Part Two: Cami's accomplishments

Here's the other part I promised.

I'm absolutely THRILLED to announced that Cami is 100% potty trained!!! It's wonderful! We put her in 'big girl' panties last week on Wednesday and she had one accident that day, one over night, and one the next day where she pooped in her panties, but since then she's had none!! She'll tell us when she has to go and usually doesn't need to be prompted. Today she successfully pooped in the potty, so I can safely say that it's 100%!

Every other parent that I've talked to that has gone through the potty training experience has told me that it's all up to the kid. You have to wait until they're ready. And when they are ready, then it will happen. I've been trying to encourage her for a long time, but it's never worked. She just would not do it. And now, finally, she's ready! It's so nice to have only one child in diapers again! Austin hasn't show any inclination towards even wanting to sit on the toilet, so I'm not pushing it.

Cami's other accomplishment this week is one that I'm not at all thrilled about, but it makes me laugh nonetheless. Cami discovered the art of cutting Austin's hair. :) I left my crafting scissors on a table where she could reach them and got them up in the morning. I was getting them breakfast and Cami comes in, holding something out for me. I take it and quickly realize that it's a large chunk of Austin's hair. Fantastic. When I looked closer at his poor head, I discovered this.

Sterling cut Austin's hair just about a week before and was very proud of his 'Marine haircut masterpiece'. We haven't yet fixed Austin's hair, just too lazy, though I'm sure we'll have to soon. I'm just grateful that Cami hasn't yet cut her own hair, though that will surely come. I remember pictures of my childhood attempts to trim my own bangs. Quite the disaster.

I'll end with a few other pictures I've taken since we've been here in New York.

Can you spot Cami?

How about here?

Showing off mom's accessories. So cute!

Things happening in New York

Part One: Our new apartment

I know some of you have been waiting for awhile to see what our new place is like. We are (mostly) settled in now. We still have several pictures to hang and I'd still like to get some additional rugs, but that will come with time, I suppose. We're in the upper floor of a building with two apartments in it. There's an unfinished attic above us, and an unfinished basement below the apartment below us. It's all space used for storage. The day we moved in, Sterling was out front unloading the trailer and two guys walked by. A little while later, they came back with a 6 pack of beer and said 'welcome to the neighborhood!' Sterling told them we don't drink and they said 'more for us'. :) Nice gesture though. They invited Sterling over anytime he wants to watch football or anything. Our neighborhood is nice. Pretty safe over all. One of the reasons we chose the apartment is because it's so close to our church and Sterling's school. Both are about two blocks away in opposite directions. We're also about two blocks away from a huge park, complete with tennis courts, a lake, a big play ground, and an area where you can have your dog off leash. It's huge!

As for our apartment, it's decent sized. The bedrooms are a little small, but they fit everything well enough. The landlord stripped all the carpet and had the wood floors varnished. I feel bad for the people below us because with the kids running back and forth I'm sure we are loud! We bought a big rug for the kids room so they can throw their toys around and not be as noisy, but haven't bought any others. I took several pictures of our place before we got furniture in, just to show the size of the rooms. It was so dirty! When they were doing work here (varnishing the floors, painting the walls, etc), they didn't clean it at all just so we could get in earlier. Thankfully they recompensed us by not charging us for the month of November at all. It took quite a bit of work though.

Here's the before and afters of the rooms. Hope that gives some idea of what it's like here. We like it so far. We've got nothing but radiant heat, but I actually like it. We also got a brand new gas stove because there was a problem with the oven of the last one. And there's a dishwasher! We haven't had one in the 5 and 1/2 years that we've been married, so I'm thrilled to finally have one.

Here's the living room - taken from the dining room

 This angle is from by the door out to the sun room, seen on the right of the first picture

 This is the dining room from the living room. The front door to our place is around the corner on the left of the first picture opening up to the dining room.

This is the entry way out of the dining room. There's a coat closet and space for shoes, then the stairs go down and down again to the left to our real front door and then through the door to the outside of the building.

The kitchen as seen from the office door

The kitchen as seen from the hallway

Our bedroom, the biggest of the three. This room is actually fairly large. Other places I've seen fit a queen bed, maybe one side table and that's it. No dressers at all. Ours fits our queen, two dressers and two side tables.

 The kids room. It's big enough for them and their toys. They seem to enjoy the space. We plan to get bunk beds for them after Christmas.

 This is the office. Much smaller than our bedroom, but still fits everything in.

Part of the bathroom. The sink with the mirror over it is off to the left and the shower is behind the door off to the right. The shower head is so high that I can barely reach it if I'm standing on the side of the tub. This place was built in approximately 1904, so I'm wondering, were they just taller back then? Or am I just really short? Never mind. Don't answer that.

There's a hallway that connects the dining room to the kitchen and in that hallway are the doors for our bedroom and the kids bedroom on one side, and two storage closets, the bathroom, and a built in china hutch on the other side. The room to the office is off the kitchen, as well as the door to the back stairs and porch. That door is seen by the fridge in one of the pictures.

That's pretty much our place. I think we'll like it here for the next two and a half years. We bought a piano for $100, which I'm just thrilled about. As a whole, it's out of tune, but the notes are all still mostly in tune with each other, so I might just deal with it. I don't mind playing on a piano that's a little off. I just got called as the Primary chorister in church, so I'm going to need the practice.

We also had to buy a new couch because, sadly, our big black leather couch would not fit through the doorway. The problem is that there's a wall several feet in front of our front door (at the bottom of the stairs) and we couldn't maneuver the couch around that area to get it through the door. The love seat fit because we could turn it on it's end, but the couch was too big. We tried everything, even took the padding out of the back and armrests. So I think we're just going to store it somewhere for the next couple years. We haven't had any luck selling it for anything near that it's worth, so we'll wait and use it later. We like our sectional though. It has the built in footrests on either end. It's definitely seen better days though, but it will do for us.

Here's all the stuffing from the armrests and the couch backs. Five bags and two blue bucket-fulls. Also the cushions.

The window you see over Sterling's shoulder here is the wall that I was talking about. Not so easy to get around.

Our poor deflated couch.

Well, that's all!  Hope you enjoyed the tour! Stayed tuned for tomorrow's post of 'Cami's accomplishments.'

Albany, New York

I had planned on finishing recapping the summer before we moved and then start a new chapter, but, as usual, all my good intentions went right out of the window.

So, we'll completely blow off the rest of the events of the summer. Fortunately, my sister covered most of those events pretty well, so I'll reference you to her blog here. And here. And here. And to this one I have to quickly add some pictures, then I'll get on to my real purpose.

This is Austin after he fell head first into the pond. He didn't cry and he didn't drown, he was just very stunned.

Travis' two brothers, Tim and Eric, valiantly leaped in after him. Eric grabbed the back of his shirt and hauled him back into my lap. Here you can see that they're a little wet, especially Tim. I got wet too because of Austin sitting on my lap.

The next two times we went swimming at Joyce's, Austin was having none of the pool. If you tried to take him in, he'd cling to Aunt Ruth's leg like it was his only salvation. It took just twice to get him re-accustomed to the water. No child of mine is going to be hydrophobic.

Oh, and here's Tim, picking leeches off his legs. Gross.

Now, on to the main event. Our trip out to Albany, New York. Point of interest. The city is pronounced All-bany as in 'ALL the king's horses' not Al-bany as in 'Albert' or 'Alfred'. Did any of you westerners know that? Neither did we. Weird. We found that out when a trucker in Indiana corrected us. And now that we're here, if we mispronounce it people give us a weird look. Old habits, but we'll get it.

On to our trip. I have pictures on my phone of the piano being moved out of our little apartment. (We sold it. No way was that monstrosity making it into our little trailer.) That was an interesting experience. We recruited several of our neighbors to help us. They were champs for doing it since that piano weighs at least a half ton. My brothers came over to help us pack up our trailer, but again, those pictures are on my phone. Or I deleted them accidentally. Oops. The last few days I was getting really worried that everything wasn't going to fit. But it did! We did end up sacrificing several things that I would really have rather held on to, but it was just one less thing to pack.

We went to church to say goodbye to our Sunday School class, then took off to stay with Joyce for the night up in Salt Lake. The next morning we started out. It was a much later start than we'd hoped for but miraculously the kids slept late. We had hoped to make it all the way to Ogalala, Nebraska, but a strong head wind all across Wyoming really hurt us. We spent the night in Kimball, Nebraska. It was one of those small towns where every one know everyone else. Lots of truckers. We loved it.

Sterling looking ecstatic to finally be on the road.

Rolling hills of Iowa. None of Nebraska. I forgot I had just gotten a new camera until after we were out of there.

The next day we pushed our way through Nebraska and half of Iowa and stayed the night in Newton, Iowa. Another small town, though not quite as small as Kimball. Apart from the Rockies, I think Iowa was my favorite. There were rolling hills all over and beautiful, picturesque farm houses dotting the land. Just gorgeous. Nebraska, Illinois, and Indiana were mostly flat farm land. I don't particularly care for flatness. Around Ohio is where we entered tree country which almost made up for the lack of real mountains. New York has 'mountains', but it's merely a consolation prize compared to the Rockies.

Farmhouse in Iowa.

 The following day we sped through the rest of Iowa and a relatively short stretch of Illinois. We wanted to drive down to Nauvoo, but figured it was a little too far out of the way and by then we were getting tired. Next we hit Indiana and the beginning of the toll roads. Toll roads stink! We had contemplated taking Highway 20 the whole way through Indiana, but got mildly lost trying to find where it went, so we stayed on the Interstate. Ended up paying $19.00 in toll fees to get most of the way across the state. We stayed the night in Elkhart, where we met the trucker who corrected our pronunciation of Albany and then decided that across Ohio, we would find Highway 20 if it killed us. No more tolls. Thank you very much.

Flatness of Illinois.

Sunset in Indiana.

We had planned to stop early and stay on the west side of Cleveland and find a hotel with a pool and take the kids swimming, but alas, it was not to be. We didn't feel very safe in the town that we'd chosen and there was nothing else between us and the big city, where we did not want to stay. We locked up the trailer pretty well, but we had lots of stuff in the back of truck, sort of seen in this picture, that we didn't want stolen. Yes, those are our bikes tied down on top of the trailer. You do what you gotta do, right?

More flat farmland in Ohio.

So we pressed on and drove through Cleveland where we were able to get back on I-90 because it was no longer a toll road. We searched all over the Ohio map in our atlas trying to find Kirtland. Strange, but it's not on there. Then, as we're driving through the last stretch of Ohio, we saw a sign. 'Kirtland 1 mile'. Fantastic! We took the road and found ourselves immediately in a very, very small tourist town. The highlight of which is, of course, the Kirtland Temple. The Visitor's Center was closed (about ten minutes previously) but we did get to walk around the building. It was cool to know that it was in that very building where Jesus appeared, and Moses and Elijah and Elias and restored the keys for the gathering of Israel, among other things. All of it happened in that building. Wow.

We contemplated staying the night in Kirtland and going on the tour the next morning, but instead pressed on to Geneva where Sterling shamelessly flirted with the hotel clerk and got us a great deal on the room. Never underestimate the power of flirting to get what you want. We still arrived early enough to relax a little, but there was no pool. Shame. The kids seemed to have fun anyways.

The last day we pressed forward and arrived at about 6 pm in Summit, New York, which is roughly 56 miles away from Albany. We're staying with a couple that's a friend of a friend of a friend. Never met them before, only talked to them on the phone, but they're graciously letting us stay here for the next little while until our apartment is ready. The couple wasn't home at the time we arrived, but they live so far out in the sticks that they don't have to lock their doors. There's seriously NO ONE around for at least a half mile. It's wonderful. Always quiet, lots of privacy. It'll be a bit of a change when we finally move into the city.

Colorful New York.

 

As for our apartment. The internet out in the sticks is extremely slow, but I am grateful to have it, so I can't complain too much. However, it takes a very long time to upload pictures, so I'm going to stop here for now and I will share pictures of our tiny new apartment at some future date.

Out of the ashes

This post is a week late, but I got to it. I'm sure there are many of you as excited about this as I am. The Provo Tabernacle, which burned down last December is going to be rebuilt and turned into a second Provo Temple! 

I'm ecstatic about the news!! I'm sure many people are. Sterling and I have had Stake Conference in the Provo Tabernacle twice a year, every year since we've been married. Sterling also sang several Men's Chorus concerts in there. That building held special meaning for us. As it did for many.

And now to have it turned into a Temple just thrills me! This is a picture of what the church projects it to look like when it's done.

My favorite thing about it is how similar it looks to the building when it was first built.

 

There used to be a bell in the tower on top of the tabernacle, but it was removed in 1917 and I think the bell was put somewhere on BYU campus, but I don't remember. 

Now, instead of a bell in the tower, there will be an angel on top.

Surprise!

When Sterling got home from work today, he set his lunch cooler down on the counter and told me to look inside. It seemed innocent enough, so I decided to do as he asked. 

Now, I was imaging that the two blue ice packs he uses every day had burst and that the inside of the cooler would just be a mess of blue.

If only.

I leaned in close to the cooler, popped open the lid and was met by this:

I'm proud to say that at least I didn't scream. But I yelped. Just a little. And jumped back. It was definitely not what I was expecting. Frankly, it freaked me out.

Once I'd recovered from the initial shock, I opened the lid again and peeked in. Only to see that the fish was still breathing.

That got me again. IT WAS STILL ALIVE!

I yelped again and jumped back. Thanks for the warning. Sterling laughed pretty hard both times. He says he wishes he had gotten that on video. 'Priceless' he called it. I see nothing funny here.

It was the first catfish that Sterling has ever caught. He was so proud. He let it live for a little longer (while I tried to finished eating dinner.) Then he took it outside, along with Cami and our niece, Beca, and taught them a little about anatomy. Nice, huh? At least it wasn't hands on - for the girls, that is.

I've heard that catfish is good eating, so we'll cook it up in a few days and see. Oh the joys of having a husband who likes to fish.

And terrorize his wife.