Happy Thanksgiving!

John Aaron and I are hitting the road bright and early at 6 A.M. tomorrow to spend Thanksgiving with our families. Tomorrow we will eat at my very favorite restaurant, Posados, in Shreveport, do a little shopping (woo!) and drive five more hours to New Orleans Thursday morning to spend Thanksgiving with John Aaron's family. We will be there until Saturday night, drive to Shreveport Saturday night and leave Sunday after lunch to go back to Tennessee. My sweet ER nurse friend in our Sunday School class told me that we need to stop every couple of hours so I can walk around....apparently, you can get blood clots if you're sitting too long when you're pregnant....scary! Anyways, we are so excited to see our families....and I can't wait to eat at Posados!!! I've been talking about it for months :)

This time next week we will (hopefully) know the gender of our baby!! I have an appointment on December 1st at 11:30 and John Aaron and I are so excited. We will definitely let everyone know as soon as we find out!!!! I cannot wait! We have our baby names picked out already so I will go ahead and reveal those....Emma Joy or Levi Aaron. I am so excited about decorating the baby's room and being able to call him or her by their name!

John Aaron has a full MAN beard, if you've seen some of our recent pictures. We are having a Beard Auction at our BCM on November 30th to raise money for our summer missionaries. This is how it works....The boys grow out their beards for the month of November and at the auction, students buy someone's beard and whoever buys the beard, gets to shave the beard however they want. Then, the student has to walk around campus with their beard all crazy for 24 hours. I am hoping to buy John Aaron's so he can shave it all off!! A group of students are threatening me that they are going to buy it and give him a Hitler mustache.....ugh. I hope that doesn't happen.

John Aaron has been playing intramurals with the BCM team, here is a peek at his volleyball skills and his beard!

It's Christmas in the Matthew Home!

John Aaron and I always decorate before we go home to Louisiana for Thanksgiving, because it's nice to come home to a Christmasy house, and because we leave before Christmas to go back to Louisiana. This year we won't go back to TN until after New Year's so we like to enjoy our cozy, decorated house for as long as we can.

Every year when we decorate our house we make hot chocolate, cookies, and watch a Christmas movie. Last year, we started the tradition of creating something out of our tree skirt...it was so silly and fun that I decided that we have to do that every year now! John Aaron made a choir robe out and I made a poncho last year. Here are our creative costumes we made this year...

John Aaron's Christmas Super Man Cape (Notice the staircase that JA painted the banister and bead board, he stayed up ALL night working on it)

My one shouldered Christmas shirt, I promise there is a tiny baby bump under there!

Sweet Zoe with her Christmas blanket.

This picture describes me perfectly right now...

College boys, Video Games, and the GI Joe Movie...





Those 3 things together is what has inspired the blog post. As I am typing this, John Aaron is living the post seminary life of a Friday night with college students. And I am in the bedroom NOT cleaning up and packing, which was my plan, but facebook always is a distraction. So our bedroom is messy for now and I am post a way over due post!





So...as everyone knows, thanks to my inablility to keep a secret, we are going to have a baby! I am 14 weeks tomorrow and you can see a tiny baby bump (if you look for it!). Pregnancy so far, has been the opposite of what I thought it would be. I was so scared that I would feel super nauseous the whole time and think that I was dying. That's usually my reaction to any pain/sickness that I feel. But in the words of John Aaron, I am, "The funnest pregnant girl ever." I think I'm pretty fun :)





John Aaron and I are loving being able to do ministry together at the BCM, God has been doing some great things here and we love being a part of it! We are so happy to be doing what we have dreamed of doing since we met eight years ago at LA Tech. Yes, that's right....we also celebrated our 8 year dating anniversary on October 28th! We spent the night making last minute plans for Homecoming, dinner, and at the homecoming float site. What more could a girl want?