our move!

Well we are all moved into our new place (although there are still LOTS of boxes to unpack...) and we absolutely love it here! We are SO grateful for our wonderful family members and friends who helped us move. My entire family helped us all day, Jonathan's brother Benjamin came up from Provo to help, and our good friends Charles and Melissa were so sweet to drive all the way from Payson to help!

We just love it here. James mostly loves the stairs. Since it is a townhouse there are two LONG staircases, and I swear that all we do all day is follow him up and down the stairs. We are gonna be so in shape.

Speaking of James, James is talking like crazy. Some of his recent words:

Moon
House ("Ouse")
Hot
Stairs
Grapes ("Bakies" - haha, love it)
Blankie (I think it's also "Bakie")

This morning I said to James "Hi, Bud!" to which he responded, "Hi Bud! Hi Bud!" It was hilarious.

Strangely enough, I took NO pictures during the move. BUT, here are a few of my two buddies hanging out at our new place. James loves playing with chalk on our patio, and is really enjoying his new room!

a new beginning

Today we rented an apartment --- a place of our very own!!

And it's not only an apartment, it's a townhouse. For some reason I have always wanted to live in a townhouse! Maybe it was driving by all the cute townhouses on 9th east in Provo - you know, the ones with the cute, colorful doors - I always liked the one with the red door. Our townhouse doesn't have a red door (they are all brown), BUT I think it is pretty awesome that we got to pick out a paint color (we picked red) for an accent wall. How cool is that?

I hate searching for places to live. For some reason it is always so frustrating to me, because you have to wade through all the places that are scary or sketchy or are bug-infested (true story) or have beer cans laying around or are too expensive or just don't feel safe or good or right. But then you get to the one that just feels good. And it is everything you're looking for and it is so exciting. And then life is wonderful :) Sometimes I also feel that there are certain places you are supposed to be at certain times, so when you find a great place to live and feel so good about it, it is definitely a great feeling!

So, this Saturday we are moving! I have already boxed up ten boxes of stuff (amazing how many things you accumulate) and we have a LONG WAY to go, but we are just ecstatic. Life is good :)

What we've been up to...

With the plethora of pictures I have been taking and posting, I really haven't written many updates here! Thought I'd catch you all up on the happenings of our exciting life...

*Most importantly and most exciting is the news that Jonathan went permanent at his job this month! Up until now he has been working there as a temp, and as such he hasn't been getting any benefits. We were VERY blessed that a position opened up and they offered it to him! He got a great pay raise as well as EXCELLENT benefits, which we are very excited about! We are feeling more and more like "real adults" as we get our 401k, cafeteria plan, etc. up and running. What a blessing :) We are very excited!

*We are currently planning and preparing to find a place of our own to live - looking into possibly buying a home, fun stuff like that! While we are so grateful to my Grandma for letting us live in her house, we are SO excited and ready to have a place of our own again.

*I have started teaching piano again a little after not really teaching for a year and a half - and I love it! I currently have one cute student who is really talented and I am in the process of looking for more.

*Jonathan and I are teaching the 8-year-olds in Primary, which is fun but is QUITE the challenge as some of these kids are SUPER rambunctious. They are sweet though, and it is fun to have a calling with my husband!

*James has been going to nursery, and this past Sunday he went by himself and stayed the ENTIRE TIME for the very first time! We are so proud of him! He did cry a lot when we left, but then he did pretty well and (we think) had a fun time! Our boy is growing so fast!

*If you couldn't tell, I am obSESSED with photography and photo editing, and have been doing that a ton during James' naps. I can't seem to get enough! I would love to (eventually) have my own little photography business - we'll see what happens with that!

*As posted earlier, James is obsessed with cars (toy cars, books about cars, the movie Cars, riding in cars, "driving" cars, drawing cars, etc.), his Grandpa (he is CONSTANTLY saying "Bapa!"), and babies (he loves to "be a baby" - he lays down on the bed and has us wrap him up like a baby - which is really funny because when I was a toddler I went through a phase where I would always want to "be a baby!"; he loves looking at pictures of the "baby" (aka himself) on the computer or the camera and he gets SO excited whenever he sees a baby or a picture of a baby - it's pretty cute!)

*James' vocabulary is really expanding! Aside from other previously posted words he uses, here are some of his most recent words:

bet (bed)
bet (bread)
book (yes he can now say it correctly!)
bux (box)
wake! or make! ("I'm awake!")
baby
dit (treat)
bus
bat (bath)
bash (splash)
'nike! (goodnight!)
dosh (drive)
goy, agoy, or yago (yogurt)


Also, his new FAVORITE word seems to be "NO." Terrible twos, here we come...

Our little family has sure been blessed - we are so grateful!

i heart high-speed internet - a.k.a. massive picture upload!

In celebration of the fact that we now, once again, have immediate access to *high-speed internet!*, I thought I'd post a whole lot of pictures for your viewing enjoyment.

These first few pictures show one of James' recent favorite activities - going outside! This kid LOVES putting on his shoes (a word he can now say, by the way) and going out and walking around on the grass. He loved the doggies and kitties at Nana and Grandy's house, and loves to just walk around and look at things.

Walking out the front door to play outside - I just love this picture

This is the day that James first discovered rocks. He held on so tight to them and got upset when I took them away at nap time.

Our cute boy

"Ball! Ball!"

Sweet little guy

Swinging with Mama, and not quite sure how he feels about it...

These next two pictures just go to show that random family traits get passed down - we couldn't help but think of Jonathan's sister Rebecca when we saw James in this position - she is notorious for falling asleep in interesting positions, but especially while praying!

Going for a walk on a COLD February evening...we walked down the Bosters' lane, and then said to James "do you want to go further?" to which he clearly shook his head "no." Smart boy.



Some pictures of my handsome boys...



Another outside outing (is that redundant?) - I love this picture of James pointing to the cat, because there is a picture of me when I was around this age, and I was pointing at a cat, too! Like mother, like son.

Gotta love James' outfit here...

Ok, so we drove back to Salt Lake from Oregon on Sunday afternoon. We had been there for about four months (wow) and originally had thought we'd be moving up in that area. We had taken multiple trips between Salt Lake and Oregon, for various reasons, so we had accumulated a lot of stuff. Lucky for me, my husband is an EXPERT car packer (is that a word?). You would not beLIEVE how much stuff we fit in our little Corolla on our way back on Sunday. Just to give you an idea, here are a few pictures...

This is the view of my lap. Yes, I was completely covered with stuff. Plus I had ZERO leg room. I was sitting on top of a couple of coats and blankets. Can you find my knee in this picture? I can't believe my legs didn't fall asleep on this six-hour drive.

Where's James?

There he is, the poor kid! At least he's happy in this picture. At one point he got really bugged by all of the blankets and stuffed animals stuffed around him. I can't say that I blame him, poor kid. Yes, it was quite the exciting and humorous trip.

This little iguana was sticking out of the diaper bag on my lap, and soon became our trip mascot. We named him Iggy.

EVERY time we drive from Idaho to Salt Lake I see this sign and WISH I had my camera ready to take a picture of it. Well I got lucky this time, and had my camera out and ready! Sadly, you can't really read what it says, but it says "MIRACLE HOT SPRINGS..." and then the good part at the bottom: "CAUTION: ALLIGATORS." Is this funny to anyone else? I just thought it was completely random! Alligators in Idaho? Who knew?

James in his stroller ready to go for a walk! This is his cute new face that he does. His daddy makes the exact same face sometimes.

So all of the stuff from our car got dumped in our family room in my Grandma's basement, so on Monday we were just trying to clean up. I was distracted, putting things away, when I turned around to find this:

James found our treat bag from our trip (which, sadly, we never even got out - it was stuffed under my feet and was not reachable), found the Pringles (barbecue flavored), reached his little hand in and grabbed a whole stack and started eating them. It was hilarious. He just loved them! One of James' new words is "delicious!" (although, it really doesn't sound anything LIKE the word delicious, but whenever we say delicious he mimics us, and at least it begins with a "d" sound!)

James loves yogurt. And now prefers to feed himself.

We're Back!

Well, for anyone who hasn't heard, we are back in Salt Lake! Long story short - we have decided to refocus our job search here, so we moved back a few days ago. We are so excited to be here and we feel so good about it. We know that we had to be up in Oregon these past few months for some reason, and we learned so much and had a lot of fun. We do miss Jonathan's family a lot! It was so much fun to be able to spend so much time with them. Stay tuned for lots of pictures and updates!

The awesomeness of our lives...

As I have been blogging in the past few weeks, I realized that pretty soon I was going to reach 200 posts on our blog! Yeah, I know – way exciting! I was trying to think of something really cool to do for post #200, like 200 interesting things about our family, or 200 of our favorite things – but that is a LOT of things. Way too many to think of and way too many for people to read (come on, how interesting would that really be?) So then I thought I’d just post about something really exciting. Well, it’s time to write post #200 and I suppose the recent events worth blogging about are exciting in a way, but are definitely not what we had planned for our family right now! So, here goes -

As you may know, we have been planning on moving up to Idaho and have been job searching for the past couple of months. We decided to move up there for a couple of reasons, one being that Jonathan’s family lives in Adrian, Oregon – not far from the Idaho border and about 45 minutes from Boise. Also, Jonathan is planning on applying to PA school (physician assistant) and there is a program in Boise we want to apply to – so we decided to move here, be close to his family for awhile, hopefully get into that program and be Idaho residents and save a lot of money on tuition. Our original plan was for Jonathan to hopefully get a job and move by the beginning of October. After applying to lots of jobs and having no luck in that department, the beginning of October came and went. Jonathan talked with his boss about working there longer and they said that was fine. We continued our job search, and then found out that Jonathan had cholesteatoma and needed some pretty intense ear surgery. This was a bit of a blessing in disguise for us and we were glad we hadn’t moved yet and that we were able to take care of his ear while still on our insurance, instead of finding out about it between insurances.

Jonathan was home recovering for about a week and returned to work last Wednesday, when his boss talked to him and told him that they wanted him to quit at the end of the month, since they had already hired his replacement. They let him work longer because of his surgery and the whole insurance thing, which was very nice. And we completely understand where they are coming from, but the hard thing was that this happened on October 29 – meaning that he only had two more days of work, and then he had to quit!

While it was a bit of a shock, and we really wish they had told us a week or two sooner, we actually were not very worried about it. We really feel as if everything will work out perfectly and that the Lord will guide us. We see it as a bit of an adventure for our family, and a push to get us up there and finding a job soon.

So right now we are staying with Jonathan’s family and are job searching like crazy. We drove up on Saturday through a pretty intense rain storm and got here late Saturday night. We almost had to pull off the freeway because it was raining so hard, but we were in an area out in the middle of nowhere in Idaho with random exits with absolutely nothing nearby – no gas, no food – and we weren’t sure if we would be able to get back on the freeway if we took them! Luckily the rain died down a bit and we were safe and sound. James likes to pretend like he’s driving when we pull over for gas or for food – this time he even made some driving noises while turning the steering wheel!

We pulled over to feed James and he had a nice little visit with his Daddy.

Jonathan’s parents have been in North Carolina for our nephew Benjamin’s baptism (congratulations, Benjamin! We are so proud of you!), so we have had a great time with Rebecca, Anna and Spencer, who stayed at home. Jonathan’s siblings had “waited up” for us and this is what we found when we got home–

James was wide awake when we got here and wanted to play with his sleepy aunts and uncle!

We had a nice Sunday going to church and spending time with Jonathan’s siblings. I took this pretty picture on our way home from church – it is so gorgeous out here!

We were so sleepy on Sunday and we ended up going to bed super early. After being on the phone for a few minutes, I found my boys like this –

I love my boys so much and am so grateful for them.

There are a couple of jobs we are waiting to hear on that seem promising and we are hoping that one of them will work out. Cross your fingers for us!

Tonight we were getting James ready for bed, and Jonathan was reading some books to him, which is our nightly tradition. Usually we read to him from the scripture stories books with the abridged scripture stories and the pictures, and then Jonathan reads some books to him and then we put him to bed. We didn’t bring our scripture stories book with us to Oregon. While Jonathan was reading to him, James was kind of flipping through the pages of one of his books. All of a sudden he started saying “Jesus …Jesus…” It was so sweet – he missed reading the scriptures and wanted to read about Jesus! I went and found a book on the Bosters’ shelf with pictures of Jesus in it, and I think he was happy. It was the sweetest thing and such a good reminder from our little boy.

A Wonderful Weekend in Oregon

Two weekends ago we took a fun trip up to Oregon and visited Jonathan's family. We had such a wonderful time, I love being there with them at their house and it is so relaxing (despite all the work we do while home :)) to be away from the city. I have been meaning to put these up for awhile now, so here you have it - a big long post with lots and lots of pictures. Hope you enjoy!

Here is the boy in his car seat. This was probably like midnight on Thursday night, stopped at some random gas station in Idaho. As you can see, James did so well in the car and was such a happy boy.


We totally meant to leave a lot earlier, but it always seems to take much longer to get ready (especially with a baby) than we plan on. Oh well, we had fun anyway, we left around 7 or 7:30, picked up some *yummy* breakfast burritos for dinner (from Albertos - they have THE best breakfast burritos!) and then got on the road. We finally got to Jonathan's parents' house around 2 in the morning!

So the reason we went in the first place was that Jonathan had some job interviews in Boise (Did I ever mention we're moving to Boise? Well, we are, and we are totally excited and we hope everything will work out soon so we can move up there before the weather gets bad.) So, here is my handsome hubby looking all nice for his job interviews.


Here are my two handsome boys -



Here is a pretty picture of my in-laws' farm - I LOVE going there so much (minus the bad allergies) and it is so pretty in the fall.



We had a lot of fun hanging out with just Mom and Dad and Jonathan's youngest siblings - usually when we're there a lot of the other siblings are home, but this time we just got to spend some fun one-on-one time with Rebecca, Anna and Spencer. I love these guys, they are hilarious and so sweet and fun to be with. Here is a picture of Rebecca playing the guitar.


James is one lucky boy to have so many aunts and uncles - here he is with Uncle Spencer. By the way, I just want to say that Spencer is awesome, he is such a great guy and I cannot believe how TALL he is getting and how much he is growing up. He was WAY shorter when I met the family 3 1/2 years ago...


While we were home we helped paint the outside of the house and stain the deck - it looks so good! We had a fun time and listened to music on my ihome while we painted. By the way, I have to say that I love how it is fall and is getting cooler outside - fall is the BEST season, I love it! Here are Spencer, Rebecca, and Anna working on the deck.


Jonathan's Mom painting the house. She is the greatest, I just love her so much - she is so much fun to be around.


Cute Anna


Definitely a Boster boy . . . definitely.


Me and Jonathan


Here I am in all my loveliness, in my awesome work clothes and wispy, weird hair. Gotta love it.


We found some new little kittens --- and I have to admit (I am NOT a fan of cats, at ALL) --- they were pretty darn cute. Too bad a couple of them died...


We had to run into town (which in this case was Nyssa, Oregon) to get a battery recharged, and unfortunately also to get our car looked at, which was making an AWFUL noise (it didn't sound that bad before we left Salt Lake, I promise!) so we hung out at Jonathan's Dad's office for a little while. James had lots of fun exploring and playing with toys while Jonathan and I watched an episode of Lost on the computer (side note - after much trying, my family finally got us to watch Lost and we LOVE it!). It turned out that we needed a new drive axle (sounds pretty important...luckily it wasn't TOO expensive, since we recently bought all new tires for our car...we weren't really in the mood to spend too much money...) and we had to stay an extra day in Oregon - which was actually so much fun! It's always nice to extend your vacation :) Anyway, here is a picture of James hanging out at Grandy's office.


Church was fun, it was the Primary program in their ward that day and that is always entertaining, right? Well James was pretty darn fussy (you gotta love church right during nap time) and would not stay still and quiet at all during the meeting, except when the little kids sang. The sister who was leading the music was sitting a couple of rows behind us and would stand in the aisle to conduct - whenever she started conducting James would stand backwards on the bench and just WATCH her, mesmerized. And then he started conducting with his little arms - it was the funniest/cutest thing. We were so glad whenever the primary kids started singing because we knew he would be quiet for at least a minute or two!

We got to visit a little with our friend Karli and took some cute pictures of Karli's little boy Grayson and James. These boys are about a month apart and they are both growing up so fast!



The drive home on Monday was pretty uneventful, except that at the very beginning James was NOT a happy camper. We were barely getting out of Boise (only about 40 minutes away from the Bosters' house, so we had a LONG way to go...) and he was just screaming and throwing a tantrum in his car seat. We wanted to get on the road and for some reason or another were not in the greatest of moods, so it was quite the experience. We pulled over at a rest stop and the second we got the little guy out of his seat he was happy as a clam (why are clams so happy?). He was so proud of himself for crying hard enough that the parentals gave him his way. It was pretty funny, but cute nonetheless - this boy is impossible to be mad at, he just flashes those cute little pearly whites with the little gap in between and you melt. So we decided we should probably feed him. I, however, couldn't find any bibs and Jonathan was busy washing the windows of the car (he worked as a window washer for like three years - he can't stand it when they are dirty, and he takes pride and much care and time in getting every little bug off) - so I decided to just try holding him on my lap and feeding him with no bib or protection for my white shirt. It didn't work out so well, and I ended up with squash on my shirt, but it sure made for a funny memory.



Then James wanted a turn driving the car like Daddy, so we let him play for a little while before getting back on the road. I absolutely love this picture. Although you can't see his little smile, you can totally tell he is enjoying himself by the look in his eye. I guess he felt all-powerful while at the wheel of such a big car.