New house happenings

We continue to settle into our new house. Here are some around the house shots.

Lydia installing the new toilet paper holder in the upstairs bathroom.

We slept in the basement for a couple of weeks and here is Caleb reading one of his school books. He is snuggled under the covers b/c there are no heat vents in the basement, so it is pretty chilly down there.

JoAnna pinking...I mean painting up her new room.

JoAnna making Aunt Stephanie's taco casserole recipe for lunch.

One morning I asked JoAnna to take the dog outside and after quite a few minutes I noticed that she wasn't back inside. I looked out and this is what I saw. JoAnna, jumping on the trampoline in her pajamas, no hat, no coat, only her gloves and boots. What must the neighbors think of us!!

Vacation to Seattle

I can not believe that 2 months have passed since my last blog posting. How did that happen? Well I'll try to explain. Since the last post we have sold a house, bought a house, spent a week in Seattle, moved and painted almost the entire inside of our new home. Phew!! I'm tired just typing that.

Lydia seems to make friends with every dog she meets. Here she is on our first day in Seattle...making friends with Grandpa and Grandma Abernethy's dogs. I call her the dog whisperer number 2. : )

This is the view from the house we stayed in...we were in the Cascade Mountain range. Breath taking and a wonderful place to sit and watch the sun rise as you read the Word before the day starts.

JoAnna and her cousin, Olivia, built these snow people, Wilson and Christina.

The kids had a great time learning how to ski. I love JoAnna's body language.

Here I am skiing. I kept going so fast and while trying to stop I ended up in several snow banks. When I asked my instructor what I was doing wrong she told me that I was doing everything right, BUT I didn't know enough to slow myself down. I had great fun, but my shoulder still hurts from the first fall.

As I packed things for moving I took Chris' box out of the closet. I felt strongly that I did not want to take the rest of his ashes with me to the new house. I knew that I needed to take the rest of the ashes with me to Seattle. When we landed in Seattle I thought, "I feel like I have brought him home." It was an incredible sense of peace. While at the house we stayed in we found this place to take the ashes. Money Creek is a beautiful place...I knew that Chris would have loved this place. The beauty and especially the sound of water rushing over the rocks...yeah this was the place.

We spent Christmas Eve night in our new house. I had the kitchen items put away so that we could have a nice Christmas dinner. Here are the children ready to eat at the island. We are still eating at the island, b/c the piano is still in the area where the table is going to go. We're slowly getting things where they belong.