The Wonnacotts’ May: Cows, birds, a weird gender reveal, and just a few more weddings

Dear Family,

We started the month with a brand new experience: petting highland cows.

This was part of our friend Lola’s birthday/pre-MCAT celebration. The day before she took her MCAT and two days before her birthday, we all drove to a cute little cow farm that has chosen to monetize its highland cows in a way that one could only do in a world run by instagram algorithms.

But highland cows are completely adorable and we all had a great time.

Lola is one of my best friends, and I’m grateful she’s in my life. One thing I’ve realized I appreciate about her recently is how positively she speaks about her husband with absolutely no prompting.

Sometimes it’s even a little weird, but I think that’s largely because it’s a lot more common for women to casually complain (often light-heartedly or jokingly) about their husbands than it is to casually compliment them. I think we could all stand to be a little more like Lola in many ways, but especially in the way we talk about our spouses when they aren’t there.

Pregnancy Updates (and Our Gender Reveal)

One thoroughly enjoyable aspect of marriage recently has been always having someone to talk to who understands me and wants to spend time with me. It’s pretty remarkable how, even when I don’t feel up to spending time with anybody, I always want to spend time with Luke.

It’s entertaining to experience pregnancy with Luke, since he is certainly quick to understand and sympathize with whatever I’m going through, but there are certain things that he is just not impressed by.

My anatomy scan appointment, for one thing, was one of those things that I thought for sure he would want to be present for. The anatomy scan, for those unfamiliar with what seems to be either a local or a newish term, refers to the ultrasound during which someone confirms the gender of your baby around twenty weeks. Nowadays, you can find out the gender of the baby around twelve weeks if you choose to undergo a blood test. The actual purpose of the blood test is to identify chromosomal abnormalities in the baby, but finding out the gender is a neat side benefit.

I opted out of the blood test, choosing to instead just assume that I’ll have a baby with Down syndrome and be ready for anything.

So, our anatomy scan was going to be the first time Luke and I heard the gender of the baby, and because my pregnancy books describe it as a magical moment to both see the baby and learn the gender, I thought Luke would want to be there. Luke didn’t really seem to feel any real need to accompany me, but humored me and left work early to come anyway.

We were both a little underwhelmed when the pronouncement came so quickly: ”you’re having a girl!”

Perhaps underwhelmed is the wrong word. We were both excited. But the moment felt a little next significant when the ultrasound continued for at least another half hour after that.

And thus we learned why it’s really called an “anatomy scan”— it is when the ultrasonographer takes a thorough look at every part of the baby to make sure everything is…there, I guess. We tried asking her questions while she was going, but she’s not actually allowed to interpret anything in the sonograms because she’s not a doctor, so we got no real answers.

But she is allowed to tell us that we’re having a girl, which is the only news we were really expecting to receive.

Luke spent most of the appointment quite bored. I’m guessing he won’t be coming to any future “exciting” OBGYN appointments. But he has kindly offered to attend the birth, which is probably the most important part. Hopefully he finds that more engaging.

One development that did get a reaction out of him was the first time he could feel our baby moving in my tummy. His reaction was one of horror and discomfort, however, and I think the experience did not send a flattering image of our forthcoming offspring into his mind. He described her as “wriggling,” which is just usually associated with much grosser creatures before it is associated with humans.

To be fair, she was really kicking and I wasn’t enjoying it much either, so it probably wasn’t the most enchanting first impression he could have gotten.

Nonetheless, discovering the gender of our baby has made everything feel a little more real, and Luke was excited enough about the discovery that he wanted to throw a little gender reveal party for our local friends and family, even though it meant throwing a little “screw you” to all of our family members in Maryland whom we had told that news would be coming on Thursday.

Now, I know the above picture requires a little bit of explanation.

I bent the genre of gender reveals a little bit because I have a bit of an aversion to some of the arbitrary things we assign to gender, like colors, activities, character traits, interests, or whatever. I feel like associating gender with things that are so obviously only social constructs can be confusing or conflicting to kids.

And I know that no one cares about my refusal to use pink and blue as my method of revealing the gender of my baby. And I know I’m not changing anything. But I just wanted to go a different direction now in the hopes that I’ll be able to maintain the momentum when my kids are actually at a point where they’re influenced by the things I do.

Anyway. Instead of blue for a boy and pink for a girl, Luke and I decided on a “flavor reveal,” theming the whole gathering around the flavors peanut butter and chocolate. Because they go well together and because I like all things chocolate and Luke likes all things peanut butter.

I know, I know, it’s goofy. But the chocolate spilling out of the cake is our indication that we’re having a girl.

Usually, you don’t have to explain a gender reveal picture, which is the primary weakness of my approach. But all of our friends and family at the party were quite supportive and sweet about the whole strange idea I had conceived of. I feel blessed that people came and celebrated with us. Thank you to all of you.

You also gave us the motivation we needed to finish up some of the house and yard projects we’d been thinking about for months, so thank you for that as well.

Most people in our lives weren’t able to join us, but luckily enough, my grandma and grandpa Kent were driving through Utah a few days after the fact, so they got to enjoy our freshly mown, recently managed backyard with us after we all grabbed dinner together. I hadn’t seen Grandma and Grandpa Kent since my wedding, so I was very grateful that they stopped to pay us a visit.

Hobbies

Luke has had a kind of exciting month, as Luke often manages to have.

This is because Luke is quite good at dedicating himself to a variety of hobbies and self-improvement kicks. You may remember that Luke is training for a half marathon and if you follow him on instagram, it’s hard to forget that he’s regularly posting.

In addition to those commitments, this month Luke has dedicated himself to two other hobbies with increased vigor: shotgun shooting and birding.

Neither of these are brand new hobbies, but he seems to have reached a new step in both of them.

For shotgun shooting, he has begun participating in local sporting clay competitions.

Luke has recently had to explain to me the differences between the varying shotgun sports. I could explain them to you, but I will not. Let’s just say the sporting clays seems to be a little like golf in that you progress through various spots, each with a slightly different way of achieving the same goal. Over the course of several stations, you have the chance to shoot 100 clays, and your score is totaled up out of 100 shots.

At Luke’s first competition, he scored 48/100 with his pump shotgun, which is not the ideal kind of shotgun for this particular shotgun sport.

He has resolved to improve, and I look forward to seeing how that goes. Stay tuned for updates.

In other shooting related news, he has begun performing community service in order to qualify for a special kind of deer tag which entitles him to two tags over three years in any hunting season if he does forty hours of service for the Department of Natural Resources. Yesterday, he spent eight hours assisting at the Utah Lake Festival, which started off rainy but seemed to be pretty successful by the end.

His other hobby, birding, is one that I am a little more involved in.

It’s pretty funny, since bird watching was initially my interest. I really enjoyed birds, but I think like most potential hobbies, I felt a little too overwhelmed by my utter lack of knowledge on a very broad topic to really engage it.

Luke does not allow such silly things to keep him from enjoying birds and has recently gone from merely observing them with the binoculars he bought me for Christmas to photographing them with his nice new phone camera.

Hopefully we’ll have more pictures of birds in the future. Luke has dreams of finding burrowing owls at Antelope Island.

Weddings

It’s time for the segment that seems to find its way into each of my famlets: the weddings I attended this month.

This month’s weddings were particularly exciting, as I was a bridesmaid in one of them and the other was Luke’s brother’s wedding.

I have to say, I really enjoy being a bridesmaid, and I feel lucky that my friends didn’t feel the need to disqualify me from their wedding party because it is a role traditionally reserved for unmarried women.

Reagan is a friend from my mission in Ukraine who I have many fond and also many sad memories with. Her other bridesmaids were two other sisters from our Ukraine mission and her two actual biological sisters. I had such a wonderful time with all five of them, and they were all very kind to Luke, who was at some point dubbed an “unofficial bridesmaid” because of his presence wherever I was throughout the wedding process.

Reagan was such a beautiful bride and she planned a wonderful wedding in Logan, Utah. She is also one of the most organized people I know, and I feel like every detail was thought of well in advance. There were several moments when someone would ask a question, and the answer would be, “I don’t remember, but I’m sure it’s on the spreadsheet.”

And it always was.

There’s something about really being a part of a wedding that makes the whole thing so much more special. I’ve realized that I’d much rather be in some way responsible for helping a wedding happen than simply attend it.

I say this, of course, never having been terribly responsible for anything important at a wedding. I think my official duties for this wedding involved helping the bride get ready, having snacks and water bottles available during pictures, and helping set up and take down the venue, most of which would have gone pretty smoothly anyway even if I weren’t there.

But I was there and I felt involved, appreciated, and almost like part of the family for a sweet forty-eight hours. Reagan’s family was an absolute joy and Luke and I both felt so much satisfaction and happiness from attending the wedding they made happen.

The second wedding required no traveling, but it still gave me an excuse to take a day off of work as it was on a Friday. Taylor and Victoria got married on May 22nd in the Lindon temple at around 1:42 PM (the scheduled beginning of the sealing plus waiting for some people to arrive plus like thirty minutes of “I’m not supposed to give marriage advice, BUT,” from the sealer).

Afternoon sealing times feel weird to me for some reason. I don’t know why, but temple weddings just feel like a morning thing. I’m not complaining though, because an afternoon sealing means I got to go out to breakfast with the previously mentioned Lola Eskelsen without any significant rush.

Shortly after my little date, I picked Luke up from work and we drove to the Lindon temple together, where we got to see so much of Luke’s extended family! It was a lot of the people who were present at my wedding, but I didn’t know any of them yet well enough to fully appreciate their presence. This time, seeing them all in one place was very exciting and heart-warming.

The whole wedding was beautiful, not only because of the people there, but because of the vision Victoria had for it. As someone who relied pretty heavily on my mother and mother-in-law’s opinions (gratefully) for my own wedding, I am very impressed by how much Victoria and Taylor managed to plan for themselves. Victoria had a vision, and with the help of many helping hands, she created a gorgeous backyard wedding and reception.

Taylor and Victoria are back in town now after a busy week of honeymooning, then attending their open house in Maryland before flying back to Utah early this morning. We had the privilege of having them over for dinner tonight, which was so fun. I’m glad to have just a little bit more family in Utah now that they’re officially married.

School

The school year is coming to an end this next week, and I’m simultaneously excited and nervous. I’m excited to be able to sleep in a little bit and to have more time to exercise or cook, but I’ve learned that I do not do well with an excess of free time. And my attempts to develop hobbies are not nearly as successful as Luke’s.

We have devised a plan for me to teach piano lessons to kids in the neighborhood, so I’ll start handing out flyers to market myself soon. Stay tuned 🙂

We’ve gotten to the point in the school year where the students can officially do nothing to change their grades and we’re just killing time all day every day. In some ways it’s nice, because it means I have no more deadlines to worry about it. But there’s also a pervading sense of, “What are we doing here?”

Fortunately, we’ve got plenty of assemblies, recesses, and hopefully fun activities planned.

And then we’re all done.

It’s been very sweet to talk to my students as we get to the end of the year. Elementary school students have a lovely knack for absolutely loving teachers for the littlest things, and I have felt very loved by my students during the last week. Several of my younger students have been begging me to come back to teach next year, or to consider switching to teach at the middle or high school so that they can have me again in a few years.

I don’t want to tell them that I really don’t like APA very much, so usually I say something like, “Yeah, maybe that could happen. That would be pretty special.”

They probably won’t remember me by the time they’re in middle school, so I think they’ll be fine. But it is very flattering that they seem to like me enough to suggest I come back next year.

I’m going to miss teaching, and I hope that being a piano teacher gives me a little bit of the same satisfaction that school teaching has given me. Hopefully I’ll be back someday. And who knows, maybe I’ll go back sooner than I expect.

I am very excited for everything that I know is coming up, and I am excited to keep sharing it all with you.

Don’t be a stranger.

Love,

Sophie et al.