our one year anniversary!

we just found out that i was pregnant wednesday morning, but nate and i had a busy day ahead of us and we ended up going off to work without talking about when we were going to tell our parents. nate was so excited that when he got to work he couldn't contain his excitement and spilled the beans right away! so right after he told me that he had told mom and dad Openshaw and his coworkers, we decided to be a little more creative in telling mom and dad Stowers. after we both got off work on wednesday we went and talked to sister Kristi Chapman about making a cake that we could give to mom and dad Stowers to surprise them with the wonderful news. our one year anniversary is today! and we had invited ourselves to dinner at their house. we told them at dinner that we had asked Kristi to make us a 'one year celebration' cake and that we were going to go pick it up after dinner so that we could have it for dessert. when we went to pick up the cake Kristi was so excited! and the cake looked wonderful! she had frosted the top with a baby's face and the wording 'congrats grandparents to be!' on it. it was so cute! we drove back to mom and dad's and made a battle plan for revealing the cake. when we went inside, nate held the cake high so that no one could see the top of it. everyone thought he was being so strange! we asked everybody to gather around the table and then nate set the cake right in front of mom and dad with the words facing them. their reactions were so great! mom thought we were joking! and dad looked so proud and happy. this baby is already so loved! the cake tasted super yummy and we were all so happy afterwards. what a great adventure we are on!

at the Red Lion Hotel where we spent our anniversary weekend :) (king size bed = amazing night's rest!)

nate holding the cake so that no one could see the top

isn't it cute?!

mom and dad's reactions to the cake :)

i feel the need to clarify here. in the video mom says something about "so you got my genes?" what she meant was that our getting pregnant after only being off of birth control for a few weeks is extremely similar to how she was with all of her pregnancies. they got pregnant with me on their very first night together! haha tmi, sorry :) so anyway, apparently i have been blessed with super-fertility too. and i am so very grateful! i know a lot of people struggle with getting pregnant and that some try for years without success. i also know that there had to be a divine hand in this. i had been having problems with my birth control for six months, switching between four different pills in that time, without success! because of these problems, nate and i started talking seriously about starting a family. we decided to go off of birth control at the beginning of august for two reasons; one reason was because i figured it would take a month or two for my body to filter out the last of the birth control hormones, and the other was because the end of august marked a year of marriage (which was the amount of time i for sure wanted to wait, even though waiting for two or three years had also been discussed...) anyways, after four weeks my period hadn't come and so we decided that i needed to take a pregnancy test. i took three, all positive! within two weeks of going off of birth control we were blessed with a little life that will change ours forever! i am so grateful, and i know we were meant to have this child now, even though we are so unprepared! God knows what is going on so we are just going to do our best and see what happens!