Telling Our Secret (September 21-23)

When we told my family that we were expecting over Skype, we had asked them to keep it quiet for a while until we gave them the okay to tell others. Justin and I wanted to wait until I was about with the first trimester before we told the general public about our happy news. But because it is such happy news its hard to keep quiet. Kendell accidentally told my Aunt Janine while he was visiting her one day on campus as he was telling her his story of how is summer played out. He felt bad that he had let the "cat out of the bag" and made her promise not to tell anyone. So when he told Justin and I one night we decided it was okay and that it was probably time to start telling extended family and our friends.

So we made plans to leave for Idaho after Justin got done with school on Friday (Sept. 21). We were able to meet up with my Grandma, who lives in Ammon, that night and share the good news with her. After our visit with her we went over to the Avon store to see if anyone was there. And apparently there was nothing better to do on a Friday night then to hang out at the Avon store. We visited with Karen and Jessica for about and hour and recounted our story of the past 2 months. After that we headed to Rexburg so we could eat at "the best Taco Bell ever" while we waited for Justin's parents to get done with the concert they went to. While we were at Taco Bell, Kendell joined us with some friends and we visited for a while with them before we headed to Sugar City for the night.

On Saturday (Sept. 22) Justin really wanted to go for a ride in the mountains in the Razor his parents just bought a couple months ago. It is safe enough and a smooth enough ride that I was able to go with everyone and not jostle baby around too much. Justin's parents, his brother Mike, Kendell, and his room mate Shaun came with us. It was such a fun ride and it was so beautiful up where all the leaves were changing and the crisp fall air was clean and not very smoky from the summer fires. When we got back from riding we made tin-foil dinners in the back yard and made s'mores for dessert. It was so delicious!! We watched "Ernest Scared Stupid' that night to start off the fall season. In my opinion that may be the stupidest show ever, and its about 45 minutes too long. But it was still fun.

On Sunday (Sept. 23) Justin and I accidentally slept in and didn't make it to church that day. We went to Rigby and visited my Aunt Janine and her family around 1:30 and told them of our crazy end of summer and our good news. She hadn't told her family that we were expecting so it was fun to see their excitement for us. And it was fun to be able to tell her the news myself. We had to go shortly after that to make it to lunch on time with Justin's parents. After lunch we stopped and told Grandma Birch our news and I think she had the best reaction, jumping up and down clapping in her chair and all sorts of merriment. From there we went back to Rigby to see Grandma and Grandpa Dayley. We always try and save our visits with them for last since their house is on the way out of town and we don't have to rush. We told them and they were both really excited. After our visit with them, we hit the road for home. We talked about how we wanted to announce it to our friends and had some good ideas but once I got home I didn't have the best week. I felt so gross and yucky most of the time that week I didn't feel like doing any of the ideas we had for the announcement to our friends. So finally I decided that I would just come out and say it and come up with something creative for when we find out if baby is a boy or a girl.

I'm so excited for this new little person and I'm so grateful everyone else is excited with us. It's going to be challenging, but we can all do hard things and look back and say it was worth it.