Football Fun

This weekend I got to go to a UW football game for the first time in quite awhile, and boy did I pick a great game to go to. NOT! Our football team stinks. We played terribly and lost. It was so boring that in the third quarter I actually fell asleep... IN the stadium! We left before the fourth quarter started because there was really no reason to stay. I wonder how many people were actually there when the last seconds of the game ran out. I'm guessing not many!

Well, besides the game our weekend was a lot of fun. Brenda, Dane, Darcy, and Erin came, and it's always good to see family. On Friday evening we ate at Corona Village. Dane had never been there before, so he suggested we go, and it took about 1.5 seconds to talk Joel and I into it. Saturday morning Joel and Dane went hunting, then we went to the game in the afternoon while Grandma R. stayed at home with the kids. Thanks, Bren! That evening we hung out, played some games, ate some treats, and had a fun time. On Sunday they came to church with us, but had to leave after Sacrament Meeting. We miss you, and thanks for coming!

In all of the weekend buzzing, we totally forgot about the Relief Society Broadcast Saturday night! I was really sad when I realized it because I wanted to hear it. But hurray for fast computers and high speed internet; I watched the entire broadcast over the course of last night and today when I would take a few minutes to listen to each talk, and it was definitely worth watching. I love hearing from the authorities in our church. It is always so uplifting, edifying, and encouraging. I always feel a sense of renewal, to try and do better in my own life. I am really excited for General Conference next weekend. I always look forward to hearing the prophet speak!

Jenna didn't have school today, so I scheduled the kids for a cleaning at the dentist. I took the three kids to Cheyenne for the appointment (Joel couldn't come because of school). Jenna and Will both did great (Adam's a little young still:) and we have no cavities! Woo hoo! However, both of my kids have teeth that are very close together, so I can already see the $$$ of braces in our future. But for now, their teeth are clean and healthy!

I've been tagged

The rules of the game. Go to your pictures folder and take the fourth picture from the fourth file and post it. That's it. This picture is actually from the third folder in our picture file. Since we have a new computer, we don't even have four files in our pictures yet! This lovely picture was taken last Sunday. Jenna was still in her church dress, and put on some of her princess stuff. She wanted me to take a picture, so this is what you get! I tag: Emily, Kristin O., Kristin P., and Destiny.

Grocery Bags

Okay, so I just got home from the store, and I have to say that it drives me crazy when the checkers give you about a million bags. One box of cereal: one grocery bag. One small bag of flour: one grocery bag. One can of Prego: one grocery bag. You get my drift. C'mon people, not only is it not "earth friendly" to use so many bags, but more importantly to me it is harder to get them all to fit in the back of my van, and takes forever to carry all of the sinking bags in the house. Sheesh.

p.s. This particular checker also grabbed the bread right in the middle of the loaf with one hand to scan it! First of all, who holds bread like that? And second of all, if I wanted squished bread I would have let Will ride in the cart, he's good at that.

Apartment Pictures

I finally got around to taking some pictures of the apartment today. They are very boring, and mostly just for record keeping type purposes. I'm sure years down the road we will be interested in what this apartment looked like. Some of the pictures are blurry, sorry about that.

This is pretty much what you see when you walk in the door. Behind the gate is the stairs, and to the left is the bathroom, the kitchen, and our bedroom.

This is taken from right inside the living room.

The view from the other end of the living room. (And Will peeking his head around the corner:)

So this is taken from about the same spot as the previous picture, I just turned to my right so you can see into the dining room.
Looking into the kitchen from the dining roomHere is part of our bedroom, I couldn't find a good angle to take a picture of this room.

Now we are upstairs. This is Will and Jenna's room.
The other part of their room (please ignore the mess)
Adam's room (he had just woken up from his nap)
And here is the play room/toy room
(No pictures of bathrooms, they aren't exciting at all. In case you are wondering, there is a full bath upstairs, and a 3/4 bath downstairs)

We've been here for one week now, and I would say we are adjusting very well. It is still a little strange to have our bedroom downstairs. I don't go upstairs nearly as much as I used to, so I'm not sure that it feels like "home" to me up there. But downstairs definitely does. We are excited to have our first "guests" here this coming weekend. Joel's Mom, sister Erin, brother Dane and Dane's girlfriend Darcy are coming to Laramie, and we are excited to see them. And it will be nice to have the extra space to accommodate them.

Scrambled Eggs

Yesterday, Jenna asked me if she could please make scrambled eggs by herself in the morning. I think my knee-jerk reaction was a quick "No". Then I thought about it for a second, and decided she was old enough to learn how to make her own scrambled eggs (with supervision, of course, she's still too young to use the stove by herself!) So this morning I directed Jenna in the making of her eggs. She basically did it all by herself, with almost no help from me. I just told her what to do, and she did it. She said they tasted good!


(After she was done eating I taught her to clean the pan by herself. Soon I'll have her mopping and cleaning bathrooms! Ha, I Wish!)

Some pics

Well, I still don't have any pictures of the apartment yet, sorry. But instead I'm posting a few pictures we've taken in the last day or two.

Here's Adam, pulling out the videos and DVDs from under the TV. Jenna used to do the same thing when she was his age, but Will never did. In some ways Adam is a lot like Jenna.
Adam was enjoying his dinner. Please don't mind his lovely slobbery shirt.
And here's me, so excited to make grilled cheese sandwiches. Actually I was just tired.

We're Here

It has been a long three days... very long... but we are here in our new apartment. On Monday morning I wasn't too confident that we would get to move that day. The maintenance man hadn't given us any keys, and I knew there was still some work that needed to be done on the apartment. Things weren't looking good. However, it brightened when Kirk (the maintenance man) pulled up to our new apartment fairly early. We can see the parking spaces for our new apartment from the back door of our old apartment. Anyway, so basically Kirk finished up the things that needed to be done, and I had keys in hand before noon.

When Joel got home from school a little after noon, it felt like the race was on. We started moving stuff over like we were on a game show or something, and if we beat the clock we could win a prize. (The only prize I won was a sore back) We moved the heavy stuff together, and I found out again that I am pretty wimpy. Especially compared to my he-man husband. Will has this dresser/bookcase/storage combo thing that is heavier than my bed, I swear. I was able to help Joel bring it down the stairs and over to the new place, but we had to leave it downstairs and wait for reinforcements to help Joel move it upstairs. By Monday evening I thought my arms were going to fall off. We were able to get a lot done, and we slept in the new apartment Monday night.

I was so exhausted I was sure that I would fall asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow and then I would sleep like the dead. Sadly, I was so wrong. I couldn't fall asleep for anything. I was uncomfortable, both in my bed and just sleeping in this strange new place. My mind wouldn't stop racing, and I was so tired that I wanted to cry! I was able to finally get a few hours of sleep, but in the morning I woke up more tired than I was the night before. I also felt like I had been hit with a truck, I was so sore.

Lucky for me, I got to keep on moving the next day! On Tuesday I moved over the entire kitchen while Joel was at school. Then when he got home we double-teamed it and got even more done. Thankfully on Tuesday night I slept like I SHOULD have the night before, and even though I was still really tired when that darn alarm started beeping, I had at least had some rest.

Today was a whole lot more of the same, but it is finally done! Everything is at least in the new apartment. And tonight I actually got a lot of stuff put away. So now I just have to clean the old apt., and do a few more things here to get everything organized and feeling like home.

This definitely would have taken longer without the help of our awesome friends and neighbors, Michael and Emily! Michael helped Joel move some of the big heavy stuff (because I was too wimpy), and both Michael and Emily watched Adam for us so that we could actually work and get things done. Thank you, Asays!!!

So far we are liking this apt. It is strange to have our bedroom downstairs and the kids upstairs. We bought a monitor so that we could head Adam when he wakes up, so that has helped me feel a little less disconnected.

I wish I had some pictures to help break up this long post, but I haven't had a chance to pull out the camera yet, and I don't want anyone seeing my house as disorganized as it is right now! But soon I will put on some pictures of the new place so that you can get a feel for what it's like here.

Oh, our other exciting news! We are finally proud users of high speed internet! Yeah! The Bresnan guys came yesterday afternoon to hook it up, and it is amazing. How did we live without it for so long? If I had known it was so cheap I would have done it a long time ago. Shame on me. Oh well, we have it now! We also got our new computer today! It is an HP slimline, so the tower is a fraction of the size of a regular tower. It is nice how it makes more space on the computer desk.

One cute little thing; yesterday Will and I were talking about moving, and Will said, "Our old house is broken, huh." I told him that it's not broken, we just moved into a new one. And he was like, "Oh, but this house is broken for Layla (a little girl that lived in the apt before us) so she moved into a new house, but this house isn't broken for us." It was so cute! He says so many cute things in a day (and so does Jenna, for that matter), I wish I could remember them all and write them down.

As for Adam, he seems to be adjusting well. Something that's not as fun, he can now climb stairs. And he's pretty good at it! This can make things interesting for us. This morning we were trying to get everyone ready and out the door, and Adam kept going up the stairs. The problem, he doesn't know how to get down, and sometimes he loses his balance; not good. So Joel put some empty boxes in front of the stairs. Will was concerned that Adam would be able to move them, but Joel assured him that he wouldn't be able to, and that they would keep him downstairs. Less than a minute later, Adam has pulled himself on top of the upside down boxes (which were pretty tall) and is trying to go up the stairs again. It was a good idea Dad, but not tricky enough to trick this kid!

Moving

About a month ago we heard that the manager of our apartments wanted to know if we could move into the four bedroom apartment here in our apartment complex. After some serious thought and prayer, we decided to go ahead and make the move from our three bedroom. Our manager kept saying that we would be able to go look at it soon, but it seemed like we had different definitions of the word "soon". Yesterday, the maintenance man knocked on our door and said, "You guys are moving into the four bedroom, right? I'm almost done in there, and the carpet cleaners are coming tomorrow, so you can probably move on Sunday. Oh, and you can come look at it if you want." Uh, yeah! It looks pretty good, and it's definitely got a little more space, what with an extra bedroom and all. :) We won't move on Sunday (obviously), but our manager is going to be back on Monday (she's been out of town for a week), so once we talk to her we will make the move! I've already called Bresnan and they are coming on Tuesday to hook up cable and HIGH SPEED internet! Yea! Right now we are trying to figure out what exactly we can do to get ready. Because we are only moving about 100 feet, it's not really necessary to box everything up. So we are decluttering where we can and cleaning what we can. I guess we'll figure out the rest on Monday!

Just let THEM do it...

As parents, and as Mothers especially, our goal is to teach our children the things they need to learn in order to survive and succeed in this world. We teach them to walk, to eat by themselves, to clothe themselves, and even to tie their shoes. Now this last one is probably one that I struggle with as a parent. It sounds so simple, just teach them to ties their shoes, right? I thought so. We've been teaching Jenna to tie her shoes since Kindergarten, but it's a hard thing to pick up. It is such a delicate process, and everything has to be just right for the end product to come out correct. Over the summer she didn't have to do it at all because she wore sandals for months. But this school year we decided it was time to really teach her. She's been doing a really great job, and she can do it entirely by herself, even if they aren't very tight on her feet by the time she's done. The reason this was hard on me was not that her shoes weren't tight, or that the laces might be hanging off to one side so she would step on them all day; it was how long it takes for her little fingers to tie the shoes. In the morning I usually feel like I'm in a rush, even if we are on time, and it just seemed easier to say "Just let me do it, really quick." Well, I can't say that, or she just won't perfect it. So now, instead of leaving shoes until the end, shoes come on right after clothes, before hair is done and family prayers are said. This helps me a lot to just say, "You can do it", so she has a chance to get the practice, and tie those shoes!



The boys love playing together on the stairs. Adam is close to being able to climb up on the first stair. But for now, he loves to watch his big brother Will being crazy and making him laugh!

Pictures

I have gotten some compliments on my pictures that I have posted (which are the same pictures that are hanging in my home). I love the pictures, and I wanted to tell everyone who took them. Her name is Megan Grant (Jared Grant's wife, for those who may know Jared). She has a blog with tons of pictures she's done. It is http://megangrantphotography.blogspot.com/ If you are around the Laramie area, I would highly recommend her for family pictures. If not, you should check out her blog anyway just to see some of the cool pics she's taken. The BEST pictures she's taken are of my kids, of course. :) At least I think they are the most beautiful. Anyway, she does family pictures, senior pictures, weddings, engagements, basically everything. She's great!

Well, I wasn't really going to start blogging until we were on high speed internet, but that day seems to be getting farther away, so I guess I'll start spreading the word that we have a blog now! I'm still not sure exactly what to say on this blog, I probably don't have many things to say that would be very interesting to very many people, but oh well.



Last night we had a great time hanging out with friends, probably our favorite thing to do. I don't have any pictures of the squirrels that were cooked and eaten (mostly by the men), so no one will have to be grossed out. :) But I'll post a few other pictures.




These are from Jenna's first day of school. She is in first grade this year, so she feels like an old pro. I still can't believe she's already old enough for first grade. I am doing preschool at home with Will this year, because I don't think he needs two years of formal preschool. We have had a great time with it so far, learning about continents and oceans, and working on writing, cutting, pasting, and other skills like that. Next year I'll send him to a real preschool, but right now we are enjoying time together, and having fun learning together.

First Post

I've been messing around with this whole blog thing. Turns out it's not too complicated, if you keep things simple. I think that when I finally have high speed internet (and it will be soon!) I will actually do this. What an idea.