The past six weeks of prenatal care with "we don't know what that means" and "we couldn't do anything about it if we did" has made me very grateful for an omniscient and omnipotent God. Back in November we had a routine ultrasound and a couple of the measurements were outside the normal range--ventricles in the brain that store spinal fluid were mildly enlarged and my amniotic fluid level was high. The doctor came up with at least five completely different things that this could mean--from maternal infection to improperly formed brain structures. The only conclusion: they wanted to do more tests and more monitoring. I asked the question that seemed obvious to me but that they apparently don't get very often, "what will you do about it if you find out what it is?" Pretty much the only answer they could come up with for that was that they would induce me to have the baby early. Well, I had read Elder Wirthlin's "Come what may and love it" talk the night before, and I felt completely at peace as the doctor was sharing her worries with me. That night, I asked Aaron for a blessing on the baby's behalf, and we were completely reassured that God knows what's going on with this baby and has the power to make our baby whole. In the past weeks, we've had to draw on this knowledge several times to refuse what I consider hypermonitoring--non-stress tests twice a week, fluid measurements once a week, and more ultrasounds in addition to the regular weekly visits.Well, yesterday our trust was again put to the test when I started having regular and increasingly frequent contractions during Church. When they were 3 minutes apart at the end of sacrament meeting, we decided to get our kids settled at Aunt Melayna's and head to the hospital. After I'd been in triage for just a few minutes, I felt a little something and told them I thought my water may have broken. I figured they had some conclusive way to determine whether or not it had. Well, after litmus paper and a slide under a microscope and more close examination and second opinions, they deliberated for almost 2 hours about whether or not my water had actually broken. They finally concluded that it had and admitted me to the Labor and Delivery unit. Four hours later, the midwife who had come on duty since my arrival brought that conclusion into question again and decided that she didn't think my water had broken! I had never seen this midwife before, but she is definitely my very very favorite one now. She was wonderful. She said that since I'd been having contractions every 2-3 minutes since arriving to the hospital but hadn't actually progressed, we could just go home and come back when things picked up. So we got home a little before 1 this morning, feeling tired, grateful, and a bit sheepish. It was very humbling to realize that even though this is my third baby, we still don't even know when it's the real deal and despite our vigilant laps around the L&D unit, we don't have the power to make a baby come that's not quite ready to come! So today, as my contractions continue to be frequent yet mild, we're trying to be patient and keep our trust in the One who is omniscient and omnipotent, unlike us and the medical world!
Heaps of raw onions waiting to be chopped. (And those quart jars in the back are freshly dehydrated onions. I'm afraid you can't tell in the picture, but these onions are HUGE--like close to the size of 
Where does one family get close to 200 pounds of onions (that's Aaron's estimate)? You may have seen it on the Today show Monday morning (I didn't, but my parents did). Miller Farm, about 1 hour north of Denver, opened their farm up to the public to come and harvest FREE produce left in their fields. As I've already mentioned in this blog, we like free stuff, especially free food, so we headed up to Miller Farm Saturday morning at 9:00, right when they opened, to find literally THOUSANDS of people there, meaning a good deal of traffic to actually park and get picking. Aaron was supposed to be at work at 11:00, and as I mentioned, this place is an hour away from town, so we were in a BIT of a hurry when we finally parked. Anyone who knows Aaron knows that he takes on manual labor like a workhorse at racehorse speeds, so we (OK, mostly he--I'm 7 1/2 months pregnant and had 
Yes, indeed, we have enjoyed a bounteous harvest at this Thanksgiving time. As Aaron finally crawled into bed last night at 2:00am after chopping and sorting all those onions pictured above, he was tired, but just radiating with gratitude for the abundant blessings manifested in the incredible onion stench permeating our home. When I snuggled up to him and said, "wow, you stink," he said, "aren't we so blessed?" (Did I mention that Aaron's a workhorse? He got home from studying on campus at about 10:00pm and I think the stench of partially rotting onions in the garage where he was parking his bike motivated him to preserve the onions before they all perish and dwindle into a heap of compost.) Alas, I'd better stop blogging and go get another batch in the dehydrators! Aaron has left me without excuse by doing all the stinky prep work!
She and 
Aaron and I were the zookeepers, and yes, that little monkey did bite right through his banana peel and ate it before we even started the night. So much for his accessory!
We carved one of our MANY home-grown pumpkins for Family Home Evening before Halloween. That explains why the pumpkin's irregular, slightly reddish, mottled, and squirrel-bitten. It looked the least appetizing so we chose it for our jack-o-lantern instead of using it for pumpkin muffins, pumpkin soup, pumpkin stew, pumpkin bread, pumpkin pancakes, baked pumpkin, or dinner in a pumpkin. All of which we have indeed eaten in the last month! Maybe next year we won't plant two full seed packets of pumpkins!
