No Place Like (Our New) Home

Brooklyn loves the beach! She JUMPS over the waves while singing "Jesus Wants me for a Sun-BEAM!"

My mom, Brooklyn, and Stephen chillaxin' in the pool on the 4th of July. Good times!

Our first outing to the La Jolla Shores as a family. Brooklyn and I will try to go weekly with the "play group" from our ward, but we had to bring Stephen so he could experience what we do all day while he's at work - HA!

I decided to skip day two of our journey to Utah because it wasn't that exciting, and the point is we made it there safe and sound, finally! Also, I wrote about Eric's wedding in a previous post, so we'll skip ahead to the present time...

We finally made it to San Diego after staying a week in Utah at Kath and Mike's house. However, our journey was not yet complete because we hadn't found an apartment. We stayed at Helen and Eric's house in Del Mar for Stephen's first week of work while we looked for an apartment. I found one pretty quickly, to my great relief, but our move-in date was not until July 12th. So, for the 4th of July Weekend, we went up to stay at my parents house. Stephen came back to San Diego for work on Monday, but I stayed the rest of the week there until our move in date the following Saturday.

Our move-in was... exhausting, tiring, and overwhelming! I am really glad that Stephen is handled it so well because I was so overwhelmed trying to figure out how to get everything to fit in here, and I wasn't even the one doing all the moving! Here's the problem. In 6 1/2 years of marrige, we have acquired way more stuff than we realized could fit into our 1,100 sq. ft. apt. This floorplan seemed very spacious and accomodating compared to other apartments we had looked at in the area! It is larger than our previous apartment in Louisiana, but there's a whole bunch of stuff that we did not take to Louisiana. About 1/3 of our furniture and other random things did not come with us to Louisiana, but was left in a 10x10 storage unit it Covina. So, we had stuff in two different storage places, one in L.A. and one in San Diego, plus we had a baby grand piano that we left with some friends in Covina. All of these things were supposed to end up in our apartment here on our move-in day. The other challenge was that I was virtuously useless, (pregnant,) and we had no help from our new ward. (We were unable to contact the Elder's Quorum or Relief Society) We actually had one guy that we had met from the other ward previously who came for a little while. Besides that, it was my dad, brother, and Jeff (Pip's husband) who did all of the hard labor! Did I mention we brought a baby grand piano with us? Our aparment does have stairs outside and inside, which adds a slight challenge.

Also, we had an interesting situation with our fridge. I thought it would be a great idea to swap out our own fridge that was stored for 6 months in Covina with the one that Stephen described as "old" or at least "older" than our own that came with the apartment here. We still had no plan for the swapped out fridge, so Stephen took it over to the Del Mar Storage. ANYWAY, when we opened the door to check out our little frigidare, it was SO SMELLY and had tons of tiny flies in it - GROSS! I guess Jeff knew all along that fridges are supposed to be stored with the doors open or off. Obviously, we had not listened to Jeff. So besides the lack of space problem with our millions of boxes, I had a stinky, unusable fridge. I felt like I really should clean it out after all the trouble we went to store it and bring it over here. But, in the end, I nixed it. Poor Stephen! I was now creating more work for him. In the end it worked out. Stephen brought it out to the dumpster and took the doors off of it. Interestingly enough, he said he later saw it back behind the maintenance closet! The janitors here are keeping it and will probably use it in someone's apt. How sad for the unknowing tenant!

So the long and short of it is... we're finally moved in! We have our own apartment and are loving the weather and new friends we are meeting here! There is so much to do! So many cool places to visit that are really close to us! The best things are that the temple is less than 5 miles away, our ward has lots of little tots (3 nurseries!) So Brooklyn has a bazillion friends, and the beach is about a 15 minute drive away, only because of traffic lights. It's probably about 8 miles.

Our new address is: 8943 Lombard Place #324, San Diego, CA 92122. Please feel free to come visit, write our call us! (Although we are still working on getting a home phone!)