad that it wasn't a football game. Those are so long! I mean, basketball periods are only 20 minutes. I can totally sit through, and pretend to be excited for, 20 minutes. The most exciting moment of the game for me, though, was when the silly kids on a date behind us decided to get up and get snack food.

One of the girls was pretending to hiccup. And it was really getting on my nerves. She would get all into a conversation and decide not to hiccup anymore but the minute the conversation was over, "Hic...hic...hic...hic...hic..." while her date crooned, "Oh, you hiccup so cutely." I almost turned around and said, "Don't encourage her!" or "Oh, Sweetie, do you need some help getting a drink for those?" or simply yelling, "Boo!"

I also had to endure a conversation about lip smacker:

Boy: Oh, you use lip smackers?!?
Girl: Yeah, why?
Boy: I love the taste of lip smackers. Ever since junior high, I just have loved lip smackers.
Girl: Really?
Boy: Yeah, what kind is that?
Girl: Gives him the chap stick, when all he really wanted to do was pull some moves.
Boy: That's one of my favorite kinds.

Awwwww...how cute. Too bad he's only 18 and will be going on a mission soon. Yuck.

Believe me, I tried to ignore them the best I could...but it was all so pathetic...

Right before the half-time show, Jacob got up to get a drink. He was gone for not even a minute. He gets back and I was like, "That was fast. Did you even get that drink?" Jacob said, "Oh, I got bored and stopped looking." Ri-ight...later he asked Andrew what I said and clarified that he really did get a drink.

Us during half-time
(one of the better self portraits of about 10)

All in all it was a pretty fun hour and a half. Our team stayed ahead the whole time, but not so ahead that it was boring...it was just right.

Here's some of the action (if you can see it--I told you: the tickets were free):

Half-time show

With four minutes and thirty-five seconds left in the game, the we got up and walked out of the Marriott center. It took us less than two minutes to speed-walk to our car and beat all the traffic off campus. We already knew our team would win...and so it wasn't a surprise when Andrew turned on the radio and it announced that BYU won 76-67.

So, we all had a great time together, bonded, and earned bragging rights. Jacob even warmed up and forgot to mention us giving him $5 when we dropped him off at home (we didn't give him $5...ha, ha).

Jacob, not in a bad mood anymore