Family Photos

Sometime this last May my family finally got some family pictures taken. We wanted to get them done before my little bro left on his mission. We seriously had a blast taking all these pictures. I cannot say enough how much I love my family. I feel like I have the best family on earth. They have always been there for me when I have needed them and when Sol became apart of the family they welcomed him with open arms and hearts. I am so grateful for the family that I have. I hope they know how special they are to me.



My little bro's mission pic. He is so handsome and he is a great Missionary!

We had to do these last two just for fun!!

Major Update

Time seriously has flown by this year for us. So much has happened in our lives this year that we are still just taking it all in. Sol has now been at his job for 10 months now and he still loves it. He is getting better at it everyday and he is getting closer to getting his ASA (which is the first level of certification for Actuaries). He takes his last big exam for it on Nov. 9th and we are just hoping he gets as good a score on this one as he did the last two he took. I am sure he will since he studies almost every minute of everyday that he isn't working, eating or sleeping. He really is such a smart guy and I am so proud of him.

We moved into our house on May 18th and we are loving it. I seriously don't think we could have chosen a better neighborhood. Our neighbors are great and we love the ward. We teach the 7-8 year olds in primary and we love it. They are seriously the cutest kids. Yes sometimes they drive us crazy, but I am so grateful for the opportunity to teach them. I am sure I learn more from them than they do from me. It has taken me way too long to post pictures of the house after it was finished so here you go.

Love the Kitchen!!

We love our huge pantry.

The tub is Sol's favorite part of the house.

We love everything about the house. It is a lot of work especially trying to put a yard in, but we are enjoying it. We have been working on it all summer and we still aren't finished so we don't get to put in grass until next spring, but hopefully we won't have too much left to do then. We will see though. Once we get that finished I am sure we will start working on the inside of the house more, which I can't wait for. Not like there is stuff to fix up but I would like to decorate more and paint the rooms. Hopefully it will turn out good.

Our House!!

We are getting so excited to finally move into our own place. The house should be done around May 21st which is in about a month. The house is coming along nicely so I thought I would post some pictures.

The first few pictures are just of the foundation and basement walls.

The next pictures are of the framing. It literally went from looking like the above pictures to these next ones in a week and a half.

Front of the house!

The garage! We are so excited for that!

Sol was so excited when he saw the tub!

This is in the master looking out to the family room.

The basement is so big, it will be nice to have room to grow.

Vaulted ceilings in the family room.

Looking into the dining/kitchen area.

As it moves further along I'll take more pictures and post them!!

House!

So as I said before we have been looking for a house somewhere that is closer to Sol's work. At first we focused our search in West Jordan because we thought it would be the closest place to Sol's work that we could live. I can't even tell you how many houses we saw in West Jordan and none were to our liking. First of all, everything was way out west and neither of us liked the feel of any of the neighborhoods we looked at and second, everything was a short sale. Short Sales are a freaking pain in the behind. Some of the homes we looked at had been on the market for 6-8 months and the bank still hadn't approved anything. I'm sorry, but I thought banks would want to get rid of houses like that. Obviously they don't give a crap about the buyers out there. So needless to say we were pretty frustrated and frankly ready to give up for awhile. Okay, so I know some of you out there may think we are crazy for this, but we decided to start looking in Lehi. The reasons being it really isn't that far away and most of the houses we had looked up looked a million times better then the ones we had seen before. Also, Sol grew up there and we lived there for about the first year of our marriage and loved it. We looked at a bunch in Lehi and like in West Jordan they were all Short Sales, except for one. Just on a whim we decided to look at this new build and well we fell in love. It is a great area, close to everything, it will be brand new, it will be done in about 2-2 1/2 months and it is by far the biggest we have seen for the money. So we are going to build. I never thought we would even be interested in building, but everything just seems to be coming together. We are not under contract yet, but that should happen sometime this week. We are finally getting excited about moving out and being on our own. I just hope everything works out like it should.

Sol Got a Job!!

It finally happened, Sol got a job. It has been a long time coming, but we are so grateful. For the last 8 months we pretty much had no leads on a possible job. We were looking everywhere and Sol was applying at every place possible, but we only got one phone interview out of that and after the phone interview we pretty much didn't here back from them. I'm sorry to say it, but I was beginning to think it would never happen. It was so hard to know how hard Sol had been working and how long he had been working and then not get anything because of it. Thankfully at the end of November Sol got in touch with the President of the Salt Lake Actuary Club and was able to get an invite to a luncheon for the club. He went to the luncheon and that is where he was able to find out about the job with Taylor-Walker & Assoc. he ended up getting. This is like the perfect position for us because he was able to start work immediately and we get to stay in Utah. We are so very grateful and feel very blessed that God was obviously watching out for us and I am so happy that Sol is now in the career he has been working towards for the last 3 years. Our next adventure is finding a house. Lets just hope that doesn't take as long as this job thing did.

Holidays 2009

We spent Thanksgiving with my family again this year. We were supposed to spend it with Sol's family, but they ended up going to Kansas and I had to work the day after Thanksgiving so we couldn't go. We went with my family to my grandparents house which has been tradition for as long as I can remember, though it looks like this may be the last year we'll be doing this since my Mom's family is getting so big. We had a blast eating to our hearts content and hanging with the fam.

Christmas was pretty great too. I had to work on Christmas Eve but it was only half a day so it wasn't bad. We spent Christmas Eve with Sol's family. I can't exactly remember what we did, but I know at some point we watched A Christmas Story which is a tradition in both of our families. Christmas morning Sol's little brother Sam and little sister Hannah woke us up at about 7, which wasn't too early thankfully. We went upstairs and opened presents and we got some pretty good stuff.

I got Sol these two books which he picked out himself and he got me an Ipod touch. (As you can see I am the picture taker so there aren't many of me in here, not that I'm complaining).


This is the stuff we got from Sol's parents:


They were so generous and we couldn't be happier with what we got.

After opening presents we had a delicious breakfast of buscuits and gravy, which is Sol's favorite. Then later that afternoon we headed to my parents house to open gifts before heading to the grandparents.



We got some great stuff from my parents, but I have to say my favorite thing I got was a photo album my mom made for my siblings and I. It is an album of all the vacations we took growing up. It is so great to have something to show all of those memories. Thanks Mom and Dad!!

Overall Christmas was great and we had a blast. We got so many great things and we are so glad we got to spend the Holiday's with both of our families.

Vacation to Moab

Okay, I've decided that I am horrible at updating my blog. I feel like I have hardly anytime to blog and I never know what to say. Hopefully this next year I will be better at updating.

About a week before Thanksgiving I was able to take some time off from work to have a little vaca. We spent the first few days relaxing together and we spent one day up in park city shopping and hanging out. Then the Sunday before Thanksgiving we decided to take a spontaneous trip to Moab for a few days and my parents were able to join us. Sol and I had gone earlier in the summer, but it was so hot then we weren't able to enjoy ourselves as much as we would have liked. This time was perfect. The weather was in the upper 40's the whole time. It was perfect weather to go hiking. All you had to do was wear a light jacket and you were good. Here are a few pictures of our trip into Arches. Most of the Arches we saw this time we didn't see last time.


We had a blast. It was so great to spend sometime with my parents and it was so great to be able to relax a little.