Bump-It

I swore I wouldn't do any bump pictures, but I guess maybe I'll want a few for posterity. I'll probably just offer up one each trimester. I'm already behind, since I'm now two weeks into my second. So here's the bump at a little over 14 weeks! (It's in my work out clothes cause that's when it's the most apparent)

Thank You Notes

Dear Peak ENT,
Thank you for my very generous Christmas bonus. I like working for you.

Dear New York,
Thank you for existing so we can visit you in February (yes, we have decided to come see you). But please warm up a tiny little bit before we get there, and have a delicious cupcake and a good Broadway show ready for our arrival.

Dear Aust,
Thank you for rubbing the cramp out of my left foot last night, even though I was being really whiny. And for always letting me watch both hours of Biggest Loser. And for bringing me cold water in my favorite "S" cup all the time. And thanks for insisting that I don't look pregnant at all yet.

Dear Corolla,
I just love you. Please don't ever die. You are so cute and are so nice to me when I have to drive a lot for work.

Dear J,
Thanks for always wanting to hang out with me and seeing movies with me that no one else will want to see. And I'll always say thanks for sharing Jam at the Adelaide in London with me. Best ever.

Dear Pandora,
My Coldplay station has been divine today. Thank you for being so intuitive about exactly what I need to hear.

Dear Utah,
Thank you for not snowing very much at all this year. And for even being kind of warm.

Dear Baby,
Thank you for not giving me any morning sickness at all. You are already so well-behaved. And happy 14th week Birthday today. We'll see you in just 26 more! =)

Dear Sis,
Thanks for being my BFF since birth. And for always giving me good hair.

Shanna-isms

Last night Siara and I were reminiscing about some people of our past and couldn't remember someone's name, so we dug into my hope chest to find a middle school yearbook to solve the dilemma.

During the rummaging I unearthed my many journals that I've kept over the years. When I say many I mean like 12 full books. I was a pretty avid record keeper in my days. We couldn't resist, and cracked open a few to hear what I had to say. The high school ones are undoubtedly hilarious. Page after page of I love this boy, no it's that boy, I'm so mad at this friend, I love my friends so much I would die without them, my family doesn't understand me, I never want to leave home I love my family so much. You know. Average teenage woes.

But the real gem is from 1992, barely 5 year old Shanna, not even in Kindergarten yet and my mom would dictate whatever I asked her to write for me. Within a year or two that journal morphed into me writing by myself, and that's where the quotes really get just unbelievable. So I'll share a few excerpts in the blog here for all to enjoy. And just to bear my witness of the joy of keeping journals!


March 24, 1992
"I was mad because I wanted to color in the book Siara had-even though she gave me a new one to color in myself. So Mom swatted my bottom and had me to go my room and think about being thankful for what I have."


I think my mom may have taken some liberties with that entry. And also the one where she wrote on February 19, 1993 "I pouted and cried all morning because I got up too early and I was grumpy." hahaha

Thank you for keeping my records accurate, Mom. =)

Public Poll

Austin and I are considering a little trip to New York in February over Valentine's Day. I know, as Jess said, "So Sleepless in Seattle"! We wanted to take another trip before baby comes, and we've both always wanted to go to New York. Plane tickets are pretty inexpensive, and we found a good deal on a hotel.
Our moral dilemma is obviously that we are about to have a baby, and should we spend the money? We think it would be worthwhile and a big stress relief to be able to go somewhere like that for a weekend. But then our financially responsible side tells us to just put more money away for the babes.

So we need you to help us decide.

What do you think??

Today we are especially thankful for....

Baby Keaton #1

12 weeks along today

Healthy heartbeat--140 BPM

Scheduled to arrive: June 2011



And we couldn't be happier!

An October Summary

Here's what happened during my favorite month of the year.

I got a haircut















We went to North Carolina.

We visited Elizabeth City





















































Ate good Southern food, including Captain Bob's





























Went to Hillridge Farms to look at pumpkins



















We picked pecans at the park where Kyle works







































































Then we came home in time to pick our own pumpkins from the garden




















































I got a sewing machine for my birthday and made us some new pillows

Before














After















And we canned peaches for the first time


































What did your October look like??

Wishy Washy

Okay I'm dumb and I've now made my blog public again. I guess I just completely stopped blogging when it was private, and even I hate having to login to my blog if I wanna just look at it. =) So for now, it is public again.

Probably temporarily, next time I'll make a better effort.

Facebook is still out of our lives.

The most wonderful time of the year

I love October.

General Conference, my Birthday, Halloween, colorful leaves on the trees, crisp Fall weather, scarves and boots, Honeycrisp apples, I love it all.

Ashton gave me my first Birthday/Halloween present of the season today, and I'm pretty much
ecstatic about it.

A darling Halloween quilt!!














Yesterday I also got a little early Birthday treat in the mail. I used to be moderately anti-Uggs, but when a glitch in the Nordstrom computer made these $40 instead of $140, how could I not get them??



















My plans for the afternoon include sweatpants, those incredibly comfy boots, and my new quilt, on the couch watching conference.

There may or may not be ice cream involved as well.

Happy Fall everyone!!

Sometimes....

....you just need a little privacy.
Lately I've been feeling the need to stop making my entire life accessible to the world.
Hence the private blog.
And we've also gotten off of Facebook.
Maybe this is just a phase. But it already feels so freeing. I don't feel the need to impress some sort of an anonymous audience somewhere in the wasteland that is the internet.
And facebook....ugh. What a waste of time. I can think of at least 87 more productive things I could be doing other than browsing facebook. At least.
So if you are reading this, thanks for wanting to read my blog enough to log in each time.
I'll try and make it worth your while.

I'd like you to meet...

Norah Ashley Gale
8 lbs 9 oz 20 inches long
Born September 14, 2010
Scott and Nicole, I hope you don't mind me sharing these. She's just too darling to keep to myself!

Favorite Things: Being an Aunt

Today I get to become an aunt twice over.
I cannot wait.
It's hard to even describe how much I love little Bailey, and I can't wait to fall in love with this new little doll.
Hopefully pictures to come soon!

Favorite Things: Gale Family Brownies

There is no better Sunday night Family Home Evening treat than Gale family brownies. We've been making these since we were old enough to climb on a chair and hold a mixing spoon. The page in the original recipe book is completely covered with brown batter. I made some Sunday for family dinner at the Christensen's.


































Just try and not lick that bowl...it's impossible. Yummm.















And I suppose I can share the secret recipe. For anyone who has never tried homemade brownies, or thinks they only come from a box (like my darling Ashton =), these are the easiest thing you will ever make.

Gale Family Favorite Brownies
1 cup butter
1/3 cup cocoa
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1 1/2 cups flour
1 t. vanilla

Beat butter, cocoa, sugar and eggs until fluffy. Beat in flour and vanilla. Pour into 9x11 pan. Bake at 350 for 30-35 minutes.
You can add walnuts or chopped caramels or chocolate chips or even put marshmallows on top before you bake it. We always particularly enjoyed them with powdered sugar on top.

Favorite Things: Real Salt Lake games

Siara and Tyler are in love with Real Salt Lake and have season tickets, so we've joined them for a few games this season and absolutely love it.
Our 2 year anniversary in April was spent at the Real Salt Lake season opener. They were the 2009 national champions so it was a pretty big deal to be there at their first game. And there was a surprise half-time guest...who else in Utah would it be except David Archuleta?? The best part was that this adorable little boy made a wish with the Make A Wish Foundation to
sing at a RSL game with David. It was maybe so cute that Siara and I both cried.










































Oh and here's us!

Favorite Things: Red Velvet Cake

There's not much to say about this favorite thing. I love red velvet cake. I adore red velvet cake. I dream about red velvet cake. I would do anything for a piece of red velvet cake right now.
This particular red velvet is from "The Chocolate", a darling bakery here in Orem.
My ultimate favorite is the red velvet from Hummingbird Bakery in London.
But let's be honest, any red velvet will do.
This is my one true treat love.

*Please don't judge the fact that the cake is already half eaten. I literally couldn't even hold off long enough to take a picture. I have a problem.

Favorite Things: Neverending box of Bounce dryer sheets

When I moved to Utah to attend BYU in 2004, my mom came down and bought me all the essentials, including this box of Bounce dryer sheets.
Since that time I have graduated college, gotten married, and moved a total of ten times. And this box of Bounce is still in my cupboard, still going strong. I have lost clothes, jewelry, bedding, dishes, a bike, and many other more important possessions over the last six years. But this box of dryer sheets has somehow managed to hang onto me. And I'm not kidding when I tell you that I even took it to London on study abroad.
That corner advertisement says 35% more.
I guess 35% more=eternity.
Thanks, Mom.
I'll never have to buy dryer sheets again.

Favorite Things: Scarf-Tied Oxfords

***Disclaimer: This post is completely shallow, materialistic, and without substance. Please enjoy the frivolity of it at your own risk***

If you know me at all, you know I am in love with these shoes. From the moment I saw them I knew I would make them mine, whatever the cost (monetary or emotional).
They were out of my size online, and when I called I was told that they were also out of pretty much every single size in every single store in the entire country. My determination did not wane.
I put the Anthropologie customer service department on my speed dial and called just about every hour for two straight days until they found a pair at a store in Las Vegas.
In a few short days they were mine.
And they were everything I dreamed they would be.
Bless you Anthropologie. You give me so many pretty things to waste my money on.

Favorite Things: Spin Class

I have to work off that homemade pizza somehow, and my new gym addiction is spin class. I used to be terrified of it, but my friend and work buddy Brittany and I started going at 6 am before work and now I am in love. Here's a pretty nasty picture to document just how much work this class is.

The front of my shirt after spin



















The back of my shirt after spin.

Favorite Things: Homemade Pizza

My mom does these super cute "Favorite Things" blogs. And I've been a terrible blogger lately, so here's a little copycat series. These are some of the Keaton household favorite things, starting with:

Homemade Pizza!

Hand made dough














Fresh basil from the garden














Garden fresh tomato sauce














Add some turkey pepperoni and voila! Homemade pizza, a favorite dish in the Keaton home. (Clearly the half with vegetables on it is mine)

CSI: Orem

Let's ignore the fact that this is my first blog in a month. The irony is that when nothing is going on in my life, I have time to blog, but nothing to blog about. And now that things have been crazy, there's lots to blog and no time to do it!

My first blog back is unfortunately a sad tale.

We have decided to move to the upstairs of the house that we have lived in the basement of for two years. (This is not the sad news)

I was raised with a "mom" standard of clean that I now uphold wherever I live. So I've spent the last four days scrubbing the house top to bottom before we move into it. (This is not the sad news either)

The windows were my first task, because the previous tenants had a child and apparently hadn't heard of Windex. After scrubbing them inside and out, I pulled up all the blinds and let the beautiful natural light pour in through all the perfectly clear windows.

So last night I started moving our kitchen stuff upstairs. I had been going up and down for hours and had only been inside the basement for a few minutes loading another box. When I walked back up the stairs, suddenly at the top step there was a little bird. It looked fake because it was in perfect condition, except for the fact that it was dead.

I looked around frantically, thinking about what a dead bird suddenly showing up on my doorstep could possibly mean. Was it just a cat leaving a meal for us? Was it a threat, ala The Godfather-horse's head in bed? There was no evidence of a struggle, no suspects lurking, no explanation for a little dead bird.

After pondering the situation and being a little paranoid, it came to me. The gigantic, crystal clean front window. Sure enough, stuck to the window in little patches--bird feathers. The poor little traveler couldn't see the window because it was so streak-free and beautiful.

I was so proud of those clean windows, and now I just feel like a killer.

But also kind of like a detective.

Hopefully this is the only casualty of having a clean home.

Last night's score....

Austin: 70
Shanna: 63

I'm blaming that on my hour and a half of yoga Monday night. My shoulders were already worn out before I even started.

It's on again tonight.


I'm going for 71.

Family Traditions

Austin and I decided we need some traditions. We've only come up with two so far.

Tuesday night is pancake night.
(A tradition that was a result of the giant Costco box of Bisquick my mom bought while the family was here in May and then didn't use)

Now we've also added the nightly push-up contest. The results for the last three nights have been as follows:

Friday
Shanna: 52
Austin: 55

Saturday
Shanna: 59
Austin: 63

Sunday
Shanna: 60
Austin: 61

To make sure it's fair and that one of us isn't doing just enough to beat the other one's number, we count our own and write it down on a slip of paper, then compare. Then there's no cheating. Unless one of us lies when we write it down...

We're still working out the kinks.


What are your family traditions?

I Heart Nie

I love NieNie. She is my favorite celeb. I am always secretly hoping I'll run into her at Sunflower because Ashton saw her there once.

So last Saturday my bestie Jess brought this to my attention: Nie's Birthday!

Eat a cupcake, help a darling family? Can do!

So we headed down to Sweet Tooth Fairy and enjoyed a vaNIElla squared cupcake to show our support.


















Sometimes charity just requires sacrifice, ya know?

At long last

I have never been able to do cartwheels.

I always desperately wanted to. In the 5th grade I did one perfect one, once. I was too scared to ever try again.

But last night, at age 23, I learned how to do a cartwheel.

And who was my gymnastics teacher?

My 26 year old husband.

Yes, Austin does perfect cartwheels. Almost as well as he ice skates.
{a skill he attributes to years of roller-blading, you know, the cool version of ice skating}

The moral of this story is it's never too late to fulfill a childhood dream.



Cartwheels are just as wonderful as I always imagined they would be.

Judge not...

Yeah. I saw it. It was free, it was with my two best friends, it was for the 13 year old girl inside me.
I'm not suggesting any academy awards or anything, but you can't really argue with something that has gained the fame that Twilight has in just a few years.
{Although the face Robert Pattinson makes every time he kisses Kristen Stewart makes me laugh my head off}

Alternate

I was pretty proud of my clever Shakespearean reference in my previous blog post title, so after I wrote it I said to Austin:

Me: "I wrote a blog about that chicken in the trunk of my car, guess what I called it?"

Austin: "Junk in the trunk?"



The creative writing skills and literary knowledge in our home are abundant.

Something Rotten in the State of Utah

We went grocery shopping last week.

My trunk was still pretty full of boxes containing various Relief Society items passed down from president to president. When I say pretty full, I mean we could barely cram the bags of groceries in around everything. We got home, unloaded the food, and didn't think twice.

Two days later...

I got into my car to go to work and a rancid, pungent smell greeted me from the depths of my little Corolla. Being too busy to figure it out right then, I rolled the windows down and forgot about it during my day's work.

That evening I went to get back into my car and the 90 degree weather had exponentially multiplied the odor. I had to get to the bottom of it.

Shifting through the boxes in the back, in the very farthest reaches of my trunk, there it was. One lone grocery bag. My favorite navy blue shopping bag with the red and white birds. Birds symbolizing all the wildlife I save by using said reusable shopping bag.

Inside.......

Chicken.

Half-cooked, greenish tinted, rotten chicken.

I guess the color of it and the fact that I knew full well how long it had been in there wasn't enough proof that it was bad. What did I do?

I took a big whiff of it.

You know, just to make sure that's where the smell was coming from. Just in case something else in my car could be radiating such a hellish stench. Just in case it had somehow miraculously survived the two day ordeal in blazing heat and we could still eat it. That's normal, right?

Needless to say that chicken sacrificed its life in vain. My guilt at such a pointless death may drive me to vegetarianism.

In the meantime, it did at least drive me to clean out my trunk.

Mais, Oui

Just an ordinary Saturday wishing....














...that pink balloons could make this happen to me.

Overheard in the Christensen basement

Siara: I keep scissors in my room to cut the muslin that I use to wax my armpits

Me: AJ, do you wanna wax your armpits?

AJ (Tyler's 13 year old stepbrother): There's no hair under my armpits!!!

Priceless

I was at the mall today and walked into Gap just to look around. Lately they've been kind of overpriced and have some weird styles (i.e. the weird short polo shirts from like 1998, and jeans for $80) so I wasn't really expecting to find anything.
The sales associate handed me a little scratch-off promo code and it was worth $25 off a pair of jeans. $80-$25=still too much for Gap jeans.
So I found a really cute cropped pair that was on sale for 24.99, figuring they'd tell me I couldn't use the card on sale items.

Here's the register scenario:
Me: "This card is for $25 off and these are only $24.99, can I use it for this pair?"
Gap guy: "I don't think you can use this on sale items, and I really don't think it would make them cost nothing."
Me: "That's fine I'll just keep the card and come back and look another day"
Gap guy: "Well, let me just try it first really quick" (scans both)
Register: "$0.00"
Gap guy: "Whoa, that's pretty cool."
Me: "Free pants?!"
Gap guy: "It's your lucky day, and that was so cool I'm gonna give you another discount card"

The second card I got was worth $20 off another pair of jeans. I'm paying the good karma forward and giving it to my sister, lest I ruin my streak of luck with selfishness.

A pair of $80 jeans for free makes for a pretty good trip to the mall.

Between husband and wife

Austin: "I promise that when we have a real house you can have a huge greenhouse"

Me: "Well I don't need a HUGE greenhouse, just one big enough to grow some tomato plants"

Austin: "Yeah and poinsettas. And then at Christmas we can give them away to people we like, and we'll make the people we don't like buy them from us"

Me: "No we'll just give them to the people we don't like because they're poisonous"

Austin: "Yeah dry them out and make poisoned poinsetta tea"

Me: "Who do we really dislike enough to want to give poisioned tea to?"

Austin: thinks carefully for several seconds..."{name of current acquanitance that we cannot stand, but cannot be named on a public blog}"

Me: "Perrrrrfect"

Saved by Chanel

I've been having a hard time coping lately.
A more severe breakdown than usual on Monday caused me to go haywire about wanting to quit my job and move away and lock myself in a dank dark basement and not have to interact with humans until the end of time.

No. Exaggeration.

And then a bright light in my Tuesday evening pulled me from my wallowing haze of self-destruction.

C.H.A.N.E.L.

Chance Eau Tendre perfume














in a darling little black bag















on a bed of other decadent samples















And this is how I feel.



















Thank you Austin.

Thank you Siara.

And at the risk of sounding like a materialistic bitty, it was really the thoughtfulness and generosity of these two very important people in my life that brightened my day/week/month/however long this perfume lasts. Not just the Chanel.


BUT {a little Chanel never hurt anyone}