Wicked

I just had to say that if you have not seen wicked yet, you need to! Thad and I went last night and it was absolutely fabulous! Amazing! I could watch it a million more times.

Before & After

Sorry it has taken so long for this post, but we have been busy! in the last 3 weeks we moved in and completely unpacked(in 3 days) and then started with the "improvements" So far we have finished the front room, dinning room and kitchen. Which has included paint(walls and ceilings because these people thought the room should be one giant blob of color, completely tearing down painting and putting back up the trim and baseboards, a couple new fans, and of course new candles and cute stuff ;). So here are the pictures, enjoy!
Kitchen Before (yes I would call that McDonalds yellow, and yes it is on the ceiling)

Kitchen After

Dinning Room before(what you can't see very well is that the walls are lime green)

Dinning Room After

Front Room Before


Front Room After



It's a good thing Thad and I can see the potential in things huh?!
I don't know if I've mentioned yet everything else that has been going on. Thad is now teaching the 14-17 yr olds Sunday School Class, and I am teaching 6-8 yr olds in Primary. SO far so good. Thad also started his new project in Fillmore and commutes Monday & Wednesday but stays the night Tuesday and Thursday. He has started playing golf a little because the house the company rented for those who wanted to stay a couple nights a week is on a golf course and they get to golf for free. So he, at the "suggestions" of the bosses, has gone with them and picked it up pretty quickly.We bought him a set of clubs last night as an early birthday present. And the only news from my end is that I am going to be teaching dance again at the studio this year. I'm teaching a ballet, a jazz, and a ballet/tap combo, and seeing as I haven't danced in 6 years it should be quite interesting at first ;)Wish me luck!

The many adventures of us

Okay, fair warning, this one is going to be long. But a lot has been going on the last few weeks! Things got off to a bang when Kelsie and Cameron flew in almost 3 weeks ago and the whole family was able to be in the temple together when Bobby went through for his first time. It was really a sweet experience to have us all there together for the first time. Then of course we went to the traditional Claim Jumper's Lunch afterward and ate more food than is healthy, but it was totally worth it ;)
That next Tuesday we took Family pictures in the back yard. Here are a few samples.





We spent that next week grocery shopping and packing for our beach trip. Thursday however Andi decided to get tonsillitis again! That makes 6 times since January thank you very much. And just to restate, the second our insurance kicks in I'm having those buggers yanked out. So we got off to a bit of a rocky start, and we did manage to have 6 of the 12 people at the beach house sick with one flu or another, but other than that we had a great time. We stayed in a house about a block from the beach in Morro Bay. We walked too and form the water everyday whenever we wanted, checked out the shops and just had a nice relaxing week/break from the heat. Andi loved the water, well, mostly she loved throwing wet sand at people, but her first real beach experience was a good one.





This is one of those quarter rides along the shops in Morro. She loved it, but kicked and screamed like crazy when we took her out of it.



Andi and little Walter are starting to get along pretty well now. He's more mobile and can fight back now and I think she recognizes that. It was fun watching them play all week. This is them at the Atascadero Zoo. It was only 20 min from the house and though not very big, it was perfect for the little ones, and Kelsie who all of a sudden seems to be a big zoo fan.



And this is at a little restaurant we ate at that had really good french dip sandwiches.


Once we got back in to town the following Saturday Thad and I finally got to sign papers for our house so we are going to get to move in this week! Finally! SO once again I'll probably be MIA for a while, but I'll be back with pictures of our house painting progress.

catching up

Well this has been a busy fun week. My birthday was on the 3rd and we had a little BBQ at my parents, and I must say I made out like a bandit! Thad ordered the locking dvd cabinet that I've been wanting for months, the boys got me my very own copy of high school musical, but I'm not sure if it was as much for my enjoyment as it was meant for Thads torture. And my parents got me tickets to see Wicked! I'm so excited, I've been wanting to see that show for ever!
I also realized this week that since we haven't had Andi's website to update every week we really haven't taken any pictures. 2 whole months of her life undocumented. So I made an effort this week to take pics and here are a couple for your viewing pleasure.
Andi has learned to love music this last little while at my parents. If the boys are on the piano or guitar she comes running to help play(which usually means dropping a pick inside the guitar). And they have taught her the wonder of the I-pod, which she likes almost as much.

This is Andi on the 4th posing in her patriotic outfit(thanks Aunt Stef)

The 4th we super busy. Starting at 8 we were up and finishing dads mail box. Then we headed over to G&G Richards for a BBQ and I met even more of Thads family that I've never met before. Good food as usual, topped off with Grandmas signature homemade ice cream. And Andi learned how to hold her breath in the pool and jump off the diving board while we were there too.
Then when Andi hit the breaking point we went back to my parents to put her down for a nap and get ready for the next BBQ. More good food and swimming, and then the fireworks began. My brothers and Thad rigged up the "totem pole of fire" basically a wood stand with a couple appendages that we put the fireworks on to light them. It was really cool because we could light several at a time and the fountains had a better effect when they actually had to fall a few feet to the ground.

Today we are just cleaning up from all the fun and resting before the next round of festivities begin. It's going to be a crazy couple of weeks so I probably won't get back to posting till after the beach trip. Don't miss me too much.

Rough Week

It has been a looooong week. Andi woke up from her nap last Sunday with a wicked fever, that kept her up all night, and made her miserable all day. SO I took her to the Dr Monday evening and sure enough tonsillitis . . . again. This would be the fifth time she has had it since January. SO when we go in for her 18 month check up in a few weeks I think I am going to request to have them taken out. Last night was the first night in a week that she slept all night. Thank Goodness!
Anyway, it was also recital week and for the first time in 6 years I went back to help. I was really kinda nervous about it b/c I was sure I'd be all sad that I wasn't dancing. But I wasn't. Maybe it was because Allison and Callie were backstage too and none of the girls I grew up dancing with were still there, but it was a lot of fun.

Well, we are still set to close on our house this friday so I hope nothing comes up this week to throw that off. I'm so excited to get Andi out of my room!

Interesting Day

So the super cute house that we thought we bought last week. . . well we are not getting it after all. We had the home inspection done on it and there were all kinds of electrical, and plumbing issues that needed to be fixed. Not a huge problem, except that the people refused to do any of the $8,000 worth of work that needed to be done, and refused to credit us that money from the price of the house so we could fix it. Their excuse "it's an old house" our response "then sell it like an old house and cut the price." They didn't like that so we cancelled escrow yesterday. Lame.
But we did put in an offer on another house last night. It's a 3 and 2 and about the same size, nice big yard, no pool, but there is a jacuzzi. Here's the weird part, it's 4 houses down from my parents! It's been on the market for a while and we saw the sign everytime we came and went but didn't even look at it because it was so close and we thought it might be weird. And it was pending, but fell out of escrow monday, right when things were falling apart with our house. It all just kinda fell into place. The owners want out quickly because they already have a new house that they were supposed to move into 2 weeks ago, so assuming they accept our offer today(which they probably will) we will still be able to move in the 29th of June. Cross your fingers for us!

The House

So we did it. We bought a house yesterday. And the weird part is neither of us are nervous about it. I mean I know that's a good thing, but at the same time, I think it would be normal to be worried about something this huge.
Anyway the house is super cute, it's 3 beds 2 bath with a pool, and wood floors which I love! We should be able to move in the 29th of June so I'm counting down ;) Here are some pics of the outside.
This is the front of the house.


This is in the front yard


This is the backyard

Argentina Pirates on the Hunt

So first of all a big shout out to Bobby who just got his mission call today. He is going to the Argentina, Buenos Aires West mission and reports August 29th. It was really exciting to be here when he opened the letter, and made me realize I finally get it. I mean, when Walter got his call I think I was still too much of a teenager and wrapped up in myself to understand how cool and important this is. Yay Bobby!
Also we saw Pirates today, and I don't know about anyone else, but I was extremely dissapointed and to be honest a little ticked. The ending(if you can call it that) sucked, but I don't even think you can call it an ending as much as yet another segway. I just wish they would have changed a few details and made it happily ever after. Lame!
The house hunting is still going. We have 2 "options" but at this point don't think we have found the "one" yet. So we will continue looking this next week. Thad really wants to stay in my parents ward, so that narrows our options considerably. I mean, it's not a necesity to stay in the ward but we'd like too, so we'll see what we can find, but at this point our two options are not in the ward. I'll let you know when something happens.

Still Alive

The last few weeks have been just nuts! We have been in Bako now for 2 weeks but it feels more like 2 months. Thad is liking his job, and after 2 weeks of job hoping and training of sorts he has been assigned to a permanent job that lasts through the end of the year. I'm not very clear on exactly what they are building on this job, but I think it has something to do with a water treatment plant or something. Anyway, it's just him and one other PM in charge so it should be a good opportunity for him.
For now we are still living in Bobby's room at my parents house. We have been driving around looking at rental houses since the day we got here, but after 2 weeks, exauhsted all of our resources. If the house was cheap it was in a craptastic neighborhood and really run down. If the house was nice we might as well buy it and pay the mortgage for what they were asking. So as of Thursday we decided(at least I thought we did) to just get an apartment for 6 months and buy a house then. So Friday & Sat morning I got a list together of possible apartments and had it all organized. I didn't really see Thad friday because after work he left straight away with the boys to the father & Sons campout, but somehow between Thursday evening and Saturday afternoon he changed his mind and came home from the campout and told me we are just going to buy a house now.
So now we are starting all over AGAIN, and looking for a fixer-upper house to buy. Meanwhile Andi is a horrible roomate! And since buying a house takes a bit longer to settle than filling out a rental contract I hope we find a house SOON! I am still a bit in shock that all of a sudden we are buying a house, huge decision, huge debt, and if it's a fixer-upper, huge project.
Other than that I have been hanging out with fma and friends here in town during the day while Thad is gone. Oh, and I didn't mention that Thads hours are fabulous! for me anyway, he goes in super early cos no one wants to work in the heat and is home between 2 & 3 everyday. Plus I have loved driving around in his new company truck. It makes me hate my little crap car, but it's nice to have a bigger vehicle.
Sorry no pictures, I have been a little busy to notice Andi's cuteness, but i'll post some soon, and hopefully soon let you all now about a house.
p.s. Andi goes to Nursery now, even though technically she's too young, but it's awesome! She loves it and I can actually listen to lessons!

End of the Long Road

Yay! It's finally finished! Thad graduated Friday morning at 8 am at the Tabernacle in Provo. The Ceremony was pretty short, which Andi much appreciated, and afterwards we had a BBQ at our place with all the fam in town and had a great time. We've enjoyed our time here at school but are very glad to be done and to be going home again.


Friday night we headed up to Heber for Grandpa Richards 90th B-day celebration. All 11 kids were there, with some of the grandkids, all together about 50 people. Thad and I have been married for over 3 years, but I was still meeting people I'd never met before ;)
Well, this post is a farewell for a few weeks till we can find a place to live and get settled. We are leaving for Bakersfield Wednesday and will begin the hunt then. I assume it's not going to take too long considering Thad agreed no fishing trips till we have a place to live. So he'll be pretty motivated ;) Thad starts work on the 7th of May. Wish us luck!

Smarty Pants

Well, Andi may not say much, but she definitely understands and has her own way of communicating. This week we discovered a few new tricks she had up her sleeve. When she sees something she wants to eat/drink she points and very loudly "mmmmm" s as in "yummmm". So she was doing that at dinner this week and we figured out she was after the juice, and being the lazy parents we are, we told her to go get her sippy cup. She wandered off and we thought "ya, right, she's going to get her cup." But she did! So now we tell her to bring us all sorts of things and for the most part she does.
Now that my table and chairs are finished I have not been able to resist the packing bug. So little by little we are getting there. It's amazing how much I find to pack that we just don't use very often, or like ever, and then I start thinking maybe I should toss it. But I probably won't.

yes, she is wearing Thad's ski goggles.

15 months

So, Andi had her 15 month check up yesterday. And we discovered she now recognizes the Dr and has learned to fear him. The minute he walked in she started clinging to me for dear life. When I put her on the table she started screaming, she just knew they were going to swab her throat or poke her legs. Poor girl! But it was weird to see her act like that because up until yesterday she would try to play with the Dr's instruments and take the tongue depressors from him. She wasn't afraid at all, but I guess now she remembers her past visits ;)
The stats: She is 87th percentile for height, 63rd for weight, but off the charts with her big head. So she's tall, skinny, and has a huge noggin. She is ahead of development as far as motor skills and activity go, but behind in the verbal. She is supposed to have a vocabulary of 10-15 words and all I hear all day is daddy, daddy, daddy. I know she understands a lot more, because she follows commands and stuff, but that's all she will say.
Anyway, today is Thads last day of class! Finals start Friday and he only has 4 left. He took one last night, so this really is the end! I finished the table and chairs and have now begun packing some things that I can get away with. I can't believe we are moving in two weeks.

Dancin

Andi loves to dance. She spasses out like this every time she hears music she likes. Enjoy!

Make an on-line slide show at onetruemedia.com

Easter

So I know this was technically Andi's second easter, but it really was the fist she was aware of. She helped dye eggs, which to her meant throw them around the kitchen and hope they land in the dye cup. Needless to say hers were pretty cracked ;)
As far as finding the eggs went, she liked busting open the plastic eggs more than finding eggs. So we still have jelly beans in the grass that I need to clean up. But here is a pic from easter morning. I finally had an excuse to wear one of the bridesmaid dresses again .

projects

So you all know I'm a little ocd, and since we decided when/where we would be moving to I have had the almost uncontrolable urge to start packing. I packed up everything I could in the basement, but since we still have several weeks here Thad won't let me pack up anything upstairs. I was really having a hard time restraining myself, so I decided I needed a project to keep my mind off of packing. So I started refinishing our dinning table and chairs. For those of you who don't know, we bought the set off this old man who was moving back to Brazil. It's super old, and had the weirdest finish, but we were poor students and it was cheap. I was planning on leaving it in Provo, but Thad got all sentimental about it and wanted to keep it b/c it was the first peice of furniture we bought together. Anyway, so I have one chair totally done, one halfway done and the table leaf done. Here are the before and afters.

Before After

You can totally tell it's a homeade job, but I think it looks a ton better.

Oh, so we have stray cats in the lot behond our house all the time. Thad likes to shoot them with his pellet gun. Anyway, there has been this one cat in the shed lately and everytime Thad goes in there to get something it attacks him! Usually they run away, but the cat hisses at him and growls and all sorts of crazy things and he has to throw whatever he can at it to get it to go away. Turns out, the dumb cat has kittens hiding behind some stuff in a corner of the shed. They are only a couple weeks old so we don't want to move them, but Thad is getting really tired of being attacked by the mommy cat ;)

your attention please . . .

We have an announcement that I, first, never thought I'd be making, and second, never thought I'd be happy about making. But I am on both accounts. We are moving back to Bakersfield the first week of May. Thad accepted a job offer there yesterday so it is official. And now I have a month to get things organized and ready to go. It was really hard to make a decision about this because we really have never had anything this big to think about. I mean leaving Provo changes everything. We are no longer poor college students so we have to think about saving money for a down payment on a house, and mortgage payments, and car payments(I need a new one), and 401K's, and school districts, and a million real world things that we have not had to deal with yet. Wish us luck ;)
Here is my new favorite picture of Andi.

Say what now?

Andi is trying desperately to talk now. Most of the time she really thinks she is talking, and she gets mad at me for not understanding. She just babbles and looks at me like, "why are you not doing what I told you!?" Last week I was talking to a friend at our house and Andi just kept babbling. I tried to talk over her, but if I got louder she would get louder. She finally climbed up on the couch and yelled in my face until I stopped talking and listened to whatever it was she was trying to say. She's kinda pushy.
Her hair is getting longer finally and she can now wear pig tails. Although, for the most part it looks like she has a mullet. That hair in front just won't grow!


So Thad has one job offer in CA, and is flying back to Northern CA tonight for an interview with a different company. The offer he got last weekend had some pretty sweet perks including 2 weeks paid vaca effective immediately. Some of the other Co's he's talked to you have to wait a year to get any vaca time. And since I am all about play time I like the Co from last weekend ;) But we'll see what the next 2 have to offer.

distractions welcome

Patience is a virtue I do not have. We are still 2 months away from moving, and I do not even know where we will be moving to, but I am having the hardest time fighting the urge to pack! I mean, I know we are leaving, so why can't we just pack up and leave instead of having to sit around for the next two months talking about leaving. I think the real issue is that we have been talking about moving forever, and now that it is so close I just want it to happen now. Time moves so slowly when something big is in the near future. Until then I spend as much time as Andi will allow on the computer looking up housing and cars and planning even though I can't really plan. I just can't help myself. I'm a little ocd.
I have no cute Andi pictures for this post because she is asleep and I am in the living room on the laptop that does not have any pictures on it. But she is getting weirder/funnier every day. She loves baths and recently learned how to make the water come out of the shower head. So she stands there in the tub switching it back and forth and screaming and laughing every time it starts dumping on her head. She also has this book that apparently is her favorite. She brings it to me every 5 minutes to read to her. Yesterday she brought it to me while I was on the phone and got tired of waiting for me, so she started flipping through the book babbling and pointing at the pictures like she was reading to herself.
Thad is gone again tonight at dinner with some company that is recruiting his whole competition team. I'll be glad when the recruiting/interviewing process is over and he's not gone so much. I get bored to easily.

The Great Outdoors

Okay, most of you will probably think I am a horrible parent for saying this, but the funniest thing happened yesterday! We took Andi to the park because it was a beautiful day(we are being hazed lately, 60 degrees one day, and 6 inches of snow the next, lame.) Anyway, a couple of the ward people were there with their dogs. One is a pug, Spanky, that Andi chases around and Spanky is used to her. The other was a big ol Lab puppy who was really high strung. Well Andi decided the lab was more entertaining than Spanky and kept following it around, but being a high strung puppy it was running around like crazy. So the dogs owner calls for it and it turns around and runs, flying by Andi and missing her by maybe an inch. Seriously, you could see her hair wave by the breeze the dog created. Anyway, she thought that was pretty funny and went after the dog just in time for him to turn around and body slam her. She was of course really upset so that was the end of the park, but we got in all on video ;)

So here are a few pics of Andi playing outside with Thad.

We have discovered that Andi really, truly, hates dresses. I used to think that it was just because it got in the way of her crawling, but now that she is walking and still gets mad when I put one on her, I have to admit. She hates them.

Oh, and the computer is her favorite toy. We've had to start shutting her out of her own room because we find her like this ALL the time!

In other news, Thad is home this weekend, but flying to Cali the next two for interviews. So Andi and I get ditched again! But we are going to Bako the week he is going to be in Texas. A week is just too long to get ditched like that.

days go by

First off, Andi would like to thank her Uncle Walter & Aunt Stef for the fabulous outfit she is wearing in this picture. She fits into it now and I realized when I was dressing her that she needed a jacket to wear with it, and since none of her jackets would look good with it, we had to go buy her a really cute denim jacket. She really is more stylish than I am these days.


And this picture is really how we find her sleeping lately. Legs hanging out the bars and everything. Which means we will never buy her a daybed because she will kick the bars out the back of it like I used to do ;)


Things are starting to get back to normal around here. Work will be calming down for me after this weekend because I will have most of our fall/winter vacancies filled. Who knew people looked for fall housing in January? Thad is almost caught up with his school work from being gone last week and is scheduling interviews with the companies he talked to at the competition. He is also interviewing people to take over our jobs for the Schanks. So he is busy, but looking forward to having something decided as to post-grad employment.