The Past 8 Months (Part I)

When we first got home from the summer we moved right into my parent's new house. We never did sell our condo but we are currently renting it out for the time being. It just makes it so much less stressful to not have to pay rent AND a mortgage during the summer and bills for two places. Most of our things had already been moved earlier in the summer by my wonderful parents with very little help from me! We just had to box up our things from Red Deer and put them away to wait for next summer. My parents are "snowbirds" and headed to St. George, UT the middle of October and won't be back until the end of April. We did live with them for just under two months but during that time they were gone for a couple of weeks to Russia. So even when they're here, they're gone a lot. But they are very easy people to live with! And our living arrangements work out perfectly. I think they like having us "taking care" of their house while they're gone and paying the bills and whatnot and it's really nice to have a place with space! I think Jensen would have gone mental in the little condo with no yard.

Chris has taken this past 8 months off of work and school. It was nice to have him around for a little while and we did get to do a lot of fun things as a family. We could just pick up and go whenever we felt like it! But having no routine or schedule gets really old really fast. We did take the kids to the Calgary Zoo on one of our outings, but of course I forgot the camera. It was their first time to go to any zoo and they loved it! It was quite cold out the day we went but thankfully most things are indoor. I think I enjoyed it even more than the kids did! I really love animals. Jensen seemed to like the tigers the most. He got so excited when we saw them and would say, "tiger" and roar. It was very cute.

We also finally got real family pictures done! We drove up to Okotoks and got them done by Arlee Greenwood. She is the daughter of my parent's really good friends so I've known her my entire life! Arlee is fantastic and very reasonably priced.

Then there was Halloween... I didn't look for costumes until last minute so there was honestly nothing left in Aubrey's size. Last year we didn't buy anything until the day of and the costume only cost $6 so I was hoping to do the same thing again. It didn't work out so well for us! My MIL got Aubrey a wand, some gloves, a tiara, and some wings from the dollar store so she just wore those over her regular clothes. She was a fairy princess. Jensen wore Aubrey's costume from last year. He made one cute little horse. Teagan (my sis-in-law) and I took the kids up and down the block and they got a lot of candy. Then Chris and I took them to grandma and grandpa "great Shurtz's" and then home to bed. I think Aubrey and Jensen really enjoyed themselves. (Pictures of costumes to come... hopefully).