Happy Christmas!

Stephen and I spent christmas in Idaho with his brother and family. It was so much fun!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

We decorated for Christmas! I love Christmas so much and I was so excited to decorate our tree and our house!

Some Pictures of The last Month

Grandpa and Ella
Ammon and Brooke's Birthday

Thanksgiving Dinner

The Hepworth Clan at Thanksgiving

Ella in the morning...

Halloween!

We started our Halloween off playing (well, Stephen played, I watched) pumpkin football with some friends. It was so fun!
So this year dressing up was tricky due to lack of time and lack of funds. The day before Halloween I was standing in our spare room trying to figure out what to dress up as and I saw a picture frame sitting on the table and it came to me, I'll be a work of art and Stephen can be an artist! I know I'm a creative genius! I think our costumes turned out rather well considering I only spent $1.25.

That night stopped by a friend's house and had some yummy homemade donuts and then we headed over to my brother's house to play games and have caramel apples. My brother and his wife dressed up as Han Solo and Princess Leah. I'm quite impressed with their costuming skills!

Pumpkin Carving!

I love this picture! Stephen looks SO excited!

Aren't we cute!

The finished product. Stephen's is on the left.

Campfires, Rain and Hail

So last night my brother, Ammon invited Stephen and I up Provo Canyon to have a campfire and roast marshmallows. Stephen and I were planning on going on a date but said we would come for the first little while. As we drove up the canyon it started raining, huge hard drops pelting the car. I started to get a little apprehensive, we were both wearing flip flops, naturally, and I was wearing a sweater that definitely wasn't water proof. When we pulled into the campground parking lot, however, the rain had subsided and we got out to trudge through the mud towards the fire pit. We met my brother's and sister's families and began to start the fire. Just about then the hail started...It wasn't golf ball sized but it was still pretty big. Ammon somehow got the fire started and we stood around it huddled under a blanket to fend off the worst of the hail.

Needless to say, Stephen and I left pretty quickly. But it was a great start to our date and a memory I'll keep for those times when I need a little laugh.

27 and Counting...

HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY MY LOVE! Stephen turned 27 on October 13. We has his sister over for cake and ice cream on his actual birthday and then had my brother, sister and cousins over that saturday. It was so much fun! Stephen got Rock Band 2 and Ticket to Ride for his birthday. I wish I had taken pictures of him playing Rock Band 2, he was so cute!

It's been a while...

I know, it's been a while :( sorry.

In the way of updates my ankle's doing great. I'm walking on it and everything, YAY! I never realized how much I liked to walk until I couldn't do it anymore.

Stephen's doing great, plugging away at school. He still has the same early morning job, yuck, but hopefully we can find him something with better hoours.

Three weeks and counting

So tomorrow will be three weeks since I had surgery, YAY!! Yesterday I got my cast off and got a soft cast. I still can't walk at all but I am allowed to do some physical therapy, you know moving my ankle up and down, side to side, nothing I really WANT to do. But the good news is that I can shower again!

The ER and seven years of bad luck!

So yesterday on my way to the bathroom I got a little dizzy and fell over, almost. my fall was stopped by a full length mirror we have on our wall. I was ok, unfortunately the mirror wasn't. It broke into lots of little pieces. I cut my shoulder a little but nothing serious. Stephen cleaned it up and we wen on our way to the bathroom. While in the bathroom, I felt some glass in my cast, oh great. I was just going to leave it in there and hope it fell out.

Meanwhile, I had been having a lot of extra leg pain in my calf and shin in the last two days. I told this to my nurse case manager and she told me to go to the ER right away because it could possibly be a blood clot, I then told her rather sheepishly about the glass in my cast. She said that they should be able to take care of it at the ER as well.

Well, I'm happy to report that After a ultrasound of my leg and a CT scan of my heart, I don't have any blood clots but unfortunately the glass may or may not still be in my cast. Just another exciting day at the McCuen home. But, hey atleast I got to go outside.

Oh, and P.S. It took me another 1/2 an hour to get up our stairs:0)

Laying Around

So there's not much to say. I'm still recovering. It still takes 5 minutes to walk a few feet to the bathroom and I'm still exhausted when I'm done. My parents came this last weekend and it was really fun to have them around. It was great to have my mommy take care of me, not that Stephen's not doing an amazing job, but there's just something about your mom that makes everything better. Thanks for taking care of me mommy!

Itchy Ankle

So when they operated on my ankle they injected some pain blockers so my ankle wouldn't hurt so much the first day or so after the surgery. Well, the pain blocker have worn off and let me tell you, OUCH! But as long as I keep it elevated, iced and I take some nice narcotics I'm fine, a little loopy but ok. One of the downsides to narcotics is that it makes me super itchy! Mostly it's not too bad because scratching the itches isn't hard, except the itches in my cast! AAAHHH! It's driving me crazy! I'm not supposed to stick anything down there because it could cause infection and I can't hit the cast because it could cause bleeding so mostly I just pretend to scratch the itches but that doesn't really work. What to do, what to do? Any suggestions?

FINALLY!!

So finally all the planets aligned and Heavenly Father decided I'd gone through enough because the surgery I've been waiting for for the past FIVE months was finally approved! I actually had the surgery yesterday. It went really well. For those of you who are unaware, last August I fell off a ladder at work and messed up my ankle. At first the doctors thought I had just sprained my ankle but it never healed. An MRI of my foot showed nothing. When we moved to Utah and I got a new doctor he ordered another MRI but this time of my ankle. This MRI showed a tear to a tendon in my ankle it The doctor recommended surgery but the insurance company didn't agree. Five months later we were still fighting the insurance company. All the while the rest of my body has been deteriorating, my hip joint is swollen and my stomach my have an ulcer. Two weeks ago my amazing husband called to plead my case again with the adjuster. He explained all the other medical problems that have resulted because of my ankle problem. She still didn't approve the surgery and Stephen hung up with her feeling discouraged, but she called back a few minutes later and told him it was approved!! Apparently her supervisor had overheard their conversation and told my adjuster to just approve the surgery because it had been long enough.

After that everything just fell into place. The doctor had an opening the next week for surgery and that's how I found myself in surgery yesterday. They fixed the tear and actually found out why I wasn't healing. Apparently there was some muscle that had grown down my tendon and it was pulling the tear apart so it couldn't heal. SO I DID NEED SURGERY!!

BOO on the insurance company! It does feeling great to be vindicated!! Anyway, now the healing process can begin. I'm not allowed out of bed for 4 days except to the bathroom. After that no weight baring for 6 weeks. It'll be oh so fun but at least I'm moving toward recovery:)

Yesterday when we got home from the surgical center it took almost 30 minutes to get me up to our apartment. It was pretty funny I had to go up the stairs on my bum. Oh boy! Anyway thanks everyone for your prayers and your well wishes. I'll update you all later.

Domestication

Today I woke up with a desire to be domestic. I wanted to ake bread...No, the world's not at an end but I have been married for a year now, I should be more domestic right? Anyway it actually turned out really well.

While I was waiting for the bread to rise I decided to make some salsa. It's pretty good.

Pictures

So finally our living room is clean enough to take pictures of. I think it turned out quit nicely. We got the couch from DI and I cleaned it with a carpet cleaner, it look almost new. I also made some new cushions for it, looks pretty good, if I do say so myself. I'll post some pictures of the bedrooms soon.

Update's on our lives

I know, I'm like the worst blogger EVER! But I have repented and I promise to try to be better at updating!

In the way of news, well, there isn't much. Steve went Spring term and took two really hard Japanese translating classes and did great in both of them, I'm so proud of him! He is so smart, I wouldn't of even known where to start with that. He's now going Summer term and taking some easier classes, well I don't think so but he does. He's taking Beginning Mandarin (as in Chinese) and Pearl of Great Price. He is actually enjoying both of them a lot. He's still faithfully getting up at 3 AM to work at the BYU bookstore doing custodial but I hope that when I get back on my feet and am working again he can find a better job in which he doesn't have to get up quit so early.

Which brings us to me. Nothing much has changed. I still have a torn tendon in my right ankle and the insurance company is still being difficult. Hopefully, however, I can get surgery in the next month or so to fix the tear and I can be back to my normal bright, shiny self by fall (keep your fingers crossed that the insurance company cooperates!). I'm trying to keep myself busy by doing crafts but boy are craft materials expensive!

Other then that we celebrated our one year wedding anniversary on the 21st, yay!

California Dreaming

We went to San Diego last weekend for my little brother, Cam's birthday (He turned 12!!). We some great fun. My parents bought this huge raft that you can see holds two women, one 8 year old girl and a nervous 1 and 1/2 year old.

All Moved In

We did it!! Thanks to all the helpers, we moved into our new place at Wymount (BYU on-campus housing). Now we have the daunting task of unpacking and organizing. I never knew how much stuff we actually do have, it was so nicely compacted in our last place. It seems that now that we have more space, we want to spread it out and we have less space, if that makes sense.

Moving

So we are preparing to move out of our minni-apartment into on campus married housing a BYU and today I was reminiscing about the interesting adventures we've had in this little place. First of all, it's Stephen and my first home together and even though it defiantly has some major drawbacks it will always hold special place in my heart. Second, the huge spiders (I'm serious, they were as big as a quarter!) that kept me up after Stephen went to work, staring at me with their beady green eyes, daring me to move, until I got up the courage to attack them with a stick and beat them senseless. Third, the stove, for those of you who don't know, the stove blew up in my face last week (one of the scariest things ever to happen to me!). Luckily nothing bad happened and I'm fine, the stove however has gone to the big junkyard in the sky and we have a new beautiful stove that works so great. My favorite memories, however, will always be Steve and I sitting on our bed eating dinner, because we don't have a table. Oh the memories. We're happy we're moving but will always remember this place fondly.

We got a CAR!!

So thanks to Stephen's amazing sister Johanna, we have a car! She moved to Japan, didn't need her car anymore and thought of us. She is so great, I love her so much! It's a silver 2008 Mazda 3 and it works great! Thank you, thnak you, thank you Johanna, you have no idea how much you've helped us!

Easter 2009 Fun

My parents came up from San Diego for Easter this year and we had so much fun! We went to visit Grandpa Hepworth which was nice because we haven't seen him in a while.

Our cousins Amber and Nicolas also blessed their baby last weekend and we had a huge Easter feast. Here are some fun pictures...

I forgot my email and my password!!

So I totally forgot the email and password to our blog but I finally figured it out! So much has happened since our last post! We've been enjoying our life in the "minni apartment" but are planning to move to on-campus married housing next month. Both Stephen and I are SOO excited!

Also the doctors finally figured out what was wrong with my ankle. Apparently when I fell off the ladder last August I split a tendon in my ankle and another tendon slipped in between the split and made it unable to heal. So that means that I have to have surgery next month to repair it. That's going to be interesting.

Stephen has also had his own foray into anesthesia. He has had really bad heart burn since he got home from his mission and just recently his heart burn has gotten so much worse, so we went to get it checked out and the doctor recommended he get a throat endoscopy. It was his first experience in semi surgical procedures and he was quit excited! I personally thought he was crazy because I've had more surgeries then I care to remember. Anyway the doctor found out that the valve between Stephen's esophagus and his stomach doesn't close like the rest of the worlds and that stomach acid goes up his esophagus, yuck, I know! And to make matters worse he has a lesion on his esophagus that needs to heals. So basically he has to take prilosec the rest of his life and he has to get another throat endoscopy next month to make sure that the lesion on his esophagus heals properly.

So next month will be crazy busy for us, but really that's the way I like things!

Everyday it gets a Little Cleaner

So my mom took a look at the last pictures I posted and almost screamed. It was a little messy for her :(. So I decided to take more pictures after I organized a little and added a tablecloth to hide the stuff under the table. Looks better Huh?

Our New Apartment

So if you all don't already know Stephen and I finally grew up, became real married people and moved out of my parents house :) We are attending BYU and living in Provo. This is our new Place!! It's a studio of sorts and tiny but we love it!! It's still a mess but everyday it gets alittle cleaner.

Christmas

For Christmas this year we had all my brothers and sisters at the Hepworth home, except Jordan, he's on a mission. It was so much fun! One of the highlights for me was being awoken at 5 am on Christmas morning by my 26 year-old brother, Ammon. Some others include watching Anne help Ella open her presents, going to the Francois's for Christmas Eve, and spending my first christmas with my husband.