Back in Town!

(he was trying to compensate for his sleep deprivation in this one)

Guess who's back from a certain Middle-East country that rhymes with Mafghanistan? My dad, of course!! We are all so happy and relieved! We greeted him at the airport early this morning (you can see how early from the pictures, ha), had breakfast, and we will be seeing our family in El Paso tomorrow to celebrate!

Friends

Last weekend we had some friends visit our house for the first time and Charlie made the most delicious Jerk Chicken from this recipe he found. I didn't realize all the ingredients that go into the sauce - things like cinnamon sticks and habanero peppers!



This weekend, we had another friend's wedding at Ocotillo Golf Club, and it was so fun to see our old friends again. :-) It's amazing how some things never change - in good ways of course! Meghann looked so beautiful in her dress!

More House Pictures

Another week has gone by and I finally am getting more pictures of our house up! It is looking lovely if I do say so myself, and the amount of boxes left to be unpacked is in the single digits :-) We are looking forward to some friends and family coming over this weekend!

Charlie doing his death-defying window cleaning on the outside of the house (this window is above the stairs)


dining room - the piano is here!!


family room


other side of family room


loft...not quite finished yet


cabinets in loft


3rd bedroom is painted! The color blue looks more soothing in real life, not like this picture


master bedroom


master bath


the office


Voila!

What's up

I am done with camp!!!! Hallelujah! Which means I had an entire weekend without going to work for the first time in 3 weeks. :-) So what did I do with all that time?

IKEA, for starters. We got a new dresser and a laundry room organizer thingy from Charlie's Aunt Bonnie, where we can hang clothes to dry, shelves for folding, irons, sewing and other stuff.

Then we spent the rest of the afternoon putting them together, and exchanging the laundry room organizer because yes, we got it in the wrong color. We wanted black brown, not white. I love putting furniture together, and Donna and I were a great team.

Today we visited a new church, St. Matthews, which will hopefully become our new church home in Arizona! We really loved the service and the people. It kind of reminded us of our church in Fort Collins.

Then, we brought my mom lunch, came home, and started painting the loft. The loft is my dreaded painting project, because of the area above the stairs, and the fact that it is so huge. But with 4 of us working, we got a good part of it done, and it is looking fabulous.

We love our house and we can't wait to start sharing it with more of our friends and family!!

Around the house

Despite the fact that Charlie and I are both working every day (I am in the middle of 2 weeks of the same camp I did in California, but in Phoenix), our house is coming along nicely. His parents are extremely helpful. We certainly could not do it without them!! We would still be moving boxes in at this point, I'm sure.

Last Thursday the 22nd, movers moved all of our boxes from storage over to our house. Thursday and Friday night we unpacked the kitchen, which was such a relief. Then on Saturday, we started unpacking everything else. In the process, we gave away even more boxes to Goodwill (it's much easier than finding a place for everything, after all!).

Then yesterday, we bought a rug for the family room at Target and a mop at Walmart, so I can finally clean the tile. There is alot of tile. Sigh.

Here are a couple of before and afters.

The dining room:



The family room (not as big of a change, but you can see the rug)




And the table in the kitchen:

Anniversary Pics

On our anniversary, we went to Fleming's restaurant and had a dinner to remember. It was so fancy and fun. Thank goodness for the gift card from Charlie's uncle Scott, or we would owe a small fortune in food. It was also starting to do monsoon weather-like things, such as downpour when we left the restaurant, so the staff lent us an umbrella to walk back to our car. How nice is that? I took a picture of the clouds from inside the car - I thought they were so beautiful.