January's jugglings

January blew by, but only in retrospect. I think I remember felling that on the day-to-day scheme the days went on so slowly. But now that I am looking back, it seems to have been way too fast.

Most of January found us living in a fully furnished basement apartment. The people we rented from lived upstairs, and just by chance, were also LDS. They were really nice and made our first month here very easy.

A heavy snow came right around the time that we should have been closing on our house, and it almost postponed it. But we braved the snow storm to make it to the closing office and got our keys during the worst storm of the year. The storm dropped about a foot of snow in one day, so the state pretty much shut down, the power was out for a great part of the area that we were in, and we still would go visit our house every day and just sit in it excited for the time when we could be in it permanently. The movers wouldn't come until the snow melted a bit, so our house was empty for a few days.

In those days, Emmett had his third birthday, and Duncan started putting on the fluff. This was when I first started to notice that his newborn chicken legs were fluffing up a bit.

(Now those thin newborn legs are a thing of the past and he is a cute, little marshmallow baby!) 

 Before we left Utah, we spent a couple of nights with our family in northern Utah. We went to a park and I snagged a few pictures of the kids. These are their last Utah pictures :-)

 It was a cold day, but with the promise of pizza and soda they let me take lots of pictures! We also took pictures of the cousins we were with:

 Teagan was very sad to leave her Abbie-girl cousin. They have grown up together and are the sister to each other that neither has. They are both co-chairwomen of the Lonely Siblings Club - a club they started for single siblings surrounded by the opposite sex. They have other cousins who belong to the club as well, and recently had one cousin kicked out when her mom found out she was having a girl.

We got into our house on the 23rd of January, and our stuff was delivered on the 24th. With a lot of hard work, we were mostly unpacked and settled in by the end of January.

Here it is, the end of February, and I am still a month behind on my blog... But before I catch up on our February Fun, tomorrow is a very important day. My baby girl turns 13...we're going to have a teenage girl in our house! Everyone get your party hats out and prepare for the hormone hurricane! (love you, Tig!)

Recap: December Happenings I missed posting about

With all the commotion of the move and the holidays and moving, I missed a lot of great post opportunities. But here is the condensed version of what could have been some fun posts! Today's post will be December, and then (hopefully) tomorrow's will be January, and then I will almost be caught up!

On the 3rd of December, Teagan had her first piano recital with her new piano teacher; the marvelous 'Mrs. Wendi'! She played three songs and did a great job. Her favorite was In the Hall of the Mountain King by Greig. It is fast and fun!

 

She also got to do a Christmas duet with Wendi. I wished I had a video camera and took running pictures of her recital, but it went really quickly and all I got were a few side shots.

Then on the 10th we had a really cool chance to see a lunar eclipse! We had to wake up at 3 in the morning to see it, but it was fun all the same! This was a really neat eclipse in that for the people in Alaska watching it, they were able to see both the eclipse and the rising sun at the same time because of the curvature of the earth - it is a phenomenon that doesn't happen too often! It was really cold outside, and we ran inside and out every few minutes because we were so cold, but it was so much fun watching it with the older kids!

I posted about the kids' going away/ belated birthday parties, but they chronologically go here in our December festivities. The kids are still talking about the fun they had at them.

Then on the 18th, our ward was really wonderful and held a personal award ceremony for Garrett for Cub Scouts since there wasn't a pack meeting in December. It made it so he was able to earn his Webelos badge and a couple other awards in that ward and have his friends there when he got it. He was so excited about it and went around inviting his friends to be there with him for it.

Our ward was also really kind to us and threw us a family going away party. There was yummy food everyone brought to share, and a lot of people showed up to say goodbye to us. It was good that the whole family was there with me because I am not great at goodbyes and I handled it much better being able to be distracted with an escape-artist two-year-old, a crying newborn, and by refilling the water pitchers :-)

On the 18th after church, we drove Garrett and Owen down to stay in Delta with Grandma and Grandpa for a few days while the movers were packing us up. They were planning on packing Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and then loading Thursday and Friday. Emmett had a dentist appointment on Tuesday to get a baby crown put on, so we kept him and his babysitter Teagan with us and Duncan.

The moving company came on the 19th and pretty much had our house packed up that day. They had to wait around until Wednesday for the craters to come and crate the TV and the washer/dryer, but then they loaded everything on to their semi and the house was cleared by Thursday. Scott, the three remaining kids, and I all headed down to spend our last few days in Utah with our family in Delta.

Christmas went really well, despite not being in our home. It was fun to spend it with family and the kids had fun sharing in the season's excitement. Santa left our kids' stockings in a nice neat row on one of the couches in the front room for all the kids to find when they woke up. They each got a new educational place mat for the schoolroom, a game or toy from Santa, and a stocking filled with treats and Lego people and fun stuff!

And Santa left us a box of oranges like he usually does. It is one of the kids favorite things about Santa!

The kids all loved the gifts they got from us and from their extended family. Duncan was learning to pull things to his mouth at that time, so all of his gifts were promptly gnawed once they were opened!

Duncan was dressed up in his Christmas duds and was passed around the room from person to person. Instead of sitting on Santa's lap and telling him what you want, this year Santa sat on your lap and ate what you got for Christmas!

After Christmas, we stayed with Grandma and Grandpa up until the time came for us to start our northward journey. We spent New Year's there and loved having one last holiday with family. 

 Our last Utah December was a great one! It was filled with parties for the kids, girl's night out for me and my friends, family time, excitement of the holidays, and Aunt Suntaree's yummy cooking.

My favorite 'Wendi-lady' even made me one of her world renowned t-shirt quilts.

It is a BYU/picture quilt and she had all of our friends sign it so I could have something to take with me to remind me of all our fun times together.

 (One t-shirt square even has Brandon Davies' autograph on it!)

Emmett loves sleeping with her quilt at naptime and we are really careful that it doesn't get dirty - we don't want the pictures or the notes to fade in the wash! It was a wonderful gift for me! (I miss having my friends already!)

Next post will be about our moving trip fun and the January happenings.

And we're back!!

Phew... that was a long time of not being electronically connected! Our house was wired for internet, but it took Scott's rewiring and house fixing know-how to switch the jacks to be internet compatible and ready. But he did it in a couple key rooms in the house and now we are back on-line and the kids and I are thrilled! It is really late already, so I really should be asleep by now, but I wanted to send out a quick blog before bed. It's just a teaser blog about our new house and what we've been up to since we have been digitally challenged for so long!

We are down to having only about 2-3 more boxes in the house that need to be unpacked, but the garage is another story. I don't know where we put all this stuff in our last house because everything fits so perfectly here in this one and this one is almost three times as big as our old house. We are loving the openness and the space everywhere. We've been having some great games of hide and go seek!

We haven't painted any walls yet, so everything is still that builder's favorite beige, but we have added some fun here and there. I'll post more pictures once I get the rooms situated a little better, but here are some shots of the schoolroom - at least the windows of it! Scott didn't like the French doors and this was our solution: Polka dots! Don't they make you smile?!!!

When the sun shines through the window, the walls, floors, and ceiling get painted with beautiful blue polka dots! And from the outside, the dots on the window look like lovely blue bubbles. Teagan is in love with polka dots right now and so our school room dots make her really happy!

The intense snow storm that his here a couple of weeks ago has melted into beautiful weather. The sun comes out almost everyday and even though the highs are generally only around the high 40's, the kids are wearing short sleeves and we are venturing outside more and more. We found a great park in the next town over and spent three hours there on Saturday!

On the way home we drove by two bald eagles that were just dancing in the sky above us. There is a lake near us where the eagles spend their winters and right now there are more than a hundred hanging out. We are trying to get the exact location of it so we can go check it out before they leave in the spring. I didn't get a great shot of them since we were driving in the car, but I was excited all the same!