Unpacking

Moving has been an adventure and I'm really excited for all the fun new things we've been doing and will be doing in the near future. But I'll be honest, it has also been pretty tiring and emotionally difficult and I'm glad we've only moved once since Ryan and I have been married.

This is the moving truck with all our stuff in it.  That door is open to one of the crates, and we had four.  We had 180 boxes.  I don't know how we fit 180 boxes worth of stuff in our apartment.

 It was like Christmas getting to open the boxes and find out what was inside.

 What could this one be? It's so big.  Maybe a cheese grater? A food processor I didn't know I had?

 Oh, it's just a cup.  Maybe the next one will be better?

Nope, just another cup.  Man this is taking forever.
Look at that huge pile of packing material.  I think at this point I had only unpacked like 4 cups.

This one is my favorite.  A before and after.  No joke, this is the same thing just wrapped up.

Now I think I know why there were 180 boxes when we had probably 50 boxes worth of stuff.
Phew, one box down, only 179 left to go.  The packing material barely fits back in the box it came in.

We decided to flatten the packing material so it takes up less space.  This is the pile we have in our family room right now with 98% of the boxes unpacked.  That's a lot of paper.

Lucas thinks it makes a good bed.

New House

Yay!  We finally have my computer back again, and it has the internet.  I mean, don't get me wrong-there really wasn't a day that went by that I didn't have access to the internet-(yes, I am spoiled)-but it's not really the same experience as having my computer and my desk.  That last post was done on the laptop and I'm pretty sure it took me like 3 hours.

But now we are out of the hotel and into a real house.  We have been crazy busy these last few days getting everything moved in and put where we want it, but for the most part I think we're done and things are starting to settle down.  So far we LOVE it here.  Our new place is twice the size of our apartment and we're having so much fun putting things away and having a spot for stuff, as opposed to the floor of Lucas's room.  We have a nice big kitchen, a backyard, and space for Lucas to run around, (and he seriously does just run around for hours on end).  I feel like I'm a kid again and I've been playing house for a week.  I've already mopped the floor multiple times.  I'm sure it will get old at some point but for now everything is fun.

Now for pictures.  These are all of the house before we moved stuff in.  I'll post more pictures with furniture and stuff later once I've decorated and made things cute.  We're still renting so there's only so much I'm allowed to do, but I'm definitely going to spruce the place up a bit.

This is it!  We love having a garage.  And it's a duplex, so it's not that big, but it's still huge compared to what we're used to.

The family room.  We love having ceiling fans and a fireplace.

The kitchen.  I love that I can look out to the family room and outside to see what's going on while I'm cooking.

The upstairs hallway.  Lucas is playing with the door stopper thing.  He loves them and we've probably lost like 4 of the caps on them already.

Lucas's room, there's another room that looks basically the same that we're using for an office right now.

The master bedroom, bath, and walk in closet.  I am in love!

And here is the park that is literally 300 feet from us.

And this is for the engineers that read the blog, check out the little structure they have.  They start teaching the kids their ABC's and circuitry early here.

And this is pretty much how we all feel about our new home.

We Made It!

We made it to Livermore on Thursday of last week. We had a lot of help packing up and getting our place cleaned before we left Utah.  Ryan's mom cleaned most of the kitchen, and my friend Shannon cleaned the refrigerator and the oven.  It was amazing.  They cleaned more than that, but that's what I was most grateful for.  I hate cleaning the kitchen.  Thanks again guys!  Even Lucas got in on the cleaning action.

Lucas played with his friend Trey a lot of the time that we were packing and cleaning, and that was a huge help too.  When he wasn't playing with his friend, or helping us clean, he was watching Curious George on the laptop.

We also watched George and Toy Story in the car on the way here.  I sure do love technology.

Since we will be staying in a hotel for the first few weeks that we are here in Livermore, we had to pack a lot of stuff in the car to bring with us; all the things we couldn't live without for a month. We would not have made very good pioneers.

Lucas was not very happy about being packed in the car in this picture, but he calmed down and actually did really well on the drive out here.  We stopped at the city park in Wells. It was a pretty fun park.

And we stopped to eat at Mcdonalds in Elko.

I actually had a ton more parks and Mcdonalds with play places that we could have stopped at, but Lucas did so well we didn't need to.  If you would like my list let me know.  There are actually parks in pretty much every city on the way from Utah to California.  And now we're just hanging out in our hotel, enjoying a yummy continental breakfast every morning, free dinner on week days, and a swimming pool.  We have a kitchen, too, so I can make dinner on the days they don't serve it.

Lucas is enjoying having his own little suite with his own bathroom, and he likes playing on the stairs. Our hotel room is pretty nice. Hopefully we don't go stir crazy over the next few weeks, though.

Nelson Apartments

We've been busy packing up our stuff and getting ready to go, but we made some time to run out front of our apartment complex and take a picture.  We've lived here for almost 5 years.  I'm not going to say I'll miss the apartment, but I'll miss the fun times we had.

These are some of our best friends, and our next door neighbors.  We will really miss them!

Family Barbecue

We had a barbecue with my siblings this week.  We wanted to have one last hurrah before Ryan and I move next Monday.  We had a blast!  Lucas loved playing in the pool with Julie and Bret.

Doing acrobatics on the bar.

Lucas thought it was hilarious.

And here is the one and only shot of me.  I was trying to force Lucas to sit still for a picture and it didn't work so well.  But you can see my cute new swimsuit.

After playing at the pool, we went back to make the food for dinner.  Ryan barbecued the burgers and shrimp.

Bret and Lucas played in the fort.

Here's all the yummy food.

And here we are eating.

We're really going to miss swimming in Julie's pool and hanging out with my siblings here in Utah.

The Mazda

Our Mazda 3 is the first car I ever purchased. It was the biggest purchase I had ever made up to that point, by a landslide. Here we are almost five years ago admiring our brand new car.

It's the first car Lucas ever rode in.

And the first car he pretended to drive.  He loves to "drive", and it all started right here.

Well, we've been debating lately about getting a new car with more room for extra carseats.  No this is not an announcement, but it's going to happen sooner or later so we figured we'd plan ahead.  The back seat of the mazda is so small it didn't really safely fit our one rear facing carseat, and what happens when we have 3 carseats we have to fit in the back?

We're also moving next week and we thought it would make things much simpler for us to sell our car now and not have to take it with us.  And save some money by being a one car family for a few months, or until we can't stand it anymore.  Anyway, so we sold the Mazda.  I'm not super attached to things like cars, but I was a little sad to drive away without it.  These pictures were taken with Ryan's phone because we forgot the camera.  They are pretty crappy but you get the idea.

So now we're looking at what car to get next.  Ryan has been looking at the crash test ratings on cars, and pretty much all of the videos are horrifying.  Seriously, watch some of those pole impact videos.  They are ridiculous.  Safety and the cool gadgets the car comes with are Ryan's criteria when looking for a new car.  My criteria?  The coolest commercials.  I may buy this car based solely on this video.