4 Months Old

So behind...

This post is small but will hopefully appease my faithful readers for just a little longer :)

Our tiny baby boy is not so tiny anymore. He is almost 2 months old and well over 10lbs!! 

1 day old- 5 lbs. 10 oz.

1 month old- 9 lbs. 8 oz. 

He is starting to smile now which makes this exhausting life of parenthood a little more bearable.

Our First House

In May we flew out to Dallas to go house hunting. After 5 days of looking at over 50 houses we signed a contract for a beautiful home in Flower Mound, TX. The house we finally decided on was actually one that we saw on the first day.

Our realtor wasn't planning on showing us this house, but the price had recently been lowered and he thought we might like it. After having woken up at 4am and flown to Dallas 6 months pregnant and seeing 10 other houses that day, I just sort of wanted that day to be over. However, before Morgan and I even walked through the front door we felt something about this house. I know that sounds weird and cliche, but seriously we both looked at each other and said I LOVE this house. After walking in, it just got better. That night Morgan and I both couldn't sleep in fear that in the morning (before we could make an offer) the house would already have multiple other offers. As soon as we woke up we found an email from our realtor saying that they had lowered the price a bit more and assured us it would be under contract within the next couple days. We met up with him a couple hours later and made an offer on the house.

Over the next couple of days we awaited the sellers response on our offer. We decided to still go look at other houses in different cities in case we found something we liked even more. However, nothing could quite compare and to our delight our offer was accepted. We then went through the whirlwind of having the home inspected and making a couple counter-offers. We flew back to CA and signed the final documents to our first home there.

Here is a quick virtual tour of the house that we fell in love with. Although it doesn't quite look the same with our 1 couch and limited furniture we still love the bones and look forward to filling it will love, more furniture and our growing family.

 Our cute wrap around front porch

  The entry way

 with the "home teacher/piano room" on the right

View from the front door into the house

 The family room, kitchen and master bedroom

And one of my favorite parts, the covered back porch and the beautiful tree-fill yard

More moving stories and pictures to come...

Stanford University Graduate School of Business- Class of 2013

This last month has been a whirlwind of activity and I haven't really had time to ponder on all the changes in our life. As I am writing this I am actually feeling very sad for the first time that our time at Stanford is over. There is something invigorating and wonderful about being on a college campus. Everyone has so much energy and excitement for life and you can't help but feel the same. We made wonderful friends, enjoyed walking around the beautiful camps, enjoyed the CA weather and loved all the experiences of the GSB.

For graduation Morgan's parents and brother Matt came to town along with my family. We had fun showing off campus and taking part in the festivities of graduation weekend. 

Congratulations Morgan! So proud of all your hard work, now onto real grown up lives with a new job, new house and new baby its going to be another great adventure!!

Yosemite

This past weekend we finally made it over to Yosemite National Park! Morgan had never been and I hadn't been there since 2006 when I climbed Half Dome with the singles ward.

This time was definitely not as intense considering my current situation but it was still fun to see the incredible granite cliffs and beauty of all the waterfalls. 

We made the trek with our GSB friends, the Monteiros and we are grateful they put up with us for the entire day of driving 400+ miles.

USS Hornet & UC Berkeley

A couple weekends ago we decided to make a trip over to the east bay. We got discount tickets to the USS Hornet, an aircraft carrier from World War II and decided to make a trip out of it. We went to the temple then decided to go visit Berkeley. Berkeley has its stereotypes and we quickly found that it met almost all of them :) There was more than one vendor on the side of the road selling tie dye shirts and we went to this pizza restaurant for lunch that had the sign, "make pizza not war."

Typical Berkeley, but the pizza was pretty good. We also walked over to the university campus as we could hear some type of dance going on, looks like it's the Mayans or a tribe similar to them. It was pretty cool to listen and look at all of the awesome costumes!

After visiting Berkeley we had tickets to tour the USS Hornet.

Hornet was commissioned in November 1943, and after three months of training joined the U.S. forces in the Pacific War. She played a major part in the Pacific battles of World War II, and also took part in Operation Magic Carpet, returning troops back to the U.S. Following World War II, she served in the Korean War, Vietnam War, and also played a part in the Apollo program, recovering astronauts as they returned from the Moon.

 Our tour guide was actually an air force pilot that at one time landed on the USS Hornet, it was cool to hear him tell about how they land the planes on the ships and hear stories about that.

 

Point Reyes and Napa

One of our good friends at Stanford ran an Iron Man last weekend. An Iron Man race consists of a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, and 26.2 mile run end-to-end. We thought a great way to show support would be to run it with him. Unfortunately, there was no way we'd survive it, so instead we went to the race and cheered him on. :) He did a really great job and we were happy to be able to support him.

The race was in Napa valley. We hadn't visited that area yet so we went up a day early to explore Point Reyes National Seashore, Sonoma, and Napa. All three of these places are BEAUTIFUL!

Here are some photos from Point Reyes. It was super windy and a little chilly, but beautiful nonetheless.

Exploring Napa and Sonoma was also really fun. It made us want to own a winery someday, but since we don't drink wine it wouldn't make a lot of sense. :) We did taste some great olive oils though. The pics below are from one of our stops - Viansa Winery.

From Napa we drove an hour north to the race at Lake Berrynessa. If you are ever going to come visit this are you should do it in the spring. All the green rolling hills are amazing and apparently everything goes brown later in the year.