This Old House

With our family is doubling in size (and the interest rates being low), we thought our house should get a little bigger too! With the help of our realtors, Matt & Kary Sutter (love them), we've sold our house and bought a new house in Cedar Park. (It's barely in Cedar Park. Just a couple hundred yards from Austin.) I'll let you know about our new house soon, for now, I wanted to reminisce about this house!

Here are the things I'll miss most about this house:

• The super cute mirrors in the bathrooms!
• Crown moulding EVERYWHERE!
• The huge kitchen with the nice pot rack! (We are taking the pot rack with us but we might not have a place to use it.)
• Tons of counter space with room for many stools.
• My purple dining room. It grew on me so much these past two years! I'll miss it terribly!
• Our flagstone patio! We love it!
• The eleven large trees that surround the house.
• Location, Location, Location -- 7 Minutes from Dell and 3 Minutes from NI. You can't beat those commutes!

All the memories that this house holds! We moved in right after we got married, our first two and a half year of marriage have been in this house. Our small group meets here too. We've fostered relationships in our small group that we hope will continue for years to come

Now, this house is great, but, don't get me wrong, there are a few things I won't mind leaving behind:

• The carpet that I thought needed to be replaced on day one, but Jason still thinks looks good enough.
• The "tooting" sound that the house makes every time you turn the water on. (After two years, we just got it fixed!)
• Shopping at what I like to refer to as the "ghetto" HEB. It is the only HEB in Austin that hasn't been remodeled since the 70's. :)
• The worlds most shallow kitchen sink and the counter tops with the burn marks on them. Granite counter tops here we come!
• The worlds smallest two car garage. After two years of cleaning out the garage, we still can't fit two cars in there!

Here is a picture of us when we first moved into this house. The trees have been thoroughly trimmed since the taking of this picture. You can even see my old Jeep.


Our flagstone patio, river rock side yard, and Jason's homemade picnic table.

Here is our purple dining room. When you walk in our house, it is immediately on your left. Jason's mom gave us a table runner and cloth that matched the walls perfectly. (She also gave us the table but that will look good anywhere.)

Here is the view from our OPEN, OPEN, OPEN kitchen. You can also see one of the blue stools we never got around to painting.

And another view of the kitchen.

Here is the living room. As you can see on the TV, we have AT&T Uverse. We'll miss that in our new location. It is not available there.

Here is the couch we fight over and a view down the hall.

Here is the red room. This was the birthplace of Paper Graces.

Here is our main guest room. The walls matched my old bed spread perfectly. The closet is packed with Paper Graces stationery.

There are a few rooms we have not taken pictures of yet. We'll try to upload those later.

This house was well loved and will be missed! I can't wait to make new memories in our new home!

Angela is Engaged

Tonight (June 27th), my little sister got engaged to her boyfriend, Allen! I don't know too much of the story yet. I do know that a picnic was involved, a ring was given, and I'm sure Angela cried a ton. She sounded worn out when I talked to her...probably from all the crying. :) To hear more than that, you will probably need to talk to Amy. Amy will find out all of the details and ask Angela all the questions I would never even think of.

Congrats Angela and Allen! We look forward to the wedding.

We're Halfway There!

On Saturday, we hit the halfway mark of 20 weeks!!! Okay, so we are probably more than halfway there since it is unlikely we will make it the full 40 weeks. But we'll go ahead and call this the halfway mark.

Here is what babycenter.com has to say about babies at week 20:

Your baby weighs about 10 1/2 ounces now. He's also around 6 1/2 inches long from head to bottom and about 10 inches from head to heel — the length of a banana. (For the first 20 weeks, when a baby's legs are curled up against his torso and hard to measure, measurements are taken from the top of his head to his bottom — the "crown to rump" measurement. After 20 weeks, he's measured from head to toe.)

He's swallowing more these days, which is good practice for his digestive system. He's also producing meconium, a black, sticky by-product of digestion. This gooey substance will accumulate in his bowels, and you'll see it in his first soiled diaper (some babies pass meconium in the womb or during delivery).

The "meconium" section sounds really gross. :) I guess I have a lot of gross stuff coming in the near future. Hopefully, it will be different when it is your own kids.

Here is an artist's rendition of our baby boy and girl. As you can see in the picture, twins normally hang out in the womb head to foot and have "marks" designating their gender.

One final note: Do two 20 week twins add up to one 40 week full term baby?

Toronto and Niagara Falls, Eh?

Last week, Amy and I both had business trips to Toronto. (What are the odds of that?) I gave a couple of two hour presentations at a technical conference and Amy worked with her Canada team. We also spent a few days of vacation to see the city and head over to Niagara Falls.

On Wednesday and Thursday, both Amy and I worked all day. On Friday, Amy needed to work but I was free so I walked around downtown Toronto. You can tell I was in Candada by this statue I found. It was close to the hockey hall of fame.

Here is a picture of St James Cathedral. There were several cool churches like this in downtown Toronto.

I walked by this huge mall that has the largest Future Shop in Canada. Future Shop is one of Amy's clients. They are like BestBuy but even bigger in Canada. It also had a Jack Astor's. Amy and I ate at one of those during the week.
This is the street van I ate at during my day walking around. This was by far the cheapest meal I had all week and was really good. I got a huge order of fries and the covered it with gravy. After Amy finished working on Friday, we made the trip to Niagara Falls. Here is the view from our hotel room. We were on the 20th floor and had a nice view of the Canadian falls. The Canadian falls are the horseshoe shaped falls that most people are familiar with.

Here is a view of the Canadian falls from the Canadian side.

Here is a view of the US falls from Canada.

This is us in front of the falls. Don't they look great behind us? Trust me, the falls are there.

On Saturday, we drove over to the US side where our tour was. Amy booked a really cool tour for us where we saw all sorts of stuff in Niagara. The hotels in the background are on the Canadian side. (Our hotel is the rectangular building on the right in the clump of the buildings on the left.) The Canadian horseshoe falls are just to the left of the hotels.

Here is a side shot of the US falls.

Me in front of the US falls.

Yet another view of the US falls. This one is from an observation deck that extends from the land. Here, you can really see all of the rocks below the US falls.

Here is a picture of the Canadian falls from the "Maid of the Mist" boat tour we went on. When comparing this to the US falls, you can see why everyone who tries to go over the falls go down the Canadian side.

On the US side, there is decking that allows you to get really close to the falls. The main US falls are on the left and the Bridal falls is what you see on the right. The island in between is call Luna Island since you can see rainbows at night from it with the light of the moon. Amy hanging out close to the falls.

Here are the two of us in front of the falls. You might wonder why my face mask is pulled so much tighter...Well, I had our camera backback on and wanted to make sure it stayed dry and I went up to the Hurricane Deck where a lot more water comes down on you.

Here is one of the videos I took of the falls.