Catch All

This summer was super busy for me so I didn't have a lot of time to blog. Right now I'm definitely putting off writing several papers, so I figured it was the perfect time to do a catch up post!
First things first. I turned 21!! My friends took me to the owl for dinner and then to Texas Roadhouse for drinks. I rode the saddle, got sang to, and all around had a lovely evening.
We went to San Francisco for our family vacation. I think I already blogged about this. Yep. See here if you're interested! We went to Ghirardelli square, another aquarium, spent some time on the wharf, walked across the golden gate bridge, rode a cable car and went to a GIANTS game. It was the highlight of my trip for sure.
We had an Anderson side family reunion in July. We went to Midway and stayed in this cute little Swedish village. We swam in the crater, hung out with family, went boating, went to our favorite restaurant Dairy Keen, had a bunch of ridiculous competitions, played a ton of games and got to spend time with my cousins and all their cute babies.
Other things:

We had this massive water slide set up in my yard for a work party.

Dani, Brooke, and Tim came up and took me to my first rodeo. 

Me and Noelle decorated for Shaylie's bachelorette party. LOOK at that banner!

I got to spend some quality drinking and shopping time with these ladies.

We had a joint celebration of birthdays for me, Janelle, and Carlie

Cupcakes are super difficult to move in cars.

Me and Noelle planned this wonderful and incredibly fun scavenger hunt.

I spent some quality time with Texas and David.

Bear lake with the girls.

These are more pictures of Dani's baby shower. This was some of the food.

The diaper cake I made.

Sage, Amanda, me, Dani

Sage and me, the masterminds of this baby shower.

the end result.

I rode a horse for the first time!!

It was such a fun summer, one that I won't soon forget even though it was super busy. 

Jaxson Craig Schaumkel :)

My best friend had her baby at 9:18 this morning, which means I'm officially an AUNT!! 

Dani's water broke at 4 this morning, so they went into the hospital.

She started getting contractions about 2-3 minutes apart.

She had an epidural at 7, which was when I woke up and left for Riverton.

I got to the hospital at nine and waited with her family for a bit.

Dani started pushing and just 3 pushes later out came Jaxson!

I cannot even describe how in love with this little boy I am.

Born Friday, October 19th (my lucky number!!), 7 pounds 3 ounces, 19 inches long.

He's not even technically related to me and I find myself bragging about how great he is to people.

Like, "oh, he scored a 9 on the apgar scale," and "he took STRAIGHT to breastfeeding."

I'm in love.

Welcome to the world, baby J.

Love, Aunt Katy

 The new family

Family plus me :)

Perfect tiny fingers

Dani was a champ.

it's raining babies

I'm making a goal to write in this blog more, even if no one reads it. So here goes :)
This weekend I threw a baby shower. And it was AWESOME. Sage, Brooke, and I went to Walmart Friday night and bought a bunch of stuff for it. We definitely wandered around for like an hour and a half looking for everything, but it worked out.
So. Saturday morning comes. Sage comes over at nine and we start to prepare things while Dani so graciously makes us pancakes. I chop celery LIKE A PRO and they all end up in beautifully sliced and perfectly sized celery sticks. Then I attempt carrots. First cut into the carrot-BAM. There goes my left pointer finger. Not literally. I just nicked it. After I get all cleaned up, we finish chopping and set everything out.
For the fruit we decided to do fruit skewers instead of having a big bowl with everything combined. Why? Because when you have a big bowl with everything combined everyone takes the strawberries and pineapple first and then you're left with a bowl of old grapes. So I pick up the first skewer with a clear picture of how this is going to go: It's going to slide gracefully on and look artistic when the rest of the fruit is on. I pick up a chunk of pineapple and impale it with the end of the stick. It gets stuck. I push harder and instead of gracefully sliding on like I envisioned, the top of the stick splintered, stabbing me in the right pointer finger.
So far, baby shower 2, Katy 0. Tim decides to play the man and comes over to get this freaking long splinter out of my finger. I hold my breath and look away. "oh. oh. i almost. shit. yeah i just broke the end off." This is what I hear. I look at my finger and, indeed, he just broke the end off. There's still a quarter inch of wood inside my finger. Sage came to my rescue and pulled out some tweezers and got the rest out, but not without shooting some scathing comments to Tim about how inadequate he'll be as a father.
We finished prepping and people started arriving. Everyone pigged out (seriously, the before and after pictures of the food table are ridiculous) and then we started games. The girls all had to guess the kind of baby food for one game. Another had to guess how big around Dani's belly was. The next Brooke and I teamed up to win the three-armed diaper races. We did it tournament style, and won multiple rounds to claim our prize, narrowly beating out Amanda and her partner after we had just tied.
I just like winning, so I was all over that.
It lasted a couple hours and ended up being super fun.
I'll write about the rest of the weekend tomorrow night. :)

San Fran pt .1

San Francisco so far has been so much fun! We left early Saturday morning, and drove to Reno. The car ride down we watched Anchorman (favorite), The Vow (eh), and New Year's Eve (surprisingly funny). We got to Reno and checked into our hotel room....and did nothing else but eat for the night. Sunday we woke up and got on the road pretty early. We stopped in Tahoe and looked at the lake and walked around main street for a while. It's a super cute little private town, because we were on the south side where there isn't a ton of tourism. The drive up there and the lake is absolutely gorgeous. I would have got more pictures but my camera died.
Sunday we also got to our hotel here in San Francisco and then did some driving around the city. It was SO BUSY. We found out that the gay pride parade was on Saturday, so there was still some residual partying going on Sunday. Sunday we walked around Pier 39 for a few hours and then came back to the hotel.
Today was crazy busy. We woke up early and headed out to go to Alcatraz. We took the boat over and then walked around the jail and the island for a while. It was super interesting. We took one of those audio tours, which I've always thought were incredibly done, but this one was actually super fun. It talked about Alcatraz before it became a prison, what an average day was like, and also talked about some of the escape attempts, which were surprisingly clever and funny. We saw the gardens over there and from the island there was a gorgeous view of San Francisco.
After Alcatraz we went back over to Pier 39 and ate lunch, got some souvenirs, and went to the aquarium.
Okay. I effing LOVE aquariums. I think they are so much fun and there's so many cool fish. I got a ton of cool pictures but I'll post them later. There were these kick ass jellyfish, and the fish from Finding Nemo. There were tunnels you could walk under that had fish going over you that were awesome. I got to pet a starfish, a sea anemone, a sea cucumber, a manta ray, and a SHARK! It was exhilarating. Also, things in the sea feel freaking weird. The anemone felt like a wet mushroom, the sea cucumber felt like a squishy, weird....something. Like, you know those tubes you play with when you're a kid that have a hole in the middle and they're filled with water and glitter and things, and if you squeeze it too hard it will slip out of your hands because it's so wiggly? it's kind of like that, but slimier and even squishier. gah. I can't get over how sweet aquariums are.
After that we drove around San Francisco for a while, came back to the hotel, went swimming, ate dinner, played games, etc.
It's felt like we've already been gone forever. Also, I've always wanted to be the kind of person that says things like, "I love traveling." or "I love to see new places and explore." Nope. I totally am not. I am so comfortable with the people I know, where I'm living, and what I'm doing. On Sunday when we were in town it was so incredibly busy. The whole town was teeming with people, and it just made me so anxious. I just wanted to get away from all that. I don't know that I could cut it living in a super busy town. I'm content where I am, for the most part. It wasn't nearly as bad today, after gay pride was over. But still. So much chaos all the time.
Anyway. This trip has been fun so far, and we'll be here until Friday afternoon, so there's a lot more coming :)

a list of recent tales

recently, i have:
-helped plan/attended dani's bridal shower
-organized her kitchen with all new bridal shower gifts
-kicked a door down
-started a new job
-been told to "fall off a cliff into shit" at that new job
-been so sick i've puked for a whole day
-took liz to salt lake with me for a weekend
-finished the redecorating of my room (except curtains)
-got to see robyn, home from her mission for a funeral
-gone swinging
-gone hot tubbing with girls from work
-read 3 books
-finished desperate housewives
-restarted grey's anatomy
-spent way too much money at old navy and victoria's secret
...
i think that's all.
life is grand, and much too short.

loss

Tonight, i watched the movie Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close with my sister. It's about a boy who loses his father on 9/11, and goes on a "quest" to try and find out more about him. And it just got me thinking. Life is so fragile. One day you can be walking around, healthy as can be. And all of that can change in an instant.

I had a dream last night that David died. I didn't dream how, but I dreamed about the phone call informing me of it. And of his funeral. I woke up sobbing. And the thing that hit me the most was that it could actually happen. Nothing in life is guaranteed, and that includes a tomorrow.

I don't know what I would do if he or Liz died. And now it's just been on my mind. I feel like I can't adequately express how much I love both of them. I tell Liz 10+ times a day that I love her, and i still feel like it's not enough. she means the world to me, and i could never get along without her. i can start crying just thinking about my life without her. ugh.

anyway. i feel very scattered and not well put together lately, so i apologize for the sporadic thought process here.

Give this one a careful read

So here's the thing. As human beings, we are programmed to respond emotionally to different things. Any of the five senses, what we perceive as a tragedy, and young children are among these. But I really think we need to take a step back from our emotions occasionally and delve deeper into things. Mainly what I'm irritated about is all of this KONY uproar flying around. People watch the video, are saddened by what they perceive, and immediately repost it without looking up the information. BE SKEPTICAL. One of my biggest pet peeves in life is when people blindly follow and trust something that they don't know to be true or correct. It's the mentality of sheep being led to the butcher. If everyone else is doing it, obviously it's okay.

If you look up Invisible Children, the company and professed charity that created the Konyvideo and is causing such a disturbance, on the Better Business Bureau website, you'll notice a few suspicious things. One is that Kony refuses to provide all of the information that the BBB asks for. While the information is technically voluntary, it makes the organization look like they are hiding something. They lack transparency. The next thing you can look at is their budget, which can be located at Charity Navigator. The three CEOs are paid 80,000+ dollars a year for doing....nothing. They founded the "movement" back in 2003, but since then, have been part of the company by name only. Invisible Children also spends a hugely disproportionate amount on travel, office rental, and other "unnamed expenses," as their website puts it.

I may be wrong. This could be the real deal. But please. Look deeper into whatever subject it is before you post about it, and before you try to convince others that you're right. This is the way mass hysteria begins.