Out with the old...

This past summer, on July 17th, we left our home of eight years in Phoenix and moved across town to Goodyear. It has been exciting, challenging, and a little sad at times. We are starting to feel at home here in our new home, but I wanted to document a chapter of our life that we will never forget--our home on 6419 W. Whyman Ave. I remember we got the keys to this house on 2-22-02.

My kitchen. I think my favorite thing about my kitchen was the pot rack, which we took with us and installed in our new home.

I have many happy memories in this kitchen though--meals prepared and shared with friends and family.

This is the family room, which for most of our time in this house held our couches and TV.

We spent a lot of time together in this room. It is where my children learned to crawl and walk.

The front room generally housed the ping pong table, and an unwanted assortment of toys that trickled down the stairs. For about six months before we moved, however, it held our couches and TV.

We painted this room red years ago, with plans to get some matching furniture at some point. That never happened, and when we moved our purple and green furniture in here, it didn't look so good, but we were not interested in repainting, especially considering just how many coats of red we had to put on the walls in the first place.

This was the chandelier in our entryway. The builder had no light here originally, but we had them wire it for one and then our friend Curtis Gardner came over one evening to help us hang the light from the 20 foot ceiling, with a completly inadequate and prequarious ladder situation.

The view looking down at the entryway from the loft area upstairs.

The nursery, or most recently, Finley's room. This is the room I had the hardest time leaving behind. All of my babies have lived in this room when they were little, and I remember when Keith and Curtis painted it and Brandon Slinker helped with the chairrail to get it all ready for our babygirl Sareny Agnes.

I rocked all of my little babies to sleep in this room, and the night before we moved, I brought each child in and rocked them one last time in this room.

Isaac's bedroom, which we painted just last September/October.

Sareny's girly room, which we finished painting last August the weekend before she started Kindergarten.

I think she was a little bit sad to leave her cute room behind.

The loft, or toy room. Had a couple of orange accent walls.

Our master bedroom. I remember painting this room when Sareny was a baby, and trying to steal moments to paint when she wasn't screaming her head off. Cuz let's face it, if she was awake, she was screaming her head off. Other things to note about my room--The dresser and nightstand were my mom and dad's from when they were first married. They were originally a garish 70's wood color, but we painted them white and added the knobs, and I thought they looked like something you would get at pottery barn. The painting on the wall of the Las Vegas temple was done by my high school Algebra teacher.

I also have had a difficult time leaving our finished backyard. I loved having a swingset and grass, and it is hard to have just dirt and rocks right now.

Our back patio. We added the uncovered part before Sareny turned two.

I loved watching the ash tree in the corner getting bigger. The dead spot in the lawn is from our bounce house which we left set up there for too long...

This house had a pretty big side yard, which was really nice. At times I had a little garden area to the left of what shows in the picture.

And that was pretty much our house. When we were showing it to the lady who is renting it right now, she seemed to really like it, especially the backyard and the painted walls. She asked more than once, "And why are you-all moving?" It was kind of gratifying to have someone else appreciate a space that you tried to fix up and take good care of.

I did love this home, and just looking at all these pictures is making me feel a little bit homesick for it right now. However, I really love our new home and neighborhood, and we are excited to be getting settled in here. I'll post some pictures of our new home soon. And by the way, I think you can tell from this post that I am just a little bit sentimental. It's just part of who I am.

I like Bountiful Baskets

I have been doing bountiful baskets for a couple of months, a food co-op thing, and have really been happy with it. It costs $15 to get a basket, and then you go pick up your produce at the designated place and time. You never know what you are going to get, and sometimes there have been some interesting items in it. (Like the "Holy Bok-choy, Batman!" week.) This picture shows what was in our basket last time--I thought it was a pretty decent assortment.
Anyway, I would say this has definitely helped our family get more of our daily fruits and veggies in!

How we've been spending our free time

One of the awesome features of our neighborhood is the fantastic waterpark we get to use just because we live here.

Our kids have gotten to be really good swimmers this summer. Before we moved here, Isaac had the basic skills and movements down, but was not able to actually move himself through the water. The very week we moved in, he put it all together and figured it out.

Now he is really good, and can even take breaths and keep going.



He is also really good at floating.

Lately Finley is trying to take off too, so I'm guessing she'll be swimming by next summer.

Sareny loves to meet her good friend Emily at the pool--they have so much fun together!

I like that the pool has a ledge that goes around the outside edge, it is perfect for Finley to play on.

We love the zero-depth entry play area too.

We generally steer clear when the giant bucket is ready to dump.

Here is Sareny coming off the slide. We like to have races to see who comes out first.

And that is basically how we spent our summer.

I heart this little girl!

Seriously, is there a cuter little face anywhere in the world? I think not.

Finney put on Daddy's hat and said, "Wookit me mom! I wearing daddy's hat!" I asked her if I should take her picture, and she said, "Hmm!" which is said as the second half of "uh-huh!" and is how she usually says yes.

I couldn't resist putting all of the pictures on this post, because she just had the cutest faces in all of them.

Finley is a sweetheart and we love her more and more each day!

And...we're back!

Okay, after taking more than a month off from blogging, I am re-entering the blogosphere to update you all on what our family has been up to. First of all, July 9th is Eat Mor Chikin day, where you get free food at Chick-Fil-A if you dress up like a cow. I'm all about free, so I whipped out some costumes for us and away we went.

We met our friends the Slinker's there and lined up the kids. For some reason, Sareny wanted to make a pouty face in every picture.

We even had little tails on the backs of our shirts.

The reason for my long absentee-ism from my blog is largely because we bought a new house in July. We got our keys to our beautiful new home right after we left Chick-fil-A, but between packing, cleaning up the old house, moving, painting, unpacking, more cleaning, ect., we've been pretty busy. The week after we got our keys, we spent as much free time as we could out at the new house painting before all of our furniture got here. The kids got pretty acquainted with our new family room, as the only thing in the whole house was our TV and DVD player.

They spent a lot of time doing this:

And one evening poor Finley fell asleep on the stairs in her favorite position.

We even stopped in on Sunday after church (although we weren't painting.)

Then Grammy Jo and Bampa came to help out with the kids while we got as much painting done as possible. Finley got to open up her presents.

And then she tried on the apron and little purse she got.

The kids had a lot of fun with their grandparents here. Grammy and Bampa took them to see Toy Story 3 and to the water park twice. I always wish I would have taken more pictures, but I forgot my camera the day I went to the pool with them.

And then on August 4th, Sareny started 1st grade! Why is my little girl growing up so fast??

I took Sareny to meet the teacher the day before school started, and her teacher seemed really nice. Since Keith didn't get to do that, he wanted to take her to school the first day. After they left, I'll admit I cried a little. The first couple of days are always sad, but then we quickly adapt and I kind of enjoy having her in school. She is making some new friends and seems to enjoy her new school.