Want to Take a Tour?

So now that we are mostly moved in we thought it would be fun to give you a tour of the place. I still have not decorated our home yet but that will come in time… we have only lived here a month and you all know that is not enough time to decorate :) So for now sit back, relax, and enjoy this virtual tour of our new home


Living Room: This is the first time since Stewart and I have been married that people don't walk in to our house through the kitchen... we are loving that!


Kitchen: We have lots more counter space in this kitchen, I LOVE THAT! Our oven and stove are gas, and as you can see they are a bit old fashioned. I am just now getting the hang of how to cook with gas... I think I may be hooked by the time we leave.

Garage: We have a GARAGE! I enjoy not having to go very far to unload our car after a shopping trip, also if you look on the other side of our car you will see a golf cart. Yep a golf cart that we drive around the yard sometimes just because we can. Anyone who wants a FREE golf cart ride come visit!

Dinning Room:

Deck: Just off the dinning room is our deck, we have enjoyed having a deck so far, it has come in handy for me to sun Sophie's diapers, enjoy the morning sunrises, and much more. Below is the view from our deck looking at our yard.

Hallway:

Craft Room/Study: Now depending on who you ask this will be a craft room or a study, can you tell whose tittle for the room is whose? Yes it looks a little crowded and it is, but we are enjoying having our own space.

Sophie's Room: Sophie now has her own room! Our land lords left this nice recliner for us to use, so we put it in Sophie's room... I love having a chair in here to rock her to sleep with, plus it is the perfect size too. We also have an extra bed in here for guests, or eventually it will be Sophie's bed... yes that is the same bed we used as a couch for the first 3 years of our marriage, we have gotten some great use out of it.

Master Bedroom: Check out this lovely wall paper! They repainted the whole up stairs except for this room, i think they ran out of steam to finish this room. Our land lord gave us permission to repaint and I plan on it as long as he pays for the supplies. Also check out the closet doors... they are more like accordion style screens that you magnet together in the middle (way out of date).

Bathroom: We love the little chair here, and the light on the mirror make you feel like you are a movie stair. So far when we have friends over this is where their kids end up to entertain themselves.

Basement: So this is our basement, in the first two pictures you can see a clothes line. Yep we have a working clothes line in our basement, i have never seen one of those until now. We also have a fun bar, and an A-Track player... that still works. We decided to put an extra bed the land lords left down here so that we would have a place for guests to stay if needed. Also in the basement is our laundry and more storage. Stewart hopes to use some of this space as a work bench for some of his projects, and Sophie likes to practice walking in her walker down her since there is so much unused space. One thing is for sure this is a great party place, and we hope to have a few parties down here before we leave.

The curtains and the wall behind the bar match!

Well this concludes our tour, we hope you liked it. We feel so blessed to have found this great place to live, and for cheaper then what we were paying in our last place. So now that you have all seen it via the web, you should come and see it in person... hint hint!

P.S. Blogger has a mind of it's own... no matter how many times I have closed all the gaps and deleted the spacing between the pictures they always come back. Sorry :)

Sophie 8 Months old

Our little baby girl is growing up fast! I now understand why my dad always joked about trying to find the stop button when we were growing up. I am amazed at how much Sophie changes daily, she is learning so much. I put her on the scale the other day because it felt like she was heavier, she now weighs 15 pounds, that’s a big jump since has been sitting at 14 pounds for a few months now.

AT EIGHT MONTHS OLD

Sophie has learned to (or rather started the process of) crawling. She gets caught up in her legs most of the time but she has started to be a little more mobile. She is also getting pretty good at scooting around on her rear-end while sitting up.

She still has only two teeth

She is getting really good at copying us with sounds we make. Stewart taught her to stick her tongue out and blow, smack her lips together, and make a squeaky noise after he does it. It is kind of funny for now, although one day it may become annoying.

She loves it when Stewart and I turn on the music and start to dance around with her.

She is a lot like her mom in the fact that we both love to look at ourselves in the mirror a lot.

Sophie is learning to eat better, she loves to eat an apple slice and use her bottom teeth to shave off small pieces. The apple slice to me takes on a characteristic of an apple being nibbled on by a mouse.

She is such a happy baby hardly ever crying unless she is tired. She wears a smile a majority of the time.

When she wakes up she does not cry out for us to come get her, she just starts kicking and talking to herself until we poke our head in to see if she is awake.

She loves to help me make dinner, often I will put her on the counter with me when I am cooking and she loves to help me put some of the ingredients in. She is lots of fun to bake with when there is flour involved.

She still loves people although she is getting kind of clingy and won’t go to people as often as she did before.

She has big blue eyes that sparkle, when we are out in the community several people stop and talk with her always commenting on her blue eyes. I have had several people tell me she is a “doll baby” I don’t know quite what that means, although it is said as a complement.

I took some fun 8 month pictures of Sophie on our back steps in our new home, she was so fun to photograph as she knows what the camera is and loves to pose for the picture. She is such a little ham and we love her to pieces, we have been richly blessed by having her in our family.

Sophie crawling for the first time on June 17, 2011

Making Peach Cobbler for Stewart on Fathers day

Eight Months Photos

(this face is becoming one of her favorite smiles to use when we take pictures)

MAY

I am not going to give you all the details of the month of May in our lives but I will give you the highlights so you know that we are still alive and what we have been up to.

The big thing that happened in may for Sophie and I was our trip to Idaho to visit our families. Sophie did great flying both coming and going, I have jokingly told people that she is a saint and needs her own holiday and a statue. She made lots of friends on the plane; we had a lot of fun. Stewart and I were standing around the baggage claim waiting for our luggage when we flew back, he was surprised at how many random people from our flight came up and said goodbye to Sophie. If I have not already said this, I will now: this little girl makes friends wherever we go.

Our time in Idaho was short, but long at the same time. We both missed Stewart and wished he could be with us, but he stayed behind to study for his board exam he had coming up. We spent most of our time in Bruneau, since my parents bought our plane ticket as a birthday gift to themselves. But we did take a trip to Rexburg to visit Stewart’s parents, since we were so close.

One of the first things we did as a family was go to the Boise Idaho temple; it was nice of my Aunt Wendy to take care of Sophie for me so we could all go. This was the first time all six (Dad, Mom, Katie, Becky, Margie, and Emily) of us were able to be in the temple together. We have all been endowed but because someone in the family was always on a mission or one of us moved across the country we have not all been to together in 4 years and have never all been inside the temple to do an endowment session before now. It was a neat experience and I am grateful we were able to do it.

Sophie loved the farm life; we visited the baby cows, drove the car, played with Rupert, and of course played with Grandpa/ma and her aunts. We even visited my Grandma Hegerhorst, and borrowed her dentures for a minute, before grandma took them back.

Sophie with Great Grandma Hegerhorst

Sophie and her Grandpa Hegerhorst

Sophie and that baby cow

Sophie driving on the farm with her Grandma Hegerhorst

Video of Sophie Driving

Sophie and Rupert, she always had to be at his side when he was around.

Sophie with mom and her Aunts: Margie, Emily, & Katie

Sophie having fun with her Grandpa Hegerhorst

Like I mentioned earlier we took a quick trip to Rexburg so Sophie could meet her grandparents, aunts and uncles on Stewart’s side of the family and of course her ONLY cousin, Blaz. We both had a great time visiting. Sophie loved playing the piano with Uncle Alex, those two together made some great music. She also enjoyed meeting Blaz, and playing with him as long as he did not invade her personal space to much.

We also took a trip to Pocatello to have a BBQ at the Hudson’s (Sophie’s Great Grandparents… Stewart’s Grandma/pa). While we were there it just so happened that the stars all aligned and all four of the Hudson’s great grand kids were there. We tried to get a good picture of all of them, but not everyone wanted to take a picture. Sophie was happy about the idea, until some of the others started to cry and then she started to cry as well, funny how kids can influence each other. While we were there Sophie also got to meet her Great Grandma North and her Great Aunt Barbara. We were glad so many came to meet Sophie and that Sophie for the most part took to all of them rather well. She met a lot of new people while we were in Idaho and I personally think she did amazing!

Uncle Alex teaching Sophie how to tickle the ivories


This is for posterity sake same ball two different people in the pictures

Aunt Camille with Sophie, and Blaz (Blaz is Sophie's only Cousin for the time being.)






Blaz and Sophie playing together


Uncle Alex with Sophie and Blaz putting on a concert for us

Sophie with her Great Grandma North

Sophie with her Grandpa and Grandma North

Sophie with her Great Grandpa/ma Hudson and all their great grand kids. Olivia, Sophie, Blaz, & Kylee

Okay, I believe that I all I have to say about the Month of May, besides our trip to Idaho Sophie and I came home and continued our packing project so we could move in June. See ya!

April 2011 In a Nutshell

Yet again it had been over a month since I have updated our blog. I don’t intend for this blog to be a once a month update on our family, it was just an intense month over here and blogging was the last thing on my mind. So let me stop the chit chat and tell you what has been going on in our lives since our last post.

We started the month of April off by celebrating Stewart and my birthday along with Sophie’s half birthday with a surprise party. I decided that we needed a reason to mingle with some of our friends so I convinced Stewart to go along with the idea of us throwing ourselves a surprise birthday party. We had a lot fun and a good turn out, I did not take any pictures of the occasion but I will post our invitation so you can get an idea of how one can throw a surprise party for themselves.

Sophie is now six months old (almost seven months now); I can’t believe that is has been six months since she has joined our family. She is such a joy in our lives! Here are some fun facts about Sophie you may enjoy:

* She now weighs 14lbs

* She is 24 ¾ inches tall

* She still loves to growl

* She is cutting her two bottom teeth, and through it all has been relatively happy

* She can sit up all by herself

* She has just started getting up on her hands and knees

* She loves attention!

*She was so excited to learn to roll over or start eating solid foods, but now that she has experienced those things she has no desire to continue doing them (although I am sure it just hurts her to eat right now because of her teeth)

* When she was eating more, she loved prunes and oatmeal and all her veggies, but dislikes apple juice for the time being.

* She still takes two naps during the day, and for the most part sleeps through the night.

I recently took some 6 month/Easter pictures of her, so here are a few of them just to remind you how adorable she is.

This is her, Baby Gap photo shot picture... Stewart and I think Sophie's facial expressions looks like something you would see on a baby model for a clothing line.

Other news, on the evening of April 8th Stewart and I decided to go out to dinner in celebration of Stewart finishing his PBL track at school. After we came home he threw up and started complaining about his stomach feeling bloated and uncomfortable. Around midnight he woke me up asking me to call someone to come give him a blessing because he was in serious distress. After the blessing we went back to sleep for a couple of hours and then Stewart woke me up again to tell me we needed to go to the ER. At the ER they gave him some morphine for the pain, and by morning he was admitted into the hospital so they could monitor him and perform more tests. Long story short after 4 days and several tests later they concluded that Stewart has Crohn’s which is what his younger brother has.

As a family we are holding on strong together through this whole hiccup in our lives, we have been so grateful for all the many people who have helped us out by providing child care so that I could be with Stewart while in the hospital as well as many phone calls to check up on us and of course all the prayers offered on our behalf. The love we feel from everyone has been overwhelming, and we are deeply touched. We are not out of the darkness yet with Stewart; he has some good days and some not so good days. We are trying to figure out what triggers his body to react negatively so that he can minimize his unhealthy days to a rare occurrence. As for his schooling, he is managing to keep on top of things, he takes his boards on June 7th and then he will have a few weeks off to just relax before he officially starts his 3rd year of med school.

It is spring here in West Virginia, the flowers are blooming and the Trees have covered up their ugly brown trunks with a fresh layer of green. I love how the trees seem to grow foliage overnight here, one night it’s brown everywhere and then the next day everything is green. It is beautiful!!! Stewart and I are getting excited to move to our new house in Beckley, WV. We are planning on moving sometime soon after Stewart takes Boards. Since we are moving to a house with a large yard, our landlords have given us the permission to plant a garden. So over the last few weeks we have made some quick trips to Beckley to prep our garden spot for planting. We have been blessed to have some friends with a Rota-tiller come and help us dig up the soil for planting. We have not planted our garden yet but we hope to this coming week. I don’t have any pictures of our garden spot but I will post a few pictures of our new home so you can see where we are moving to, which happens to be cheaper than the place we are renting now.

This is our current Apartment, we live in the red circled unit of this four-plex

This will be our new home come June: Front View

Back View

And just because I can here are more pictures of Sophie playing in the flower bed at our new home.

Can't reach the flower with my hand

Maybe I can get it with my mouth

Got it! Of course Dad had to help me :)

Moving on, we are now the owners of a second car. Since Stewart will need the car to get back and forth from his hospital rotations, and there would be no way for us to schedule me time to use the car we decided it was in our best interest to buy a second car. We have been looking since the beginning of this school year and until recently have not found anything to our liking and in our budget. I call this car Stewart’s baby; it is a 2008 Suzuki Forenza. Here’s a picture of it, it is a standard so I told Stewart I wont be driving it, I may change my mind however if we ever move back to Idaho where the roads are wider and not winding up and down through the hillsides.

I will be traveling to Idaho, next week so Sophie can see her Grandparents and Aunts/Uncles who have never met her before. I am a little nervous about flying with a baby alone, but if I backed out of the deal because of nerves I would have a lot of sad family back in Idaho. Hmmm, I think that is about all the update I have for you all. I hope to be back on her next week telling you what is up with us, but then again the word to highlight in that last part is “hope”.