Things Benjamin Said

"I demand you to tickle me." -- in a very regal voice.

Pleasantly, while opening the door, "Hey, outside! Here I come..."

Benjamin and Levi, closing the dishwasher.
"This job takes the strength of two men!" I said.
"We're boys!" Benjamin corrected.

Hunting Eggs!

Three Happy Hunters:

Getting ready to hunt eggs!

everybody's happy!

Jubilee finally notices I'm taking pictures, but by now the boys are distracted. :D

Jubilee's First Egg Hunt

"Wait, you want me to do what???"

"Ok, I'll give it a shot."

"OooOooh. Look at this, mom!"

The pom pom was one of only two things she would pick up on the egg hunt
and this was technically before the hunt started. 

The hunt has begun!
"Remind me what we're doing again, exactly?"

"Look. Dirt."
Jubilee was completely uninterested in the eggs,
even after I pointed some out to her.
She's not really into the
putting-things-in-a-box stage, yet
and still prefers only to empty boxes and containers. 

"Now this is an egg MY size!"
She finally decided that a little yellow jelly bean,
which had fallen out of someone else's egg,
was worth picking up. She didn't even try to eat it. 

Levi's Egg Hunt 

Happy to stop hunting for a sec and "cheese" for the camera.

"Show me your eggs!" I said.

"Ok hold your basket a little lower..."

This guy takes the prize for Stewart sibling who gathered the most eggs!

Yelling at the top of his lungs
to try and get the fly off of his arm.
Yelling doesn't really work on flies.

 Benjamin's Egg Hunt

The "big kids" egg hunt ranged a little farther
and was a bit trickier...

Benjamin's strategy was to stay in the middle of the pack
and keep a sharp eye out.

He was very pleased to have found
one of the eggs that we brought,
filled with his choice: Malted milk eggs.
Here he tells us about how he spotted it before the hunt even began.

And here he is, in  his awesome bunny headband,
mouth full of candy.
Chubby Bunny!

Mosquitoes

So, it's not that the mosquitoes in Georgia are that much bigger or more abundant, particularly (though there are plenty of them). No, the thing is that they are fast. All the other mosquitoes I've chased with my two hands and clapped to death have been fairly easy targets. Here in Georgia, I find myself clapping in all sorts of weird rhythms, trying to kill those fast little blood suckers.

Georgia! We have arrived!

After I got the following comment over on Everead I figured it was time for an update over here! 

Did you get there okay?
Is the house great?
Do you have a bed to sleep on?

1. Yes! We got here okay. We are very glad we took the 10 hour drive over 2 days. We didn't get off as early as we could have hoped, and road construction season slowed us down considerably. Add in our long bathroom breaks and we took about 8 hours to do 4 hours' worth of driving on the first day. Anyway, we made it eventually, and without accident or injury. We were very glad to not be driving our moving truck.

We did U-Pack with ABF and sent our stuff on its way the morning we left. It was supposed to take 3 business days to get to us, but it ended up taking 6. We were in our house for a looong time without our stuff. I was not very pleased the second time they called to push our delivery date back. <-- i="">understatement  
In hindsight, was it worth it to not have to drive my own moving truck? . . . Eh. . . Maybe. We had a much more positive (read: prompt) experience when we used them in 2008. However, we did not move the week of the 4th of July then, like we did this time. *shrug*
2. The house is great. I am still trying to figure it out -- where to put furniture, what furniture we need exactly,  how to make the place function. Right now the "laundry" function of home is hung up by the fact that we don't have enough dressers. We left two of them behind and haven't replaced them yet, so we don't quite know where to put clothes once they're clean. The beginning of the laundry cycle works great though! Oh man! Jacob and I now really appreciate just how bad our former washer and dryer were. Haha! The ones that came with this place are by no means brand-new or top-of-the-line, but they are amazingly better at doing laundry. It's so nice.

The most awesome unexpected perk of the place is the blueberry bushes! We are loving them! I don't actually know how many of them there are, but enough that I can pick blueberries every day. We have not been out of blueberries since the day we moved in. I feel like I'm living in paradise to be able to walk out my door and pick something off a tree (they're big bushes, rather) and just eat it. Plus: blueberry bushes do not have thorns! I had never picked blueberries until the day we moved in, but they're a dream to pick. I don't have to water them (it's been raining like crazy) I didn't have to plant them, I just showed up for the harvest.

Let me grab my journal and record some of the other perks I put in there... here it is. Additions in brackets.

July 3, 2013
Awesome things about our new house:

• Don't have to fold laundry on our bed where kids will jump on it! [The laundry is in the unfinished basement, and there is a nice sized table down there, right next to the dryer.]

• A bed! With no giant divot in the middle or spring poking through or torn edge that snags you when you walk.

• A lock on our bedroom door, bow chicka wow wow! [yes, I wrote that in my journal! ha! I crack myself up.]

• Washer and Dryer can be running and I can still hear myself thing/talk at the table!

• Carport! Today was rainy and as I unloaded groceries I was so excited to not be getting wet.

• Driveway! I was also excited to not have to walk down a long sidewalk or across squishy grass. Yay!

• Lots of doors! So it was kind of wierd to me at frist that the hallways have doors on them. But now I really like it. Boys running around yelling in an empty house make lots of noise (oh, it is so, so echo-ey) but that noise is damped by doors. Nice.

• Close to library! Like it is the closest thing to us other than people's houses. Totally a walkable distance. No sidewalk though, unfortunately. We got our cards today, yippee! [on July 3, that is] And checked out books and movies. I've been hungry for books since even before all of ours were packed away, and starving for reading since we've had no internet for 2 days. Jacob said "You looked so much happier nursing with a book to read." :) [except the smile is right side up in my journal] I devoured The Best Time to Do Everything. Fun little non-fiction book.

• Convenient to shopping -- today I want to Walmart (just past the library) and Aldi (just up the road the other way). Benjamin and I walked in and I said out loud, "I love Aldi." [tiny heart].

• Bathroom in my room! So nice. [This is a first for me and Jacob, and I must say it rocks. They call these en-suites in Canada, did you know that?]

So there you go! There are some things about the house! Also a sample of one of my recent journal entries. When I tell people I journal every day they sometimes ask for my secret and I say it's because I mix it up. Also I make myself laugh.

3. Yes we have a bed! (See above.) A nice guy in our ward, Jeff Wheatley, gave us a tip on a mattress sale he had heard about. Another nice guy in our ward with a truck, Donny Young, helped us get it from the store to our house. We would have had it delivered, except they couldn't do it until the next day, and we had just spent the previous night on a very flat air mattress. Seriously, I pumped it up 3 or 4 times. Ugh. So. We were super glad to have a real bed! Our old bed was so sunken in that my eyes seriously thought that our new bed was dome-shaped for the first couple of days. Ha!

Okay, so questions are helpful to me blogging. Thanks for asking Ashlee! What questions do y'all have for me next? (I get to say y'all now! Without fear of someone thinking I'm poking fun/being a poser. I'm so excited!)  

Mooooooving!

Why did the cow cross the road?
To get to the mooooo-ving truck!

Benjamin and Levi tell variations of this joke all the time (the most popular being "to get to the moo-vie theater).

Anyway, we're actually moving! Loading the truck in less than 7 hours. Outta here for realsies on Friday morning.

Our new address is now available on request, and it is not too soon to send me a letter at my new place! yippee!

First visit to Georgia

Jacob and I visited Georgia about a month ago. We went to meet his colleagues and adviser, see the campus at Emory, and try to find a house to rent. The following comes from an email that I sent to my sister after our trip:

Atlanta is crazy. All of the streets are curvy. I mean seriously. All of them. Ok, a couple of the freeways are straight(ish), but here is my theory. The area was once heavily wooded, and so people just took the cart-path of least resistance through the trees and eventually those got paved and ta-da! Curvy streets everywhere. For instance, a street, let's say Clairemont Ave. will intersect another street, say Lavista. Then they'll both wind around for a bit, and intersect again, a couple miles later. Yeah. That's not confusing. 

Also confusing is driving down Clairemont Ave and seeing the cross streets: Clairemont Rd., Clairemont Place, Clairemont Ct., Clairemont Way, etc. All of these one right after the other, little residential dead-ends. 

Third confusing thing (though maybe not as unique to the area): Two roads converge and one is just swallowed by the other, so you were on Briarcliff, and now you're on, say, Clairemont. But you don't always know (because you don't live here yet) which name the street will take. 

Oh, and don't forget how Clairemont Ave is sometimes posted, within the same few miles, as Clairmont Ave (no e), and how Lavista is La Vista when the signs feel like it. 

Emory seems nice. It is strikingly small. I guess I didn't realize how big BYU and University of Illinois are, but they both have reputations for large campuses, whereas Emory is a small private school instead of the big private school that BYU is. The buildings are gorgeous white stone, some with accents in red marble, which is native to the area. It's all very hilly, especially compared to Champaign. 

Very hilly and very wooded. I felt like I couldn't see anything. When I moved from AZ & UT out to IL, I was like "hey, I don't get a view of every city as I come down into it. This is tough" and Georgia, man, whew! Many, many more hills and trees and you don't even get a view of the street you're on while you're on it, let alone the city as a whole. If you drive in a neighborhood, there's probably a sign warning you of a "blind drive" just ahead. Watch out for cars backing out!

The weather in Atlanta was gorgeous while we were there. Oh, so lovely! I'm looking forward to Atlanta weather. Even though it is reported to be despicably hot in the summer, I'm looking forward to it. 

We did NOT find a place to rent while we were out there. Boo. :-( The rental market is moving too fast and everyone's like "oh, you want to move in in 3 months? well if you pay us $250 we'll hold this place for you for 3 weeks..." it's much more geared to people who are moving inright away. Probably in part because it's a bigger city than I've ever lived in before. Thankfully we found a realtor we like, we were just guided right to him, like it happens when you're praying your guts out. Probably he'll help us find a place long distance and we'll move in without first seeing it in person. Cuz, you know, he's like "you'd want to come back in late April, at the earliest." and I'm like, "yeah, I'm having a baby then..."    

Jacob is getting serious about writing his dissertation, and plans to defend it before his committee in the first week of June. 

We still haven't found a place to rent yet, but it is still early (for the Atlanta market, anyway. Here in IL I've seen signs advertising rentals that open in August). Wish us luck!

Perching in a Peach Tree

Perching in a peach tree
To see what I can see,
Cuz there ain't nobody anywhere
Exactly like me.

I have composed the above especially to announce that We Are Moving to Georgia!

There's peach trees there, I'm told. (Millions of peaches, peaches for me. Millions of peaches, peaches for free.) Also, I'm hoping to record here some of my observations about our experience. We'll be alighting in Georgia for two years or so, we expect. I've never lived in the South before -- in fact I think the only time I've been to the Southern states was a quick weekend trip to Arkansas, most of which was spent in close proximity with Jacob's family, who are the same no matter where they get together.

Anyway, I figure I'll be surprised and interested by some things, and I'd like to commit to writing those down. Because anybody can go to the South, but I am the only me, and I can only move there for the first time once.

Jacob will be working as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University, beginning in July. (Yay, Jacob!) Being a postdoc at Emory will give him both research and teaching experience he needs in order to fulfill his dream of becoming a professor of Chemistry. That Jacob is always headed toward his aspirations. He's an achiever.

I've heard they have cockroaches in Georgia. I don't think I've seen one since my AZ days. I don't remember seeing any in my UT time (though maybe I just saw fewer?), and there are none here in IL. Illinois has cicadas, which I did not know about -- could not know about -- until I lived here.

I've heard it's hot and humid in Georgia. That doesn't really scare me (yet?) and I was looking longingly at the Atlanta forecast (60 degrees) as I watched light snow fall all day today.

Other rumors:
Atlanta traffic is horrible
People in the South are nice (but sometimes it is fake-nice)
They have these things called hurricanes?
There are loads of counties in GA. Atlanta itself is in 2 counties, to say nothing of the metropolitan area. I think there are, like, 15 counties in all of AZ. I can probably still name most of them.
It's only 6.5 hours from Disneyworld.

My first ever trip to Georgia will be in late March. (We've got to go find a place to live! Preferably before I go into labor!) I will let you know what I find out. Anything you want to know?