Where to Begin?

Where do you begin when your 3 solid months behind on blogging. Ugh. And of course a lot happened, why else would I be so behind?

Biggest things first I suppose.....we moved!

We've been thinking of moving, and watching the housing market for about 2 years now. But nothing really came up, or felt right. Then, at the end of July, while I was at a swim meet with Lincoln, Ivan, and Adelia, Aaron sent me a text saying, "I don't know if I want to live in Elk Ridge, but I think we have to go see this house." accompanied by a link to pictures of the most perfectly, perfect farm house on a half acre. There was already a huge garden. There was already a 250 foot chicken run with a coop. There were already 32 producing fruit trees on the property. And the house was big enough to fit our family of 8. I knew we had to go see it too. (Here are some pictures from the listing)

And go we did, that very afternoon. And we put an offer on it the same night. The offer was supposed to be contingent upon us being able to sell our Springville house (which was not on the market yet, and not ready to be on the marker either), but the owners of the Elk Ridge house didn't want the contract to be contingent upon selling our house because they were in a hurry to move to Oregon and build their dream house. We decided to go for it anyway, and then just hope our house would sell quickly enough to buy this new one. "If it's meant to be it will work out." Has really been our motto throughout this whole process. And there were so, so, so many times when we couldn't see a way in which is would work out. But we kept moving forward. We got our house up on the market at lightning speed. We showed it, and showed it, and showed it some more. We had multiple showings every day for two weeks. We were running out of time. And then, some buyers came along that wanted to be in as soon as possible. They were coming from an apartment and didn't have a house to sell. Everything went so fast, and there were very few hiccups along the way. And suddenly it was Labor Day Weekend and we found ourselves moving into a farm house in Elk Ridge. Someone pinch me! Haha! Here are pictures I've taken since we've been here:

Real wood burning stove. We tried it out for the first time on the first day of fall.

Ivan doing math in the school room. 

The view out my bedroom window.

The view out of Ruby's bedroom window.

View of the garden out the dining room window. We've had a few rainy days since we've moved in. 

Ruby at the bottom of the deck stairs in the rain. 

Ivan climbing up one of the pear trees to pick fruit.

The house also came with a 150 foot zip-line, and my kids have been in heaven. This is Ruby going down.

Adelia on the zip-line

Ollie.

Ivan

Unpacking it taking lots longer than I had anticipated. But it is coming along. The space is so different than the space we left, that I'm having a bit of a time wrapping my head around how to organize everything, and where to put what. And then in the middle of that, I've had all the fruit to take care of. Peaches, pears, apples, grapes were all ripe and waiting for us when we got here. And I'm not talking a tree of each. No. There are EIGHT peach trees, 3 pears, 4 apples, eight grape vines, a raspberry patch, a blackberry patch, a strawberry patch, rhubarb, tomatoes, onions out the wazoo, and herbs, and plenty of things I don't know what they are.. It's fabulous, a dream come true....but a little overwhelming to come into during harvest time.

The people in the ward and neighborhood seem really nice. Everyone we meet for the first time says, "I hope you like snow!" and laughs. I'm getting the impression that we are going to get a lot more snow up here than we did in Springville. But everyone says they are really good at plowing the roads, so it won't be too bad. There are deer every where. I mean everywhere. Any time you go outside at dusk or after dark you see them. I can't believe there are so many. It makes me really glad that the  garden and the orchard already have tall deer fences around them.

I think we are going to be really happy here. I hope we stay here for 25 years. :)