Cozy fires are hard to beat!

The weather is changing and we are taking advantage! The leaves are changing and painting a backdrop of bright orange, red and yellow. It's beautiful! The cool evenings have been spent sitting by cozy fires sipping hot apple cider and cocoa. I love the tastes, sights and smells of fall. We are enjoying the opportunity to experience the seasons change. The trees are in the front yard of a home down the street from ours, they are so beautiful! The last one is our front yard. We spent hours outside raking, blowing and cleaning out the gutters only to have twice as many leaves fall throughout the week! I think we might leave it until the weather gets drier....so sometime around mid-May we'll clean it up! ;)

C's 30th Birthday!

C turned 30 today! Earlier in the summer we had a birthday celebration with friends and family so this weekend was pretty low key. Janet and Grandma Gail flew up from California and spent the weekend with us. We had a wonderful weekend walking around the neighborhood and taking Grandma to the park and the mall. The weather was beautiful all weekend and at night C kept us cozy with a warm fire. Janet made C's favorite birthday treats, peanut butter squares and a pizza cookie and we had his birthday dinner at P.F. Chang's which turned out to be much better than we thought it would be. His day was happy and I think he is looking forward to "many more!" Happy 30th Birthday!!

My New Kindle

I got this for my birthday and couldn't be more excited about it. Thank you Tara!

Enjoying our new home

We are now officially Oregonians. We have our new Oregon drivers licenses, new Oregon license plates and we are registered to vote in the state of Oregon. That should prevent us from future hand gestures as we drive "California Style" on the freeway. I can't even begin to describe the difficulty in slowing all the way down to 55 mph while driving to work! We do take the speed limit more seriously up here being that the fines are the 8th highest in the country and the highway patrol are out in force. It has been 2 1/2 months since making our sojourn to the north. C is slowly aclimating into the Portland office and T continues to press on teaching a classroom full of kindergartners at her new school. We love being home in the evenings and on the weekends and have spent a lot of time enjoying our yard, hot tub and new couches! These photos are some we found and wanted to post from various activities around the house. One of the photos is of a little toad that hopped out to explore his new surroundings after T cut down a fence full of ivy. He had been stuck to the side of fence and seemed to feel a little too exposed once the ivy was gone.. He was a cute little guy so we couldn't resist the photo op. The tomatoes are ones that came from our garden. They have been delicious, but we don't think we'll get many more. The roses in our rose garden are absolutely beautiful and so fragrant as well. T loves clipping them and putting them in bud faces around the house. The other photos is of C enjoying lunch out on the back deck one sunny Sabbath afternoon.

New Couches!!

Time to celebrate!! Our first big furniture purchase has finally arrived in the form of brand new couches!! We are thrilled and have spent quite a bit of time enjoying them already! The circle couch is called a "Cuddler" but I affectionately refer to it as the "Snuggle couch." Enjoy the video!