Be it ever so humble...

...there's no place like home. I wanted to show our home that we just moved from in it's "Before and After" stages. The "Before" pictures were taken by my sister Kelly when our parents first looked at the house for us. We were still living in Wyoming at the time. The "After" pictures are at various stages of our living there.

Wow! What a difference! It took many years to fix and improve things, and we sure learned a lot during the process. It's fun to look back and realize how much improvement we made. Although part of me is saying "Did we really buy such a dump?" Yes. Yes we did and we were excited at the time.

From Collages

From Backyard

From Basement Before and After< From Living room and Kitchen /a>

We love our old home! Can't wait to document the new home in all of its phases.

December Catch-Up

Again, so much to catch up on and not much time to do it in. We enjoyed a very nice, very busy holiday season like most of you. We spent Christmas Eve sledding up in Pine Valley on the one hill that had any snow on it. But still enough to make it fun.

Christmas Day was magical as always. The kids were excited with their new bikes that Santa brought and have enjoyed riding them in the awesome winter weather we have here in St. George. We spent Christmas afternoon at Adam's parents house and I snuck back home to undecorate the tree and get things ready for the big move the following day.

O Christmas Tree!

Hooray for new bikes!

Whitney loved getting the entire Percy Jackson series.

Whitney made the boys matching BYU pillows- so cute!

Audrey is destined for stardom!

THE MOVE: Seriously, what were we thinking moving the day after Christmas? Of course it was nuts, but we had tons of help which made it go really fast. To all those who helped, you are sworn to secrecy regarding the filth and other treasures that were hiding under all of our furniture! You think you're a clean person until you move. 6 and 1/2 years is a long time for dust to accumulate in unseen spots. And you know how you always think you'll move around your furniture and clean under things every year or so? Well, who REALLY does that? Not me apparently.

We had so much help, they even took down our Christmas lights for us!

But the purpose of this post is to express how grateful I am that we had the opportunity to live in our wonderful home for the past 6 years. It was such a fixer-upper when we moved in, but we loved it and made it our home. And we sold it to a darling young family who is so excited to have it for their first house. What a blessing this has been for us, knowing that our house is in good hands with it's new family.

And now we are in a rental home for the next few months while our new home is being built. And you know what? It still feels like home here. The surroundings are different. But we are still together as a family and we WILL be happy here. I feel it. I think my kids feel it too. They don't want to admit it quite yet. But they will. Someday. I hope...