A Bun in the Oven

Today I made these really good dinner rolls, and I thought it'd be fun to share the recipe with everyone.

Hahah, just kidding!! Yes, I'm pregnant! :) And I won't give you that recipe until you're older. But, we think the baby should be coming in April. :) That means Avery and Baby will be 23 months apart. Oh, and this post has zero pictures. Sorry!

We're so excited, and I was a little nervous about getting uber-sick with this pregnancy like I did with Avery. As it turns out, I don't think I'm as sick as I was last time. But, I'm pretty darn sick and have been in bed for the last 2 weeks, but my Mom has been here taking care of me and Avery every day! She did this for my last pregnancy, too! She's such an angel. I think Avery wears her out because she's so active now and gets in to EVERYTHING. But, my mom is a trooper and has been such a blessing. Thanks mom!!!


Nathan's parents got here this evening and will be here for the next two weeks, too. We'll be having the Richardson family reunion in a week and a half, and we get to host it at our house (because now we actually have a place big enough to host it!). We'll have 25 people here for 4 days! We can't wait!

Food, Glorious, Food!
I also had a wonderful experience tonight. It's funny that being pregnant makes food taste either 10 times worse or 10 times better. Well, we went to one of Nathan's book design clients' house in Salt Lake and he had garden tomatoes and honey comb fresh from the hive (which I had never had before). I felt like puking the whole drive up to Salt Lake, but when I got there and ate that food, it was sooo heavenly. I haven't been able to eat tomatoes since I've been pregnant, but these garden tomatoes tasted better than any garden tomatoes I'd ever had before. And, amazingly, I didn't feel like throwing up for the next 30 minutes after I ate them! I also decided that I want to have bees on our future property so we can eat fresh honeycomb. It just dissolves in your mouth. Yum.

Anyway, I spend 90% of my day thinking about food, and didn't have much to write about for this post, but heck, food's always an easy topic when you're preggo!

Piano Tuning
In other non-food related news, one of the men in our congregation at church is a piano tuner (he teaches at BYU and tunes all their pianos, too). He was teaching a 6-week course on piano tuning, and asked me if I was interested in taking it because one of his students dropped out after the first class. The only downside is that it is each Saturday from 8:00 am to 10:00 am; two hours!!! Ugh. Nathan was kind enough to come with me and make a Jamba Juice run in the middle of class for me. Despite the early hours, it's been really fun, and much more challenging than I thought.

I was surprised to find that you don't need to have a "good ear" for pitch if you want to tune pianos. All you really need to listen to the beating between strings and intervals. Let me give you an example of some of the stuff we have to memorize before next week. This should be fun more my music major friends to read.

Equal Temperament intervals
Wide intervals: 3rd, 6th, 4th
Narrow: 5th, m3rd
Pure and/or slow beating intervals: Unison, octave, 4th, 5th
Fast: 3rd, 6th

Checking a Note with a 5th
This is the 6th - 10th, so M6th > M10th (M6th beats faster than the M10th). A major 6th below the bottom note of a 5th makes a M10th with the upper note of the 5th. If the M6th is faster than the M10th, then the 5th will be narrow as required in equal temperament. All 5ths in the Temperament area should be on the narrow side of pure but almost with out beats.


There's basically a bijillion of these rules. He says we need to practice these on our own pianos at least an hour a day. Our swamp cooler has made our piano so out of tune because of the humidity in a matter of two months. So, I get to practice and make it really out of tune before learning how to tune it back to normal.

Nathan's First Expo Class
Also next week is another family history expo in Sandy. Because I won't be able to help him out with the booth as much, we're getting a hotel next to the expo center so I have a home base to go lay down/throw up. :) That's exciting because I don't think we've stayed in a hotel room since our honeymoon! Too bad it's during a time when I feel icky. :( Oh, well. It'll be interesting doing this while I'm sick, but Nathan is presenting at this one on Automatic Stylesheets in Word, and he's pretty excited. (See the most recent post on www.richardsondesign.org for the juicy details)

Well, that's about it. I can't wait to update with pics from the reunion! Mmmm...I'm already thinking about the food! :)

Avery is Walking!..and More Vacation

As a continuation of our vacation travels update, we also went to Las Vegas and Arizona.

Vegas
We went to the venetian, which was pretty darn cool. I wonder how much the Gondola singers get paid. What a cool job that'd be.


This floor does some funky things with my eyes:


We went to this fun store with a bunch of costumes and masks. The costume on display was a man's suit and woman's dress for $5,000 each. Pocket change, right? It was this beautiful, ornate, fancy-looking, white material with gold trim for both costumes. The man's costume even came with a cool top hat. But, we weren't allowed to take a picture of it, so we didn't.

Here's a really cool dress in the shop. You get the idea, eh? They had a bunch of them.




The Venetian


We went over the Hoover Dam, too. They're in the middle of constructing a new bridge for traffic, and here you can see the big concrete bridge in the background. It's much larger up-close. From what I heard, the longest legs on the bridge are the length of a football field.


Arizona
In Arizona, we went to visit our friend Dana, who used to be a nun during her teenage years in a Buddhist temple! She showed us her wooden fish (a hollow block) that she rhythmically taps on with a mallet during meditation as she recites sutras. The bell is to signal the end of meditation. Avery loved it!


Dana's mom, who only speaks Chinese, enjoyed babbling with Avery on the phone while Avery played with the Wooden Fish.


Dana also took us to a meditation center that she goes to and we got to meet some really nice people. We even got to participate in a session.


Our Survival-of-the-Fittest Baby
Before we headed back to Utah, we stopped at a grocery store to get some produce. I put the bag of produce in the back seat, next to Avery. After we had been on the road for about an hour, she got a little fussy, so I was about to go back and feed her, but then she stopped, so I just stayed in the front seat. However, when I got out to fill up with gas, and checked on her, she had some red stuff all over her face and clothes. As I looked closer, I saw the little core of a tomato. She had pulled the bag up to her lap, got the tomato out, and eaten it like an apple! It was so funny!

I decided to move the rest of the edible produce away from her, except for the bananas, because she didn't know how to peel them. Again, about another hour later, she got a little fussy, but then stopped. She only had drunk a few cups of milk thus far. Well, when we pulled up to our driveway, imagine our surprise when we saw this:



I have no doubt now that if we lost her in the jungle, she'd have a pretty good chance of surviving. :)

She also started walking last week! She has been able to stand on her own for a month or two now, but refused to walk without holding on to something. One afternoon last week, I set her down to get something, and she was just standing there. I offered my hand to her about a foot in front of her, and she took some steps to grab it. I moved back further and further until I ran into the wall! She took like 20 steps all at once!

This video is about 1 minute after she first walked up in our bedroom. I had to bring her downstairs to show Nathan.