Fall 2009

This fall has been the craziest, most stressful time of our life. But don’t feel sorry for us, we brought it all on ourselves. Of course, Sawyer has been nothing but pure joy for us. I am serious. We have been so blessed by such an easy, happy baby. Of course he is easy for us, but not so much at daycare. I think that it is a sign he needs to be home with his mommy right?

One of our biggest stressors has been buying a fixer upper. Our house needs a lot of work. We have almost finished remodeling the kitchen. I can wait to reveal the photos. It looks great and I love cooking in it now. We need to paint in there, and then we are done. But part of the remodel was re-staining over 45 cabinet doors and 30 drawers (we have a lot of storage space). I didn’t think our marriage would survive. I will post a sneak preview of the horrible before. What were we thinking when we bought this house?



The cabin is also done for the year. We, as well as our pocketbooks, are happy. We made the 16 hour road trip up there over Labor Day. Sawyer did great! The trip wasn’t too bad because we were captivated by Louis Lamoure books on tape. Perfect for a trip out west. We also had a great time hanging out with the Blomquists. Clint installed the stove in the cabin. Everything looks phenomenal.

Sawyer helped us drive to Colorado. He actually loves to "drive".



The guy who did most of the cabin building is 60+ year old Joel Blomquist. This is the tub he bathed in when he was a baby.

Another stress was season football tickets. We enjoy OSU football, but it has been too much for us. The games have mostly been nighttime games which don’t bode well with a 1 year old. I think we learned our lesson, the money would have been better spent on cable.


We had my 10 year reunion (uneventful) and the U2 concert in Norman (awesome) on the same weekend. It was like being in college again, not sleeping for multiple days straight. Staying up late and consuming adult beverages isn’t too hard unless you have a toddler waking you up at 6:00 a.m.


We also had the unfortunate stress of going to Europe for our 5 year anniversary. J/K it was awesome! The trip was so perfect and everything went so smoothly we thought surely our luck would run dry. But it didn’t. It was just a short trip where we spent 2 days in London and 2 days in Paris. We hit all the major sights, drank a lot of coffee, beer and wine, ate, slept (part of the time in an amazing 5 star hotel I snagged on Priceline) and just enjoyed the oasis of being a couple in love. We don’t get many of those moments these days.
This is our sweet sweet baby waving goodbye as we left for our trip. It was hard to leave him but . . .






In between we squeezed in the zoo, some time at the farm, some shopping and dinner dates, and a lot of stressing out because we had overcommitted. Now that we are entering the holiday season Clint and I have a new motto. Instead of “ho,ho,ho” this season we are saying “no, no, no.” If you want to find us we will be hanging out at home!