Utah

Vinson was absolutely amazing for the airplane ride! The flight from Prague to Atlanta (11 hours) was pretty empty so Vinson got his own seat. It would pretty much have been a nightmare otherwise. Then we had a five hour flight to Salt Lake. He cried more in the car ride to my parents house than he did the whole flight. He would wake up at about 5 o'clock every morning and Dan and I took turns waking up. Highlights of the trip were:
Sledding: Vinson hated sledding. He would cry even if Dan or I went down the hill by ourselves. But he didn't seem to care what happened to his aunts or grandma. It actually was pretty funny. Vinson didn't seem to mind when Dan held Vinson on his cross country skis and went down the hill.

Eating : We were SO spoiled with food :) My mom had our favorite cereals stocked (cracklin' oat bran and Wheaties), we had that and sausage for breakfast. (Sausage here is more like pepperoni here.) While we were at Dan's house we had mom's yummy tomato soup! YUM! And we ate Mexican a lot! Here we are at Mi Ranchito. Vinson accidentally ate a hot tamale, I wish you could have seen his face. I gained 10 pounds. I blame it on the pregnancy ;) We also fed my family Halusky - a traditional Slovak dish that tastes a lot better than it looks, and Dan's family Svickova.Swimming: One of Vinson's favorite things to do in American Fork was go swimming. He wasn't afraid of the water and even tried to push the water out of the way when it got too deep.
Shopping: I LOVED SHOPPING!!! We bought food and clothes and I understood everything that was going on! I could eavesdrop if I wanted to! :) It was great to have a cart that I could control and BAGGERS!!! Fast food that cost normal prices! Wow!!

Children's Playhouse: Vinson and his cousin's Lori and Charlie went to the Children's Treehouse which was a lot of fun. They had a whole bunch of themed rooms.
Skiing Skiing and More Skiing:

This is definitely one of the things that we looked forward to most. Dan got 4 skiing trips in and I got in 3.

Us at Alta. Go ahead and drool, the snow was amazing!!

Us and Tiffa, one of my absolute best friends ever!

Cross Country Skiing at Pine Hollow up American Fork CanyonDan and me at the top of the trail. I love the canyon!
Of course Dan decided to ski down the steep hill we just climbed.

Me and Rachael, also one of my bestest friends ever!

Dan and I at Canyons, this was one of our awesomest Christmas presents!

Ahhh!!! Virgin powder everywhere!

Friends: We got to see a lot of friends that we had missed while have been here. I got to see Tiffany and Rachael, and later we got to hang out with Dan's old college gang: the Wades, Shammy's (except for Shammy), and the Joels! There were a lot of new kids added to the group and Vinson had a blast! He especially liked playing ring around the rosies. Later we got to see a bunch of Dan's High School friends. It was a lot of fun!Family: And last and BEST of all! We got to see our families!!!! I feel bad we didn't get more pictures of Dan's family. It was so much fun taking pictures of Vinson play with his cousin Lori that we spaced on taking other pictures.

I loved jus hanging out and talking to my family!

Here's the whole gang!

Lieing all over eachother is pretty normal in my family.

Hanging out with Dan's cousins! We've missed the Ward Family gatherings.

Vinson was Lori's shadow. They had so much fun.

He still points her out and says, "Lori!"

And these are just some cute pictures of Vinson.

Stay tuned...

So we recently came home to Prague after visiting home in Utah only to find that our internet connection has gone fickle. It works once in a while--usually when I am prepared to call our provider for help, but most of the time we have limited or no internet service. This has for obvious reasons made us slow to add updates about our Utah trip and other exciting events. So, don't give up on us, we are still here. And someday soon our internet connection will work properly and we will post some pictures of Utah's beautiful mountains and our beautiful families!


For now, here is a nice picture I took from my parents house on one of those strangely bright nights that seem to happen only in the winter.

Getting Ready to Go to America

We've put off packing . . . the normal stuff you need to pack for any vacation so we got ourselves pumped up. Vinson was watching "Cars" which meant Dan and I could have 2 . . . at least 1 hour of time to pack. "Dan pojd," Vince called from the living room. Apparently he didn't want to watch the movie alone, and yes he lovingly refers to Dan as Dan. I think it's because it's so close to "Dad." So I packed all of Vinson's stuff and my stuff and took my turn with Vinson. Dan was almost done and we decided to pack a book from the bookshelf. Crash!! The entire shelf fell off the book shelf. We found that a screw was missing and spent the next half an hour trying to fix the bookshelf (which was a failed attempt but the book shelf is lighter we'll see if it stays :) while Vinson kept himeslf busy stacking the books that were all over the floor. He had two good piles going and we figured he was busy and happy and weren't paying any particular attention to him. Then Vinson decided to put BOTH of our cellphones in a cup of water. I caught him pretty quickly, and Dan hurried off to try to get all of the water out that he could. I was still trying to put the bookshelf together and Vince got out of being punished. Our phones still aren't working properly. Hopefully two weeks of drying will fix them. Long story short . . . it's taken us a lot longer to pack and clean up than we'd expected to. It's still not done, I took a break to try to laugh at the day.

Apparently I wrote too soon. I started making dinner and Dan decided to see if our Temple recommends were expired. Mine is expired. So between making dinner and trying to make calls on our still not entirely functioning phone and burning a few french toast Vince decided he was hungry and grabbed the opened box of milk -yes milk comes in boxes :( - and dumped it all over the floor. It might have started out as an accident, but by the end it was obvious he was quite enjoying himself pouring the milk all over the floor. There is a happy ending: we cleaned up Vinces mess while he was being punished in the crib, I was finally able to eat (man do I get hungry) and with Skype I was able to finish all of the phone calls. What a day!

Answer Blog

Nothing exciting has been going on with us. We're going to Utah in exactly one week and are super stoked for that! I've started packing since Christmas trying to take home everything that we don't need here but want to keep like board game boxes. So we'll have a lot to write about when we get back, but a lot of people have asked me questions, so here is the answer blog.

1. Will we go back to the U.S. to have the baby? We will have the baby here. The Czech Republic is supossed to be one of the best places for deliveries. I am still a little nervous, though. We'll start doctor searching when we come back. I really want someone who can speak decent English. Some differences I've heard about are that you go to the doctor every 3 weeks during the whole pregnancy and they do a lot of ultrasounds. Which is pretty similar to my experience with Vinson. With having the baby you have a lot more options: standing up, etc. but epidurals are very uncommon :( Hopefully everything will work out so I can have one. There's no need to feel pain, right ;) Afterwards you and your baby and all of the other mothers and their babies share a room, which doesn't sound so fun. Dan can't sleep there, and it's not a two nights max thing. Anything less than a week stay isn't normal :( There is an upside to it, though. One of my good friends just had a 2 year old birthday party with her daughter and all of the other kids that were born around the same time. The mothers were there long enough that they became good friends. I'm really good at small talk in Czech, but we'll see how it goes. I guess I can handle anything for just a week.

2. How am I feeling? Great! I'm one of those lucky ones that everyone that has horrible experiences hate. I haven't had morning sickness at all. I can tell I'm pregnant though. I'm hungry all the time and if I don't eat then I get dizzy. I hate coming up with 3 meals to eat everyday, and this 5 smaller meals is driving me nuts. Especially since oftentimes nothing we have sounds good to me. My only craving, if I could call it that is orange juice. I'm not sure it's a craving, but I never wanted it before and it always sounds good to me now. My sense of smell is better so Dan has to clean out the fridge. My weirdest symptom is that I have nightmares more often, It happened with Vinson too, but it seems like my bladder wakes me up before it gets too bad. I'm showing a tiny tiny bit but not much. You can't tell if I'm wearing a shirt.

3. Do we want a boy or a girl? It would be fun to have a girl, but we already have so many boy clothes and two boys close in age would be fun . . . honestly we'd be fine with either but am leaning twards a girl. As soon as I find out what it is we'll be thrilled either way!

Suprise

Yeah!!! I'll be due in August. Vince has been really excited about babies lately, so hopefully that means he's ready.