pictures of Cole

Here is my official public plea for someone to take pictures of my kids that have me in them!

to be 3 again...

Audrey's Ballroom Dance

I'm trying to learn how to upload video to share with grandparents. This is Audrey practicing her swing routine that she is performing on Nov. 23rd at 7:00 pm. She is in the back row on the right. One girl was absent so a teacher is dancing with them...

Neborn Pictures of Cole

My cousin at Paige Davis Photography took these pictures for us the weekend after Cole's blessing. The one of dad & son is our favorite.

It's a boy!

The title of the post basically tells the story. We had an ultrasound today and had it confirmed this is definately a man child. We kind of already thought that was what they would see from an earlier ultrasound so no big suprises but it is always a relief to see everything looks healthy. Plus it was kind of fun to see the regular as well as 3-D ultrasound which we didn't have on our last go around.

25 Things about Andrea (from facebook)

Sorry so long, it turns out I kind of had fun doing this and could have done more.

1) Being married to Shawn (who is a fabulous writer) makes me super self-conscious about writing anything (like this). Not so fond of my run-on sentences he once offered to “give me a comma for my birthday that I could use any time I want to.” I may not use commas enough or correctly but I am enthusiastic about semicolons.

2) My daughters Audrey and Clara are my world; a never ending source of joy. Teaching Audrey to read or ski, and Clara to be potty trained makes me wish I was more patient and a better mother. My kids are incredible, super intelligent, energetic and so full of potential! I want to be more like them.

3) My husband Shawn has gorgeous eyes, luxurious hair, and a super cute smile. He is an amazing father, and luckily for me the love of my life. He is getting easier to be married to over time.

4) Baby #3 is on it’s way (due August 21st)! I am grumpier when I am pregnant. So even if it is true; I think it is really condescending and patronizing when people tell me my stomach is huge so soon “because I’m older/it’s my third” and/or “every pregnancy is different.” I don’t think I can do this pregnancy thing more than once more at the most. Makinzee - you are right! I may actually be getting too old for this!

5) When I grow up I want to be a chamber musician /collaborative pianist or whatever you want to call it. Piano is the best instrument; but as a solo instrument it is also the loneliest, and who wants to memorize everything? I am very worried my violinist friend Sara is going to get married and move leaving me nobody to play with. I wish my degrees were in collaborative piano. If I ever did go back to school I would work on that and/or an unrelated degree in something involving math/science.

6) Shawn and I had our 1st anniversary dinner at Carls Jr. (because we did errands until too late forgetting how early things close, and how lame SLC could be on a weeknight). In two weeks we are celebrating our 10th anniversary (a little eary) in Kauai.Things are looking up!

7) My dad says I share a brain with my mom who I am really close to. She is forbidden from telling me about anything weird happening to her because the power of suggestion is far too strong with us. For example when she tells me about a strange muscle twitch or having a hurt jaw from biting her teeth while sleeping, within a few weeks I end up having the same problem. I love you mom but I probably literally won’t be able to take care of you if your health ever really fails.

8) OK this one I modified from Shawn’s list: In the first few years of our marriage one or both of us were involved in about 10 different car accidents that we did not cause. We felt like we had targets on our foreheads. The scariest: a lady ran a red light and smashed into our car, then spun off of us and hit another car hard enough to smash it into 3 other cars. If the timing was only slightly different she could have killed Shawn. She told the police we ran a light to hit her because she was Hispanic. The oddest: the Park City Fire Department dropped a fire hose on our car on I-80 (think metal links not soft hose…it shredded the underside of our car in a blizzard). The most annoying: a girl hit us on Shawn’s birthday and then gave us fake insurance information. The police tracked her down for us and showed up at her house while her family was watching general conference together. The end result was a lot of property damage and a strong hatred for dealing with auto insurance companies.

9) I am an organizational nerd. I desperately need more closet space in every room of the house! I love to buy new containers for things. One of the happiest days of my year is when I get my new calendar for the upcoming year. I immediately start writing in family birthdays and everything I can think of.

10) I can lose a day in my pajamas pretty easily if SimCity is around; so Shawn banned me from all Sims games. Though we avoid computer/video games at our house; I am still kind of a game nerd. As long as the game isn’t violent or long I will probably like playing it.

11) FAMILY: I have 2 brothers and a sister. My siblings are cool people. I am closest to my older brother Brandt. I am enjoying getting closer to my sister Korinne now that we leave near each other. My little brother Dallas is super cute but I don't get to see him enough. I really like everyone in the family I married into. It is not bad not having a father-in-law. I am the oldest granddaughter on both sides of my family. I am definitely my grandma Margene’s favorite grandchild. (Knowlton cousins I love you more than I’m sure you know; but you know that’s true).

12) I have a terrible memory especially for names/titles. I can play many pieces of music that I can’t remember the name of. I could literally write down the music before I could tell you what it is called. This made preparing for my masters degree oral exams one of the most stressful activities of my life! Watching Shawn try to memorize large amounts of material for bar exams proved I still have post traumatic stress disorder from the experience.

13) I loved living in Maryland (DC suburbs). I did not like living in Idaho. I would have loved a chance to live in New York for a year or two pre kids. I intend to stay in Logan forever now because I am sick of moving; and I have a free lifetime membership to our gym. So basically I have serious commitments here now.

14) One fun day after we had just finished power washing and staining both my deck and hers; my friend Tricia pointed out a great truth about myself to me: I love to have a project! I personally dry walled the new wall we made when making our laundry room. I never want to drywall again.

15) I replaced the keyboard built into my laptop by myself and felt like a rocket scientist for being able to do it. It was one of my proudest moments.

16) I started playing percussion kind of on a dare from my neighbor across the street. For better or worse being a drummer or in marching band resulted in most of the few social connections I seemed to have in High School. Because of piano I was fairly easily able to outplay almost everyone who had been doing percussion a lot longer. I quit playing percussion 6 years later when my stick bag was stolen and I couldn’t afford to replace the couple hundred dollars of mallets I had lost. It was fun while it lasted.

17) I’ve been having an anti-facebook phase (Can you say Satan’s tool?). So, typing this list is actually therapy for me. I do like blogs better. I think it is strange when people I don’t know, with pictures I don’t recognize; or whose names I only vaguely remember want to be my facebook friend. If someone kind of creaped me out when I knew them, or I have to pull out a yearbook to remember who they were, I ignore their “friendvite.” I don’t want daily updates on former boyfriends.

18) Something about when I was a kid… I really wanted to go to spacecamp and begged for years. Also I wanted to cut my hair like Cindy Lopper (if you don’t remember she had long red hair on one half of her head and a checkerboard pattern shaved onto the other half.)

19) The day I went through the temple was one of the worst days of my life. The day I was baptized was also not good. Morals of the story: expectation is a dangerous thing & spiritual experiences often don’t come at the times you would expect.

20) I don’t think polygamy was ever divinely ordained. There are a lot of implications to that statement. I try not to get too caught up in them. I think I will wait to the next life to really dive into that one / understand it or make a final verdict.

21) Last summer I tried road biking and really loved it. I did the Little Red Riding Hood Century (100 mile ride) with my mom, sister and sister-in-laws. I felt pretty good about how it went considering it was literally the 3rd time I had ever been on a road bike. I am excited to get my own bike and make that ride an annual tradition (at least on years I am not pregnant).

22) I regret testing out of all of my general education classes in college (except that lovely diversity class and what was a new writing requirement). I would like to go back and have a chance to explore intellectually and learn about a wide variety of topics. I wish I had taken honors general education courses.

23) I got arrested for assault after throwing my little sister’s boyfriend out of our house on a late night when my parents were out of town. It took about 10 years for that to turn into a good party story; and even now it is probably only possible because there is no official record…

24) I love to water ski! My favorite color is the sky above Lake Powell on a summer day. I wish I was skiing now. The first sign of spring for me is when I find myself sitting with my feet stacked in water skiing position. I am getting back into snow skiing now that we are living in Utah again but I don’t get to go often enough to be any good.

25) For those few of you who ever need a gift idea for me, you should buy me these: http://www.langlang.com/adidas (I’m very serious… They only come in men’s sizes so I need whatever the equivalent to a women’size 7 ½ or 8 is) I hear you can get them for less when ordered/shipped from an adidas outlet. Someone I sat next to at one Lang Lang’s concerts said “Do you think he sold his soul to the devil to be able to play like that?” I replied “No, If it was that easy I’d be able to do it.”

25 Things about Shawn (from facebook)

1. I am the third of six children. The oldest son. I love my family. Some of them more than others. I was going to rank them here in order of most to least-loved. But some people are really sensitive. Email me if you want to see the list.

2. Andrea Knowlton is the love of my life. She is beautiful, talented, intelligent, good company, a great mom, nice-smelling, and so on and so on.

3. Annie and I are celebrating our 10th anniversary in Hawaii in about two weeks. Anticipating a tropical vacation in the middle of a hazy, frigid Logan winter is almost as good as the vacation itself.

4. We have two girls: Audrey and Clara. They give us unspeakable joy and exhaustion—usually at the same time. We are in for even more of the same. The due date is August 21, 2009. It may be a boy.

5. In the space of a couple of years, Annie or I (or both of us) were involved in a series of car accidents we didn’t cause. The scariest: a lady ran a red light and hit us going 40+. The oddest: the Park City Fire Department dropped a fire hose on our car on I-80 in Parley’s Canyon. The most annoying: a girl hit us on my birthday and then gave us fake insurance information. The police showed up at her house while her family was watching general conference together. Turns out that her dad is a judge—I actually practiced in front him a few years later. There were at least three other accidents. We never got seriously hurt, we sustained many thousands of dollars of property damage, and we acquired an abiding aversion to insurance companies.

6. I am a Utah boy. I love the terrain, climate, and history of my home state. I was amused to learn (while living on the east coast) that some people think Utah is just a really crappy place. I didn’t try to change their minds.

7. I ran unsuccessfully for class office in high school. Twice. My campaigns were hilarious and odd. Slogans I used on posters, buttons, and fliers included: “The Candidate Preferred by 3 out of 5 Small Woodland Animals,” “The Candidate Who Does Not Own or Operate a Monster Truck,” and “The Mother of All Candidates (Not Literally).”

8. My parents’ marriage fell apart when I was about 15. They got divorced four long years later. My older sisters were out of the house, so I was the oldest child at home. This part of my life was not very awesome.

9. I am an attorney. I work for a great law firm in Logan called Bearnson & Peck. I do business work (litigation and transactional), patent litigation, plaintiff’s work (personal injury), and various other things.

10. When I was in sixth grade, I hung a sign on my desk at school advertising my services as an attorney. And I actually took on some “cases.” I argued with my teacher and the ground duty (the recess cop) to get my friends out of trouble.

11. I didn’t always want to be an attorney. I entertained a lot of high-falutin’ romantic-genius ideas about art and stuff as a teenager. So naturally, I passed some years thinking that lawyers were beneath me. I wanted to be a writer.

12. Sometimes I wish I was born an English gentleman 200 years ago. I would spend mornings with my children and dogs tending to the estate, afternoons reading and writing (and maybe practicing law), evenings by candlelight with Andrea, Friday nights dancing at balls I would throw for everyone in the county, and Saturdays shooting things from my horse with Darcy, Colonel Brandon, and the rest.

13. I am a Mormon. I have a testimony of God, Jesus Christ, the Book of Mormon, and the prophet Joseph Smith. Certain aspects of Mormon history, culture, and theology challenge me—I certainly understand why people think we are weird. But I can’t deny the things that I have seen and felt. The church is both good and true.

14. I served in the Brazil Recife Mission. And I waited in the Mississippi Jackson Mission for the Brazilian Consulate to issue my Visa. This proves that God has a sense of humor because I told people before my mission that I wanted to go anywhere but South America or the Deep South. My mission changed me. I was a skinny kid when I left, and I came home twenty pounds lighter. Also, I am incurably enchanted by Brazil. Particularly the music, the barbecue, the futebol, the beaches, and on and on. My mission was a watershed spiritual experience too.

15. Unlike most people, I like vacations. Favorite destinations include Hawaii, Waterton Lakes National Park, and the Colorado Plateau (various points). All great places to hike, bike, and kayak. I badly want to go to Europe. Especially London.

16. Contrary to the proper study habits I was taught as a child, I like to work with good tunes playing. Some favorites by genre and artist: Indy rock (Radiohead and Death Cab for Cutie). Brazilian (Djavan and Marisa Monte). Alt country (Wilco and Ryan Adams). Jazz (Thelonious Monk and The Bad Plus). Musical theatre (Sondheim and Bernstein). Classical (Bach and Ravel).

17. I have followed and contributed to the Bloggernacle (mainstream Mormon blogs) since 2003. I blog at A Motley Vision, which covers Mormon art and culture. Annie affectionately calls the Bloggernacle the “nerdernacle.” An apt description in the best possible way.

18. I am a BYU football fan. I like underdogs, and BYU (strict, religious, based in Utah) is an underdog by definition. I hate the BCS, ESPN, and stupid BYU fans (see cougarboard.com). But not the Utes.

19. I hate partisan politics, cable news, right-wing talk radio, and all other sources of glib, divisive demagoguery. If I was running for office or something, I could probably pass for a moderate republican or a conservative democrat. But I don’t lose too much sleep thinking about where I fit in. If Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign teaches us anything it should be this: nothing unites some Democrats and Republicans like their shared contempt for Mormons.

20. I am conservative by instinct and learning. David Mamet’s essay “Why I Am No Longer a Brain Dead Liberal” is a great short read on what thinking like a conservative means. Google it. And don’t be offended by the article’s title. Trust me: Mamet is a genius playwright, not Rush Limbaugh. Also, I shamelessly admire the achievements of Western Civilization. Read Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence if you don’t know what I mean. Also, both my common-law training and my lifelong inculcation in restoration theology prevent me from underestimating the accumulated wisdom of the ages or overestimating my own (or my contemporaries’) ability to remake the world.

21. I love good literature. Favorites include: Chekhov, Shakespeare, and Stegner.

22. My literary tastes are not entirely pretentious. I am into crime/thriller/mystery lit too. Noir classics like Hammett and Chandler are great. The Sherlock Holmes and Rumpole books are good fun too. And I am a sucker for Alfred Hitchcock films.

23. I like the paintings of Brian Kershisnik.

24. Under the influence of Andrea and her family, I started road cycling last summer. I did a century in September, I have been doing a spin class all winter, and I am looking forward to riding again when the snow melts.

25. I have published a small pile of short stories and poetry. You can check out some of my stuff at shawnbailey.com. Also, I have stories appearing in upcoming editions of Dialogue and Irreantum. Apologies in advance for my eyesore of a website.