"let's tune out and listen to the radio..."

Alright, move part two!

So, we got a moving pod that would move our stuff for us and store it since we weren't going to be able to move in to our new place for a few weeks after we arrived. We packed up our boxes and the truck and said goodbye to our first house together.

We decided we should take Sebastian in because lately he was shaking a bit when we drove on the freeway, so we figured it would be good to get the alignment fixed before we drove across the country. No big deal...
until they looked at my tires and discovered this:

huh. Well I guess it's a good thing we got that checked out before we got stranded in Kansas or something. So we got those changed out, packed up our car with all the needed essentials:

and set off on our journey across the country. We documented most of it here:



We were going to drive out of our way to avoid Kansas altogether until I remembered that's where my brother and his family live now. I was excited to see their little munchkins, and they were adorable when we got to stop by. Carly was just little miss chatterbox from the second we saw her, and after Isaac decided he wasn't bashful anymore, he joined in too. They are so much fun and growing up way to fast for how often I get to see them. I was really hoping Savannah was going to have her little girl before we got there, but she ended up having her the next morning. Sad day. Her name is Lydia Rose, and she is just precious. I'm sad I didn't get a chance to hold her.

We stopped at Devil's Canyon on our way out of Utah and Mikey got to roam around for awhile, which he was pretty happy about. The view there was really pretty. We also stopped at the Arch in St. Louis and about 5 minutes after we were there it started just pouring. My phone spazzed out and stopped working for awhile, but then Logan ended up fixing it. Thank goodness, since I just replaced it right before we left.
Mikey was a trooper the whole trip and especially loved the leaves at the arch.

We got to our new house 4 days after we left Utah and around 4am or something crazy. It's pretty cute, despite being the house the phrase "paper thin walls" probably came from. (ha ha, we can hear everything our neighbors say.)

I love the entryway. It's so quaint.


 Logan had orientation the day after we got here and then started school officially a few days later.

A few days after we got here my hair was driving me crazy so I decided it was about time I took care of that.

and then for some more fun, I added some color

A few days after we got here we heard there was another free concert in the park, so we headed over and saw Andy Grammer, Gavin Degraw and Train.

In true free concert form, it started raining and rained sporadically throughout the show

Oh! and somewhere along the time we got here, I got new shoes!  My shoes finally made it after being routed to St George, missing us by a day, re-routed to Boston, missing us by 3 days, back to Zappos, and finally to me! Making our debut in Boston: "the walking city". 

Logan also got Mikey a new toy for his house for being so good on our trip and he is just loving it. He thinks he's king of the mountain.

I guess that's about all the news I've got so far. Man...all caught up. Sorry for the million posts in a row!

"don't know where we're goin', but I know where we've been..."

Ah, we have finally reached the part one of the blog about the move. I thought we'd never catch up, and yet look how far we've come so quickly! Hello again.

Logan and I are now current residents of Boston, Massachusetts. Not official I guess, since we haven't gotten driver's licenses yet or even moved into our apartment, but we've been here for about 2 weeks so that counts for something, right?

We came out here a couple months ago to search for a place and it was pretty much a nightmare. You can't just go look at places to rent here, you have to go through a realtor, which is a huge hassle. They take you around to these ridiculously crummy places that no one should ever even consider living in, all the while feeding you the same lies about how "this is actually a really nice place. This is the nicest place you are going to find in this area, for sure!"  Nevermind that the rent is like, quadruple what you would pay for a house payment in other states, it's cool. I like the idea of paying literally thousands of dollars for this quaint little closet of an apartment with mold coming through the ceiling and rats living by the heater. Juuuust swell. I'll just buy a nose plug and breathe through my mouth so I don't have to smell what I can only assume are the decaying remnants of the tenants who lived here when this place might have been acceptable back in the early 1900s when it was built. super! Sign me up for some of that scummed bathroom with the broken toilet!

Whew. Now that we have that out in the open, we'll just say we had a rough week or so here apartment searching and things were looking pretty dim (literally- I don't think some of these places had working electricity).  This was us:

woo! first subway ride in Boston! we're off to find our new place to live!

get us out of this horrible, wretched wasteland. I don't wanna sleep with rats!

So that was that. But then, on one of our last days here before we were flying back to Utah, we met up with a realtor who showed us these really great places! Just when I had lost all hope and resorted to thinking all Massachusians must live in smelly dirty holes! It was a miracle. We found a place, and in another week or so it will be ready to move in to. That's the downside- it wasn't ready to move in to until like, 3 weeks after we had to be here. But we're living in a cute little home for the time being, and it's not bad. I'm just ready to get my stuff out of storage and start unpacking! 

Anyway, on that last trip, once we'd found our apartment and breathed a HUGE sigh of relief, we did some fun things. 

We found the Necco World Headquarters...

We went to a free concert in the park and watched poncho sanchez in our ponchos. 

This opening act's equipment was powered by the bikes these people on stage were riding

We discovered delicious root beer at Panera Bread

And we went to the park and saw swan boats and beautiful weeping willows

So the trip wasn't totally a bust :) I'm excited to move into our new place and get settled. It feels strange that we moved here, but we don't have any of our stuff. 

I was going to just include the whole trip out here and what we've done since we've been here in this post, but I think I'll save that for next time. To be continued and all that....

"And for a moment I love everything I see and think and feel"

How I spent my summer vacation:

Shave iiiiiiice

more shave ice!

lots of shave ice!

shave ice all the days!

ALL THE SHAVE ICE!!!

It was glorious and delicious. We found an awesome place in town that we went to all the time. They're Hawaiian and they loved us and their shave ice was soooo good.

In other news, we also went up to Kolob Reservoir. It was gorgeous up there, that's one of our favorite places to drive through. It winds through Zion National Park and has lots of changes of scenery. Very very pretty. Plus it's like 10 degrees cooler than down in St George, which we looked forward to. I filmed a lot of the drive when we went in this video, and as I was filming, a mountain lion almost jumped into our car!! Logan's face is priceless, but sadly, I didn't turn the camera to see the lion. In my defense, he gets really excited and freaked out when big birds swoop towards his car too, so I thought it was just another case of the big bird. Whoops.

"shining, shimmering, splendid..."

A couple weeks before we left Utah, my brother Jason graduated from BYU, and my little brother Justin was getting ready to go on his mission (he's headed out to the MTC in London, and then off to serve in Ireland for 2 years!), so Logan and I drove up to Provo.

Nathan spent the night with us, and he and I played cowboys and bad guys most of the time. He's awesome at dodging bullets, but even better at playing dead if he does get hit. I was laughing so hard I could barely handcuff anyone. He kept handcuffing Logan and then just leaving him for a long time in a room before he would "go check on the bad guy" and come back to make sure he was still behaving. He'd even get an extra shot at Logan for good measure.
The best part was, we were running around in our boots the whole time, and if I ever tried to take mine off he would reprimand me pretty good. The next morning he got up bright and early so we could play some more and when I took off my boots after a couple hours he took one glance at me and turned to me and said sternly: " HEY! i THOUGHT we were playing Sheriffs! Put your boots back on!!" So of course I obliged.

At Jason's graduation Rebecca and I played with Nathan and Jack-jack the whole time, and they were just adorable. Nathan kept waiting for Jason to walk out at the graduation and then when he did Nathan clapped and cheered so loud, it was the cutest. 

Nathan was mesmerized by the tassel. ha ha. Daddy and his 2 boys

waiting for his Daddy to walk the stage

this might be my favorite picture ever. "how YOU doin'?"

I'm sure going to miss those fun kids. When Nathan was getting ready to leave, Melinda (in her Captain America shirt) was going to drive him, and I was hugging him and saying good bye, when he casually said "see ya Sheriff, Captain America is goin' to take me home now..." I gave a big "awwww" with a sad look and he said "hey, don't be sad!" and that was that and he was off. 

Later that week, Melinda came down to visit us in St George, and we went to see Aladdin at the Tuacahn Amphitheater. It was a fun show, and we were sitting in the perfect spot so when it rained we didn't get wet. yay us! They even had a carpet that flew Aladdin and Jasmine over the audience while they sang. It was pretty magical. They have real camels in the show, and you can ride on them outside, which Logan, Rebecca and I did a week or so later, when more of  my family came to visit. They take you on a ride in a little loop and the whole thing is very strange because you're randomly riding a camel, but very cool. 

haha, I love how his camel is just looking at the camera posing

So my parents and Justin and Rebecca came to visit us for a couple days and we hung out and went to Tuacahn and took some pictures of the pretty scenery outside. It was pretty scorchin' hot but then, when isn't it during the summer in St George? 

I also introduced them to The Lorax, which might be my favorite movie of the year. After that they left, and Logan and I got to start on packing up our things and getting ready to move out. But we'll get to that next time...