House hunting in Las Vegas

Hello all.  I know that it has been over three years since I (Andy) have posted something on this blog, but I felt that it was time that I contribute again.  I finally finished residency last week.  My parents came out for graduation and while they were there, they were nice enough to help us pack the house and drive all of our stuff half way across the country.  We took all of our stuff to Las Vegas.  Jill and I then spent a couple of days looking for a place to live there.  Here are a couple of pictures of places that we looked at:

(Too french)

(Too many naked women statues)

(Too many rats in the dungeons)

Since none of those places actually worked out, we'll have to keep looking...  Eden is very excited about having a pool since it is hot in Las Vegas.  So we had to make sure that we found a good pool for us.  Rachel also seemed to like the pool option.

We are also looking forward to getting to know our new neighbors!  I can't wait until they bring over some house warming gifts!!

We will also need to furnish our place, so we went out to try and find some cool stuff for us.  We had seen that this place had a lot of cool things!!

We had a lot of fun and are now back in Utah for a vacation before I start my job.  We are very excited to get back down to Las Vegas though and see what all the desert has in store for us!!!





The perfect picture

I am amazed by those professional pictures with 30 people in them and everyone is looking at the camera and smiling.  I was trying to take a good picture of the girls earlier this week.  This is the one that turned out the best. 

These are a few of the "not so perfect" attempts before I got a good picture:

Looking at these again, I realize that they may not have turned out perfect, but they show the personality of the girls so much more than the first picture.  I think I love them just as much. They make me laugh and remind me what each day is like in our house.  Perfection doesn't always have to be the goal!

Eden and Rachel, but mostly Rachel

I just wanted to do a couple quick posts of some pictures of the girls.  Eden is such a great big sister.  She loves Rachel so much and helps me out with her so much.  One of Eden's favorite things to do is to try to "match" Rachel when I get her dressed.  She tries to wear the same colors and patterns.  So she was very excited when we got the girls matching jammies.  She wants to wear them every night.  Rachel doesn't seem to care whether she matches her sister or not, but as you can tell from the pictures, she does like to be by Eden.  Eden can always make her smile.

Rachel fell asleep on the couch one night leaning up against Andy and she looked so sweet I just had to snap a picture (or two or three...).

Rachel is now officially 8 months old.  She got her first tooth (bottom right front) the day before she turned 8 months.  We're still waiting for the other front bottom tooth to make an appearance.  She is getting really good at rolling and loves to be on the floor rolling around exploring.  All the rolling has thinned her out quite a bit too.  She's by no means skinny, but she's lost a couple chins and some of the folds in her thighs.  She's also sprouting some new hair on top.  She's got a great mohawk going on- we try to curl it a little bit.  She's recently discovered that we have a cat and it has caught her attention enough that she tries to say "cat" when she sees it.  So far, it sounds a lot like "dad" but we're working on it.  My mom says that "cat" was my first word, so maybe it runs in the family.  She just figured out clapping and signing "more" when she wants a snack.  Now if only I could get her to feed herself...  She's my little baby bird and will only hold her mouth open for food- she won't pick it up and put it in herself.  I also got her to start sleeping through the night this past month- it was a lot easier to do than I was expecting.  I just stopped feeding her when she cried and would instead give her back her binkie and walk out.  I thought she would cry for hours the first few nights, but she just went right back to sleep.  If I had known it would be that easy I would have done it months ago! That's our little Rachel at 8 months old.  We sure love having her in our family!