News

Greetings from the Northwest Pacific! Our weather news - it snowed! 2 inches. The whole Seattle is shut down. Nobody wants to drive around in these monstrous hills and land in the water. But hey, after it snowed, it's always sunny and ski resorts are opened now because of that. And it is that time again to make fun of weather.com. We've woken up many times this week with sunny weather and yet we got the opposite from weather.com. But it just has to rain even a little bit in the vicinity for it to make it to the weather column as rainy so ok we'll forgive them. They're probably going to be mostly right because this year is La Nina. Great, we're building a home. More delays. That's ok because that means we can save up more. Hopefully anyway. The house is at Architectural Review Stage. Sighs, building a custom home in a new community is a lonnnnnnnng process.

I'm way behind on blogging so let me go back and review the events of the last part of October and beginning of November. Reena had her primary program. She did great until her mommy got up to conduct, which was less than a minute from her little line "I will follow faithfully". She did her line so beautifully and sweetly that I even got complimented on it later. But the whole time that we were singing and I conducting she was making eye contact with me and asking for a cracker. "No Reena, mamma doesn't have a cracker so be quiet!"

Big news this month, not bad news (we'll leave that for the media), is that we've moved. We wanted a cozy little place to be for the winter while we wait for our house to go up. We figured that anything we could save up will go towards the house so why not live simple for the next 8-9 months. So we packed everything up and 1-2-3 we're here.
It's small but has amenities to make up for it. We're lucky to be right next to the facility they have with an indoor pool and hot tub, basketball court, kids playroom and a gym. I especially love the gym for training because my sister asked me to join her in the Utah half marathon in April.
The goals for us moving to an apartment to wait for our house to be built are: to get a head start on packing; to save up both in energy usage and money in general. The other unspoken goal is living a simple life. We started off the first week saying we'll unpack only the things we need and keep the rest in their boxes. Like I said, this lasted a week. After a week of not baking, it drove me crazy and I now have gotten some new kitchen appliances to add on to my other kitchen appliances in the boxes.

Our cozy hibernating hole for the winter. 3 bedrooms though not quite as nice as our 2 bedroom luxury apartment on the 21st floor looking out to the bay in Seattle.
We had a whole entire pool and hot tub to ourselves! No way!

I ran 5k, then jumped in the fun with the fam!

Pumpkin Time or Play Time
Pumpkins are super cheap here. We got 4 pumpkins for $12. You could even go and get free pumpkins after Halloween is over before they push them all down into the ground.
So we got a huge pumpkin and the lady at Remlinger Farms just gave it to us for $3. You can tell the size difference here on an average carving pumpkin as compared to this one.
Reena carved hers as a cat. For Brie I just cut out some holes and she turned it into a huge Mr. Potato or Mr.Pumpkin in this case. The rest I cut out, cooked and froze. I've since then turned into this yummy pumpkin pancakes. What a wonderful way to sneak some veggies into your kids diet. They love Mickey Mouse pumpkin pancakes.
You can also tell when I used the iphone to take pictures and when I used my photographer's camera. Ah. Craving some right now.

This year Dan's birthday fell on a Sunday and since we were moving on Saturday, the day before his birthday, we decided to celebrate his birthday on Monday. I looked around at different restaurants, and found one that looks so good. Danube Bistro was the name of the restaurant. It served food from the Danube region; Italian, German, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Russian, Peruvian food. It was amazing. A true gem. We had some mouth watering authentic dishes that night in the beautiful downtown Bellevue. I called ahead of time and even got them to bring Dan a dessert and candle out for his birthday. They brought him creme brulee, for free!

First big purchase, I mean, ahem, that's right Dan had a birthday. Yay! Wow doesn't he look amazing? I got the coolest and cutest Stevens boy!Buying boarding supplies with daddy.

Dan was so excited for his very first long board. He got it, put it together, took it for a spin in the parking lot (smart move this time :D) and then created a template using grip tape and placed it on his long board.
Here is the finished product. He did a great job, didn't he?! Of course it has to be a guy getting hit in the head with a toilet and falling over. Oh Dan.

Harry Potter Exhibit and Store!!!
Dan and I are big Harry Potter fans. I took the kids to see the exhibit and bookstore because I was so excited but of course they were more excited to see the science center. Can't wait for my mother to come babysit the kids so Dan and I could go back and check out everything they used on sets to film Harry Potter. I can still remember the night the last book came out. We stood in line for 3 hours until 3:00 AM to get that book and because of that I stayed up all night to read it and finished it in 3 days because I couldn't stop. Luckily, Nama, the kids grandma was there to help take care of Reena. She probably thought I was the craziest daughter in law ever.

And to add to that craziness, I joined the Seattle Glee club. I sent them my youtube music and they expressed interest in my voice, asked me to come in for an audition/rehearsal and welcomed me into the club. So there, I'm in Glee. They have opportunities for solo performances so it sounds alright. They're competing in a Christmas celebration to raise money for charity. Sounds fun, right? We'll see. My composer has about 50 songs for me to learn so I'm not sure how much time I have to dedicate to this club. It's more of an opportunity to expand beyond my group of church friends. Not much missionary opportunity there.

Here is Brie trying on Harry Potter's glasses at the Harry Potter store. She looks like Harry Potter's grandma. I know she acts older than her age, like being potty trained already and such but this old?! Speaking of potty trained, she's amazing. She'll tell you that she needs to go potty now.
I took Reena to the Festival of Trees at the Fairmont hotel in Seattle. It was beautiful and so majestic. I forgot my camera and the pictures from the iphone just aren't right to show how beautiful the 20 Christmas trees were, so I'll have to come back for pictures. But here's a a cute picture we caught on camera of Reena reading to her sister that will make you go awe....