It's a baby...

GIRL!!!

We are very, very excited. We're getting used to the idea that the 7 bins of baby blue clothes and blankets that we have, we won't be able to re-cycle right now, and the fact that at some point in the future now we'll have to buy all that princess paraphernalia. :-) But I'm starting to get really excited about those adorable baby girl clothes, bows and jewelry. Shea is very excited to be having a "baby sister." I'm pretty sure that he has no idea what that means but he's very happy as are we.

We're pretty sure that her name will be Clare (Irish) Jeanne (French version of Jenna, Jean, Jane and Joan. How's that for handy? We get to name her after her mom, both grandmas and Joan of Arc all in one shot.) She's on schedule to arrive on 2/22. I'd be happy if she comes on time, it would be easy for everyone to remember her birthday! We'll keep you all posted.

The Groves

Some of our favorite people here are the Moores. Morgan totally helped set up our move, (Kaylynn, our old RS president is her mom, so she knew that we were moving here) and has been so kind to us since we got here. And Henry and Shea have become BFF. They play together so well and love to hang out together. So anyway, they invited us to this awesome place in LA called The Groves. It's a big pedestrian shopping plaza that connects to the LA farmers market. The farmers market is AWESOME- on the side that connects to the Grove is all these little restaurant booths with outdoor tables. So we got to eat all this delicious authentic food, shop in some really cool shops, see the fountains, listen to a band and ride a TROLLEY! Shea had SOOOOOOO much fun and so did Mom and Dad.

My first Earthquake!!

And we've only lived here a month. It turns out it's like my 7th earthquake, but they're usually so small and far away that you don't feel them even though they happen a few times a week. This one happened Thur morning while Chris, Shea and I were sitting on the couch eating our cereal and watching the morning news show. It was bizarre!! I thought that a truck had hit our building, our whole room just rocked quickly to the side and then back and it was done. It was so weird to have your room just move. It was only a 2.7 but the epicenter was less than 3 miles away and we were just sitting there, which was why I think we felt it. Anyway - your first is noteworthy I guess if you're going to be living in CA for the next 4 years.

Shea's first day of Pre-School

On his way out the door on his FIRST DAY OF PRE-SCHOOL. (I know I'm biased, but have you EVER seen anything this adorable?? - Look at that big, boy smirk. :-))


I know, I know, he's only 2 1/2. What is this all about? Our amazing, fantastic, wonderful new friends run a co-op preschool and invited us to join. It's Tue and Thur from 10-12 in the resource room in our complex. They have it decorated so cute, Shea loved it on Tue. How the co-op works is one mom teaches each class and another mom is the helper and we rotate around. I end up doing 8 days each semester. The curriculum was written by a pre-school teacher and includes the letters, colors, numbers, holidays, safety things, it's really well done and fun. There's lots of craft and play time for the kids and they get to help alot and share and all those good pre-school things. i was worried Shea was a little too young, he's about 5 months younger than the youngest of the other 5, but he did great last week and LOVED, LOVED, LOVED, LOVED it.



Showing off his "packpack" that he gets to take to school.



Shea sitting on his rug listening to "teacher Katie"



Shea's bucket. He was so happy to have his very own bucket and his picture on the job wheel. He got to be "Rope Leader" on Thursday. :-) He held the rope and led the kids across the street to the playground for playtime. Ahhh, what makes a two year old happy. :-)

The Getty

There are so many fun things to do here. We can't do them all fast enough. This week we visited the Getty museum. It is soo beautiful! (Although since the only museum that Shea has ever been to is the Dinosaur museum at Thanksgiving Point, he kept saying that we were going to see the dinosaurs. We had to explain that, no, this was a different kind of museum, that we were going to see pictures and statues. ) I was surprised at how good he was and how much he liked looking at all those paintings of the baby Jesus ("with that hat" - you know the halo they always paint on Him). :-) The Getty is on 750 acres on top of a mountain in Santa Monica. It was so beautiful, it's all white marble with trees, fountains, gardens and a gorgeous view of the ocean. We loved it!!!


Here's Shea with Van Gogh's the Iris's and some random lady's back side. She wouldn't move!!!

Shea and mommy at some of the fountains

Happy Birthday Chris

Chris turned 32 last week! He had an orientation at UCLA all day so, since we knew he wouldn't have a very fun day we bought tickets to an Angels game for that night. We had so much fun!!! Shea loves baseball games and the Angels are his dad's team.

Free Popcorn

Free Popcorn! That's right. Dale and Thomas offer a two bag free sample once a year and it's that time again. This is decadent, fresh popped, gourmet flavored corn. This year we got a yummy carmel nut and a chocolate covered! Check out this link to get your free sample. (you pay $5 shipping and handling)

https://www.daleandthomaspopcorn.com/freepopcorn/default.aspx

Our new place

Ok these are mostly for my mom who wants to see where we live now. It's very small, but very cute (IKEA furniture rules!) and I LOVE it!!!!

This is our front door. Not normally photo worthy, but check out the hotel-like entrance. We have cards and a code, not keys. Then we have a card to get through the pedestrian entrances and car gates, and a different card for the laundry room, oh, but a real key for our mailbox. (It gets very confusing.)

This is with my back to the front door. This is what you see as you enter. To the right is my super tiny kitchen, to the left is the dining area/office and straight ahead is the living room. Please don't fail to notice my NEW couch! Yes, Julie, I finally got a couch!!!! :-) Chris refused to get out of the way for the picture, Hawaii Five-O, or "The Five-O" to devotees, was on.





To the right of this central area is Chris and my bedroom and bathroom and to the left is Shea's bedroom and bathroom. There is a little hallway before reaching our room that has some really nice closet space and where we stuck a bunch of book shelves. And our bathrooms are both really big so that's nice.




This is the view from my front room. I love all the sun and trees!



This is what's below those trees, Shea's personal park.



So that's it! It's small, but it's clean and I think it turned out really cute considering. I still have to empty out some bins in Shea's room and hang pics in both bedrooms, and then there's the closet of shame. (You don't even want to know how much stuff is crammed into this one poor closet.) We love spending time at our new home and we'd love to have visitors! Not sure where we'd put you, but hey, come see us!!

Living in Los Angeles

The things I LOVE about living in LA.

• We go to Church at the LA temple! Our building is directly behind it. Shea gets to see the temple and Moroni every Sunday.
  
• There is always an ocean breeze.
• Missionary opportunities! We have already picked a family from the next building over that we can't wait to share the gospel with.
  
• The magnolia trees and the bamboo. They are both everywhere!
  
• My gas stove. (finally!!)
• My laundry never takes me more than an hour and a half no matter how many loads I have. No more rotating and folding laundry every weekend, all weekend.
• There is a playground/park directly below our house!!!! Just outside our door!!!!
• My adorable, apartment.
• The weather! Today, the end of a heat wave, it was 80 and the forecast is sunny in the mid 70s for the rest of... the year.
  
• Chuck and Daniel. (The custodian and maintenance man for our set of buildings. Two of the nicest men I have ever met in my entire life!)
  
• Having said amazingly sweet guys come fix anything I want fixed within a matter of days.
  
• Walking 1 minute across the street to the grocery store.
• The beach.
• Trader Joe's. Aaahh. I finally live somewhere where I can get French cheeses, French yogurt, real baguettes, creme fraiche, pate, Orangina and Australian licorice just around the corner.
• Our new friends.
  
• Tons of restaurants, grocery stores and fast food, a copy/mail place, a nail salon, etc. etc. etc. all within a 3 minutes maximum walk. (El Pollo Loco nachos at 11pm without moving the car from that coveted spot closer to the house anyone?)
• The UCLA ward. Within four days of moving in we had four different families bring us food, lend us something we need or just come over and introduce themselves. Then we had the RS pres and the Elders quorum come over. And it hasn't let up. We get pop-ins all the time, people here are SOOO nice!! We've already had a dinner party!!! Wow.
• Our ward is entirely composed of UCLA grad students, so... they're smart. Church is fun and in Sunday School, the comments are actually insightful and pertinent! I have yet to hear the usual, "My mission president said that an apostle once told him..." or tearful Oprah-monies or inaccurate quotations from so-called LDS scholars.
  

The things I'll have to get used to while living in LA.

• It takes 15 minutes at 10pm to get home from IKEA and 45 minutes at 4pm to get there. Traffic is the great unknown. You can never just ask someone how far away something is, the answer is always prefaced by, well, in traffic...
• My uber tiny kitchen.
• Although doing laundry is super quick, I have to cart all my clothes downstairs and across the courtyard to the laundry room where I pay $1.75/load. Ugh.
• While the park just downstairs is amazing, it is also quite a distraction with a 2 yr old as we have to pass through it to get to our car or walk anywhere.
• Married student housing carpet.
  
• Everyone here is either a med student, dental student, law student, post-doc or getting a PhD. With only two degrees to my credit, I'm the dumb one!
• While walking just a short distance for almost everything we need is great, you then have to carry all those bags back home. And when we make an IKEA or Target trip? The only parking is very far from our front door so we have to make trip after tiring trip carrying all that up. I already miss the open the car door, walk a few steps and into the back door.

The move

So, I know I've said this pretty much constantly for the past 2 months (sorry babe), but I HATE moving!!! Nothing, and I mean nothing is as bad as moving! UUGGHH. So it is with GREAT pleasure that I can finally, finally say that ours is pretty much over! It was ugly, but we were really blessed at the same time. Here are all the grizzly details:

Packing up took way longer that I'd anticipated and we had so much going on that last week, including Chris' graduation that we were very stressed as the day approached and we still had a house full of unpacked boxes. The morning of the move was not a time I like to remember, but then the door-bell rang and Chris' cousins Julie and Jace were there. Julie took charge and basically saved my life. Then a few hours later, some more of Chris' cousins showed up, and all those teenage boys worked non-stop! They were amazing! We were done before I realized it.

Shea was a dream on the drive to Mesquite where we spent the night and then again on the drive to LA the next morning. We are so grateful every day for such an amazing child!

Getting to our new house in LA with a 26 foot moving truck was a nightmare! Those trucks don't fit so well on crowded LA streets and definitely not in the tiny driveways of our complex. We finally got it inside and the Elders were there right away to start helping us. But after an hour of carting single boxes from the driveway, past a building, across our courtyard and up two flights of stairs (which is the closest we can ever get to a car - more on that to come) the four of us still hadn't done much. Then the cavalry showed up! We are so grateful for the church!!!! How does anyone move without the Elders quorum? We ended up with about 11 of the nicest, most hard-working, cheerful guys, who carried box after box until they were all soaked through. And the wives! One took Shea to a birthday party (4 hours later when I went to pick him up, he was fed, bathed, jammied, storied and almost asleep!) two others helped move a ton of boxes and then made us dinner and then breakfast the next day too! The ward has been so incredibly amazing (and more on that to come later too!)

So then the unpacking! WOW! All I have to say about that is that I was not anticipating this being that hard! But man!!! Moving from 2100 sq feet to 920 sq feet has proved to be quite a challenge. I am so happy with our place now, I think it's adorable, but we can't park our car in our garage as it is full to the ceiling with all the things that won't fit in the house. We need to get a storage unit soon! :-) Parking on the street is getting old!

The move is over and four years (when we'll have to move again) will be decades and decades sooner than I even want to begin thinking about moving again. One good thing we've firmly decided though - no matter what it costs, next time: MOVERS!!!!!!!

I'm back!

I know it's been almost a month since I've posted. I've been going through blogging withdrawals, but moving and then having no Internet made it a bit difficult. OK, so here's what I need to catch up on:


CONGRATULATIONS CHRIS!
Chris received his masters degree in French Studies from BYU just a few days before we moved, and we wanted to say congratulations! We're proud of all your hard work. (Now I really have to read that dissertation!)





Chris finally got a TUBA!
So my husband who has been wanting to own his very own tuba since he was about 6 years old, finally got one. It's a really, really nice tuba. When Shea sees it he says, "Daddy's tuba is so beautiful." I'm pretty sure I've NEVER seen my husband this happy. :-)