December Catch Up

Since I haven't done much blogging, I thought I would get most of December in one post.  After Jeremy finished his first semester of law school, we drove down to San Diego and went to the San Diego Temple.  It was beautiful with all the Christmas lights!  What an amazing temple, it looks like a fairy tale palace.  We ended our date night with eating at Outback Steakhouse, my favorite!

This is the view of LA from Griffiths Observatory.  

We are up close to the hill with the Hollywood sign.

Here is the LA Temple with its Christmas lights.  I love the palm trees.

We got a deal to go whale watching for 2 hours and this is our way out of the harbor with the huge cranes.  We were so excited to see whales and dolphins, but we spent the whole 2 hours looking and searching.

Finally on the way back to land, we saw these Sea-Lions on the buoy.   That was it.  As fun as it was to watch the sea-lions push each other off, we were really annoyed that there were no whales or dolphins...

This was a hike to Point Dume in Malibu.  We love this area and it is our favorite beach (Zuma Beach).  This is also where Tony Stark's house is in Iron Man (it doesn't really exist).

After hiking to the top, we kept going and found a tide pool with sea anemones, starfish, and lots of birds.

After getting back to Zuma Beach,  Jeremy did some boogie boarding in the cold water.  Apparently it's not too cold for him though.

We went to Ellensburg, WA for Christmas and had a blast!  I only took these pictures though because we were having too much fun to remember a camera.  One of the days we drove up to the pass to go sledding with our two nieces, but they didn't really like it that much.  There was only a little snow there, but we brought it back with us to make a snowman.  The boys tried to make it on the front porch without Jeremy's parents hearing, but then the base cracked and the whole thing came down.  No snowmen knocked on their door, but we rebuilt it on the grass.  It stayed up long enough for pictures, but it was too full of water to stay up for long.

After spending a wonderful time with the Gibb side, we flew to Utah and spent a while in Draper with the Browers.  We didn't take any pictures here, but had a blast with everyone!  The only sad thing was that there was no snow!  How can it be Christmas without snow??  It was great to spend Christmas and New Years with family.

What we have been up to...

The last little while has gotten busy for both Jeremy and I.  He has been very busy studying for and taking finals (just one more week)! I have been having tons of fun organizing our ward Relief Society's Super Saturday.  Here is a picture of us making Personal Pies in a Jar (from Our Best Bites).  It was tons of fun to make all sorts of fun things with such great women in the ward. 

Here is the table making Mini Book of Mormon's.  Cute Felt Christmas Trees are the table behind.  Sadly, we forgot to take more pictures, but everyone had a great time.

 We ate lots of delicious Cinnamon Rolls and Pumpkin Hot Chocolate.  Yummy!  Turns out it works great to make them and freeze them way ahead of time and thaw and cook them when you want them.

Catch up

So I haven't blogged much since moving to LA, but here are some highlights over the last 2 1/2 months (or some of the highlights that we took pictures of anyways).

We hiked Strawberry Peak on September 5.  It was an overgrown trail and we were poked several times by a very pokey plant or by yucca plants or by cactus.  We didn't see anyone on the hike which we thought was weird considering it was still very close to LA.  Then as we finished the hike, we had to go through a fenced area that said it was closed.  Woops!  We had a hard time finding the start of the trail, so we didn't even see the start where it was closed off.  It was a fun hike, but I got very very tired on it.

Here's our customary "top of the mountain" picture.

There was a fire here and the dead trees among the smaller green plants were kind of spooky looking.

The pointy mountain in the middle is Strawberry Peak from the road.

On October 8, we hiked Sandstone Peak (also known as Mt. Allen) which was a short, but very scenic hike.  In the second picture, you can see the ocean behind Jeremy.  We could see lots of islands too.

Other than hiking, we have also gone on a few mountain bike rides.  The best trail we have found is the Backbone trail and it goes forever.  It reminds me of the Crest trail in Utah because it is so beautiful and has lots of smooth single track through the trees.

We have also spent a lot of time at the beach.  We usually go about once a week and here are some of my favorite pictures from the beach.

If you look at this picture closely, you can see a dolphin in the left half of the picture.  We went to Zuma Beach in Malibu because they have dolphins a lot.  We were really hoping and then we saw them!  They were so close to the beach and playing in the waves, it was awesome!

I like watching birds at the beach.  They are so funny how they run into and away from the waves, how the dive-bombers are so fast zooming into the ocean.  This bird had the longest beak ever.

Jeremy was boogie-boarding and all the seagulls stopped to watch him...

Its a Girl!!

We are having a little GIRL!!  

We are so excited and I'm already planning all sorts of cute pink things to make for her.  It is just so awesome to know that we are having a girl and now we get to have fun coming up with a name.  Thank you everyone who guessed, and congrats to those who got it right.  

One other funny thing, we have had 4 different proposals from our friends with boys already.  Who says we can't have arranged marriages... 

Taking one to the Polls ;)

Well everyone, I guess I haven't made it official unless its on the blog, right? 

I am pregnant!  The baby is due March 5, 2012.  I am almost 18 weeks along and we are finding out the baby's gender late next week!  So here's the vote.  Who thinks it will be a girl and who thinks it will be a boy?  I don't have the slightest clue what I think, but Jeremy is sure we are having a boy.  This is all because of statistics (that's what he says anyways).  We have 4 nieces and no nephews, so he thinks we will even it out...  we'll see. 

Anyways, I hope you all comment with your guess since I guess it's not really something we can vote on to actually change the outcome.  We are super excited to find out!

As a side note, this is our first radish from our garden in LA. We are very proud of our growing abilities.

Kings Canyon National Park

After spending a day in Sequoia National Park, we drove over to Kings Canyon National Park (their borders touch).  We found a camping spot, set up our tent, and had dinner.  Here are pictures from the next day.  I think it would be hard to appreciate Kings Canyon fully unless you hiked a few miles past the last paved road like we did.  The views got better and better.

The road was really cool right here.  It was super narrow and windy with a straight up rock face to one side and a cliff down to the river on the other side.

We went for a little moonlight hike to a small waterfall, but this was the best picture.

Kings Canyon reminded us a lot of Yosemite.  Huge granite cliffs with beautiful forests and rivers.

The Kings River was very clear and you could see the deep bottom very clearly.

This was half-way up the hike to Mist Falls.  This view is the one that nobody gets from the road.  The rock formation is called the Sphinx and it was incredible.  This was a huge valley.

Mist Falls

Jeremy walking over a very large tree over the river.  It wasn't even scary because the tree was so wide.

Here's the only picture we took of ourselves.  We loved Kings Canyon and recommend it to everyone.

Sequoia National Parks

Well, in case you didn't know already, we moved to Los Angeles, California.  The move was "fun" and it is so green and beautiful here.  We love it so far.  Last weekend, we decided to take a break from all the moving in stuff and drove a few hours to Sequoia National Park.  

This is the start of the hike to Moro Rock which was up very narrow stairways with railing the whole time.  It was an incredible view.  

The view from the top.

Looking back down what we came up.

This is the Tunnel Log that everyone (including us) wanted to drive through.

This is General Sherman. It is the largest tree in the world (by volume and weight).  It is actually not the tallest or widest tree in the world.  It is 36.5 feet in diameter at the base and still 13.7 feet in diameter 180 feet high.  Its largest branch is bigger than any other tree east of the Mississippi River.  It is 275 feet tall, and 2,200 years old.

General Sherman is too big for good pictures.

 This is General Grant which is the widest tree in the world at 40 feet.  It is also the National Christmas Tree.  It didn't look anything like a Christmas tree to me...

Trying to show how big General Grant is.