Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Microwave-safe Bowel

Laura was looking up a recipe the other day on allrecipes.com and this is a copy of one of the reviews that she found for peanut brittle that you can make in the microwave.

Everyone loved it and asked for the recipe. My only tip is DO NOT USE A PLASTIC BOWEL to make it with in hte micorwave, not even a micorwave safe bowel. USE A GLASS micorwave safe bowel. I made that mistake and it got so hot it melted a hole in the bottom of the bowel.

So, make sure you never but a plastic bowel in your micorwave!

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Christmas and Babies

Laura and I decided that last night's FHE would be get the apartment ready for Christmas night. It turns out that I felt sick as a dog and Laura ended up doing most of the decorating and we are reaping the blessings of Laura's Christmas greatness and cheer. Check out our Christmas tree and our random decorations. (it turns out we don't have a whole lot of room to decorate with so we just had to randomly put things up)


Better than Christmas decorations Laura and I were able to go see our OB/GYN today and had a wonderful experience. We really like him, Dr. Mckernan, and were impressed at his memory of Mark and Liz and of Jeff and Angie. (He delivered Joy and Cal) Without us saying anything to him he walked into the room and looked at me and said are you a student at Midwestern? I said yes. Then he said are you one of the Fosters? Jeff and Mark? I said yes they were my brothers. Isn't Mark in Colorado now? Yes, and Jeff is in his residency. Anyway, after talking a little bit more we realized he didn't have all of the details right but we were still impressed by him.

By far the best experience of the visit was the ultrasound. I had heard about and seen a lot of ultrasounds before and honestly I had thought that they were kind of lame. You could barely see what was going on. It just looked like a blob. But when it was your wife's stomach and your baby that they are looking at it becomes a totally different experience. Not only that but the baby moves! I didn't know that. My wife has a moving baby inside of her stomach and we got to see it today! In fact she/he couldn't stop moving. Not only does he/she move, but has a heartbeat. It was moving so much the technician was having a hard time getting the heartbeat. Neither Laura and I really said anything while we were watching the baby move and listening to the heartbeat but I can honestly say that I was blown away. It was the first time I really felt like a Dad. (It actually feels weird to type those letters with them referring to me) I am going to be a Dad!!!

Here is the first picture of our baby!
According to the ultrasound the baby is 11 weeks and 4 days old which is about a week ahead of what we thought. The due date has been changed to June 19. We still think that our original due date is correct but it doesn't really matter. Laura is officially pregnant.
Even though I am not feeling very good and school has just started, we both feel that life is good, real good!

Monday, October 27, 2008

Rights and Tolerance

This is going to have to be shorter than I would like it to be but Laura and I have been thinking and talking about this a lot lately and I thought I would share a few of our thoughts and a good article that will make you think about it. As I am sure most of you know California, Florida, and Arizona all have propositions to constitutionalize marriage as being between a man and a woman. The church is strongly supporting these propositions and has laid out their reasoning clearly on lds.org.

One of the many issues that has been brought up is that defining marriage more liberally as between any two people will clash with the freedoms of churches and parents. That is what the article I have linked to this blog is talking about. (Click on the Title and you will go to the article) It's really a very interesting topic that forces one to re-evaluate freedom and what it means.

Laura and I watched a little clip of an interview with Elder Bednar where he talked about the issue. One of the main points he made was that tolerance has to be a two way street and it seems often times people want it to be a one way street. The Gay-rights movement is fighting very hard to have equal rights, but they seem to look past the fact that their fight for rights is tromping on the rights of religions to believe and practice as they would like. But that is the big question whose rights should be protected?

I am sure that after reading the article some of you thought that the Catholic church having to pull their adoption services out of Massachuset because they wouldn't place babies with homosexual couples, or a woman being sued because she wasn't willing to photograph a gay-couples wedding, sounds pretty ridiculous. Now think about similar issues but now imagine them being about race, or gender (women's rights). What if a woman today chose not to photograph a black couples wedding, or if the Catholic church refused to place children in African-American homes? I think our first reaction would be to say "but that's different," and I think that they are but the issues are similar. When should a church have the right to prevent someone from joining, or when should a photographer be able to chose who they photograph? The line is not black and white and I am afraid we are going to just keeping moving closer and closer to everyone and everything having legal rights to anything that they want. "I was treated unfairly, I should be able to sue, or the government should force them to let me do what I want" will become the way we think as Americans. I don't know what the solution is, but I what I do know is that not everyone can be satisfied. It seems to me that we should protect the rights of the largest amount of people that we can. In this case, those of us who believe that marriage is between a man and woman and cannot be anything else. This is why America is so great, in a few days there will be a vote and the majority will have their way!

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Our Story



Enjoy the story of our life so far. The apartment at the beginning is the apartment we lived in in Provo, not our apartment in Glendale.

Friday, August 08, 2008

Way up in the Gore Mountain Range Part 2

If you had not had a chance to read my previous post go ahead and do that before you read this one. If you don't have time to read the last one and this one I will sum up the first day of our trip in one sentence. We hiked through some beautiful meadows, passed some awesome waterfalls, and found a nice place to camp.

DAY 2
I woke up at 7:00 am knowing that unless I got a fire going Laura would not want to get up. So I got up and with one match was able to get a blazing fire going by the time Laura got up at 7:45. Our thermometer said that it was 49 degrees when Laura got up and I thought that it was significantly warmer than when I got up so I am thinking we were in the 30 degrees over the night. Regardless we both stayed fairly warm and got a decent nights rest. This is what it looked like in the morning.
This is just east of where we slept
We had a delicious mug of oatmeal to start the day and then we were off hiking by 9:00am. We knew we had about 3 miles to the top of the pass but we were not ready for how beautiful of a hike it was going to be.This view was constantly to our left as we rounded around this valley. It was huge. I think it was probably a mile to a mile and half wide.

We crossed about 20 other streams just like this one that were running down into the valley. It was all run off from the melting snow. We had a couple of close calls but we didn't take any spills into the creeks.


After we went through about a mile and half of going through trees and little breaks into beautiful mountain meadows we started breaking out of the trees above tree line. We are at about 11,500 ft here.
You can see Eccles pass in the upper left hand corner of the
picture. It was spectacular when we got above the tree line.
















We ran into two crystal clear mountain lakes. Behind the lake on the left you can see Red Buffalo Pass. That trails runs down into Vail. Behind the lake on the right you can see Eccles pass. This trails runs down into Frisco.




This is what it looked like from the top of the pass. This is the path we took to get to the pass. This was the most spectacular part of the hike.


This is looking down the other side of the pass. We could hear a waterfall but we couldn't see it very well until we got down a little further but then we saw...
This picture doesn't do it justice. We were probably a mile away from this on the other side of the valley and it looked gorgeous.
We walked through this meadow for a mile or two. It was hot but it was pretty awesome.


This is where our pictures start thinning out a little bit. We were getting tired but we also wanted to get as far as possible before stopping for the night. We ended up going for another 4 or 5 miles and decided to stop at a less than ideal location, but it had a nice rock to sit on and enjoy the afternoon.
We sat out on this rock for almost two hours. We pumped water (tried to), whittled our sticks, boiled water, talked about life, and enjoyed the day.

By four o'clock Laura got up to go to the bathroom and while she was gone I found a tick crawling up my leg. Laura came back and said that she had also found two ticks on her. We were already dreading all of the mosquitoes that night and the next morning. (There already were a lot and it was the middle of the day) We decided to pack up camp and hike about a mile to the a lake that would provide a better place to camp.


They didn't call it Lily Pad lake for nothing. We decided that we didn't want to drink this water, so we moved decided to hike another mile to the next creek up the trail. By this time it is about 5:00 pm and we are getting real tired of hiking.

We don't have many more pictures of the day because we weren't in the picture taking mood. We got to where we thought the next creek should be and couldn't find a good place to stay. Laura mentioned that she thought there was a campground at the end of the trail which was probably another mile or so up. I looked at the map and sure enough there was a triangle at the end of the trail. So we decided to hike there.

Laura started talking to me about Turkish food and how great it was and somehow we got onto the wrong trail. We quickly realized that the trail had changed and that we were going up hill when we should be going down. We only got about 1/4 or 1/3 of a mile off track but that seem like a really long time when you are getting as tired as we were. We got back on the trail and headed to the campground. By this time our feet and legs were numb and so it didn't hurt too bad to hike.

We got to the end of the trail and started looking for the campground but we couldn't find it. I looked again at the map and the little triangle didn't mean campground it meant trailhead. It is about 6:30 by this time and we are both really tired of hiking. I am thinking that we have done about 9 or 10 miles to this point. Now we are surrounded by cabins and roads and we have no campground to stay at and our car is still 2 and half miles away. I was very impressed with Laura and her composure at this point. I was getting frustrated but she remain calm and just said "well, let's hike to the car." She also had the idea of leaving our packs up in the trees and then driving back to get them with the car. I thought this was a great idea so we hike up into the trees and hid our packs. I found the keys to the car in my pack and was getting ready to go when I realized that it was probably going to rain before we got back and so I decided to cover our packs with some garbage backs that we brought.This is the last picture we took as I was putting the garbage bags on the packs. You can't see it here but I put the keys down on the ground as I put the bags on.

Laura and I were feeling light on our feet as we got on the road and started walking towards our car. We asked a few people how to get back to the trailhead where our car was. (We even talked to a bus driver that was very disgruntled and told us that the trailhead had been shut down and they weren't letting anyone up there since midnight last night. We still don't know what he was talking about) The last quarter of a mile before the car Laura got very light on her feet and was happier than I had seen her the whole trip. We were both talking about going to Pizza Hut and drinking lots of water and eating a ton of pizza. The car was a glorious sight. Lonny had never looked so good. We get to the car and I reach down into my pocket to get the keys and I didn't't feel anything. I reach into the next pocket and didn't feel anything there also. Laura noticed what I was doing and had sudden break down of emotion. I couldn't tell if she was laughing, crying or cursing. On cue the rain clouds opened up and it began raining. This was a terrible feeling.

We decided that we were going hitch hike back up to our packs and try and hitch hike back down. Luckily, we had passed two women on a walk earlier and we re-passed them as we were walking back. They were very kind gave us a ride back to the packs and then back to our car.

We went to Wendy's had a junior bacon cheeseburger and a frosty and then we headed home. We were a little disappointed that we didn't camp out the second night. (but not that disappointed) Overall, it was very fun.


Friday, August 01, 2008

Way up in the Gore Mountain Range

Drew, Kristin, Laura, and I have been planning to go on a backpacking trip since the beginning of the summer. We were meant to go last week the 23-25 but due to Kristin's bad cough and to the fact that Laura and I both got a temp job for those two days we decided to postpone until this week to go, but without Drew and Kristin. :(

We decide to hike a loop that would go up and over Eccles Pass. It is the mountain that is directly north of Frisco, CO. We were planning on hiking 5-6 miles each day and go for 2 nights and 3 days. It didn't quite work out that way.

Day 1
This is Laura's first backpacking trip. Doesn't she look great like a true mountain woman!

The trail started out nice and flat through a forest with a ton of trees that were dead, dying, or fallen over.

We crossed this creek or other smaller creeks about 30 times and only a few of them had bridges. There were a couple of close calls for both of us but we ended up getting through the whole trip dry!


We hiked through some gorgeous mountain meadows with beautiful flowers of all shapes and colors. The picture of the flowers does not do justice to how beautiful they were.

We had heard that there were going to be some waterfalls along the trail but we had no idea that they were going to be as cool as they were. We could hear them from the trail so we trekked about 50 yards off to the side and we found...
Can you find Laura in the above picture?
There were several other waterfalls that we didn't get very good pictures of. They were awesome. Much bigger and loader than these pictures make them look.

We continued on for another 2 miles or so and found a nice camping spot. We were only 100 feet or so from the creek and there was a ton of firewood all around. It was a really nice place to stay.

This is taking longer than I thought so return tomorrow for the even more exciting Day 2 of our backpacking trip...

Friday, April 04, 2008

Random thoughts blog

I have a few minutes so I am going to post a few random thoughts that I have been having.

1. I only have a few more weeks left in Provo. My missionaries were moved to a different room in the MTC last week. We are on the 5th floor and from the windows you can see all around the city of Provo. It is a beautiful place! I am going to miss it.

2.I am really excited for General Conference. I have felt a lack of direction for what I want to focus on for the next couple of months. It feels like I am sitting around waiting for Med-School to start. Which I guess is exactly what I am doing. I am excited to hear what we need to focus on as church and as individuals.

3. The economy of our country amazes me. I am taking Econ 110 this semester and I learning a lot. I am not sure how good I am going to do on the final but I didn't take it for the grade. I just wanted to learn basic economics. If there is one thing I have learned while taking it, it is this, no one really knows what is going on. There are trends and statistical likelihoods, but no real facts. We seem to blame people a lot for what is going on in our economy. We blame people for controlling to much or we blame people for not controlling enough. From what I now understand, which is admittedly very little, our economy is so huge, well over 13 or 14 trillion dollars, no one really knows what is going on. To me its kind of like a puppy growing into a dog. Sure, when you first get it he was cute and fun to play with, but then he gets bigger and bigger until you can't control him any more you can try and fence your garden, or train him to go in your yard, or not rip off your windows, or not tear apart you porch but really he is going to do what he wants when he wants. That was the first analogy that came to mind. Sorry.

4. I am married to a beautiful woman that is smarter than me, funnier than me, more spiritual than me, a better cook than me, etc... I am a happy man and life is good!

Friday, March 07, 2008

Machu Stinking Picchu

Laura and I are going there this summer. It's going to be awesome. More details to come!!!!!

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

THE BIG DAY

Thanks to a few mean comments on how I have not posted anything in a long time I have decided to post something about the wedding day. Thanks Kristen!!



This is how I felt all day! It was great because we didn't have to do anything except smile a lot and talk to people. Thank you to all that helped!



This is us coming out of the temple. I don't think anyone saw this but about 15 seconds before this picture was taken something really funny happened. Laura and I had just started to confidently and joyfully walk out of temple because we were just married. As the inner doors of the temple were opening and we were getting ready to face the many people waiting for us, Laura tripped on her dress and almost did a face plant in the foyer of the temple. We thought everyone saw but no one said anything so we assumed no one knew.



This is us taking pictures behind the temple and I thought I looked pretty cool!!



This is my favorite picture from the reception. Joy is so good at getting down and getting jiggy! I love the concentration that is on her face. This is a woman that knows how to groove!



This is my beautiful wife. I thought she was beautiful on our wedding day but amazingly she continues to become more and more beautiful to me. I have no idea why she said yes, but now she is stuck and cannot go back. I love her!