So Long, Farewell

This weekend our friends David, Weston and Alicia came up to Boise for a visit. David and Weston are moving in a week across the country so its unlikely that we'll see them even as often as we could with us in Idaho and them in Utah. We had a fun time going to the Farmer's Market, eating a lot of food, adoring Callie and playing one million games. It was sad to see them go. Hopefully Alicia can visit some, at least. Here are a few pictures I took from their time here.

I am covetous of that shirt. Here is the aforementioned Callie adoring.

Playing "Say Anything" and "Loaded Questions". The boys also played a lot of video games and Alica and I played Skip Bo. For those who have played, are the very low numbered cards blue or purple? This was a very big debate.

David didn't want me to take a picture of him.

For some reason David's abs became a recurring theme in our jokes over the weekend so of course we had to take a picture (clothed).

It was really hard not to spend 100% of the time adoring Callie.

I just wanted to document the video game playing. Poor boys-- they grew up together playing video games and this probably the last time for a long while that they'll all be together doing it. Of course, I'm the one being sentimental here. The boys are probably like, "Uh... yeah. Okay." Oh, boys.

I made this delicious cake. Seriously, this is some of the most moist chocolate cake I have ever made or had.

Anyway, goodbye friends! We will miss you a lot!

Lastly:

This is probably the best thing I've ever found between the couch cushions.

Our Recently Adorable Life

This post is mostly about cute things. What can I say? A lot of cute things have been happening to us lately. For one, we got Callie about a month and a half ago. She is a joy to have around. I realize the next two pictures are almost identical but I couldn't help myself.

Believe me, I have taken oh so many pictures of this sweet girl. I'd say 90% of the pictures on my phone are of her. Woops. Am I turning into someone who talks about her cat all the time?

She is pretty much a hoot, too. She does the silliest things. She is easily transfixed by lights on the ceiling or floor. She used to arch her back and prance around like that whenever she saw her reflection. She tries to be very sneaky. This is just one video I happened to get of her being her silly self.

I also have started trying to get into crafting. I decided to make one of my nephews a baby blanket. It mostly turned out great.

Except for the edging... That's going to take some practice to get down.

 

I also stabbed (not pricked, stabbed) myself in the hand with a quilting needle while putting these ribbons in. Don't worry, I didn't get tetanus but Bryan was worried.

Here is baby Jack (my sister Natalie's new baby) modeling the mustache pacifier I made for him. Unfortunately, baby Jack lives across the country from me and I've yet to meet this sweet little thing. That pacifier seriously didn't seem this big when I saw it. He is just a tiny little guy.

Last week, Shelley had her baby as well so we drove down to Utah this past weekend to meet baby Ethan.

He was a very sweet thing as well. We got the opportunity to see him and hold him several times while we were there.

There is nothing like holding a sleeping newborn. So precious and innocent.

It was a nice weekend but, sadly, we had to leave on Sunday. Check out this gas station we stopped at near Twin Falls on the way back. There was basically no one there. I felt like it was a scene out of a movie or something.

We are just awaiting one more adorable little addition to our family! She should be arriving no later than Wednesday!

Our Home

The time has finally come! I'm not sure if anyone was actually waiting on the edge of their seats for me to post this but I can tell you it's been on my mind for a while. I waited until we had furniture and then until our new duvet arrived and then the house was a mess from some crafting projects I'd done (I think I mentioned we had three pregnant ladies in our family-- one out of three has had her baby! I was busy sewing away for them.) I put off cleaning my house for too long. I don't so much love the cleaning part but I really love that accomplished feeling at the end when I look around and see what I've done. Plus, I really just feel happier in a clean environment. Anyway, let the tour begin!

Here is our house (we're renting right now, we aren't in the process of owning it). This doesn't look like your average townhouse but that's what it is. We have about four of these complexes where we live and there are four homes in each one, kind of like a square cut into quarters rather than side by side.

You can see it a little in the picture above but here is our patio, situated to the left our house.

I know Bryan would want me to show this picture of our garden. He's very proud of it. It's grown a lot since we started it. You can't see all of it but we planted the zucchini, green onions, green beans and lettuce from seed. Those are mostly flourishing. We bought Thai basil and Thai chili pepper starter plants at the farmer's market. The peppers are slowly growing but the basil flowered. On the bright side, the flowers are purple and I think they are kind of pretty! We also bought some thyme, cilantro and rosemary from a garden store. I think the cilantro is starting to die a little but the others are doing great. I have a little oregano that was handed out at church one Sunday and last but not least, a lady in the Relief Society gave me four tomato starters! They are growing like crazy but we haven't had any tomatoes yet. Oh yeah, we also tried some flowers from seed. They mostly didn't work except for a few sprouts.

I bought this wreath from Target (we live three minutes away from Target... this might not be safe for me). It seemed like a good summer/spring wreath and I really like it. I like wreaths with a holly a lot and, if I'd taken the picture a little closer you'd see that's what the white part is.

Callie decided she wanted to be present in this post, so here she is welcoming you to our home. She is a very personable cat. She really likes to be around us and will often come snuggle in our laps unbidden. She is usually at the door when we get home but doesn't really try to get outside. She's an indoor cat but we took her outside the other day so she could see what the world was like and she was surprisingly timid about it. Anyway, end tangent.

Here is our main room. We weren't sure if our TV would fit in that hole but it was the perfect size. I don't know what we'd have otherwise done.

Here is our desk area and hallway leading to the downstairs bathroom, storage closet and washer/dryer (as I typed that I realized I had some laundry to change. Oops! Can I just tell you how much I love having my own washer/dryer?!)

Anyway, here is said downstairs bathroom with all the bathroom stuff we initially got when we got married.  Minus the cat litter, which I'm glad we haven't been carrying around until now. I really need to get her a bigger litter box.

Hey look! We now own a couch! Actually, we own all our furniture minus the large appliances! Since we have moved here I put together a large bookshelf, decorative shelf (see to your left in the picture with our TV), computer desk, and two nightstands. Bryan put together the table and chairs from IKEA. The both of us put together our dresser. Whew! It was a lot of work but gone are the days where we used an inflatable couch and bed or lived in a pre-furnished apartment. We're like real adults or something. Scary!

The aforementioned table and chairs. I'm really glad we didn't get a larger one. This one has a leaf in it with a neat way of storing it. We can make it bigger when we move into a bigger space.

Fairly new appliances in the kitchen. The only one I hate is the dishwasher, which has two motors that are dying and a tiny little place for utensils. What were they thinking?

My mom and dad helped us move here to Boise so they got to see the home but not all put together. One thing my mom said was, "Oh, that raised bar is nice. It'll hide all the dishes that need to be done from people who come over." Haha! Sometimes its true though. I can't be a perfect homemaker 100% of the time, I guess. I mostly try to keep it looking like this since for the sake of my sanity.

Mostly I took this picture to tell you I'm going upstairs now and so you can see the picture I've hung, though now that I see it... I don't think it can really be seen. It's one of our engagement pictures with a Family Proclamation over it on velum. Mom made it for us (and all my sisters) for Christmas.

Here is our guest/storage room. My parents didn't love the thought of sleeping on an air mattress when they came to visit so the bought this bed for a really good deal from a local retailer. It's pretty nice to have a legitimate guest bedroom. We've actually already had a lot of visitors so we've made good use of it. Lucky for us we already had all the bedding too... I'll get to that more in a couple of pictures. Anyway, this is also the kind of the room we put things in to keep them out of the way, like our vacuum. Oh! We even bought our own vacuum and it's pretty great! I haven't had a vacuum with such great suction since I lived at home. It's glorious.

I know its pretty silly but I was pretty excited to get stuff for another bathroom! I really liked this shower curtain and hand towel that matches the pattern. We went with a sea-green type of blue and grey.

The hand towel, as mentioned. Bryan would probably say, "No one wants to see a picture of our toilet, let alone two of our toilets." Oh, well.

Ta da! Our bedroom. As I mentioned, we already had all the bedding for our queen sized guest bed because it was the bedding we had previously use. Bryan's mom gave us a king sized bed she had and we love it. We each have all the room we need. I love being able to sprawl out.

This was the last thing I was waiting for-- we had been using the bedding that was on the bed when we took it but I kind of wanted to personalize everything in our room. I love the contrast of the dark blue over white with grey as a neutral. Also, there is our dresser. We were strangely overjoyed to have nightstands and love pulling the chains on our individual lamps at night. Silly, I know, but simple pleasures!

Then, because I'm cool now and have a smart phone, I decided to do a little video tour. Sorry if you get nauseous from me moving around. I just thought it'd be cool to kind of move through it and see some things in more detail. I decided not to speak in it because I thought I'd sound awkward. Callie decided to make a couple of cute guest appearances. Enjoy!

A Visit

Last weekend Bryan's mom, Shelley and Ella all came to visit us and we had so much fun! We did a lot-- probably more than we should have for how hot it was outside combined with how pregnant Shelley is. I unfortunately only thought to take pictures of one of our activities. They arrived on Thursday night and we had a full house for its size! (A post of our house will be up tonight or tomorrow!) We went to the park, ate dinner and played games, so that night was pretty relaxed.

The next day Bryan had to work for the first half of the day so us girls decided to browse around the shops downtown, which was fun. Even though I live here, I hadn't gotten to do much of that yet. We found this cool boutique called, "Bun in the Oven" that had baby toys, clothes, maternity clothes, etc. It was slightly on the expensive side, as boutiques usually are, but it gave us a lot of great ideas!

We picked Bryan up from work at went to eat lunch at the Boise Fry Company, a place that is just perfect for Idaho. The main order is potatoes-- you order the type of potato and then the cut of potato. You can have different kinds of fries or something called po-balls (like tater tots). Then  you order a burger on the side. The fries all come unsalted and they provide all kinds or different salt seasonings and sauces. It's awesome-- we all got different things so we got to try a little of each.

After this we went to the Zoo! The Boise Zoo is slightly small but has a lot to offer and its nestled in a park in downtown. I could never have imagined that they could fit a whole zoo there-- passerby would never notice. It is probably comparable in size to the Hogle Zoo in Utah. There were actually not very many people there either, which made looking at the exhibits so much more enjoyable. The only downfall was, as I mentioned, the heat.

This sloth bear was pretty neat. I didn't even know these existed! We got to see him playing in the water a little. A lot of the animals were very active and it was fun to watch.

Tigers are massive, I realized on this trip. As I mentioned, it wasn't too crowded so we were able get right up there and get a really good view of them. They were probably one of my favorite parts.

Aw, Ella! This is around the time that Bryan's mom lost her phone (one of many things she lost on the trip). Someone found it and took it lost and found-- what a good person!

Ella spraying down a statue of a komodo dragon. How nice of her, thinking of others in the heat!

Another very cute shot of Ella pretending to be a turtle.

He basically posed for this picture.

I don't even remember what kind of animal has ears like this.

Laying some eggs.

This red panda is the mascot for Firefox, the browser I am currently using to write this blog! And by this panda, I mean this is actually one of the three red pandas Mozilla used in a live feed marketing project in 2011. One of the other red pandas is also at this zoo. These are the Mozilla Firefoxes.

This anteater was actually so big! I had no idea!

As a special attraction, we went to a butterfly pavilion. Don't worry, there was someone there who was happy to answer all of our butterfly questions.

At one point Bryan's mom ask him, "Did you hear her answer your question?" and I butted in and said, "Does this one like to eat?" and the guide, from over his shoulder kind of gave a perplexed look. Maybe she was thinking, "People are always saying that..."

So, I love lions. I don't know what it is but they're just my favorite animals. I was sorely disappointed a couple years back to find that The Hogle Zoo didn't have any so imagine my utter glee at finding they had them here. They were on the last leg of our trip but I just kept saying, "All I want to see is the lions!" Bryan and I took Ella to see them while Shelley and his mom rested in the shade after a long walk in the hot sun. They weren't very active but it's got to be ridiculously hot with all that hair, as evidenced by:

Anyway, we were all pretty much pooped after that.We went home, cooled off, ate dinner and, surprise surprise, played games. We love playing games! It was so nice to have four players and this group is one of my favorites to play question asking games in.

The next day we had planned to go to the farmer's market here in Boise. It is so nice and big-- Bryan and I go almost every Saturday to get stuff for a Sunday dinner. We were going to go in the morning to beat the heat but the heat beat us again. Oh well! There are some cool fountains in downtown that kids play in in the summertime so we had Ella all dressed up in her bathing suit to play but she was afraid of "spiders". I think the other kids playing rambunctiously might have been a little intimidating. I was going to have a picture of it to put up here but, alas, no. The water felt wonderful on my feet though! We got a lot of food there-- it was all so good.

Again we came home and rested and did a couple of errands with Ella so Shelley could rest. When we came back the girls decided to go see, "What to Expect When You're Expecting". It seemed pretty appropriate for our group (Shelley and my sister Lindsay are both pregnant and due pretty soon and my other sister Natalie just had a baby, Jack Orson Browning, last Monday! From what I've seen, he's a doll). Bryan and I had seen it the previous weekend and really enjoyed it, apart from the swear and crude things that all movies seem to have these days. Why! Why ruin a perfectly funny and good movie with those things. So much of it was good and clean but there were definitely parts where I cringed uncomfortably.

Anyway, the next day we went to church (Bryan and I got called and sustained as Sunbeam Teachers!) and then came home and had a feast from the farmer's market. Then they packed up and left! It was a very full trip (maybe a little too full) but still so much fun. We love having people visit!

As an end note I'll just mention something entirely unrelated to the rest of this post. Last year I mentioned that the Boise temple was closing for renovations. It is supposed to be opening around October-December time frame. Bryan and I were asked, along with many other couples in the ward, to help with the open house and dedicate two sets of four hour time blocks to helping with it. I'm pretty excited and hope to possibly meet a general authority or even the prophet. Meeting one of those would be infinitely more thrilling than meeting some celebrity.