So here's my mug shot. Just kidding. I'm just showing off my black eye. In case you are confused because both of my eyes have dark bags and wrinkles, (Three weeks of no sleep does wonders to your face) , the left one is damaged. Logan gave me an awesome head butt two days ago. I forgot to take a picture of it yesterday when it was at its full dark glory. I got sick and had to stay home, which I was really disappointed about becuase I wanted to go out in public and have people notice it and wonder..."Did her husband hit her?" It's fun to make people guess.

So here is a pic of my couch that I love THAT WOULD NOT FIT INTO OUR NEW PLACE. I had a hard time with getting rid of this couch. It's very decorative and is the only nice piece of furniture we own.

Since we are now poor college students, we were trying to figure out what cheap new couch or half way decent used couch we could buy, and I decided to try out the yard sales of Billings. Jon and the boys decided to come. We were unsuccessful, but decided to swing by a Goodwill (thrift store) that we went to the week before. We saw a green sectional we liked, but then walked away when we saw that the store was selling it for $700. Like we were going to spend that much on a used couch. So, we decided to go check out the couch once more, basically to see if it was still there, and if they would accept our offer of less money. They did! Apparently, nobody wanted to spend that much at a thrift store, and the couch had been there awhile. They were going to slice the price in half the next day, and we offered them less than that. So, we got a new couch. And we really like it, and I'm not missing my old couch as much. I sold it on the side of the street the other day. It was a little sad, but oh well.

We are totally in love with this couch. It is way comfy, and Jon and I spread out on both ends, and we are still not touching. (Not that that is a good thing) but it's fun to have a big couch. We are in love with sectionals and wonder if we can ever go back......

We spent a week in Fairfield with my family just before we permanently moved to Billings. It was so nice to see the pace of the world slow down singnificantly. We enjoyed quiet relaxation, but had some fun as well. Amazingly, tons of my cousins (who were my good friends growing up) were in town with their families. It was fun to see Jessie, Jinny, and Elly who I haven't seen in years. It was fun talking to them and basically catching up on life. Then I got to hang out with Mckay and Isaac with their sweet wives and cutie pie kids. It felt all homey and nice for me to see these people that I have a lot of childhood memories with. The only one that wasn't there was my past little sidekick- Megan. I would have loved to have seen her, but she came up a day too late, and we missed eachother. Too bad.

Chase and Logan had so much fun running around the yard, playing in the sprinklers (especially on the trampoline). Chase got to help Lauren mow the lawn, and Logan helped grandma water the lawn. They went to a duck pond to feed the ducks too. It was a good time.

Mom, Jameson, and Lauren helped us move into our new place. Thanks Guys! You are awesome.

These bug splattered windshields are a constant in the big MT. There are so many flying bugs- its ridiculous. Something is always landing on my head.

Grandma had a kissables stash in the house, and Chase got a hold of the bag. All he did was eat kissables the entire week.

The boys got to know Uncle Jamason, who recently finished his mission. Uncle Jamason is awesome with the boys.

The boys loved feeding the ducks at a pond.

Here's Logan conspiring to wake up Grandma.

Chase spent practically every moment with Aunt Lauren, who is his favorite person ever. Every time we have left Fairfield, Chase lets out a sad in his car seat, "Mom, I'm really going to miss Lauren." Ahhh.

Chase got to have fun with Grandma Mary on the trampoline

Here's what I really miss about Fairfield, besides my family. I saw gorgeous sunsets all the time growing up. In fact, I'd often pull my car over to the side of the road so that I could admire the sunsets. It was dangerous and straining on the eye to try to watch them from the rear view mirror, so I'm sure my parents can appreciate that I only did that 7 out of 10 times when I saw a pretty sky. This isn't the best picture of one, but it is the only one I saw when I was driving and I happened to have my camera. It was beautiful, so I pulled my car over and by the time I got my camera out, it had changed to less beautiful, but I still got some pretty colors in there.

It's about over.....I think

So our moving fiasco has pretty much come to an end. Of course, Logan got really sick and feverish while I was at my moms, and then I came down with a cold that wiped me out the day before we were headed to Billings to unload the truck(or load up and then unload AGAIN). That really ticked me off because I was really preferring to have my health since I was really needed. BUT my wonderful brother Jamason saved my hide and drove down to Billings with my hubby and they did all the hard work, while my wonderful mother and little sis drove me and the kids to Billings later that day to arrive at our new home will almost all of our stuff inside. ALMOST EVERYTHING? Everything but my big beautiful oversized couch that would not fit in through the narrow, low ceilinged hallway no matter how hard they tried. I am so disappointed because that couch is the only nice piece of furniture that we own. It really dressed up my living room.

So, what are we going to do? I dunno. It rained the other day, so we threw a tarp over it. We can store it, but that's pretty costly for just a couch, so we may rent a small truck and drive it to my moms to store it, but then I got to thinking that she only has room for it in her basement and she has a narrow, low ceilinged hallway too. Ahhh, blast that oversized sofa! And blast narrow hallways and low ceilings.

Mom suggested that we may be able to store it at my grandma's house, but Jon just started his classes today, so I'm not sure when we'll get the time to drive up there. We'll see. So once we figure out the best way to get this sofa off the lawn, we can focus on what we are going to sit on for the next year. Isn't life fun? I'm not stressing about it, I just thought I'd post this as a contribution to all the other posts of things that have gone wrong with this move. Everything!

As a good point, I'm almost all unpacked and my new place is coming together nicely. I think it is a decent place, considering we didn't have much time to find a place to live. It has lots of lawns for the kids to run on, a cute playground, pools, hot tubs, saunas, exercise room, and its on the border of a park which has a splash pad. Me and the kids are going to have lots of fun this summer. And my new ward is so friendly. I've never met so many friendly people on my first day at church. It was nothing like the other three Utah wards I've been in, where hardly anyone says anything to anyone unless they are the bishop or relief society president. Sorry-I love Utah, but that was the common experience for me when in many new wards.

So, I look forward to this new ward and also...another cool thing...there are tons of mormons in Jon's program. I am suspiciously beginning to wonder if the director of the program had a bias for mormons. (He is a mormon, but unfortunately he had to recently step down for health reasons. There is a new director of the program, and he'll sense somethings awry since another professor is mormon and that a handful of the students are mormon. There is one other couple in our ward that is in this program and that LDS professor I mentioned is in our ward too. Crazy huh?

I'm sorry I've had no pics to post yet. This is the first day we've had the internet and I haven't downloaded my camera yet. One day

Well, this week has been a crazy one, and it's still not over yet. I would have prefered our move to have gone smoothly, but alas, it was not the case. Things started out awesome when about 8 or 9 or 10 guys from the elders quorum showed up to help. How awesome is that size of a crowd? They had the truck loaded within an hour probably. We had tons of stuff. I can't believe we own so much. We needed the largest truck, and we even got rid of some things.

I would also love to give a grateful shout out to my wonderful in laws Jeff, Megan, and Trevor who took some time out of their vacation in St. George to help us as well. Megan was the one responsible for cleaning all that last minute stuff in our place. Your awesome Meggie!

We swung by my friend's house to pick up our children. It was a tearful goodbye, because Michelle has been my best friend here. We are both married to athletic trainers (or I guess I was) and that meant that we had many evenings, Friday nights, and weekends without our hubbies....but we had each other and we had some good times. I feel bad leaving her with her weekends alone, but hopefully she'll find another trainer wife. They are few and far in between, but here's hoping.

We started to head out of town, Jon got a head start since I needed to drop off something at a friend's house. (Thanks for the tape gun Ambur) Jon headed on with the giant moving truck, but I knew I would catch him soon enough. Those things are aggravatingly slow. Once I got on the interstate, I drove as fast as I could to catch him. (It was over five over the limit. I'm too much of a pansy to drive too fast. I have a ticket less record....if you don't mind me bragging. :) Well, I never caught Jon, and I should have, going over those giant hills, and I knew I didn't pass him. I knew something was wrong. So I pulled off in Cedar City and used the pay phone. Unfortunetly, Jon just got a new phone and I didn't have the new number yet. I luckily remembered my inlaws home phone off the top of my head, and called knowing that they knew my sister in laws number who had Jon's new number...blah blah blah.

I got ahold of Jon who was sitting in a garage shop while the truck maintenence people were running diagnostics on the truck. The truck's alarm started beeping as Jon pulled out of town, and he had to take it back. Well, I waited things out in Cedar City while Jon sat in the shop for hours as the people could not figure out what was wrong with the truck. It was the computer system that was going crazy.

Its kind of hard to entertain children in a town that you have to hang around in parks and stores to pass the time. My kids weren't so interested in all the things I tried to do with them. Chase just wanted to see daddy in the super cool big truck and Logan wanted a nap, but would not take one. We tried to decide if I should keep waiting in Cedar to hear what will happen with the truck, come back to St. George, or go on the Salt Lake City. The last option would be complicated because we planned our trip so well that I had Jon's overnight bag in my car, and me and the kid's stuff in the other car he was towing.

At around six in the evening, the truck still wasn't figured out and I didn't want to leave Jon alone in St. George, especially if we had to move our stuff into another truck and that idea made me want to cry. It's so hard to load up once, but again? So, luckily Megs, Trevor, and Jeff were still in St. George and they had room in their condo for us since we no longer had a home. As soon as I got back, the truck was fixed. Yeah!!!

So we headed out of town the next morning and I got to say goodbye to my beloved former home one last time. We stayed one night in Salt Lake at Jon's parents and then left the next morning with Jon's mom. She was so sweet to drive with me and she was so helpful in fulfilling the children's needs in the backseat so I could drive. I had a fun time with her and enjoyed our conversations. (Love ya Su)

Now, the next problem we had was one we knew could possibly happen. We didn't get a chance to check out housing in Billings before we moved. Jon is going to be a graduate student at a college there, and we signed ourselves up for the one family housing building on the campus. We coudn't get much information about the place because the manager lost the apartment layout sheet. She tried to describe it, but it was iffy on the details on the living room and kitchen space, but it was such a good deal, that we decided to go for it and hope for the best. Well, we got there and our eyes popped out and our hearts dropped. It just wasn't livable space for our family. All the square footage was in the bedrooms, and they forgot to include a living room. Ok, there was a living room, but I hardly could see it. It just wasn't going to fit us, or we had to get rid of everything we owned. We could do it if we needed to, but we wanted to see if we could find something a little better for our kids. We hadn't signed a lease yet, so that was in our favor.

This is where Jon's mother came into great help as she watched the children for us as we went searching for a place to live. We also spent a chunk of the next day unloading our stuff into a storage unit. They charge you a whole month of rent to store your stuff for one week. I was a little bothered about that extra money, but we had to do it anyway. We stayed in a really fun hotel for two more nights. It had a neat tropical indoor area with pools and several hot tubs scattered about the tropical rocks and foliage. We had a hot tub right outside our door. That was great after that backbreaking unloading day.

Most importantly, we found a good place to live. It had a living room! Yeah! And also pools for the kids, exercise rooms, a playground and its right against a very large park, and there's a stake center just down the street. It will be a great place for me and the boys to be as Jon spends a lot of time with his schooling. Its further from the campus that we want to be, but it came down to two choices. We could live on campus, but our home would be unfavorable. (You have to keep in mind that the winters here are long and cold, and we'll be indoors a lot). So if Jon has to drive a little more so that we have a comfortable home then so be it. I think we'll like it there. It's not perfect and its more money that we initially tried to spend, but its worth it for us to be comfortable.

This apartment didn't have an availability immediately, but one would be ready in a week. So, we decided that going to Fairfield and staying with my mom would be a great weeklong distraction. Jon's mother's flight wasn't leaving until Friday, and this was a Wednesday. We looked into changing her flight, but it cost more than her initial flight did. It was cheaper to book a hotel room for one person rather than five, so we put her up in a decent place that had shuttle service to the airport and we took off for Fairfield. I feel bad that she had to stay one more night alone in Billings. She was a trooper. I know that was a hard few days in Billings, taking care of our kids, but we all loved having her along and she got some good grandkid time in.

So, I am currently at my mom's house. We will be leaving soon. I am not looking forward to Thursday, when we leave for Billings. Friday is the 4th, and we couldn't go that day because the managers of the apartment building will off for the day and the truck rental place will be closed as well...so we need to go up one day earlier to sign our new lease and get a big truck to move our stuff from storage into the truck, then unload it back into our new place. How hard will that be? Very hard since we don't know anyone in Billings. It will be just me and Jon doing it all in one day, as well as driving up that morning. Ahhhh! That will be hard, but mostly I'm concerned about what I'm going to do with my kids. So, there is the latest in our moving fiasco which has gone anything but smooth.