No, We're Not Completely Ignoring Our Fixer-Upper (Part 2)

Call us selfish, but we decided to remodel our master bedroom right away.  Our theory was that we could spend a lifetime trying to make the rest of our house less embarrassing for when we have visitors, but then we would have no time to work on our private space.  So we started with our bedroom and now we can spend the rest of our lives on the rest of the house.

Before

After

As you can tell, we like green and decided to go bold.  And we still need to hang pictures, which, as anyone who has visited any of our homes in the last 10 years can attest, has long been one of our domestic struggles.

The biggest project in this room was to take our tiny and highly inefficient closet (seriously, who uses shoe boxes?) and turn it into something functional.  First, we ripped out the old closet.

Then we doubled the size of the opening.

 And then we finished it up.  

It was a lot of dust-producing work, but it was sure worth it.  And looking at this picture reminds me that my husband dresses like a dork.

In the first ten years of our marriage, we had never had a real bed frame or even a headboard.  But at some point you have to grow up, and owning your first home is as good a time as any.  We looked far and wide for our bed, and finally ended up with a black walnut beauty from Lofgren's.  Unfortunately the matching bedside tables were $600-$800 each, and we just couldn't pull the trigger on that.  So Jeremy designed and built these matching black walnut end tables.

For those of you wondering about the one photo we do have on our wall, it's an original print from one of our favorite St. George photographers, Nathan Watkins, that Jeremy gave me for my 30th birthday.

We're super happy about our room.  It's everything we wanted:  cozy, colorful, happy, and a relaxing place to crash at the end of another crazy day.

I've done my fair share of making fun of Jeremy for working too much and leaning OCD, but I should really thank him for being the best husband of all time.

Four More Miles Hike Club - 2013 Season

The inaugural season of the 4MM Club last year was a huge success.  Let's do it again!

The rules (there are none) and details can be found at this link.  Other than that, let us know if you want on (or off) the e-mail list that we use to distribute the time/place for our monthly hike.  We're already in the planning stages for our first hike in May, so don't delay!  There are adventures to be had, so let's have them together.

Tenny is a Nats fan from birth.

But he just had his first ever t-ball practice, and he's playin' for the Bees! Go Tenny! (You've got a lot of family reputation to live up to. "Don't embarrass the family!")

Recently seen in Jer's Instagram feed

We've started posting a lot of our daily pics to our Instagram feeds, so, for those of you not on Instagram, here are some of Jer's latest.  Suzy's pics are coming soon. 

 

Springtime on Temple Sqare

General Conference

Stuck in an April blizzard in Denver

Grandma

Trying to bring our yard out of the 1940s.

Cherry Blossom Festival - SLC

Taiters

Tenny lost his first tooth!

Tait helped knock it out.

Nicaraguan Adventure - Part 8 (Redonda Bay)

The idea was to use the Treehouse as our base and then to spend four days exploring southern Nicaragua.  We were going to hike, ride horses, visit local villages, take surf lessons, hire boats to see the coastline, visit national parks to look for nesting turtles, etc., etc.  Oh boy we were going to have so many adventures!

But then we walked down the trail to the beach below the Treehouse and saw Redonda Bay.   

Forget adventure and forget plans--we ended up spending all four days on that beach.  Perfect beach, perfect water, perfect weather, perfect snorkeling, and most of the time we were perfectly alone (we saw a grand total of about 6 people in four days).

We read in the shade, tanned in the sun, swam in the bay, and snorkeled around the rocks.  The cove pictured below was the second best snorkeling we've ever experienced (the Red Sea being the best).

We don't want to make it sound like we did nothing for four days.  One afternoon we found the motivation to hike up the hill to the nearby "wellness resort" to have 45-minute cocoa body scrubs followed by 60-minute full-body massages.

Paradise found.

Easter in San Jorge del Sud

It's hard to beat Easter in St. George, especially when the whole family is in town to share in the outdoor activities, perfect weather, and holiday festivities.  Here is Grandma Julie surrounded by every last one of her grandchildren (congrats to Ashley, the oldest, for getting her mission call to Brazil), at an old CCC Camp in Ivins where her father worked.

Of course, the first thing our kids did upon ariving in Dixie was to hit the sandbox and swings (it's tradition).

We got in a little crack climbing with uncle Jason and cousin Ethan.

We explored "the red hill" (another tradition).

 



And of ourse we attended the world-renowned, annual Isom Easter Party -- a huge success, as always.

 

On of the highlights of this trip was the Easter service we held at Grandpa Ross's grave.  Each of the grandkids took turns talking about their favorite memories of grandpa, and then we release helium balloons and watched them float higher and higher.

And then we did a bit more climbing to make sure our knuckles were good and bloodies and that we wouldn't be able to lift our arms for the next week.

 

Some random shots of the beautiful drive home from St. George to SLC.  There are a million gorgeous views like this along the drive home.  We seriously love Utah.

 

And Tait earned first and second place for the best lines of the trip, both spoken the day after we returned:

 

1 - "I miss my best friend Maggie Drew."  (MD is his cousin, about 5 times his age.  They really bonded on this trip.)

 

2 - "I want to go visit my balloon to see if grandpa got it."  (And our hearts melt, since Tait was born two weeks before grandpa died and never got to meet him.  We're trying hard to make sure he knows about, and feels a connection to, Grandpa Ross.)

 

Also, we're totally in love with Souther Utah and we're already planning our next trip.  So many hikes/climbs/adventures, so few weekends!