Rachel pictures

Since yesterday was Rachel's third birthday, I thought I'd put some pictures of her (and her sisters) up. She's such a cute goofy girl!Rachel and Alice. It was in the 'Thanksgiving' folder, so sometime in November. Note that she's not looking at the camera; this is a normal thing for her. She can't stay still long enough to actually take the picture. She also LOVES her baby sister! (sometimes too much...)
This was from Thanksgiving in Utah. We had so much fun visiting with all the Zillner family that day!!!!
Despite the football shirts, this is actually us at the BYU v. Creighton basketball game on Dec 1. The girls all LOVED it, even if we were in the nosebleed section!

This is Rachel's 'house' that she built with daddy out of legos. If you don't recognize the cute blond in the corner it's Haylie Tufts. Yep, this is when we were in Charlotte for Joe's graduation in December. Rachel wants us to be in a house so badly. When she built this she was convinced it was going to be big enough for our family to live in and we wouldn't have to go back to our apartment. She had a really hard time when we had to put it away (read: total and complete meltdown).

That's a small taste of what we've been doing the past couple of months! (but more is still coming, I'm just working on it...)

Our House

For 7 1/2 years we've been looking forward to the day that we would buy our first house. In that time we've lived in 9 apartments/small houses. We've lived in 3 places in Provo, Ut; 2 different times in Indiana; 3 apartments in Charlotte, NC; and one in Papillion, NE. However, we are now pleased (more like ecstatic!!) to announce that we are buying our first house!!!! We won't be moving until sometime in May, but the paperwork for our purchase agreement was done yesterday. This is what our house looks like right now:
Yes, it looks like a muddy, grassy hill, but now it's under 6 inches of snow, which is much more pretty. We're builiding in this subdivision! Our house will look something like this, but an elevation 2 and the garage on the other side.

The upside to our new house: it's in a great location with great schools in a big LDS ward. The downside: it's farther from Joe's work and in a different ward than we're currently living in. We're just hoping that our new friends will forgive us and still be friends even if we live on the 'other side' of the line.

I know this post doesn't even cover all the things I've missed in the past couple of months, but I've got a list to work from and have resolved this year to do better with my blog. Hopefully I'll make it past January with the goal still intact, but for now I'm out of time!