A Fun Dinner

Today was a really awesome day. Now that we don't have church at 8 am, I'm really beginning to enjoy Sundays so much more. I also LOVE our new ward. It's so fun to be in a real family ward with people in a variety of stages in their lives. I feel like I am able to learn so much more in my classes. Another couple moved into the ward the same weekend that we did and they also moved from Wymount. Today, before Relief Society began, the sister asked me if I missed Wymount yet. My response was "not at all." She said they are starting to miss their ward. This couple differs from us in 2 aspects: they haven't been married as long as we have and they have no children. I think this is what makes them miss Wymount when we don't. I do miss the friends that we made in our Wymount ward, but I feel like our new ward fills so many needs that Wymount couldn't. We are just so happy to be a part of the Pioneer Park ward.

We actually had some Wymount friends over for dinner today. It was really fun to have them over and hang out. I love trying out fun new recipes when people come over and I have a tendency to go a little overboard. The first time we had this couple over for dinner (about a year and a half ago), I made a burger from the Bobby Flay book that I gave Mitchell for his birthday a few years ago. They loved it and requested to have another great burger next time they came over. Mitchell picked out the Cheyenne burger for me to try this time. It had smoked cheddar cheese, homemade barbecue sauce, bacon, and thin onion rings on it. It was a really good burger. It would have been better when we ate it, but I timed a lot of the preparation wrong and they were kind of cold by the time we all sat down to eat. Nobody really cared about that, though. Mitchell made the onion rings almost entirely by himself (following Bobby Flay's recipe) and they were so good! I love good onion rings and these were just like the really good and crunchy ones you get at restaurants. They were a lot of work, but they were delicious. For some reason, I thought we would want fries to go with the burgers and I prepped them, but they were never fried; we ended up having more than enough onion rings to go on the burgers and eat on the side. We also had this amazing "Old-Fashioned Pink Lemonade" that I found online. It was SO good. It made 2 quarts and we finished all of it between the four of us. The last thing we had were Double Chocolate Milkshakes with Fluffy Coconut Cream. This was another Bobby Flay recipe and it was great. I've never been good at making milkshakes, I always seem to mess up the ratios and can't get good flavors. Following this recipe was easy and it was delicious. I actually made the chocolate syrup by hand earlier in the day; it made me feel so fancy. :) I didn't get the layering of the milkshakes quite right, but they were really good anyway. By the time we were done eating, we all felt like we were going to explode. It was a really fun evening and I'm glad we were able to have fun with some friends.

My kitchen is a DISASTER. I forgot to unload the dishwasher before I started cooking, so I couldn't just immediately put the dishes in there and they all just got piled on the counters and in the sink. And I accidentally left the frying oil on the whole time we were eating, so the house got super smoky and my dutch oven is full of pitch black oil. I want to just leave it all for tomorrow, but I don't think that would be a very good idea. I have to decide if I have the energy to get it all cleaned up...

P.S. If you are interested in any of the recipes, just let me know!

Busy and Tired

We have been so busy! We officially moved in on the 1st and then had until the 4th to finish our cleaning at Wymount. And since then, I've just been trying to unpack and organize as well as just get settled in. The only room that I've completely organized is the kitchen; everything else is still a wreck. and pretty difficult to maneuver around in sometimes. I've taken some pictures, but everything on and around my desk has been so messy that I kind of avoid my computer most of the time. We also have real cable for the first time in years, so I've been distracted by the TV. I've been watching a lot of the Olympics as well as enjoying having my favorite channel, HGTV.

The kids love having so much space to play in, so they are constantly running around. They've also been getting into a lot of trouble. We don't have any cabinet locks in the kitchen yet, so I'm constantly pulling them out of the cabinet under the sink (they like to pretend it's their car and they drive to places like Macey's and SmashBurger). They also like bringing all of their toys out to the living room and leaving them there, but they don't actually play with them. They like to be my helpers when it's time to load/unload the dishwasher or start a new load of laundry. Joseph loves watching the clothes "take a bath." The first couple naps/nights sleeping in their new room worried Annabelle a lot. She woke up after her first nap and was crying because she thought we left her. She would ask to go home whenever she got really tired, but now she's figured out that this is home.

I wanted to get pictures of the various stages of our moving in process, but that didn't happen at all. I could take pictures now, but it really just looks like we have a super messy house because most of the boxes are gone. I think I'm just going to wait to get pictures until we have everything set up. Some of the set up has to wait until the end of the month when we get our school loans in and can go get some bookshelves. Our Wymount apartment had built-in bookshelves, but this apartment doesn't, so we just have stacks of books laying all around the house. One of our bookshelves also fell apart during the moving process, so we have even less shelving than we were expecting to have. We also have no couch because they only way we could have gotten our old one into the apartment was to lift it over our 2nd floor balcony and bring it in through the sliding door. We decided we didn't want to do that for a $30 DI couch, so we are going to buy a more compact, but functional couch (it folds out into a full-size bed!) at IKEA.

All of this busy-ness has been very exciting and fun, but also very exhausting. I've been sleeping WAY longer at night because I keep getting so worn out, but I have been going (mostly) without naps, too. I think once things have settled down and I'm not doing so much organizing and unpacking, I won't be quite as tired. But it all could just be that I'm pregnant and I'll keep being tired for the next year or so...

A Joseph List

The 3 Most Annoying Things Joseph Says Everyday:

1) "I want to see you" or "I want to see Mommy" -- It means that he is feeling very whiny and clingy and will start crying if he isn't right on top of me.

2) "What day it is?" -- He asks this at least 20 times a day, sometimes most of those 20 occurring within a 15 minute period. Mitchell has been working on getting him to phrase the question correctly, but he still says it wrong most of the time.

3) "I'm so thirsty!" -- This is frequently said a little bit after we have given him a drink, but he has misplaced it or he drank it so fast that it is gone already. This kid drinks RIDICULOUS amounts of liquids a day, but never wants to eat his food. In fact right now, he is asking for a drink and not eating his (very small) bowl of cereal.

I think my hopes in posting this are that I will be able to find the humor in what Joseph says and stop being so annoyed. Do you get annoyed by things your kids do everyday?

Dream Home

In my excitement over moving into our new apartment, I started pinning a Pinterest shopping list for things we would need. That led me to start pinning things that I want to have for our new apartment, even though we can't afford them. And that led me to wondering what color schemes I want to have for our someday, final home because I don't want to buy things now that won't work with that decorating scheme. So I went to the library and checked out at least 10 books about decorating and home planning and stuff. But I won't know exactly what I want my decorating scheme to be unless I have an idea of what my house will look like, so I've been going through a book of over 500 Traditional house plans and marking the ones that fit my criteria for a "dream home." I've decided that I want a house with at least 4 bedrooms, a formal dining/living room area, and a open kitchen/family room with a breakfast area. For exteriors, I like stone and timbers on the front, big porches, shutters, and gables, dormers, turrets or bay windows. Inside, I like foyers, more than 1 story, bonus rooms or dens for Mitchell to work in, butler's pantries, "overlooks" on the second floor, powder rooms, coat closets, walk-in bedroom closets, a separate shower/bath in the master bathroom, fireplaces, and kitchen islands.This is a long list of wants/likes, so I'm just looking to get ideas that match as many of those as possible.  It's kind of silly that I'm doing this, but I LOVE it. I just love looking at house plans and making decorating plans and gathering design ideas. It's just way too fun.

Our New Apartment

On Saturday, after a good week of looking at apartments (we saw around 15 different places), we signed the lease for a new apartment. We are really excited! It's over 850 square feet and has an awesome living room. It's also cheaper than we would be paying if we had moved over to a 3 bedroom in Wymount, but it's SO much nicer! Our official move-in day is August 1st, but our landlord gave us permission to start moving some of our stuff over. Today we took a few loads of boxes that I had already packed. The kids loved playing around in all of the space and it's exciting for me to see our stuff going in. I took some pictures of it empty and I'll try to show the process of us moving in.

This is the first part of our living room (the lighting did not work for me). The sliding door leads to a wooden balcony/deck. Joseph is doing a little happy dance because he loves being there. 

 This is probably what would normally be the dining room portion of the living area, but we will be setting it up more like an office area. The white to the left is the fridge.

 This is my cute little kitchen. It's not large, but it's U-Shaped and is very functional. It has a dishwasher and the fridge is the side-by-side type with a water/ice dispenser. It's also red and that's the color I've always wanted my kitchen to be! And aren't the cabinets so cute?

 This is our bathroom. The bathtub is actually jetted and there is a timer on the wall for setting the jets when you want to use them. It's WAY deeper than any tub I've ever had in my life and I'm excited to take a bath in it.

This is going to be the "master" bedroom. It has the biggest closet and I like that it has a full length mirror, which we haven't had in about 3 years.

 And this will be the kids' room. In the closet, there is access to the attic where we will have tons of space to store things. 

I like that the apartment came with the cute curtains in all the rooms and it had a brand new A/C unit put in to replace the old swamp cooler. We also have a closet in the hallway with a full-size washer and dryer! Everything about this place is so great and it seems almost too good to be true that we will be living there for the next 9 months (at least). I can't wait to actually move in and start living there.

Fun on the Playground

We've been having fun playing on the playground lately. It's been nice to have a place to play outside. 

The kids like sticking their faces in the little windows on the tube of the playground.

Joseph has finally learned to push the peddles on the tricycle. We will probably be getting him his own bike this fall.

They got so tired out and just look so cute when they are sleeping.

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More to Come

I have so much I want to blog about. We took tons of 4th of July pictures and I've been taking other pictures of the kids for posts. But we are apartment shopping - again - and I'm SO tired (we looked at 5 different places today). So I will have to blog about everything later.