Be Thankful

So, on Sunday, my primary class was in charge of sharing time. We are in Junior Primary (tons of cute little kids) and we talked about things we are thankful for. All the 8-year olds in my class got up and gave a short couple-minute talk on the things they were grateful for and why (we put a big emphasis on why to eliminate the long list). I was very impressed by them. It made me think about how blessed I am. I am one of those people that looks at what is right in front of me, that little speck of something, and doesn't look around to see everything else.

So, I am writing them down cause it feels better to let it out.

1. I am grateful for my beautiful daughter. She just loves me, no matter what. She giggles at me, always wants me near her, and really NEEDS me. There aren't too many people or things in life like that.

2. I am so thankful for my husband. I can be a bum sometimes, but he is always there to love me enough to let me know so I can be better. He really believes in me. And right now, he loves me enough to stay over at our house until all hours of the night and all Friday and Saturday so that he can give my my dream of getting in by Christmas.

3. I am grateful for in-laws who let us live in their basement and eat some of their food. And give free labor for the house. And take care of Kaylee so I can help out with the house.

4. I'm grateful for all my friends and family and how you love and support us. I think about how much you all do for us. THANKS!

There was my thank-a-mony. But I just felt so blessed to be around and acquainted with so many wonderful people.

Late Halloween Pics

Halloween at Corn Belly's in Lehi. It was fun!

More Brick

As you can see, we have more brick done

Blessings

Kaylee is quite a ham. I love to get her to laugh and giggle. She is getting to such a fun age where she loves to get into everything (which is a drawback), but she is just so fun to watch when she gets into everything. You can just see how curious she can be. And she loves attention, but if it is too much she plays her coy "shy" game. I feel like this is such a fun age!

And she is now standing and walking around with the help of chairs, mom, tables, bookcases, etc. She gets up on everything and if she is not close to anything she whizzes by crawling to get there. My favorite is that she can get down from standing up, but sometimes forgets how. So you see her desperately holding onto the chair/table while the other hand is reaching down trying to brace her fall. The tuck and roll is another one of her favorites. We will keep working on the preferable method of just sitting back (much less dangerous and fewer bruises!).

We went to visit/have lunch with Clayton today and I was just thinking about how blessed I am (and we all are). How often I drive around (usually late) in a hurry and don't notice all the beautiful changing colors, or the bright fall day, or the nice people who open the door for me cause I have hands full. Or the nice husband who works all day and night or the cute little girl who wants nothing more than for me to hold her and laugh with her. Cheesy, yes, but today I remembered why God has asked us to count our blessings. Hope you enjoy the pictures. And I hope you like her pigtails!

Here are the latest pictures of the house. Yay for sheet rockers and brick-layers! I give a shout out to all of them in the world.

Real Work

Now some real work is getting done. You can hopefully see that the roof is totally done, the glass block windows are done, the brick has started and we are getting our retaining walls done in the back. We originally were going to use retaining wall block, but Kristi wanted to use boulders because she liked to look better. It cuts down on the gardening area, but we will still have some room. Oh, and we have started insulating, the blue stuff between the studs is a spray in foam that expands, so as the insulators spray it in, it fills all the small voids and cracks. It is an excellent insulator for both temperature and noise. We are building our home to energy star standards, so when it is built (according to our energy inspector) it will be 36% more energy efficient that a home built to the standard building codes. Overall is has been an added cost of about $4,000; however, we qualify federal tax credits and rebates from Rocky Mountain Power and Questar Gas. The value of the tax credits and the rebates is about $3,800, so the true added cost is insignificant on a mortgage; furthermore, we will have a significant savings in utility costs. We find it to be a wise investment.