Mad March Memories

From a letter I wrote to my sister in 2005:

Some other boys in the ward assigned girls' names to the teams in the NCAA tournament bracket, and they will take out the girls that make it to the final four. I am Arizona, a #3 seed who is still in the tournament, but I will have to beat Shannon Bloom who is Illinois to make it. That will be tough.

Shannon Bloom ended up winning the date, but by that point I didn't care because I was dating Gary. Would have been awkward . . .

Skip forward to 2008. I was hugely pregnant with Noah, and one night Gary presented me with a blank tournament bracket to fill out. So, we both made our picks, set the papers down beside the bed, and turned out the lights. Since I was so large, I had a hard time getting comfortable. I tossed and turned, trying to find a position in which my whale belly and sleep could co-exist. After a while of listening to my rustling Gary said, "Can't sleep because you're excited about your bracket?"

This year Gary decided he'd treat himself to a day off work to watch the first day of the tournament. (He'd been working non-stop.) We had a bracket contest with my family, and Josh picked his winners solely based on the awesomeness of their logos. Thus, he had Florida vs. East Tennessee State in the national championship game. We had a lot of fun watching the first couple of days, especially since we were too exhausted to do much else. After not too long our hearts (BYU - although the first game was awesome) and our brackets (Kansas) were broken, but that's all part of the madness. For some reason Josh has loved the sound of Butler's name from the beginning, and gets excited when he hears they're playing. Gotta end this post because there's only 40 seconds left.

Here's Gary and Andrew loving their March Madness.