Being Authentic on Social Media

I read a blog post the other day about how women should just have a good attitude about pregnancy and it will be this happy, amazing journey, and how your husband deserves a happy wife for those 9 months. This girl went on to post all these pictures of her looking totally glamorous, working out, and just looking so unbelievably pretty, perfect, and happy in every picture!

As I read, I started feeling terrible about myself. I thought, "Man this girl is such a better wife than me. She is always in love with pregnancy and always looks so beautiful! I must be such a bad wife because I've had a really hard time with pregnancy and have not enjoyed it. And look how pretty she is in every photo! I rarely even get ready anymore...of course I can't feel my hands so that has something to do with it...but seriously how does this girl looks glamorous every single day? How is this girl's pregnancy and her life so perfect?!"

Then all of a sudden I just stopped and thought about it for a minute... I shared some of her post with Ryan and we just started laughing! This was ridiculous! I didn't even know this girl and she doesn't know me! How could she be influencing how I feel about myself and my life!?!

Social media and what we write/post has an influence on others, whether we realize it or not. I think it's healthy to post both the good AND the hard times to better represent what real life is. I'm not super good at posting regularly on Facebook or Instagram but when writing my blog I've often felt bad if I write negative details because I feel like maybe I'm complaining or coming across as negative or something. However, now I realize that I shouldn't feel bad about that. This is life! And life is not always perfect or easy and doesn't need to be portrayed or remembered that way.

Sometimes writing about the hard times is just what I need to remember/count my blessings. It's one thing to whine (which hey- sometimes I do) but it's another thing entirely to write your history and work/cry/laugh your way through it. There is always going to be good with the bad and it's OK and healthy to acknowledge that!

This morning my husband shared this quote that his sister Jennica shared with him and I just thought it was perfect! It really makes you want to think twice about what you post and what you see on social media.

"Elder David A. Bednar recently cautioned members to be authentic in the use of social media. A prominent thought leader, Arthur C. Brooks, has emphasized this point. He observes that when using social media, we tend to broadcast the smiling details of our lives but not the hard times at school or work. We portray an incomplete life—sometimes in a self-aggrandizing or fake way. We share this life, and then we consume the “almost exclusively … fake lives of [our] social media ‘friends.’” Brooks asserts, “How could it not make you feel worse to spend part of your time pretending to be happier than you are, and the other part of your time seeing how much happier others seem to be than you?”

It's too easy to look at social media and think how easy someone else has it, or how perfect life is for someone else. However, life isn't perfect for anyone. It's important to remember that. Rather than pretend it is, we can be grateful for the life we have been given and try to be more balanced about what we post on social media and more selective in who we choose to follow.

Pregnancy Update: 39.5 Weeks

Yep 39.5 weeks. (If you've been pregnant before you know that half of a week totally counts!) Our baby has been fully cooked for a couple of weeks now and could TECHNICALLY come any day. I have a feeling that she'll be coming late though. I'm not just saying that. I really, seriously feel that she is going to come late. Ry and I seem to be late everywhere we go so it's probably just inherited from us :) but I guess we'll have to wait and see. I would LOVE to be wrong here...

A few pregnancy updates are that I'm huge. AKA gargantuous. Also, I am still craving Jimmy Johns Veggie subs like crazy and also oranges. I am LOVING oranges.



They always say that the third trimester is the hardest but for me it was CAKE compared to the first and second trimesters. I was nauseous every single day of my pregnancy until 30 weeks. Then I only had nausea once in a while with throwing up only every couple of weeks as opposed to daily. However, the last few weeks have been horrible. I'm just being honest here. I have absolutely hated it. One of the biggest problems has been my carpal tunnel. My hands have become so swollen and my carpal tunnel gets really painful! It used to be that as long as I slept with my splints on my wrists I would be fine but the last couple of weeks I have had to wear them all day and all night just to deal with the pain.  At night my carpal tunnel has been waking me up every couple of hours at best. I just wake up to this burning feeling in my hands and sometimes the pain will keep me up for hours at a time.

During the day has been tough too. If I use my hands too much the pain will set in. Pretty much everything requires the use of my hands though so it gets really frustrating to constantly have to stop what I'm doing and wait for my hands to get feeling in them again. Even small things like clasping my bra, brushing my teeth, chopping an apple, doing my hair/makeup, all of these things have become difficult and painful. I have really had to rely on Ryan for so much. He has been my rock through everything and I could never say how much he has meant to me through all of this. We went out to eat and my hands were so completely numb that I was unable to use a fork and knife and Ryan actually had to cut my meat for me. I felt kind of stupid and kept hoping that no one was watching and thinking I was some prissy girl who wouldn't cut her own food. haha. I'm so grateful for Ryan though and all he does to help me!

Last week Ryan got the flu :( He was so sick and feeling horrible and had to go back to school and start his new classes feeling poorly. I felt so bad for him. I thought I had lucked out and not gotten it because I had gotten a flu shot...but sure enough it came around to me too. I have been feeling horrible all week. The worst was the body aches and night sweats. I was sleeping around 3-4 hours a night AT BEST. Finally, towards the end of the week I just broke down and balled. I was so exhausted and in so much pain. Ryan had already given me a priesthood blessing a few days earlier and as I sat there and cried he just hugged me and asked if I wanted another one and I just nodded-I couldn't even get out the words. It meant so much to me to have him there, supporting me and comforting me. That priesthood blessing really did give me strength and comfort. It hasn't made the pain go away but I feel that Heavenly Father is helping me to get through it.

Later that night as I lie in bed I felt so sorry for myself. I had been sick pretty much my whole pregnancy. I was yearning for my healthy, normal, energized self. I had carpal tunnel so bad that it felt like my hands had been run over and crushed by a truck, I was so congested and sick I could not even breathe, my head hurt, I had pressure/pain in my ears, my throat hurt, my back hurt, my hips hurt. UGH I was just feeling like a miserable human being. and then this happened...

Without saying anything, Ryan came and sat on the edge of the bed and just started rubbing my feet to help me relax and try to help me fall asleep. All of a sudden I started to silently cry and cry and cry. I looked down at my sweet husband and just silently prayed to God and thanked him for giving me such a wonderful man. All of a sudden, despite the discomfort and pain, I just felt LUCKY. I have such a wonderful husband and we are having a baby we created together who will be joining our family so soon. I love my Ryan with all of my heart.

I secretly snapped this picture of Ryan while he was rubbing my feet. Probably my favorite picture of him of all time.
I just see and feel so much love when I look at this picture. I'm a very lucky woman.

Sometimes icing my hands/wrists helps the pain!

Don't be jealous. I know I should be a hand model :) You can't tell as much in the picture
but my fingers are so swollen. They are seriously like sausagey man hands. 

My wedding ring won't even fit on my pinky! My hands are so, so swollen! It's bad.

This. hah this is pretty much what pregnancy has looked like for me the last few weeks :) 

On a happier note, my friend Jessica Benscotter is an amazing photographer and volunteered to take some maternity pictures for us! It was so sweet of her! Here are some of our favorites so far. This is how I would like to remember pregnancy... haha this was at the happiest/best time of my pregnancy. I was pretty much just getting over nausea and my carpal tunnel hadn't hit yet. I'm about 30 or 31 weeks in these photos...I can't remember exactly. Love the pictures though!

2015 Updates

It's 2015!! Hallelujah! Our baby is almost here and I am ALMOST DONE being pregnant!! YAY!!!!!

Here are some updates since the start of 2015.

I am done nannying. I really loved the kids and the family I nannied. They are such awesome people and the kids were really fun and entertaining. Once the new year came, I stopped working and it's been nice to have the last couple of weeks to prepare for our baby! I will definitely miss those kids though! I love them a lot but am excited to get my own kid here :)

My little Deya friend. Such a cute girl! She would run to me, calling my name every morning
 when I walked in the door and she had the BIGGEST crush on Ryan. Such a cutie! 

Dominic, Dylan, Deya and I. These kids are so awesome. Very energetic and obedient. The only time they would fight was over who got to do the dishes! haha they seriously would argue over that. They loved helping me! 

For New Year's Eve Ryan and I stayed home in our cozy sweats/pajamas and watched a movie. Back when we moved to California from Indiana, we listened to the audiobook of "The Maze Runner." We had heard how amazing it was and downloaded it for the long drive. Oh my gosh. WORST book EVER. So poorly written! It was almost torture to listen to it. We ended up making fun of the writing most of the time. It does have an intriguing plot line though so we finished the audiobook and have been looking forward to seeing the movie. We rented the movie on New Years and holy cow it was way better than the book! I still fell asleep (oops! :) I'll blame pregnancy for being tired).  The parts I saw were good though :) and Ryan seemed to like the movie too. It wasn't our favorite but much much better than the book and an entertaining movie. We toasted our sparkling cider at midnight and had some nice smooches too :)

Ryan had a good long break off of school, about a month! It was so much fun to be together all day everyday. We really are best friends so we had a blast. I could never get sick of him. I wish we could spend ALL day EVERY day together! We watched Arrow a lot on Netflix and spent a lot of time getting ready for our baby. Ry put together the baby swing, carseat/stroller, and I organized all of the baby stuff! We did some cleaning and just getting last minute things ready for our little girl's arrival.

We also bought a new car! Ryan's current car is a silver Chevy Malibu. It has seriously become a money pit and is starting to fall apart. Just last week we found out that the steering wheel shaft needs to be replaced and it's deemed "dangerous to drive" until repaired. We had to take it into the dealer to get THREE factory recalls fixed. Luckily, all of that is paid for by Chevy but the steering wheel problem is something we will have to fix on our own. They quoted the repair for $1100!!! The blue book value of the car is only $2200 so that's a ludicrous amount of money to put into the car right now. However, we really can't get anything out of the car unless we repair it so we are currently shopping around now for a cheaper repair estimate. Then we will get rid of it as soon as we can! :)

This is hilarious but our new car also happens to be a silver Chevy Malibu! ha it's a 2011 though and only has about 50,000 miles so it's in way better shape and we got an amazing deal on it! It really came at a great time considering that Ryan's car is currently un-drivable. Since we bought it through the church/my Dad, the car was in Utah. My little brother Roah was so nice and volunteered to drive it out here for us! He came out and stayed with us a couple of days and then we flew him back home. It was great to see him and fun to get our new car here.

We took Roah to Amish country. Usually there's a lot of fun stuff to do but for some reason EVERYTHING was closed. We went to Middlebury and our favorite place, Rise-n-Roll, was closed!  Then we went to Shipshewanna and pretty much everything was closed there so we went out to Nappanee and Rise-n-Roll was closed out there too! Bummer! We tried. 

We took Roah to an Irish pub for an Irish dinner. It was fun. This place is really popular around here.

I love my Notre Damer!

In Chicago at our favorite place! Giordano's!  

Giordano's is the BEST place for Chicago deep dish pizza! 

Ryan and I are excited to head into 2015! We have our baby girl coming any day now, Ryan is graduating from Notre Dame in the Spring, and then this summer we are moving to the Bay Area for Ryan to start his new job at Salesforce! Lots of changes and lots to look forward to. Happy New Year!

Baby Showers

I just realized I never blogged about all of my baby showers! I already blogged about our trip to Utah and the wonderful baby shower I had out there. But I haven't blogged about the others! I have been so lucky to have been showered with so much love and so many fun gifts at several baby showers! It's been a lot of fun.

The first shower was a group shower for our ward. There are four of us that are all due within a few weeks of each other so our friends Miriam and Mary-Elizabeth threw us a joint baby shower. It was a lot of fun. One of my favorite parts was that they asked all of the husbands to write a letter to their wife about why they think she'll be a good mother. Of course I am biased but I thought my letter from Ryan was the best! :) It meant a lot to me and was so sweet! He is gonna be a wonderful father. Since the shower was for so many of us they took cash and split it up between all of us so it was nice to use it to get what we needed. I used it towards a baby monitor and a diaper bag.

All of us girls and our prego bellies

From left to right- Janna was due mid January? and just had her baby! Andrea was due beginning of Jan
 and also had her baby. I'm due Jan 22 obviously still waiting :) and Janelle is due in mid February.

Here's my "diaper bag" I picked out. More like a really cute, bigger purse. I love it!

My family threw a beautiful shower for me when I was in Utah over Thanksgiving break. It was so much fun to see everyone. And we were definitely showered with a bunch of cute gifts!

I already blogged about this shower. You can read more about it here.

Back in South Bend a few of my friends threw a shower for me. Jessica Benscoter and Monica Henry have husbands in Ryan's business program and we have all become great friends! We do lots of dinner groups together and Jessica is a photographer and has helped me a ton with photography and has been such an incredible friend. I seriously love these girls so much! They offered to throw this shower for me. We had a great time. It included a surprise interview from Ryan. They had asked him all sorts of fun questions. For example, what will baby's first word be? What will she do that most terrifies you? How old will she be when she goes on her first date? What traits do you hope she gets from each of you? They read each question to me and asked for my response and then read Ryan's responses. Ryan's answers were really funny--a lot of them had to do with being an over-protective dad and how he's scared for her to date and how he will have a shotgun ready and be sure to get the boy's social security number :) Overall, the shower was a lot of fun. I'm lucky to have these girls as friends!

These are some of my amazing South Bend friends. Love these girls!

From Left to Right: Dani, Jane, Denise, Me, Jessica, Monica

I was teaching early-morning seminary in the fall. My class was really excited for me to have a baby, and the teacher that I co-taught with asked if they could throw a baby shower for me. So one early morning, I headed to class and they had this cute shower all set up for me.

My seminary kids decorated it so cute.

One of the yummy treats at the shower made by a seminary student!

We played a game where everyone got some salt dough and everyone had to create what my baby will look like.
Some of them were pretty ugly haha :) This one was so cute. It was the winner.

I wasn't sure that I was going to have a baby shower since I've been living so far away from home while I've been pregnant. Needless to say, I was really surprised by the outpouring of friendship and love I have received out here! I am so grateful for all the people who have been so nice and generous and have really helped us get a great start with our baby. I am so lucky to have all the friends and the ward family that we have out here. We were definitely showered with a lot of love and support!

Merry Christmas 2014!

Merry Christmas!

Our Christmas was so nice! We definitely missed seeing our families and spending the holiday with them but we had a nice time celebrating and being together.

On Christmas Eve we watched The Grinch and cooked some yummy dinner and had our friends Wes and Anna over for Christmas dinner. I'm so mad I didn't capture a picture of it! It was just so picture perfect and yummy. I made a honey baked ham (thanks to Costco for the ham and my mom for the extra glaze recipe). I also made some yummy mashed potatoes. Anna made fabulous rolls, veggies and pumpkin pie! We also celebrated with apple cider and homemade Wassail. Last Christmas I got Grandma Van's recipe and we finally made it. It was yummy!

After dinner we watched the movie Elf. Never gets old :) Then Wes and Anna took off and we skyped Ryan's family so we could watch the family talent show. The nieces' and nephews' talents were all so cute! It definitely made us miss everyone. The adults' talents were also pretty hilarious :) It's a fun family tradition that Ryan's family does. After chatting with Ry's fam we got each others stockings ready and headed to bed.

A screen shot of Karli and Danny's awesome talent :)

Addie was so cute dancing and twirling to "Let it Go." We miss her!

Christmas morning we had quiche, oranges, and wassail for breakfast. Then we read the Christmas story in the Bible and opened our stockings and presents. We just took our sweet time and enjoyed being together and dragging it out throughout the day.

36 weeks pregnant on Christmas morning!

After presents we had leftovers from Christmas Eve dinner and called our families to wish them a Merry Christmas. It will be fun to live closer to our families next Christmas so we can hopefully be with them for the holidays! Later we watched Home Alone and Ryan's family favorite, Arthur's Perfect Christmas haha :)

Christmas was wonderful and it was so fun to think that next Christmas we will have an almost one year old!! So crazy! Usually, once Christmas is over it's so sad because the "most wonderful time of the year" is over. However, this year...it wasn't so sad. In fact I was kind of excited! Not that Christmas was over but to think about what was lying not so far ahead! Now that Christmas is over we have our daughter coming in less than a month! The best Christmas present is coming in just a few weeks :)

So in love with this man.

Happy 27th Bday to me!

I had a great, happy 27th Birthday! Ryan is the greatest husband ever and always spoils me rotten on my birthday. It's pretty fun :)

I had to work but Ryan came over around lunchtime and brought me my favorite meal that I crave on a daily basis in my pregnancy... Jimmy Johns! I could seriously eat one of their veggie subs EVERY day. The last few months of my pregnancy it has been my favorite thing in the world.

The kids I nanny were looking forward to Ryan coming over all day! We all had lunch and then decorated cupcakes that Ryan brought over. Then we just played games and Ryan stayed for several hours to keep me company. It was so sweet of him and the kids seriously LOVED Ryan. Especially Deya. She has the biggest crush on him now! It's pretty hilarious how big her crush is! Although I can't blame her ;)

Decorating cupcakes with Dominic and Deya. Dylan was still at school but decorated some when he got home.

I just LOVE this little girl. Such a cutie!

After work, I came home to a very clean house with all my b-day presents wrapped and under our Christmas tree. Ry also had bought me a beautiful poinsettia and wrote me a sweet note.



We got ready and headed out to dinner at our most favorite restaurant, Corndance! We seriously love that place!

My Mom gave me this necklace. I opened it before we went out to dinner so I got to wear it out.
It's so special to me! The three hearts symbolize Ryan, Me, and the tiny heart is for our little baby coming so soon!
I'm soooo excited for us to become a family of three! I can't wait for our baby girl's arrival! :)

Out to dinner at Corndance

We have to get this appetizer every time we go to Corndance, spinach artichoke dip. It is AMAZING!!!!

I got my fave, pear ravioli and a yummy salad

Ry got the pork chop- also super yummy! 

We also tried their mac and cheese. Mmmmm! So much amazing food!

 After dinner, we headed home and I got to have my yummy b-day dessert, German chocolate brownies, (homemade by Ryan) and Neapolitan ice cream. Then I got to open all my b-day presents. It was a very nice day! Everyone made me feel very loved! 

Ryan hates coconut so I told him to split it and make sure to put whatever he wanted on his half.
He picked chocolate caramel. Mine was definitely the better half :) I LOVE coconut!

My 27th b-day was wonderful! I'm so grateful to my husband and my wonderful family and friends who made me feel so loved!