Our Weekend

Thursday: Our friends the Flores moved from Sahuarita, AZ to Houston, TX this week!  Its fun having more friends move close to us.  I realized that I now know someone from every aspect of my life, living nearby!  I have a high school friend, Morenci friends, and now Sahuarita friends.  Plus a cousin up in Dallas.  Its so fun!   

Phil stayed with us a couple days while waiting to get into their new apartment.  Once Phil heard that the New York Yankees where in town to play the Houston Astros we HAD to go to a game.  I mean its Derek Jeter's last season we had to watch him play!  Plus its was dollar hot dog night, that basically sealed the deal.

Carson thought it was pretty Awesome. 

 Derek Jeter up to bat:

 It was such a fun night!  I'm so glad we went.  The boys loved it and Carson has already been asking when we can go again.

Friday Fun Day:  This has been our "Arizona Friends Reunion Week" this week.  Graham and Brittany Theobold our dear Morenci friends were in town house hunting!  It was so fun to get the original IH (industrial hygiene) team back together.  Its been almost 7 years since the team was together and how funny is it that we all ended up in Houston Texas of all places!  To welcome them to Texas we all went to Taste of Texas (one of the best steak places ever).

(From left to right: Graham, Brittany Theobold, Emily, Brad Clark, Steve, Christine Hickenlooper)

Saturday:  I've been feeling a little guilty with this pregnancy.  I haven't thought much about it since we found out he was a boy.  I don't have much to prepare for his arrival except come up with a name, which Brad and I have thought about needing to think about it, but have yet really talked about it.  

So my sweet neighbor Erin loves to paint and offered to help paint the nursery.  I thought it would be a perfect way to get us excited and a little more ready for our little boy.  She had the awesome idea to do circles. Luckily Erin's husband is an engineer and it literally took him a minute to come up with all the mathematics of spacing/size of circles.  So they came over and we got to work.  Its looking so good! I can't wait for her to come back today so we can do some more and hopefully finish!  

We also watched  general conference.  

Sunday: General Conference and no bake cookies

a quote from my favorite talk

We also face timed with Grandma to wish her a happy birthday.

Phew!  Such a busy and fun week!

Pima County Fair

We went to the Pima County Fair a couple weekends ago with the Singletons.  It was very spur of the moment and we weren't planning on going, because Brad is not the fair going type, but when Jordan asks of course Brad will say yes.

You should have seen how Carson's face lit up when we pulled into the parking lot and he saw all the rides.  He was so excited and literally kept saying "mom, I'm so excited!"  

 Carson's favorite rides where the roller coasters!  A boy after my own heart.

 The only ride Tanner and Lucy could ride, and they loved it.

We got so lucky at the end of the night.  We had used up all our tickets and where pretty sad that we where done, until Ms Jenny looked down and right at her feet was a card.  When she asked the worker how many tickets where on the card he said $38!  No one was around to asking for it and how where we going to find who lost it?  So their loss was are gain and we got to ride a few more rides that night to the delight of the boys (even the big boys ie: Brad and Jordan).

It was a wonderful night to make lasting memories with our friends before we move.

Its starting

After reading this I know I really can't complain, but Brad left this morning for Texas.  I'll be manning the fort here in Arizona until our house in Texas closes and we can move in at the end of the month.  In 3 weeks.  3 long weeks.  Brad and I have spent some time apart, but not this long and usually I'm at least up in Utah with family to keep me occupied/sane.

Brad said some goodbyes last night to some friends and it really is starting to feel like we are really moving.  Its hard saying goodbyes.  Luckily I still have 3 weeks to say mine.

While the cats are away the mice will play

While Brad and I went to Texas to go house hunting Aunt Marilyn came down to watch the boys.  The boys loved having her here and they did lots of fun things.

The first day we were gone (Sunday) Marilyn was getting ready for church and when she went to look for Tanner she found him like this in the linen closet.  This spot is not unusual for Tanner to play peek a boo in, but Marilyn soon found out that he wasn't playing, he was sleeping!  Yep, he conked out while standing up.  I died laughing when Marilyn texted me this.  Crazy kid. 

While at church a lot of people told Marilyn that we sound a like.  Not that we look a like, but that we sound a like.  Even after she left I had a couple people tell me that.  Weird.  I guess if I ever want to know what I sound like I just need to talk to Marilyn.

Ummm, where's Marilyn supposed to sleep?

Sometimes I forget to take the everyday type pictures.  So I'm glad Marilyn captured this.  The boys having a movie night.

Tanner also got his first black eye at church.  Marilyn swears it was an accident. wink, wink.

Marilyn said our relator stopped by to put up the For Sale sign and Carson told him that we we're moving to Texas.  Thats his newest thing.  Carson will go up to people, tell them we are moving to Texas, and then ask if they will miss him.  He likes the sympathy card.  Carson also thinks that anytime we drive anywhere we are now in Texas.  Sorry kid, not yet.

Buying & Selling

It seems more official with the for sale sign in front of our house, that we are really moving.  Our house has been on the market for little over a week, and can I tell you how tiring it is to keep the house clean 24/7!

However heartbreaking it has been knowing we are selling our first home (The home that Carson was only a month old when we moved into it.  The home we watched him take his first steps.  The home that we brought Tanner from the hospital too.  The home where we watched our two boys wrestle and play).  It has been exciting to house hunt for our future home.  The home we will watch our boys grow into southern gentlemen.

I have been looking at houses online for a while, and it was frustrating.  I would fall in love with a house and then find out the next day it had sold.  So I was getting worried that all the good houses would be gone by the time we eventually went house hunting (our realtor said the housing market in Katy was HOT)!

We went to Katy, Texas last week to do a whirlwind house hunting trip.  It was exhausting. We looked at 18 houses the first day, and the second day we saw probably 12, but we found our house!

*sidenote: one of the houses we saw, had a FOR SALE sign on front lawn when we went inside to look, and by the time we left the sign had changed to say SOLD.  Thats how crazy the housing market is there!  I wish it was like that in Sahuarita.

We found our house on the second day and it is perfect for us.  4 bedrooms, study, formal dinning room, & a loft.  It has beautiful wood floors in the study, dining & living rooms, tile in the main entry, and carpet in the bedrooms.  Plus it has a HUGE backyard.  It had the biggest yard of any of the houses we had looked at.

 Love the french doors to the study.

 I {heart} this kitchen.  Especially the end cabinet doors that have a glass window pane.  

 Its hard to tell in this picture, but if you look straight and slightly to the left there is a full length 3sided mirror in our master bath.  Like the mirrors you see in bridal stores. 

 Our backyard.  We have GRASS!!!  Real grass not artificial.  Guess we'll need to buy a lawnmower!

 Told ya it was huge.  I even have a citrus tree, not sure what kind, but I'll find out soon enough.

So although we looked at a lot of beautiful houses the reason we chose this one was the neighborhood, it's in another master plan community (similar to what we have now). We will live directly across from a park and an elementary school is down the street.  Its surrounding area is a little country, but I love all the green.  It really is so pretty.

Now that we have a house we are getting more excited to move, and to make this house our home.

Checking things off the Tucson Bucket list

While my family was in town we were able to check a lot off our Tucson bucket list before we move.  I've been wanting to go to a lot of these places for a while, but some were a little pricey.  I finally buckled down and got a Tucson Passport (which is a booklet of buy one get one free to a lot of Tucson's attractions) so we could finally go to these places.

Biosphere

One of the places both my mom and I have been wanting to see for a long time was the Biosphere 2.  The Biosphere is one of the largest greenhouses in the world, and back in the late 1980's 4 people locked themselves in here to see if they could survive on their own for 2 years.  Crazy.  I'd go nuts, but they made it.

We took a tour through many different eco structures and learned how the 4 scientists survived and what they learned during their 2 year experiment.  Carson liked going through the bat cave (some underground tunnels). It was really fascinating.

The Titan Missile Museum

Brad drives past this museum everyday on his way to work and we have never gone until now.  We went while Carson was in preschool, because we heard it was boring for kids.  I thought Tanner would do fine, but he made it really difficult to listen to the tour.  

The gist of it was, that we had this Missile ready to launch at any moment during the cold war.  It was to try to scare the Russians into not bombing us.  This missile is worse then the Atomic bomb.  Its blast radius would obliterate the length of San Diego, California to El Paseo, Texas. 

The Pima Air and Space Museum

Can you tell my family likes museums yet?  Another museum we went to was the air and space museum.  Everyone around us told us that this was a favorite and now I know why.  We have driven past the bone yard (where old/non-working planes go to rest) dozens of times and I always thought it would be cool to see.

The boys loved it.  There were so many planes to see you could really spend days looking at all the stuff.  They even had a moon rock (it was more like a pebble, but apparently worth millions).  They had lots of planes from WWII to Gulf War.  Of course if you know our family you'd know that the WWII ones were favorites.  We love WWII things.  

a replica of the first plane by the Wright Brothers

 the boys on the moon!

The Children's Museum 

For the kids enjoyment (and Tim & Aarons) we went to the Children's museum to mess around and have some fun.

 the closest Aaron will ever get to riding a motorcycle

Other fun

Some other fun things we did while the family was in town was playing mini golf.  Our community has a small course and we hardly use it.  Carson loved it and now asks to go play golf all the time.

Aaron and Tim would play soccer, read bedtime stories, play Candyland and Chutes and Ladders, and go swimming with Carson & Tanner.  It was nice to have them around!

Before they left we had to take them them to El Guero Canello to try some authentic Mexican Sonoran dogs.

As always we love having visitors and having some playmates!  It really was a fun filled week and went by way too fast.  Love ya guys!