Looking Forward to

I've been intending to write this post for a while but these are a few of the things I am looking forward to being grateful for in our new house (that we will own in a week).

1. Not having to haul the stroller down a flight of stairs in order to take Eli out in it (I think we will have more walks in the house.

2. No more obnoxious neighbors in the next apartment over whose kids are outside all day screaming.

3. A garage to park in (and we will once we get an opener for it).

4. Storage space! An attic, a garage, and closets! Our current apartment only has two closets (one in each bedroom) good thing the master is large enough for our linens too.

5. Two bathrooms! Now one of us can go to the bathroom and the other can bathe the baby without interfering.

6. A big kitchen. Now it's not big by anyone's standards but ours seeing as our current kitchen is smaller than our master bedroom closet.

7. A separate office from the nursery. Maybe now Eli can take naps in his crib more than once in a while.

8. A fridge with an ice maker! Now that is not the house but the fridge we bought but I'm still totally stoked!

I'm sure there are more and I will post them as I think of them. Thanks for letting me share the excitement!

Never forget

It's been 9 years since the attacks on the world trade center and it's crazy to think it was so long ago. Though my memories of that day have faded some, I still remember quite a bit.

My roommate Kirsten turned on the radio as she always did while doing her make-up. It was strange that the music station wasn't playing music and it wasn't commercials. There was some agitated talking. We heard something about a plane crashing into a building and I remember not really understanding what was going on. I was only 19 and really didn't know much about the world outside my comfortable life as a college student. We started to understand that 2 planes had crashed into the world trade center towers and that it likely wasn't an accident. While we were listening a plane also crashed into the Pentagon. I called my brother Mike to find out who had such hatred for the US to do this and it was the first time I remember hearing the name Osama Bin Laden. How naive I was at such an age, thinking no one really had such hatred towards America and Americans. I had no idea about world affairs. I wanted to know it was real and since I did not have a TV in my apartment at college I knocked on peoples doors until I could find a TV so I could see what was happening. It was one of the most surreal things I have ever seen, it seemed to tear at my soul. I had always felt so safe as an American. People weren't dumb enough to attack America any more, right?

My first class of the day was a religion class (I was at BYU-Idaho) and my professor just turned on the news in the class as we sat silently watching. I still remember exactly how I felt and what a scary thing it was to feel like my safety was gone. He turned it off and we read from the Book of Mormon about wars in those times. I can't remember anything that we read but I know that there was some peace in something we read (in fact I probably have it marked, I should find that).

There was a TV in the lounge at my apartment and I watched it constantly for a few days, still shocked and trying to make sense of it all. It felt like the last days. A neighbor of mine had a family member in one of the towers and I remember she could not get through on the phone to anyone to find out if he was okay.

Sometimes I feel like we forget that day. For the first few months afterward it felt like our nation was united. It didn't matter what political party you were affiliated with, or how you felt about abortion, we knew that Americans had been murdered in a political move by al-Qaeda. Our hearts were broken and we felt the weight of the tragedy universally.

Do you still remember?

Cousin Pictures

Dave's parents have a friend across the street who is a professional photographer. We caught up with her the other day and got these pictures of Elijah and his cousins. (They were all born in a 16 day span). Elijah is on the right, Remington (Dave's younger brother's son) is on the left, and Jamison (Dave's older sister's son) is in the middle. Enjoy!









If you live in Houston area and want a good photographer check her out at www.k4photography.com