Baby Sofia eating her arm

My baby looks like Mr. Magoo!

Sofia's Baby Blessing

Bath time!

Mas fotos de Sofia

Black and White Pictures Taken by Tara

Algunas fotos!!

More American Idol

American Idol Concert

Wow! I am actually writing something on my blog. It is a miracle! I'm doing this for my friend Julie so that she can have a taste of the American Idol Concert even though she can't go. Te quiero mucho Julita! First off is Ramiele! Now her video! Sorry everything is so little and fuzzy. We were far away!I'm going to try posting this and see if it even works. Then I will upload more later. I just realized that it is almost time for my dr appointment. I am dreading the pelvic exam, what if it's today?? Ahhhh!!!!

I've been waiting since 1:30 pm for this video to upload and it is now 7:30 and I give up!!

Ana, did you eat a gallon of ice cream or is that a baby in your belly?

The day has finally arrived!! I can finally say I am PREGNANT!!! Yaaaayyyyyy!!!!!This all happened on Saturday morning, November 17th, 2007. A day that will live in infamy! I peed on the first stick and started to cry because I just couldn't believe it. Then I peed on the second stick for confirmation and I still couldn't believe it and then I was sobbing. So I went upstairs and told my mom and Chiquis and they thought someone had died because I was crying so much!

Then we started taking pictures of everything and getting ready to go to Anna Michelle's wedding. I felt like I was in limbo because without a blood test to confirm it, it didn't really seem real.

Then my dad and abuelita came over to look at the preg tests and we were all so happy and excited! Here is my due date ticker for an expected July 29 delivery. Woo hoo!!!!

The big news!!!

"The Committee of Bar Examiners of the State Bar of California is delighted to report that you have achieved a passing score on the July 2007 administration of the California Bar Examination administration of the California Bar Examination. Congratulations; you may justly be proud of your achievement."
They even have fancy wording on the passing letter! Sheesh! Well we are justly proud!! We found out at 6:00 p.m. on Friday Nov 16th and what a relief it was! I knew all along he would do it! He is the smartest of the bunch. :) It reminds me of how tough and crazy those three days of tests were in Sacramento. It seemed so far away at the time but now it seems to have passed quickly. Thanks for everyone's prayers and support!

My recent culinary delights

This picture is of a Strawberry Cream Cake I made for my grandmother's birthday. I had bought a huge case of luscious strawberries weeks before and when it came time to make the cake I found that many of the strawberries had gone bad. Very bad. So I had to gingerly pick out the edible ones and throw away about half of the case. It was soooo sad. Especially because strawberries are so expensive!

This picture is Chicken with Goat Cheese and Basil accompanied by Couscous with toasted pine nuts. Perhaps the most delicious thing I have ever created!! Thank you Barefoot Contessa!! It is very easy and quite impressive. If anyone would like me to post this recipe on the blog let me know please. That is if anyone is reading anymore . . . (I feel sheepish, baaaahh)

This is me with my culinary art. Enjoy!

The two week wait is horrible!

Today is Wednesday and I am supposed to test on Saturday. It is still so far away! And J gets his bar results on Friday. I really hope it is good news all around. I am so horribly impatient. And everyone is pregnant all around me! Ay!

Updates

It has been a very long time since I've posted and I am very sorry! My reservoir of guilt is already enormous and I love to add on to it! J is feeling a little better at the job but basically still hates it. He is excited about the job he applied for because they sent him a letter requesting transcripts for his nomination to go forward. That is exciting! My class is going well, most of them are hard workers and there are a few that are so dependable that it makes it easy to love them. Flamenco dancing is really fun. The girl in my class, Natalie, is really nice and just dropped the "three months pregnant" bomb on me two weeks ago. We went on a double date with husbands to a dinner/show with flamenco music and dancing. It was so expensive and the dancing ended up being pretty mediocre. But we had fun and got to know each other better. Her husband loves to hunt and has lots of African animals mounted on his walls. On his most recent hunt in Africa he brought home a zebra. J feels that killing a zebra is like killing a horse except a more special rare horse. Pobre zebrita! The highlight of the night was when the sexy 50 something drunk lady started dancing her heart out on the stage. They asked for volunteers to come up and dance and this lady when wild, stomping her feet and whooshing her dress around in a passionate fashion. It was very very funny. We just stared for a little while, then we started clapping and cheering. I love to clap really loud, it makes me laugh for some reason. So there we were clapping cleverly while sexy lady danced daringly!

I'm watching a lot of T.V. I won't comment on this, whether good or bad, I'll just present the facts.

Monday: Dancing with the Stars (I love Julianne and Helio), Chuck, Heroes (Peter is suddenly very good looking!).

Tuesday: Dancing with the Stars, The Biggest Loser, and House (today he chooses new interns!)

Wednesday: Pushing Daisies (I'm really excited about this one!) and Bionic Woman (which I haven't seen yet, I'm still deciding whether to watch or not)

Thursday: This night is reserved for one special show - THE OFFICE! (I expected more JAM from the first episode of the season but ni modo)

Friday: Ghost Whisperer (I can't believe that I watch it either) and Moonlight (new show about a vampire private investigator!) YAY!

What next? Health insurance problems, infertility dilemmas, our entire future hanging in the balance . . .

One Semester of Spanish Spanish Love Song

This is exactly what goes on in a beginning Spanish college class!

Tombola!

I have recently discovered Marisol!! I love her! And I love this song! The video is fantastic and you can watch the whole Tombola movie on Youtube. Plus she has a ton of movies more to watch :)

Watch Justin and I do the Charleston!!

Star in Your Own JibJab! It's Free!It is hysterical!! Turn the volume up to hear the music!

I love to read!

My library website has a great feature that lets you make a list of all the books you would like to read in the future and then gives you the option of requesting them electronically. Then you will be notified via email when your books are ready to be picked up. It's great!! So I am adding here the books I have recently read, with some extra comments. This week is Harry Potter week so I have planned to read one Harry Potter book per day until the grand release! I read HP 1 on Saturday and I will read HP 2 today. One more bit of news . . . yesterday we went to Bakersfield to see my cousin Diego who is back from Iraq! It was so wonderful to see him and he looked great. He is alive, which is the most important thing of all! It was really good to see him and we met his little girlfriend Natalie. I quizzed Justin with his flashcards all the way there and back. He is worried! By this time next week we will be driving to Sacramento and on to our destiny! More about that later.

1. Jenna Starborn by Sharon Shinn. It is basically the story of Jane Eyre but set in a futuristic space setting. It sounded great to me and I was really excited to read it. I liked it okay but Jane Eyre is better of course!

2. The Grand Tour or The Purloined Coronation Regalia. It is the second tale in the lives of Cecy and Kate, the magical cousins I have come to love. They are on their honeymoon doing a tour of all of Europe and solving magical mysteries all the way there. I love the idea of honeymoons across Europe!

3. Darcy's Story by Janet Aylmer. From reading the description of the book I was desperate to read it. It is Pride and Prejudice told from Darcy's perspective, which in the original novel is almost non-existing. Naturally I was quite piqued! However, I perhaps had too high expectations because it ended up being very close to disappointing. Let me know what you all think about it.

4. Old Friends and New Fancies by Sybil G. Brinton. It is the first Jane Austen sequel ever created. Written in 1913, I felt the language was closest to the original than any of the other PP offshoots that I've read so far. The most intriguing part of this book is that it pulls together the characters from all six Jane Austen novels into one story. It might have been bad but I really liked it. It was a great read for me!

5. Mr. Darcy's Daughters by Elizabeth Aston. I loved this book!! It was great! Did it depend heavily on the same PP formula that Jane Austen made so famous? Yes of course it did, but I still loved it. The Darcys have 5 unmarried daughters and wreak havoc all over London. Very exciting to read!

6. The Mislaid Magician or Ten Years Later by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. Kate and Cecy now have a bunch of magical kids and more adventures. It was a little convoluted but I still loved it!

7. Deep Waters or Many Waters by Meredith Ann Pierce (I can't remember the name now). It was a compilation of short stories that I read a while ago but had forgotten to put on this list. It was okay, I read it fine, but the fact that I had forgotten about it tells you I didn't really like it all that much.

Thanks for reading, let me know what you think!

It's almost Harry Potter time!!

Moving!

Moving was tough even though we only had a small apartment worth of stuff. Justin had to be in Fresno 2 weeks before I would be done with work so we had to do all the loading of the truck the Monday after his graduation. Those were really busy days! I had lots of help though. Jessica was nice enough to come help me with the glass stuff even with her baby and new job. I had help cleaning: Julie, Luz, Piedad, Erika, Alba. And yet I still couldn't get it all done. The day I had to turn in the keys and have the inspection was the same day I was going to Salt Lake and leave Ogden forever. It was literally the worst day of my life. I was super behind because the day before had been my last day of work and I was there until about 7:30 p.m. trying to finish cleaning out my office. So Friday morning I got up really early to finish what was left. I thought it was just a little but it turned out to be so much work. I kept finding drawers with stuff still inside, and I didn't have anywhere to put the suitcases and other things I was taking with me. Then the worst of it was the hoarder in me that just couldn't throw any useful things away. Poor poor Julie was my savior and the savior of my stuff that hopefully can be put to good use by someone in Ogden. We went from house to house delivering vacuums, microwaves, running errands and a thousand other things that I hadn't done yet because I didn't have a car. I forgot to mention that! The last week and a half I had no car which was okay in the beginning but then disastrous in the end! I had so many things I wanted to give away but no way to get them to the people who needed them, who unfortunately also had no transportation to my house either!
Now for the piece de resistance (that is supposed to be French but it just looks like bad English!) . . . As I was helping someone from the branch, that had come to pick up a desk that day, down the three flights of stairs, it crumpled in our very hands and fell right apart! The pull-out shelf for the keyboard flew out with increasing velocity and the edge of it landed right on my pinky toe. Oh the pain! The terrific, colossal pain! After he left I started crying and crying, wondering how I would ever finish it all. I called Hermana Milla and left a message telling her I needed help desperately. Where were my visiting teachers? Was the Spirit prompting them to come help me but they were burning lunch or packing meat so busily that they couldn't come? Anyway, I continued my work between sobs, going up and down the stairs with trash and more trash and my foot throbbing. By the time Julie came I was a little more composed but within 5 minutes I had started crying all over again. Talk about stress! Nobody could get pregnant this way! The apartment lady came to inspect everything and of course busily scribbled notes of things that they would deduct from our deposit after making us pay almost a whole extra month's rent!! Ahhhh! Sure enough we just received the check and they gave us $78.00 out of $200!!!!! What a rip-off! They totally cheated us and they'll do it again and again to other unsuspecting tenants I know! It is all part of their evil plan! So frustrating! Oh well. That's life, la la la la la la. Or asi es la vida, a veces triste a veces color rosa. Well, I'm off to continue my present project known as "Organizing pictures so they aren't destroyed by heat and dust in the garage". Good news . . . I have been called as secretary in the Primary. I'm excited! I get to sing all the songs but with a lot less responsibility than before! Hooray! Beijinhos a todos! Ate logo!