Thursday, June 26, 2008

Popcorn Popping

We've been very stressed out lately, driving around the entire metro area looking for a new home, so we haven't had a lot of time to just hang out and play, but I caught a video of Anna being cute this morning. I thought you would all enjoy seeing it.



For those who are confused about our move, here's a quick summary. Our house is too small, and we are tired of all the "accessories" to condo life (i.e. neighbor noise, parking lots), so we sold our condo planning to buy a home. However, with the down market, we are losing too much on the sale, so we are planning to rent a home for a year or two until we can buy. It's not the way we planned for things to work out, and we love our ward up here in Bothell, but we are excited to live in a real house with no noisy neighbors upstairs or down (except our beautiful noisy girls), and renting doesn't really bother us for now as long as we can get closer to work. So if anyone knows of a great place to rent with at least 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, let us know. It also, PLEASE, needs to be clean. That's the biggest problem with most of what we've seen so far. Some places are just... OI. Yeah, horrible.


In other news this week, Mariah has all of a sudden gotten two teeth (one on top and one on bottom), and the other two are coming in very soon. She's been very crabby, but I'm just relieved she's finally going to be able to chew things. Oh, and here's another cute picture of Anna this week. She was so sleepy that she fell asleep while we changed her diaper. We just left her on the changing pad because it was so funny. :) Have a great week!

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Portland

We've been back from our trip for almost a week now, and this is the first time we've had a chance to update the blog.  We had a great time, although Mariah had a hard time being confined for so long on the train.  So here's some pics and summaries of our activities.  

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Here's us at the bus stop in Mill Creek.  We got a ride to the stop, and took a bus to the train station.  Here's us on the bus. IMG_2642

Then we rode the train.  Anna decided this train's name was Aero and Bull (two of her trains). 

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Here's a picture of our hotel room and the massive donut Adam found at the VooDoo Donut shop.  SO GOOD.

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Anna's favorite part of the hotel we stayed in was the round pillows on the beds. 

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Mariah was just happy to be in the hotel because it meant she could crawl around on the ground instead of riding in the stroller or the frontpack. 

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This is the girls in front of a Stegosaurus at the Dinosaur exhibit at the carnival on the waterfront.  Anna was excited when she learned that the Stegosaurus is Uncle Nate's favorite dinosaur. 

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One of our favorite parts of the trip was riding all over downtown on the Portland Max Line, a light rail train system. 

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We also rode the MAX to the Children's Museum, and here are some pictures of Anna's favorite activities: the water tables and the kid-sized grocery store. 

 

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My favorite part of the trip is one we have no pictures of because we forgot to bring our camera.  The night before we came home, we met Claire (a BYU roommate from ages ago) and her family at Powell's Books and had dinner at the mall.  We had a grand old time catching up, and the bookstore was the biggest I have ever seen.  Imagine room after room full of new and used books piled at least 12 feet high--oh, it almost makes me cry.  *sigh*  Anyway, we had  a great trip, but it was good to get home.  And now, we're selling our house.  We've got and accepted an offer, and we're almost done with all the inspection stuff, so we're getting close.  The close date is currently July 10th, so it's coming up soon.  We're very excited.  I'll give more info later.  Bye.