When It Rains, It Pours

Yesterday, I noticed a burning smell in our house.  It was kind of like the smell of the heater turning on for the first time in a year or a curling iron that's been heating up for a LONG time.  I searched the whole house over, but couldn't find the source of the smell.  Then, I got a call asking if someone could come see our house in half an hour, so I just forgot about it for a while. 

As Dave and I were getting ready for bed, the smell returned.  Dave thought it was someone burning something outside, but the air outside was not smoky.  We tore the house apart looking for the source and after about 45 minutes, we found it.  Our heater seems to be broken.  It overheats and wont blow any air out.  Can you believe our heater would die now!?!?!?  Actually, I'm not sure if its dead or just sick, the repair man will be here later today, but either way...REALLY?!?!? I suppose it beats the heck out of a house fire, but still...

In the mean time, it's about 62 degrees and dropping in our house.  Josh's toy car that changes color when you run it under cold water has changed to its cold color.   Dave's coming home for lunch to light a fire for us.  I asked him last night, "Remember when we decided to move forward on this job and we said that if it's not the right move God will stop us?  What exactly does 'stopping us' look like?"  He didn't have an answer.


UPDATE: Sorry about the rant earlier.  I was feeling a bit low at the time.  It's later in the day now.  The repair man has FINALLY gone home - he was here for more than 6 hours.  It was a tricky repair, but we're so happy that it was able to be fixed.  It was only $350 instead of the thousands it would have been to replace the furnace. In the meantime, I had no choice but to bake cookies to warm up the kitchen.

Unfortunate

Over the past few days, David and I have been trying to fix a few things around the house that have been neglected for a while.  Its unfortunate that we didn't take care of some of the stuff before we decided to sell the house.  Why do we do that?!?!?  Why do we fix thing up so OTHER people can enjoy the things we should have enjoyed ourselves?!?!  Hopefully, I've learned a lesson through all this and will take better care in my new home.

Anyway...one of the things we needed to fix was the microwave over the oven.  It broke years ago and we've just been using a counter top model rather than try to figure out the wiring on the other one.  Last week, David finally figured out how to remove the old microwave and we bought a replacement for it.  As he was installing the new microwave (which was a pain in the neck, of course: cords in different places than the previous model requiring new holes to be drilled in cabinetry, unclear instructions causing holes to be drilled in the wrong place, etc.) he sat on our oven while pushing the drill into the counters above him.  You guessed it.  The glass cook top shattered.  Now the lucky people who buy our home will get a new microwave AND a new oven!  I wouldn't mind very much if I hadn't spent literally hours scrubbing the old oven into shiny oblivion! 
Just livin' the dream...
By the way, just as an update, we get tons of calls about our house.  We've even  shown it twice, but we've had no real serious interest yet.  I'm going crazy.  As I might have mentioned before, patience is not one of my strong points.  I want this OVER WITH!!!!  Do you know how hard it is to keep the house show-worthy all the time with a Tazmanian Devil and his three older siblings running around?!??!  I'll spare you the details of my mental mood swings over the house.  I know it will all work out in the end, I'm just not good at waiting until the end.

First Tooth

Nicki, almost 7, finally lost her first tooth last week.  Seems kind of old, doesn't it?  Still, she might not have lost any teeth yet if she wasn't so.....so.....Nicki-ish.  Her tooth wasn't really all THAT loose, but she decided she was tired of waiting for it to get loose, so she asked her dad to wiggle it really hard for her (yikes!  It gives me the shivers to think about it).  He did and it loosened up quite a bit.  She said she felt a little tear and tasted blood, but she wasn't going to back down now that she'd started.  She asked her dad to stop wiggling because she wanted to pull it out all by herself.  She just reached on in and yanked it out.  The whole thing was over in a matter of minutes.  Contrast that with Ali's first tooth which took three hours, twelve fireman, and a psychologist! 

It's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year!

Hey!  Who finished off the Thin Mints?!?!?

Girl scout cookie season is upon us!  I have to avoid going to the grocery store when they might be stationed outside the door.  I have no will power to resist either the cute little girls or their blasted cookies!

Shiver Me Timbers

Alison and David had their first official Daddy-Daughter-Date last Saturday.  Alison's activity day group has been working on it for over a month.  She was pretty darned excited! 

The party was Pirate themed.  Everything was so cute!  They had a rain gutter regatta, played "Captain's Daughter" which my crew won two out of the three times they played, ate yummy food, and even gave their dads a sweet message in a bottle.  They had a really fun time! 

Arrrgh!  Alison is a gypsy pirate.

David's so swashbuckling!

Ali's pirate face.  She came home with the mast of the ship as a souvenir.  Great.  All we need is another "souvenir."

Eating buffalo wings.

Go Gee's!  Go Gee's!

Rise N' Shine

Before we went to bed on Saturday night, David went around the house and set all the clocks forward an hour for Daylight Savings.  Little did he know that the new alarm clock/i pod dock he got for Christmas would automatically adjust itself as well.  Poor David was all ready for church at 5:30 in the morning!

The Winds Of Change Part II

I don't have time to do this right now, but I want to make sure that I keep up this family history so that my grandchildren can read about our lives many years from now.  So I'm making this a priority.

Our lives have taken a huge, unexpected turn in the past few weeks. It culminated in David's accepting a job offer in Bountiful, Utah on Monday and us putting our home up for sale this morning.  How we got to this point is almost unexplainable, but I'll try.

David had been plugging along at his job for almost nine years when all heck broke loose last January.  I wrote about it back then, remember?  Anyway, once things started to change around work, David decided that it was time to find a new job.  He spent one evening creating a new resume so that he could apply to a few places in Rexburg and Idaho Falls.  The very next morning, my dad called and said, "Kell, you know you shouldn't tell me things about David looking for a job, right?"   He said that he was at a meeting with the president of  South Davis Hospital the day before and had mentioned that his son-in-law was thinking about changing jobs.  My dad said he was wondering if there were any PT jobs at the hospital so that he could move his grand kids  closer.  The President said that his hospital usually contracts out their physical therapy, but he's involved in who the contractor hires, so Dad should get a copy of David's resume to him.  My dad hadn't even mentioned the conversation to me before the president called him a day or two later asking for the resume because he had a meeting with the contractor.  When he called, Dad asked me, "Does David even have an updated resume?"  Actually - yes, he did.  He just BARELY did.  So I e-mailed a copy of it to my dad and called David to tell him what had happened.  We both laughed, knowing that nothing would probably come of it.

Well, a few days later, the president of the hospital talked to my dad again.  He said, "I didn't know THAT was the resume you'd be sending me! That's the kind of person we'd like to hire for our hospital directly!"  That was flattering to hear.  They wanted him to work for the home-health section of the hospital.  Meanwhile, David was applying and interviewing for jobs closer to home.  He was offered jobs, but not really ideal situations - either less money, no guarantee of hours, or 7-on-7-off type schedules.  (I'm trying to shorten this story considerably.) When David went to the interview in Bountiful a couple of weeks ago, it seemed almost too good to be true.  Not only was the base salary good (which is good in and of itself - many PT jobs are paid hourly, which has been a problem for us since last July when things stared slowing down at work) it also offered a bonus for every visit Dave performs after a certain number per day.  That's virtually unheard of in the PT world.  Basically, David could choose how much money he'd make to a certain degree, with the real possibility of making a lot of money if he wanted to.  On top of that, the benefits were much better than any other place.  It just seemed like they had a more employee-based mindset than the other jobs.  My dad said they had won awards for the past two years in a row for being the best employer in the area. As far as jobs went, Utah was the clear winner.

In spite of the fact that the job looked great, the decision to move was nearly unbearable.  For a while, we talked about turning the job down.  We've lived in Idaho for most of our married lives.  All four of our children were born here.  We have family and close friends and roots here.  We love our yard and animals and home and ward and schools and so much more!  It hurts to think of leaving.  So, we almost decided not to.  But we just couldn't shake the feeling that we needed to keep thinking about it.

Last Saturday, we decided to move forward with the move to Utah.  It just made the most sense and we felt like we needed to make SOME sort of decision before we both went mad.  Dave's parents reminded us that Elder Bednar said that you need to make the best decision possible with the information you have and then move forward.  If it's wrong and you're acting in faith, Heavenly Father can stop you.  We fasted and attended the temple with this decision in mind.  Almost before we began, I knew we were leaving.   It was exciting to think about the possibilities and the exciting times that await us, even though I am sick at heart at the thought of leaving.  I'm not sure why we have to move, but I'm perfectly confident that God does. 

In the mean time, I've been painting and cleaning and working like I've never worked before to try to get this house ready to sell.  Here's hoping that it sells quickly.  We've done the two-house-payments thing before and it's not very fun.

A Hoppin' Good Time

My friend, Christine and I decided to throw a little leap year party for our kids this year.  It wasn't anything fancy, but I think everyone had a great time.  It was frog-themed.  Get it...LEAP year!!!

We made frog crafts...     L to R: Jessa, Nicki, Kyler Martin, Ila in her highchair, Gage, Alison, Kya, Josh

We did frog origami...

We even decorated frog sugar cookies.  We also played a cake-walk-type game where the spots on the ground were lily pads and the kids had to hop from one to another.  I didn't get any pictures because I was too busy running the game.

I'm not sure Ila had as much fun as the other kids.  She just watched. Bronson had a great time though because he found my bag of gummy frogs and ate them all while I was helping the other kids.

Our trip to Utah

David had a job interview in Utah last weekend.  Since my parents had come up for a visit the weekend before, we decided to let Dave go on his own.  However, about an hour before he was planning on leaving, I got the crazy idea that I wanted to tag along.  We quickly packed our bags and did our Saturday chores around the house so that when Dave came home from work, we were ready to go with him.

Our trip was short, but really fun.  We showed up at my parents' house late on Friday evening.  We shuffled the kids to bed and talked for only a few minutes before going to bed ourselves.  The next morning, we got ready for the day and packed up the van, knowing we wouldn't be coming back to my parents' house once we drove north.   After a delicious, fancy, pancake and bacon breakfast, David went to his interview in Bountiful and the rest of us drove to Ogden.

Hanging out with Grandpa.
 

David's interview went very well.  Almost painfully well.  We never intended to look for a job in Utah, but it kind of fell in our lap (thanks to my dad, who said something to an associate and it all went form there - more of that story some other day, if necessary).  If this job was offered to us in Idaho, we'd jump on it!  It's a great job!  It just happens to be in another state and we're having a hard time imagining selling our home and uprooting our family.  Anyway, that's a whole different story - this post is about our trip to Utah.

While Dave was being interviewed, the kids and I went to Payton's basketball game. The Holts didn't know we were coming so we surprised them. That was fun.  Payton told his mom later in the day that when he first saw Alison in the crowd, he thought he was dreaming.  So cute!  He did a good job and his team barely won at the buzzer.  It was a real nail biter!

Playing with a teammate after the game was over - I forgot to take pictures during the game.
 

 After the game, we went to Kristin's house for a while.  The kids played with each other and with the dog, Beau.  He's a huge, standard Poodle who acts like a Labrador.  I love him!  So do the kids, but from a distance only.  David met us at Krsitin's house.  For lunch, we met Katie's family and Grandma and Grandpa Church at Chuck-A-Rama.  We were a big wild bunch, (my kids being the wildest, of course) but Chuck-A-Rama can handle it.  It's kind of like kid heaven!  We left for home straight from the restaurant.  The kids watched videos while David and I discussed our family's future.  Nothing like a three hour drive to hash out every possible scenario. 

I tried a million times to get a picture of beau, but he doesn't hold still - this is the only one that's not of his bum or his nose.

Payton is a really cool cousin!  He does boy things with Josh like having light saber fights.

The choice is yours at Chuck-A-Rama

Love this picture of Megan.

The grown-up table.
 

I loved our quick, impromptu trip!