A second winter

You know it's a serious snowstorm when the whole city of Sioux Falls shuts down!!  You'd never know it's the middle of April when you wake up to 18 inches of snow coming in sideways!  Most stores shut down Sat, all our community classes and sporting events were canceled - and church was even canceled for Sunday!  We were grateful to have two days home as a family with nowhere to go!  We took advantage of every minute! 

Of course - you'd never know it is winter by the way Grins dresses!!

Saturday: Daddy built shelves in the garage, Mommy painted the living room and the kids built forts inside, out of the box of our new treadmill, and then snow forts outside once the snow had stopped!  Their snow fort had 3 "rooms", each connected via "underground" tunnels.  They also created a throne for "Sire Scratch" as well as an Igloo for the neighbor boys!  They are quite the talented sno-architects! ;)

Angel working on the tunnel!

Wiggles in the Igloo

Wiggles modeling the "throne" :)

Scratch LOVES the forts!

Sunday: We had our own little "church meeting", lots of quiet reading/journal/letter writing time, and then had a Family Bake-off!  Since we were left with no eggs (thanks to the snow storm), we had to get creative!

Daddy and Wiggles made the Harry Potter Chocolate Toffee Trifle - RUNNER UP!

Grins and Angel made their own creative Chocolate PB Truffle / Salted Pretzel Chocolate Cupcakes - WINNER of both Best Presentation and Best Tasting Awards!!

Mommy and Scratch made white chocolate macadamia nut cookies!  Not pretty, but pretty tasty. ;)

While we are ready for Spring, we thoroughly enjoyed the snow days, home together as a family!!

A couple more pics of our fun:

We love seeing Angel and Grins creatively working together in the kitchen!  They are so talented and creative!

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The kids worked out a throne (Wiggles as the seat) for "Sire Scratch".  He sure runs things around here! ;)

The snowfall was crazy - all this overnight!!

Utah Memory Lane

While in Utah, we decided to take a trip down Memory Lane with the children.  Our children were all born in Salt Lake City, and spent the first several years of their lives there, so Salt Lake City holds some very dear memories for our family.  And we hadn't been back to Utah for over 4 years, so we decided it was high time to show the children around their very first homes and neighborhoods!

We started at the University of Utah hospital, where all 3 of our children were born!

The outside has changed, but inside, Labor and Delivery looked exactly the same!!  I have a picture of me, pregnant with Angel, standing in this very spot!)

We then visited the former Ronald McDonald House, which was both Angel's and Grins' first home (we moved a few months before Wiggles was born).

Then we visited the incredible downtown SLC public library, where I took Angel and Grins for story time almost every single week that we lived in SLC.  They didn't remember it - but I remember SO many hours there - playing in their different themed rooms, nursing each of them in the mother's room, the hundreds of fun and clever preschool and baby story times we attended, and so forth.

Next, we headed up the hill to the University of Utah married student housing, where we lived from 2008-2010.  The kids are standing right in front of our apartment, 1450 (the middle floor).

Here they are at the court playground, where Angel and Grins both learned how to ride their bikes!

Then we headed further up the hill to the Shrieve's house, where we lived for a year (2008-2009) when Wiggles was born.  

From there, we hiked through City Creek Canyon - a walk we took nearly every Sunday Spring through Fall while we lived there.  Though the creek had shifted somewhat, and our favorite bridge had been removed, we were able to find our old favorite picnic area.

It was a picture perfect day in our perfect little picnic spot!

We finished our little tour at Temple Square - another location we used to frequent on Sundays during our years in Salt Lake City.

We took a tour of the Conference Center.  During all our previous visits to the conference center, we had never been on the roof!  It did not disappoint!

The children enjoyed our various 'landmarks' and hearing stories of when they were little - but for the the Mr. and I, it was precious.  The memories of our children as infants and babies, and those precious first years as a young family came flooding back.  It made me miss those wonderful times with all of my heart - while at the same time, filled my heart with gratitude for the wonderful memories we have with our children.  It meant so much to be able to see so many special places again!!  I only hope it won't be so many years before we visit again!!

Farewell to Maine

Maine made us feel so very loved!

Brownie

In April 2010, the Mr. and I took a trip out to Maine (from Utah) to look at houses.  We had never owned a home before, so home ownership was an exciting new prospect to us!!!  We found a few we liked, put an offer on one and went under contract, and returned home to Utah to prepare for the move.

Sadly, as soon as we were in Utah, the seller of the house we were negotiating for pulled her house off the market.  We started putting in offers on other houses we had liked, but they were all under contract by that point.  We started to stress.  I began looking online every day, scrambling to find a home before we moved to Maine the following month.  We really felt that buying a home would be in our family's best interest (in comparison with the high cost of renting for 4 years), and we didn't want to have to move into a rental and then move again, so we were getting desperate!!!

One day, I came across a house that looked nicer than others in our price range.  It had just come on the market that day.  The only problem: it was a foreclosure.  But I called our broker, he looked at it that day, and we decided to put in an offer that day, sight unseen.  After our offer was accepted, we began wondering if we'd made the right choice.  I had nightmares that we would arrive in Maine to find an old, abandoned house in shambles, full of mold and cobwebs.  Many people said we were crazy.

When we arrived in Maine a few weeks later, I was still feeling stressed and unsettled.  We drove straight to the house and looked around, which helped settle my nerves, but then we learned that, due to it being bank-owned and changing hands right before closing, the title was missing, so we couldn't close on the house as planned.  Frustrated and stressed, we again wondered whether or not we were making the right decision.  Doubt and fear filled our hearts as we waited a few days for the missing title, and deliberated over what to do.

One evening, while still waiting to close, our agent said we could do a walk-through of the house.  When we arrived and entered, a beautiful feeling of peace and serenity - and a feeling of "being home" filled me.  I told the Mr. how I felt, and he said he felt the same.  At that point, the doubts and fears left, and we proceeded with the sale excited and comforted that we had, in fact, found our home.

The following day, Friday, the paperwork finally came together in the final hour, and we were able to close on our house Friday evening, the final appointment of the day, after an exhausting roller coaster of a week.  (Since we were completely out of money and couldn't afford a hotel while we waited for our home purchase to go through, we'd been essentially 'living' at a nearby park/forest and eating at McDonalds.  Angel had a stomach flu and we were all anxious to get settled.)  We were thrilled!!!

Here we are, the day we moved in.

Our children affectionately named our house "Brownie", after the brown cedar shingle siding.  We were SO excited to have a home.  Our children spent months running through the empty rooms.  We rearranged furniture and had so much fun painting walls, remodeling the bathrooms, landscaping the yard and filling the backyard with fairy houses and vegetable gardens.

Over the next four years, Brownie would be a venue for various social events, including Christmas Caroling parties, Little League dinners, Birthday parties, Game Nights, Book Clubs, Baby Showers, Graduation Parties, Play dates, Summer slip-n-slide days, and more!  It would hold yard sales, lemonade stands, rock sales and back yard trampoline sleepovers.  It would keep our family cool through many hot summers, and warm, safe and dry through many long, cold winters!!!

Some of our favorite memories in Brownie:
~The kids doing musical parades around the living room / kitchen / hallway loop. (Mom)
~Doing construction together as a family!  Tearing downs walls/doors/etc and rebuilding them, finding different types of wallpaper/carpets, and having the children doodle and draw on walls before we painted them. (The Mr.)
~Playing Hide and Seek in the Dark and Sardines (Angel)
~Having lemonade stands on the corner (Angel)
~Beating pinatas at our birthday parties (Grins)
~Learning to ride our bikes on Bartlett St (Grins)
~Dancing around the house (Wiggles)
~Doing the slip n slide and jumping on the trampoline (Wiggles).

It's plain to see that many wonderful memories were made at 32 Bartlett Street, our Brownie.  "She" will be dearly missed, and will forever hold a special place in our hearts.  I tend to be quite sentimental, and was having a very difficult time letting go of our first house, and the home in which my children have grown.  But fortunately, I received an impression with the sweet, loving reminder that my precious memories of Brownie are special not because of the house itself, but because of the lovely people with which I shared the home and memories - and thankfully, I get to keep them forever!!! :)  That has made it much easier to say goodbye to Brownie.  Still - we will remember the memories which were made there!

Here we are the day we sold Brownie

Pictures of Brownie when we moved in:

Pictures of Brownie AFTER we added our own personal touches:

We love you, Brownie!  Miss you already! :)