Married Life: Year One

Me and boy ages 17 and 18, not long after we fell in love...

Our wedding day was the greatest day in the history of our lives. It was perfect. Never had we felt so much love from our family and friends, from the Lord, from each other.

Our first empanadas de pino! We decided it would become our new Halloween tradition.

Thanksgiving with the Cranes at the Scott's house.

Our first Christmas in St. George! (and my first sewing experiment, his stocking, turned out...ok:)

New year's eve sledding with Kelsey, Kyle, and Katy

We made a cake to celebrate our half birthdays. We may have just wanted to make a cake. It is decorated with the lego tree that fell out of the couches we got from Jacqui and Jeff when we were moving. The tree had been washed since said event.

Don't know why this picture is out of order, but we went to Disneyland as part of a belated honeymoon in April 2010. This is the Buzz ride in which Darin spanked me in shooting all the bad guys and targets.

A random hike up the Y. One of the many spontaneous adventures we enjoyed in our first year of marriage.

True story.

Taking off for the California honeymoon.

Darin introduced me to lost in 2005 and I got HOOKED. We have watched it over the years in several different states, apartments, hours of the evening. To celebrate the end of the greatest show on earth, we went made a LOST cake of the island complete with Oceanic 815 and a hatch. We couldn't figure out how to make Smokey.

Lake Powell with the Cranes in July, 3 months pregnant. (I forgot to include a picture of the pregnancy test, but we found out when I was about 6 weeks along, and believed it after 4 tests:)

Darin's birthday! I kidnapped him and we went to a park up in the mountains, cooked blueberry french toast and bacon with orange juice, hiked some forgotten mountain trail until we came to a dead end at the river and had a blast.

Hottest coats we could find at the Burlington Coat Factory. Mine was a leather poncho and Darin's was a lovely fur lined bit of goodness.

Me and Lily Jane. That's right! We are having a girl!

Here I am with my best friend in the whole world the night we celebrated our anniversary. Some days I am just amazed that I actually got to marry Darin Brooks. He truly is my best friend and I am so amazingly blessed to have him by my side forever. Happy one year to us!

10 Months and 8 Days....

That is how long I have been married to my best friend in the whole world. He proposed to me on July 24th, 2009. I came home from work and got ready for a date he had asked me on that night. I found out while driving around that we would be having a picnic. I happen to have an obsessive infatuation with picnics, especially on summer nights and especially surprise ones. We sat on the lawn above the Provo temple. No one was there, which is a rarity on summer evenings, but this was our evening. We enjoyed a yummy pasta dish from the Pizza Factory, lemonade and a yummy dessert. Then we laid on the picnic blanket.

I rested my head on his torso.

He played with my hair.

After a stretch of blissful silence, he sighed and said:

"Well, I wanted to get you a ring..."

And in my head I thought about how tight money was and started telling myself that it was ok and that it might just take a while longer and how it didn't matter anyway and that I was going to marry him regardless and who needed a ring to be engaged when he said:

"So, I did."

I felt him slip something onto my finger. I hadn't even thought about looking at it when big happy tears escaped my eyes and I was hugging him tighter than is probably healthy and laughing out loud with pure happiness. After laughing with me at my reaction, he exclaimed "You didn't even look at it!" So I did, once I wiped some tears away. It was beautiful and perfect and oh so shimmery. It was a very happy day.



10 months and 8 days of marriage later, and I can say that though that night was magical and so wonderfully happy, it has been trumped by an accumulation of various tiny events and kisses and making dinner and road trips and finding out we were pregnant and quiet moments of realizing I'm the most blessed girl in the world. I've learned that happiness in marriage is what you make of it. So many people told us before we were married that marriage was going to be different that we thought it would. It was going to be hard, especially the first year. And you know what I would like to tell them? Keep your doom's day warnings! This has been the best 10 months and 8 days of my life! Because your first year of marriage was the hardest does not mean that it is going to be mine. I am sure that harder trials will come, that we will not always see eye to eye or be able to come to a reasonable solution together. We may even get mad at each other and argue. We might hurt each other's feelings and let each other down. We might struggle through hunger and poverty (oh wait...we're already at the poverty point), and I am sure that raising children will not be a piece of cake, but from this first 10 months and 8 days, I think that I may safely say that the rest of eternity together is going to be what we make of it. I'm thinking it is going to be the happiest eternity of my life.

A blog is born

OK, I have to be honest, this blog has existed for a while, and a lonely existence it has had. Due to spousal pressure to compose our lives into a blogging masterpiece, I am putting this once empty template to use. It may not be the most interesting thing you've ever read, but we love life and we love each other and we have TONS of fun so at least for our own viewing pleasure, we are going to write it down.

Life as of late:

We just moved from our wonderful, magical, shoe box of an apartment to a new (for us), larger, two-bedroom carpeted one, which suits us nicely for the time being. Reason for moving out of the magical, tiny shoe box: Landlord said no babies allowed. We thought to ourselves that we would just not renew our contract when the time came, but then our pals the Avarells were moving and offered us the apartment that we currently live in. We felt good about it, so here we are! Once we moved in we happened to take an unmistakably positive pregnancy test, therefore Baby Brooks already has a room to his/her self and carpet to crawl on (not a feature of the magic shoe box). Funny how things just work out perfectly. Thanks, Staci and Eric for letting us snuggle with your old place.

We are 16 weeks along in this pregnancy. Count 'em, Andrews! (Li, I believe you are the only one who understands this) 16! That's 4 months. Two more weeks and we are half way there. The good news is, nausea and most food aversions and feeling like I had been run over by a train every afternoon is pretty much gone (woo hoo). I am feeling large and in charge already. I definitely have a belly and I've even felt him/her move, which was way exciting. Darin is almost entirely sure it is a boy. I think it may be too, but have no basis for that, really. I am not sure I can trust any of this "mother's intuition" stuff. But if it is a boy, we'll name him Jackson and call him Jack. If it is a girl, probably Lily Jane. If you are a girl, little one, we are truly sorry for calling you he/him/boy for the last four months...five by the time an ultrasound can prove otherwise.

Anyway, if you want to keep up with our lives, stick around. Now that I have posted once, it might be harder to keep me off of here, so hopefully you'll see regular postings. We have pictures to be posted soon of California, Lake Powell, and some fun stuff in between like making empanadas, and our LOST cake, and finding the sexiest coats in existence at the Burlington Coat Factory.