Decorating

Over Memorial day we decided that it was time to do some decorating around our house! We have been trying to decide what to hang where, but we focused on 3 rooms for decorating (living room, piano room, and bedroom) and 2 rooms for cleaning (storage rooms upstairs). Here are some pictures of the results!

Living Room Pictures

• Living room 1
• Living Room 2
• Living Room 3

Piano Room Pictures

• Piano Room 1
• Piano Room 2
• Piano Room 3

Bedroom

• Bedroom 1
• Bedroom 2

Our other rooms are just clean and organized so I didn't take any pictures. It was fun to decorate and clean up our house and put things away. It definitely looks more like we are moved into our house now.

This week Daniel and I both had book club. My book club read Divergent and Daniel's book club decided to go watch the new Star Trek movie.

New Adventures

This last Monday we decided that we would try out our local disc golf course. They just redesigned and rejuvenated it (Which we didn't realize until we went to print out the map of the course.) The course was really busy. Probably, because it was a beautiful Monday evening, and the course had just reopened two days before with a tournament. 

Daniel did all the disc throwing, and I just walked along behind holding his bag and a water bottle for me. I decided that an excuse to walk around and get exercise, as well as spend time with Daniel, was a good reason to do disc golf for our family home evening activity. (Plus, I was promised orange julius for a treat if I came along and had a good attitude. Who can say no to a homemade orange julius?)

This week I also decided that I would make a diaper change pad cover for Baby Girl's room. I looked at the pricing and it was mostly a equal that way, but Daniel said "it will give you something fun to do while I'm at work and that is worth something." So we ran down to Jo-Ann's and picked out some fabric. I have the hardest time picking out fabric -- we were probably at the store for an hour before I decided.

These are the pictures of my project. As you can see, I picked out a pretty, but safe little pattern for the fabric. Fortunately, they turned out cute and perfect for a baby girl!

Vacation Part 3: Visiting the Calls

I know what you're thinking (or at least, I know what I'm thinking): "Really, a vacation trilogy?  It can't have been that epic!"  Well, they decided that the Hobbit could be made into 3 movies, so what's to say we can't make this a trilogy?  Or what about the Odyssey -- wasn't that about a trip (a very long, terrible 'trip')?  Ours was a pretty good vacation so no hating on our trilogy.

After spending an awesome several days at my house, we headed up to Idaho to visit with Elissa's family.  Elissa's dad hooked us up with a good mechanic that fixed our air conditioning in our car (which, until that point, had been broken but we thankfully hadn't needed it really) for tons cheaper than anyone said here in Austin (and found the real culprit instead of just replacing the most expensive part first).  That was about all the work we had to do -- the rest was fun.

Elissa and I went to Gossner cheese and met up with a friend for ice cream.  This was definitely the first time I've ever seen a chocolate-dipped cone that actually looked like it might be worth the extra money, and it did not disappoint.  After visiting for a while, we headed back to Elissa's place where we saw yet another of her friends for lunch (unfortunately, I was still full from ice cream and the lunch was delicious).

On the trip we also discovered that a nearby state park (to which Elissa's family could go for free) had a pretty neat disc golf course.  We decided to check it out and get some discs so we could play.  Kyle, Elissa's brother-in-law, is into the sport and was able to give us a few pointers while we all struggled to try for par on a hole (if I recall correctly, only Kyle got par once).  We spent longer playing than we meant to and I had forgotten sunscreen, which meant that for the rest of the trip I had to avoid the sun because I'd turned pretty red.

We did lots of other fun things on our trip, but those were the ones that come to mind as I look back.  Hope you enjoyed the vacation posts!

Vacation Part 2: Visiting the Larsens

We got to Daniel's mom's house on Friday the 3rd. We got to see family right away, which was really fun. Saturday morning we had a get together to see our Utah friends while we were in town. It was fun to see everybody there and catch up. Saturday Daniel's family threw me a baby shower. They had cute decorations and yummy treats. They gave Baby Girl lots of clothes and other good things. I'm pretty sure she'll be the best dressed baby on the block. Saturday night, we decided that we needed to get some sweet pork while we were in Utah valley so we piled into the car and headed to Costa Vida. It was a busy exciting Saturday.

We also got to enjoy one of my mom's famous (well I think it should be) family dinners on Sunday.

Monday was pretty boring as we spent most of the day looking through Daniel's old things and deciding which things were going to come to Texas with us (don't worry, Daniel picked me as part of the 'going to Texas' pile).

Tuesday some of the family came back over for game night. It was fun to play and to see the nieces and nephews some more. Generally, to the nieces and nephews, we are the weird aunt and uncle who come into town once in awhile who they really know almost nothing about. That is okay, I guess; just a bad consequence of moving away.

It was good to see everybody while we were in Utah. It was a good visit.

Vacation Part 1

So our blog is now three weeks behind. We decided that it was probably not best to post all over the internet about how we were gone on vacation. (Not that most of the internet thieves are probably checking out blog out to see if we are leaving valuables around our house for them to steal.)

On the first day of our vacation, we drove up through Oklahoma and stopped at the Oklahoma City Science Museum. When we were planning the vacation I knew that I kind of wanted to go to a museum and an excuse to get out of the car. I also knew that Daniel probably wouldn't want to wander around and look at boring displays after being in the car for hours. So, I found a great compromise: a hands on science museum! They had lots of fun displays to touch and look at. We even ended up seeing some cool pictures of fractal art that Daniel snapped some pictures of.

We spent the first night in Kansas, and when we woke up, there was snow on our car! On the 2nd of May!?! I was just glad that we decided to put in coats, just in case. It was crazy, but we weren't complaining because our car AC was broken. A little cold is better than really hot when your car doesn't air condition.

This trip we also decided that we would start collecting pins for the states we have been as a family. (Daniel's mom collected spoons, and on our last trip we got a New Mexico pin from our geocaching adventure.) We had no problem finding Oklahoma or Colorado, but Kansas was a different story. We probably stopped at a dozen gas stations and stores trying to find a Kansas pin. One or two stores had displays with almost every state except for Kansas. We even looked at places on the border on the Colorado side to see if they had anything, and they didn't have one either. Daniel is pretty sure the moral is that Kansas has no state pride.