pictures!

Here is a picture of the three of us by our U-Haul. This U-Haul trip was a whole lot easier than our cross-country trek, that's for sure. Jace really liked the zebra on this one too.










Here we are in front of our new home!














This is Jace's new train table set up in his "playroom" which is actually an additional dining room. It is right by the back door, though, so it is going to make a wonderful playroom with linoleum floors so he can have his paints and everything out there!










He logs about four hours a day at this table since we set it up. He definitely loves it! :-)

Washington

Wow... well... a lot has happened in the last couple of months. We did move to Oregon. We stayed with my mom for a couple of months while we looked for a job for Thomas. It turned out to be a pretty difficult ordeal, but one job did finally work out (I am sure more opportunities would have arisen had we waited long enough, but we had no money coming in and were basically freeloading, so we were in somewhat of a hurry to make something work). So we have moved again. Thomas got a job as a computer programmer in Washington. He was a little apprehensive, since his degree was certainly not in computer programming (he only took two semesters), but he has done great. He has worked a full week now, and he is liking it a lot more than he initially thought he was going to, which is wonderful. They haven't put him on any projects or anything yet, so he's still not sure exactly what he is going to be doing on a day to day basis, but they are undergoing a lot of change right now in the company, so he has been attending a lot of meetings, which really means this was probably a great time for him to get on board because he won't have to adapt to all of the new changes. He has just been given an opportunity to attend a week-long training seminar in Atlanta, Georgia next week. This is probably going to end up being a great way to really get himself integrated and it shows a lot about how they view him that they thought he was ready for it, so it's a pretty great thing (even though it does mean leaving for a whole week). Jace and I might go down to see my family some that week since we'll be home alone.

We are still working on unpacking. Jace got sick (probably triggered from all of the dust from the unpacking process), and had to spend a couple of days in the hospital. That was stressful, but he is doing better. He is still on his breathing treatments, antibiotics and steroids, but at least we are home. The moving in process went really smoothly. Thomas's aunt and uncle who live about three hours away and my sister and her fiance who live about six hours away all came to help us unpack, so it turned out to be a good time and went way more quickly than we even hoped for. It was amazing how much got accomplished Saturday having them all here. Many hands truly do make light work! We sure appreciated them!

We got really lucky with the house that we ended up finding. It is nothing like our house in Bentonville was, but it is great for the area. It is three bedrooms, and although it is smaller than what we're used to, so far we have had plenty of space for everything. It is pretty old, which is different for us, and it doesn't have central heat and air, which we actually kind of like for the heat (I like that you can turn off and on the heat in each individual room), but we are already looking into options for air since we have one unit and it's in the dining room. I'm pretty sure we'll melt if we don't figure something else out, so we're looking into it. We (this is kinda hard to imagine if you haven't seen it) actually have two dining rooms, one on either side of the kitchen. So, we turned one into a playroom for Jace, which is awesome because we have space for his train table (which I am posting pictures of) and extra space for his toys. Plus, it's linoleum flooring, so I don't have to worry about him painting, using play-doh, etc. I think it's going to be a great room when we get it all set up. We also have a park right down the street, so that is great for us!

Anyway, we still haven't gone grocery shopping, and the boys are waiting on me so that we can go do that, so I better wrap this up. Stay tuned, I am going to post some pictures soon! Give us a call if you want our new address! We are still using our same cell numbers.

Happy Holidays!

Well, I figured I better post some pictures of Jace's Christmas! We actually celebrated Christmas the week before (so we could take the tree down and pack things up), BECAUSE (in case you don't know yet) we are moving! Grad school didn't work out for Thomas, and since I never did get a teaching job here, we are both going through the newspaper looking for dead-end jobs that we don't want to do anyway, waiting for our big breaks to come through, we figured we might as well do that somewhere around family. SO, we are cutting our losses here, packing up everything and moving to Oregon, where my mom, sisters, neices, and basically that whole side of my family live. We don't know for sure what we are going to do there yet, but we didn't know what we were going to do if we stayed here either, and I am ready for Jace to get to know some of his family. So we will only be here until about the 15th of January, and then we will be spending about a week, driving our car and a U-Haul out to Oregon.

I hope everyone had a good Christmas! We spent the real Christmas packing, as we plan to do over New Year's. :-) Happy Holidays everyone!

Decorating Christmas cookies on Christmas Eve day! :-) (Which was actually a week before Christmas - we celebrated Christmas early so that we could take the tree down and get started packing).  

Christmas Eve - we let him open one present and he was very excited to find that it was a pack of 5 Matchbox cars. He loves cars, trucks and trains!  

Merry Christmas! This is Jace discovering his Christmas stocking. Notice he is still clutching the 5 cars that he recieved in his 5-car pack the night before. He slept clutching them all night.  

Jace opening presents Christmas day. This process took about 12 hours. This was not due to his quantity of presents, but instead due to the fact that he had dto adequately play with each gift before he would willingly open the next one. He opened presents from the time he got up until the time he went to bed. :-)