Life of Late in Pictures

I was going through the pictures on my SMART PHONE the other day and re-discovered the following pictures that tell the story of my life over the last 2 months:

This was from Stephen and my Aloha date night. We made smoothies :)

I obviously spent an exorbitant amount of money on decorations for said date night... 

This is called, my life before my smart phone. Aka, my life in the dark ages, when I either called my mom for directions at least once a week, or looked up directions on someone else's phone and then took a picture of it with my dumbphone. What a wretched existence it was. 

These are the churros that I made for an amazing Mexican (ish) Thanksgiving dinner. They turned out soooo good!

This is my student, J. He made himself into a cyborg one day for indoor recess. 

This is called, I cannot live in this frozen tundra wasteland any longer. Note the icicles on this sad, sad bicycle. That is NOT okay!

This is the "Be" Stephen and I worked on for the month of December. I was very proud of my chalk drawing and took a picture of it. I'm glad I did, because no sooner had I hung it up than Nicole backed into it and got it all over the back of her skirt. 

This is the date card I gave Stephen for our winter wonderland date night!

This was our Christmas tree this year. .........you can see why we needed a reminder to "be positive."

This is the date card I made for the present we gave to both of our parents - a date-in-a-box!  Stephen didn't know that the word "stay-cay" existed. I know I did not make it up. 

This is called, here we are at the airport and we are so excited to be up at 4:30 in the morning and about to be on our way from Indiana to Maryland!

This is the insane line for Southwest Airlines check-in. 

This is called, we did not make our plane. So we went to the Indiana Children's Museum instead! They have so many costumes you can dress up in, like these dinosaur ones. 

.....or these deep sea diver ones.....

or this turtle and butterfly option! I was thrilled. Stephen was a little embarrassed. But still a good sport!

Logan got tired. Stephen is so cute. 

Here was another embarrassing picture I asked Stephen to take. At the Indianapolis airport, there is a shop called "Forever, Heather" and I was not about to miss that golden opportunity! His hands are supposed to look like a heart. Because he hearts me. Forever. 

Good Morning, Your Dog Died.

Waking up on Christmas morning is like....well, like waking up on Christmas morning. You wake up suddenly, and the air feels fizzy, and you know that it's the beginning of the best day ever. {Or at least the best day that year...}

Waking up on the day after Christmas is like waking up the day after your dog died. And you wake up kind of slowly and then all day it kind of sinks in that your dog is never coming back, and you keep remembering your dog as you go about your day, and by the end of the day you just feel rumpled and depressed.

Christmas morning this year was just as fizzy as the Christmas mornings of other years. It started at about 8:00, when the little boys woke up.

{I wish I had pictures to share of that, but they are all in Indiana and I am not.}

Luckily, the day after Christmas this year didn't start until 11:30, and when I did wake up, it was to kisses and hugs, and when I got up after that, it was to spend an hour putting on Natalie's fancy makeup and curling my hairs with her fancy curling iron so that we could go and eat lunch at the cutest little fancy historic lunch / brunch / dessert place I have ever seen: L.S. Ayres' Tea Room.

 

 

L.S. Ayres used to be really hoppin and iconic of Indianapolis, but then Macey's bought it and shut down the restaurant, which was the L.S. Ayres Tearoom. Stephen's mom went a few times with her mom so it was a really fun memory for her, and the Indiana Museum reopened the tea room just for the month of Diciembre 2013, so all the girls got to go (me, Stephanie, Natalie, Diane, her sister Angie, and their mom, Stephen's grandma).

 

We had hot chocolate and yummy sammiches and salad and soup, and they checked our coats, and it was just really fun!  

 



You know what I really like? Whenever we go out, Diane says: "These are all my daughters," or, "Can you get a picture of me and my daughters?" I know I'm not really her daughter, but it is so sweet.

 

The plan for tonight was ice skating. But when we arrived, there was no ice on one rink, and the only sign of life was a hockey team practicing on the other rink and two very nice black guys walking around with a boombox ish thing and also wondering where the ice rink was.

 

So instead, we wandered around the square, which was all lit up for Christmas and was home to the biggest fake Christmas tree in the world.

 

This was their first date years (and years and years and years...jk...) ago!

This is a statue that somebody thought was a good idea, but the rest of the world is just confused by.

This is some guy.

This is either a nutcracker or a steadfast tin soldier.

This is where people used to ice skate, but now it's all dry and people can only dream of skating in such a perfect ambiance.

This is across the street from the real  L.S. Ayres. See that clock? That's how you know!

Not too shabby for the day after Christmas :)

Baby Jesus and a Shimp-Load of Presents

Christmas, at the Shimp home, is not just a one-day celebration. It is not even a two-day holiday.

It is a month-long festival, and when you cram all of that yuletide into the one week that your college kids are home, it becomes a week of dashing through the snow from mall to family party to classy Christmas event and back to the mall, at high speed and dragging along as many brothers and sisters as possible. Also, food.

This is us at the Scottish Rite Cathedral in Indianapolis. We watched the Nutcracker Ballet! Which is basically the music of my childhood, so I was in heaven the whole time. And Stephen liked it too.

We had a Christmas gift exchange for the kids on Christmas Eve. Stephen gave to Michael and Logan, and he told them he had gotten them a Hershey's bar. It was actually a rocket....that he ended up assembling on Christmas. 

Then we got our Christmas jammies!! And Stephen ruined some pictures. And so did Brandon. 

The whole family got Christmas jammies! I love this tradition!

My favorite decoration in the house was this ginormous ball of mistletoe. It is a very popular hangout with the newlywed couple and the engaged couple, and also the married-with-seven-kids couple. 

The girls and their Christmas jammies :) 

We like each other. 

 This is another tradition that they do - every year, someone hides the pickle ornament somewhere on the Christmas tree, while everyone else waits in a different room. Then the person who finds it gets a Christmas book that they read to the whole family, and they are the one who hides the pickle the next year.

...GUESS who found the pickle this year??

Well it was me :) I promise they didn't just let me win, either. I know because there were tears.

Then I read "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" in my best teacher voice and it was on to the next tradition of making gingerbread houses!

 This was not a "let's build our gingerbread houses and whoever has the most fun is the winner" kind of contest. Teams were picked out 2 weeks ago. Barricades were put up between competition sites so other teams couldn't look. And we were given a time limit of 18 minutes.

So it got a little intense and some feelings got a little hurt, but in the end, three works of art sat on the table, ready to be judged.

At some point in the middle of the night (or at 6:45 in them morning), Santa came and filled up the living room with gifts!

So that's how Christmas began up in here. More pictures to come of the rest of our break :) 

Shimp Home for the Holidays

This year is my first year not going home for Christmas.

.....I KNOW. Hash tag, big girl.

Instead of Baltimore lights twinkling up into my airplane window on Friday, I experienced the lights of Indianapolis for the fist time.

Then I experienced:

-some delicious cheesy bread, sugar cookies, peanut butter fudge, and cold medicine
-getting tackled by little boys who quickly stopped when they realized I was not their sister
-using all of Natalie's makeup since I apparently left all of mine in Utah
-going out Christmas shopping in the middle of Indianapolis flooding

{I'm serious. I got an emergency weather alert txt telling me to stay away from potential flooding areas}

-sleeping with Stephen in the bed his parents assigned to us. Oh, with his brother in the same bed.
-the Christmas program in the Indy 1st ward, which included a fabulous special musical number and donuts after the meeting
-a Christmas dinner at an interior designer grandma's BEAUTIFUL home

-a conversation that went like this:

me: Brandon, are you taller than me now?
We stand up to measure ourselves and find that he is a good 3 inches taller.
Diane: Oh yeah, I can't keep him in the same pair of pants for more than a month! He just grows out of them so fast!

-followed by a riveting game of boys vs. girls Catchphrase

-in which I got "growing pains," and the timer was speeding up, and it was up to me to help my team guess it, and I blurted out: "Okay, this is what....Brandon keeps doing this out of his pants."

-and my team didn't guess it and instead just got really confused.

-so I said, "Diane was just telling me about it!"

-and then people just laughed instead of guessing and I had to try something else.

There's no place like home for the holidays, but there's an H on one of the stockings here, and Natalie drew me in the family picture she put in Eric's room, and I'm surrounded by people I love. Besides which, there's a huge ball of mistletoe that I can stand under whenever I want. So for my first Christmas away from home, it's going to be a pretty nice one :)

How it Started

I'll just address the elephant in the room right upfront: This is a long blog post. I put in some pictures, which I'm hoping will act as snacks in Sacrament Meeting and keep you entertained....mostly. Carry on!



Some might say that it all started with a note. But actually, it didn't. Actually, it all started with knock. And a handsome stranger asking if this was the apartment where our ward was having nice notes.

Some might say that it was the wrong apartment, and at the time, that's what I told him. But actually, it wasn't. Actually, it was the right apartment, and the right girl, and the right boy. I just didn't know it yet.

I didn't make a great first impression. As in, I asked him if he was weird and awkward in the first 3 minutes of knowing him, and he thought I was rude. [For the record, he was a teeny bit awkward, so it was a valid question.]

However, it wasn't such a bad impression that all hope was lost. He came over again, and I redeemed myself. And then, he came over again, and again, and then he kept coming over. And I didn't even mind.

October 9th was my birthday, and since the best friend advertised free food and birthday kisses in a painstakingly crafted mass txt, he was there.

Some might say that Stephen had nothing to do with building this cake. Those people would be right. He just put the candles on because I said we couldn't eat it until I had blown them out, and if we're being honest with ourselves, we might as well just admit that the cake was 90% of the reason why he was there.

I won't tell you what I wished for when I blew those candles out....but the weekend after my birthday, I found myself squashed up next to him on a couch in an apartment south of campus, watching a scary movie with some friends. And he held my hand.

He played it cool, but this is how he felt:

(Me, too.)

A week later, I got a mysterious nice note. It looked like this:

This is the note that some say it started with.

I searched the ward menu, and the only S.S. in our ward was Stephen Shimp. And I knew, grazie to my women's intuition, that Stephen had not written this nice note.

Even so, he did like my cute skirts. And we did go out sometime.

This is the night he wanted to take me on a date, but it was the ward Halloween party. So we just hung out there and took beautiful pictures like this one about it.

This is the night after the Halloween party, the other night he wanted to take me on a date. A Jew came to town and we had already planned on going to Cornbelly's with my roommates, so we just invited Stephen and his roommates along. They did things like taking pictures of us in the pumpkins and then offering to let us use them on our wedding announcements. I did things like pretending not to notice their comments....

This picture is not from a date either. It's just from Halloween day, when Stephen and I hung out for like the hundredth time. And for the first time, he caught a fish from the Raintree River. And also for the first time....something else happened :)

When we finally did go out sometime, it was to this place:

The Quarry

I had been rock climbing a few times, and even been on a few dates to this place. This date was the best of them all :)

This might be where my mom might say it all started. The day after he asked me on a date, I called my mom. 

"MOM," I said, "You'll never guess what happened to me."

"What!" she said, all excited already. 

"The cutest boy in the ward asked me on a date!" I said. "I think we're going this weekend!"

She cheered. She asked for his name. She facebook stalked him. She congratulated me.

That date was on November 3rd. And not to color myself psycho or anything, but in the interest of full disclosure I should probably share that when my sister asked me less than a month later if I liked him, I told her I kind of wanted to marry him. 

In December, we had all kinds of adventures.

December 1st found us ice-skating at the Gallivan Center....

 This conversation happened when we stepped out onto the ice:

Stephen: WHAT! Heather, you don't know how to ice-skate??
me: No, I do! I promise I do! I just....I forgot, but I'll remember in a second!
Stephen: Oh, no, no, Heather, noooo!
me: Stephen! It's fine, I'll remember! Just wait a minute!
Stephen: What are you doing? Heather, what??
me: I'm just skating! Hold on, just slow down for a second!

It was not my most graceful ice-skating debut, but as soon as I remembered what to do (after about 5 minutes of tremulously clinging to Stephen and insisting that I knew what I was doing), I actually did okay. 

Looking at the temple lights in SLC....

.....meeting some Anti-Mormons posing in awesome costumes for free pictures, forgive us for that brief affiliation.....

.....wandering the streets of SLC, looking for the car.....(Don't worry, it was parked at none of these hotels. We checked.) 

 

 

I love Christmastime. I love downtown Salt Lake City. And holding hands on the car ride back to Provo, once we finally found the car at 2 in the morning, I loved Stephen, too.

This one time, we made a bomb-amazing gingerbread house.

 Ingredients, if you're interested in replicating our fine work:

-Starbursts from my kids for Christmas
-Berry Colossal Crunch cereal for the roof
-fudge-striped cookies from a 100 calorie pack
-brownie bites, also from a 100 calorie pack
-Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal
-tootsie rolls from ???
-frosting from when my kids made gingerbread houses at school and the parent volunteers tried to throw away the frosting and well, I rescued it.
-graham crackers from a bonfire we attended in oh, October....

And then he went home to Indiana, and I went home to Maryland, and we skyped almost err day.

Even when I was back in Utah for New Years Eve and he was still in Indiana, and I should probably have been going to a party or something. We skyped then too.

When he managed to get his arse back in Utah, we had more adventures!

He taught me how to snowboard....

and one time, when we were snowboarding, he asked me to be his girlfriend!

I said no.

But then I said yes of course, so it was just a minor setback. Then we went home, made fajitas, called his parents, and - most importantly! - changed our facebook status (super-important, you guys. It is 2013)

I should note that, when we called his parents, his mom said I seemed really sweet :) ...........which she quickly followed up with an invitation to read the new For the Strength of Youth booklet. 

As boyfriend and girlfriend, we once optimistically went to Sundance to try to get into the Matthew Mc-con-a-hottie and Reese Witherespoon movie without previously buying tickets, and instead just eating at a cute Mexican restaurant when we found that there were no more tickets available.

We went to Fire and Ice at the Riverwoods. We missed the fireworks, and the snowboarding, and pretty much everything else, but we were in time for the ice sculptures!

....and in time to walk around and try on some really beautiful hats.

 Winter has never been my favorite season. As in, it has always been my worst-favorite season. But winter with Stephen is a nice season, because it involves fun things like snowboarding and yummy things like Little Caesar's pizza that I had to buy for my roommates and warm things like cuddling.

It was one night, later in the month of January, when Stephen said: "I don't want you to think I'm weird, but....do you ever think about, what it would be like if we were to like, get married?" 

I was so surprised that he said that, but to tell the truth, I did think about it. Pretty much err day.

All of a sudden, it was February, 

Jazz game!

 and then Valentines Day. 

Which was a perfect day with a perfect ending. The ending was a whisper that sounded like this:

him: Heather. 

me: Stephen. 

him: .....I love you. 

 

me: I love you, Stephen!

And with that, we started life with a new normal.

 

It was normal to go rock-climbing,

normal to go running,

normal to hike the Y (with one person riding piggy back at times),

normal to fall asleep on the apartment floor after working out.

It was normal to never have leftovers, because I had a Stephen instead. Normal to sit on his lap while he studied and I graded. Normal for him to come in and visit my class, when he had a chance. Normal for me to come and study with him in the library and go to classes with him when I was off-track, or to go to the UVU basketball games so he could get extra credit in his class. It was all just the best kind of normal I had ever lived!

So that's how I think it started. How THIS

happened, is a blog post for another day :)