Living the Texas Dream Part 2

I just have to show you pictures of my morning running spot. We have a park just around the corner and it's huge. It's about 1 1/4 mile to circle it, so it makes for a good morning jog. It's beautiful! Normally it's filled to the brim with little India, so it's strange to see it without anyone there. It really is beautiful!

Alrighty, back to our vacation with Uncle Jason. Monday we FINALLY went SWIMMING! FINALLY! It was something we had been aiming to do, but we were always too lazy to get going. Monday morning was the day. 

                                       

We woke up, blew up the kids' floaties, walked over to the pool and....it was closed. HA! Go figure. 

                                      

We had to wait for about 4 more hours until we could go. Since I promised Claire swimming, this is what we gave her in the meantime: bathtub "swimming".

                                      

We finally got to the pool and had a great time. I think Jason and I had more fun crashing the kids into each other than they did. Jared was a little underwhelming in the pool and didn't splash as much as I thought he would, but Claire was having a blast in her airplane and car.

 Our swimming was cut short because stupid mom thought it was a good idea for an alligator (my hand) to touch her leg. I mean, why not? We had fishies and ducks that already got her legs, but an alligator? Of course that's more real that ducks and fishies. She f.r.e.a.k.e.d. out. The second I said alligator and she felt the tip of my finger, she was hysterical. Screaming, jumping out of her floaty, literally climbing to the top of my head. We got out of the water and she was rigid with fear. So sad, but Jason and I were still chuckling. What were we to do now? I explained for quite some time that it was my hand, we scanned the water, made her go back in, which she hated. We ended up going home and ended up having alligators in our house two days later with the same sort of reaction. This time it was from a squeaky noise from the air mattress she was sitting on. Luckily, I taught her to say "boo alligator" and they run away. Also, She is scared of my "alligator hand" and looks at it very cautiously.

Tuesday was super fun. We met Brian for lunch at the famous Sonny Bryans. I don't know what it is about BBQ, but apparently it's better if it looks like they got it out of the trash. This place was soooo......terrifyingly ghetto. Really....here's a picture....

Yes, that is where you eat. It's worse in person....can you even believe that? We ate outside on their picnic table. That being said, if you're in Dallas, go to Sonny Bryan's and get the ribs. They were out of this world amazing. Go there for the ribs and to Rudy's for the brisket and you'll be in heaven. 

Jason and I went to the Dallas Museum of Art and I was very impressed! We spent a couple of hours there and just skimmed the surface. I wish we could have done more, but two kids in an art museum....you know how that goes. Brian and I are going to go back this weekend and see this: 

The Discobolos. It has never before been in America and I am terribly excited to go! I'll take a picture for everyone to see. It'll be as if you are there. :)

Jason left on Wednesday, the 19th, and I was very sad to see him go. We had such a great time and I loved having him around to hang out with. I was determined to show him how healthy I've gotten, but all we did was eat desserts and load up on ice cream and oreos. Seriously. Maybe the 2 salads he had for lunch really stayed with him.... :) I'm so glad he came to visit! It was too short. 

And he LOVED Sherlock! Success!

I really should do this in three parts, but i'm not. Here:

LIVING THE TEXAS DREAM PART 3

There's your heading. Our little family headed out for a day in Fair Park on Saturday. It was pretty darn hot, but a really nice day. We decided to do the Children's Aquarium first and go from there. When we first walked in, it was a little underwhelming and small, but turned out to be well worth it. 

The kids loved the huge fish and sharks. Seriously, it was awesome. Their sharks were huge and impressive, so it kinda made our day as well.

Stingrays

The most enormous lion fish we have ever seen! They were gigantic!

You can't really tell here, but Jared was just about as big as that fish in the tank. 

That cool cement weirdness in the background is part of the park. It's a walkway and you can walk all over it in a little shady area. It looks like a tongue (not in this picture)....at least I think so. 

Swan lake. You can ride these swan paddleboats around the lake.

Next we went to the Natural History museum. It was super old school. A taxidermist paradise. Very cool to see how far we've come as far as museums go. That's about it. Afterwards, we went to the Butterfly Exhibit. They have 7.5 acres of gardens and a butterfly house. Beautiful gardens, but it was more worth the time to go into the butterfly house.

Claire is chirping with the birds.

Dirt and boys....

Brian made fun of me for taking a picture of mating butterflies, but they were easiest to get because they didn't fly away. 

I chased this one for quite some time before I finally got it! I've never seen a green and black butterfly, so I had to get it!

Atlas moth. This was easily bigger than my hand.

We had a great time together and really enjoyed Fair Park. We'll have to go back and do the rest of it sometime. Claire is still talking about the baby froggy she saw. It must have been cute. 

Since then we have gone to the pool with our cousins and had SO MUCH FUN! We've also started another attempt at potty training. I'm trying to go cold turkey from diapers, so we'll see how this goes. It's really nice to have wood flooring for that reason, but I do kinda miss my vacuum. :) 

Living the Texas Dream Part 1

Hi "ya'll". We've lived in Texas for almost a month now (time flies) and it is infinitely better than living in Provo. I know, I know, I lived there for 10 years and maybe it got a little boring. Well, I kinda had a hard time finding things to do when I first moved there. Granted, I miss the mountains and I feel myself get a little tinge of jealousy when I see that someone has gone camping in the beautiful pines. I suddenly start feeling a little homesick when I have to go to our new (and incredibly ghetto) pediatrician's office. Of course, I miss the Provo people. If I could bring them here, I would (the food is better anyway!) I may become a fat Texan after all because everything is too far away to walk to. Seriously, EVERYTHING is 20 minutes away.

With all that said. I LOVE it here. I don't have any friends yet. Our church is 20 minutes away (it's seriously Provo ward #2....transient and full of BYU students). We have bugs in our apartment all the time. We have neighbors at all angles and I don't love sharing walls. Our room squeaks when we're sleeping (we think maybe that our apartment is sinking a little and constantly adjusting). It's all just wonderful! I'm excited to be here and excited to make new friends. We've been busy playing and having a wonderful time. There is something just wonderful about being in a new place and having a new beginning. Change never tasted so good.

We have been b.u.s.y! After we got our stuff here and unpacked, we've been bombarded with all this wonderful company. Brian's family was here for a few days and his mom stayed for 10 days. We had good food, way too much ice cream, only one board game (which we'll work on next time), snuggling with my brand new and adorable nephew,  PLAYING WITH COUSINS!-a personal favorite that I'm sorely going to miss when they move, and too much fun. I'm sad to say that I don't think I took a single picture from that week - something else I'll work on next time.

We had a 3 day hiatus from company and I didn't even clean my house in time for Jason to come. Those three days were spent with fevers for both kids and multiple trips to different pediatricians. It was nothing except a fever for 5 days that turned into an ear infection (for Claire) a horrible cough and a terrible runny nose.

Jason arrived at the largest airport I have ever driven through! Sizeable enough to make note of it in this blog. Yes, I committed several traffic violations and got lost a couple of times. I'm still not sure how I made it out of there alive.

Friday we slept in, we were LAZY, and I was committed to getting Jason hooked on Sherlock (easy to do) so we watched an episode or 2 each day. We really did nothing all day except take Claire to the doctor for her ear infection. We got our beloved Boston pizza and ate it for dinner (for free because our take out order didn't go through and we had to wait an extra 10 minutes...can we say AWESOME!). Did some (very little) outlet shopping and loved every inch of that Banana Republic sales floor. Finally, some clothes that fit!

Saturday we went to the Northpark Mall and the Dallas Arboretum. First, the mall. What the what!? It was ENORMOUS! Four times the size of a normal mall and the nightmarish parking to match. Honestly, I'm terribly excited to go back and see it because we only saw Nordstrom. I'm sure that it will be a heavenly place to bask in it's air conditioning mid summer.

Jason was craving some humidity and Saturday brought it with a vengeance. We were wet just standing by the car. Oppressive. The gardens were beautiful, enormous, and amazing! And now....I have pictures. :)

Alice in Wonderland exhibit - beautiful!

Tea Party, anyone?

Someday I'm going to have an entire backyard filled with Crape Myrtle trees just like this!

Brian got me some macro lenses that I had fun testing out!

Look for the ant.

We went to Rudy's for dinner. Rudy's - where white trash means getting gas and eating exceptionally good BBQ. We will definitely be going back there again! Ending the evening with some board games and Sherlock, a successful day. 

Our Texas Move

I'd like to introduce myself today since I've been missing from the planet for almost a month now. I'm converting to Texas kindess each day and melting away piece by piece. I'm gonna be a whole new me.

Kidding, other than the melting and Texas kindess part.

First off, I'm convinced that moving is just a disaster in and of itself. It's a pain in the patooty and a real strain on my nerves. We went with this company called Ally VanLines because they had the best prices and the nicest reps I had talked to. They seriously were SO NICE. I felt very comfortable with them, but I was just wary about moving in general. I told them I wanted my stuff delivered no later than May 25th, so they picked our stuff up on the 17th. After a glorious week in Park City and a couple of days spent with my family we made our trek to Texas.

We left bright and early on the 23rd and decided last minute to drive through Wyoming. Ya know...it wasn't that bad. For some unknown reason, Wyoming was green and pretty. We drove through this crazy/scary/very cool wall of fog for a while with very little visibility. One second there was a huge truck passing and then it was gone.

We were glad when we were out of it. Nothing much happened for the rest of the day other than we drove too much. We made 15 hours of driving and the kids were great up until the last 2 hours. We had no choice to stop since there is pretty much NOTHING in Kansas. We stayed the night in Hays, Kansas and had enough time to get our stuff to our bedroom, let the kids run for about 15 minutes and we crashed into bed. 

Day 2: Since we made such good time the first day, we only had 7 hours to go; however, it still took us forever with stops. The kids were, once again, gems and we couldn't have hoped for better. I called the moving company to see when our stuff would be there (I had several people tell me it would be there no later than the 24th....and it was the 24th) and I was told that it wouldn't be there for another 5 days. I asked why that was, since I was assured the 25th, and this "assistant supervisor" got mad at me saying that they never guarantee dates, that they wouldn't, and since I wasn't happy with this service they were going to return my stuff to Utah. Then he hung up on me. 

I was furious! I hadn't yelled at him. I wasn't rude. I called him back and he said he would check with Ally vans to see what could be done. Whatever. I'd call them later.

In the meantime, we made our way through Moore, OK who was just hit by there devastating tornado. So sad. The first picture is a demolished neighborhood and the second is across the street with all the damaged cars. You can't see it in my picture, but there were piles of rubble everywhere. I just can't imagine. :(

The rest of our drive seemed long because we were so ready to be out of the car. We finally got to Texas and I wished I would have taken a picture of the state sign saying "Welcome to Texas! Drive Friendly - The Texas Way!" The Texas- Pride (brainwashing is what I call it) starts from the first step across the line. Beware: it works. There's a whole state to prove it. 

I called the moving company back, same guy screamed at me some more after saying (very calmly) that I would withhold my bad ratings if they would just....didn't even have time to finish my sentence before he screamed at me telling me my stuff would get sent back to Utah and he hung up on me again. FINALLY, after I started bawling and told him that he was the worst customer service I'd ever received he started to listen. I asked him how he was allowed to keep his job if he treated people this way....he never answered, but said, "Let's just start over." Whatever. Bad rating and better business bureau here we come!

We were housed by Brian's family for a few days (bless their hearts for putting up with us for so long) and we had a blast, especially the kids. They were elated to have cousins to play with all day. We drove our area a bit and we really like it! We got a new table and a washer/dryer (LOVE!) and tried to get as settled as possible. 

Long story short, they delivered our stuff a week late and didn't even really deliver it. We had to rent a Uhaul, unpack our stuff at the local Wal-Mart, and then bring it to our apartment. It was a pain, but we're happy to have our stuff and be a little settled. 

Here are some pics from our new place:

Master bathroom - I love my colors! So happy.

Master Bedroom with my little man defending his favorite space.

We have a long hallway leading into our bedroom with the bathroom off to the side and our huge walk-in closet right next to it.

Living Room 

More to come. I just have to clean the rest of my house before I take a picture of it.