Lately

Abbie posing with the American Girl dolls... We own two of them (I had Felicity growing up, and my sister gave me her Samantha recently).  The Molly doll we rented from the library (seriously! She came in a little mesh backpack with a Meet Molly book and a Molly movie. They have lots of awesome stuff to borrow.  Today I got a backpack with a microscope and some slides for the kids to look at).

Ellie had to pose with the dolls, too:

I was taking a nap on the couch a few weeks ago and woke up to this lovely sight - Olivia, face covered with sidewalk chalk, playing the recorder (more like just blasting it).  I have since hidden the recorder.

There is a free zoo here, so we checked that out a few days before school started.  It was a pretty nice zoo, as far as zoos go, especially considering it was free.  But it was also pretty crowded because.. well, it's free.   The girls were pretty excited about how close we got to the giraffes (and Ellie was pretty excited about that hat she borrowed from our friend who was with us).

But the MOST exciting thing, according to the girls that night at dinner, was the chipmunk that they saw in the monkey area.  Seriously.

Olivia at the zoo:

Garrett need a nutella s'more one night, but didn't want to do all the work of making a fire in the backyard:

Lunch at Costco one day.  I have no idea what Olivia is doing with her  face.... haha:

Sushi for our anniversary dinner date:

We are putting our fire pit to good use lately, especially as the weather cools down in the evenings.  Last night I told Garrett that a fire pit is a "must have" in the future!  This one was already here in the yard, but they are so easy to put in:

Abbie was so excited to find out that she has her very own locker this year at school. (Ellie has one too but I don't have a picture)

We had an assignment to clean part of the church building in August.  The girls were excited to vacuum:

We went for a walk after Church a few weeks ago and came across this little playground in the middle of the woods!  The girls were thrilled:

On our walk:

First day of school!  The girls were SO excited to start school, and it has been going great so far.

Walking home from the bus stop after the first day:

Olivia and I were heading out the door to run some errands, but her hair was in her face.  I quickly pinned a little flower hairpin in, to get her bangs out of her face.  She asked me to take her picture and as she posed, she said "Now the people will love me."  Hahaha.

A couple Saturdays ago we went to an awesome farm.  We picked apples and raspberries, went on a hayride, and then played for a couple hours in the play yard.  It was so much fun! And cheap!

Picking raspberries always reminds me of when we lived in NH when I was little.  We had some friends with tons of raspberry bushes and a bunch of families in the ward would always go pick them every year!  They are definitely one of my favorite fruits:

This little playhouse (in the play yard) had a train table inside:

There was also a huge teepee to play in, that huge pile of hay that the girls climbed all over, tires to climb on, goats to feed, kittens to play with, a little corn maze for the kids, and a TON more.  It was such a great day, and the weather was gorgeous.  The field on the hill is full of pumpkins, but we didn't pick any that day... we need an excuse to go back!

Abbie and I playing a game of checkers in the play yard:

Picking apples.  We picked mostly Macintosh and some yellow ones (I can't remember the name).  I picked a bag of Honeycrisp apples too, and then hid them for myself when we got home (they were more expensive, or else we would have gotten all Honeycrisp!). 

The girls found my old iPod and have been fighting over it ever since.  They sat down to dinner the other day like this, so we had to have a talk about no media at the table. They are so funny... Abbie is like a little teenager just sitting on the couch listening to music on there.  I asked her once, "what are you listening to?" and she said "Under the Sea".  Haha.  Not quite a teenager yet, thankfully.

Garrett just finished up a week of being on call.  He hates being on call, but thankfully it hasn't been too bad yet.  He had to work all weekend, which we knew would happen, so that was okay.  And thankfully the pager never went off in the middle of the night so that was really nice too.  He did get paged a few times, though:

Just chilling in the backyard on a Sunday afternoon.... Garrett's in his scrubs since he was home briefly between being at work, Abbie is pushing Ellie on the rope swing, and Olivia and I were just reading on a blanket.  We are loving the gorgeous weather here and soaking it all in before it gets too cold!

Around town

I love this picture.  When we were preparing our move, Garrett was very concerned about our small, dead end road and getting an ABF truck down there.  So much so that he wanted to rent a U-Haul and drive it himself.  I was not willing to compromise on that - especially for a stupid low-hanging wire (I wanted to drive together in our van), so we had quite a few "discussions" about it.  I figured that it was ABF's job to figure out how to get to our house, and he was worried that they would tell us it was our problem.  He even called the city of Madison and asked them to go measure how low the wires were (they did, and yes they said that the AT&T wires were too low).  Garrett called AT&T and told them they had 3 weeks to fix their low wires (haha)... but of course it didn't happen.  In the end, it wasn't a big deal.  The picture above is Garrett using a broom to push the wires up, while our landlord holds the ladder, while the ABF guy drives the semi towards our house.

On a related note, we had a fantastic experience with ABF.  Everyone we came across - both in Florida and in Wisconsin - was great.  Excellent customer service and everyone was so nice.  We also had a good experience with the company who shipped Garrett's car.  In fact, our whole move went very smoothly up until we got to Wisconsin and our truck was delivered.  After that, we ran into a bit of trouble.... every moving company we called to hire to unload our truck was booked for several days, sometimes weeks!  It was a huge oversight that we didn't call ahead of time, but we really didn't have any idea when our truck would arrive until the day before it arrived, so we really couldn't have known anyway.  So, that was tough.  We ended up hiring our landlords' 18-year-old grandson (who looked 12) to help us (well, me -- Garrett can't lift anything with his back).  It was a loooong and tiresome day, but we did it.  And we only dropped one piece of furniture off the ramp (whoops).  Every time we move, we tell ourselves "never again -- we will hire help next time!"  To be fair, we did TRY to hire help, haha.  But for real... next time we will.  It's only 10 months away so I'm pretty sure we will remember how painful it was.  And we DID use ABF and shipped Garrett's car this time, so we did hire out a lot more help than we have in the past. And yes, it was worth it!

Ellie turned 6 the week we got to Wisconsin.  We celebrated by having dinner & custard at Culver's.

We are having a great time exploring Madison so far.  This park is about a half mile from our house, and we have eaten several picnic dinners there!  We are trying to enjoy the great weather while we can! 

Another shot of us at the park by our house

 We drove out to a small town on for some July 4th festivities.  Unfortunately we missed the Madison fireworks (they were on June 27 (??), but we didn't arrive until the 30th).  We were pleasantly surprised by the ones we saw here, though.

We checked out the Madison Farmer's Market, which was fun.  My friend Stef told me that we HAD to get the cheesy bread from Stella's.

The city has these cute little "book houses" around the city, where you can leave books and take books for free.  There is one pretty close to our house, so we've gone a couple of times.

 Another picnic dinner by the lake

Catching fireflies before bedtime

Cinderella hanging out in the backyard

 Checking out a new trail

Walking around at the UW Arboretum with friends.  It's so nice that we had some friends move here from FL!  

Abbie on a fun zipline at our ward playgroup in Waunakee.  Many families in our ward (church congregation) live up there, so sometimes we meet at a park up there.

Making s'mores in the backyard.  I love having a fire pit, hopefully we can use it a lot through the Fall!

Ice cream out on the terrace at the Union building on UW campus.

Abbie as Bucky Badger

Walking around campus with Mom (she came out to drive back to the farm with me)

Off to check out some more trails!

 Watching the sun set on Lake Mendota

500,000 sunflowers in bloom at Pope Farms

Abbie's BFF from Florida was in Madison visiting her grandma, so she and her mom spent a day with us after we got back from PA.  We had lunch at Ella's Deli, which was a fun experience.

Riding the carousel after lunch at Ella's Deli

There are lots of fun parks in Madison.  This one is also super close to our house.  There's also a splash pad there, but we haven't been to it yet.

Some of our good friends from BYU live about an hour away, and we have gotten together with them a couple of times.  They came over a few Saturdays ago so of course we had to make s'mores again!  It's really nice to have some familiar friends here, even if we only get to see them once in a while.  It makes me really miss having good friends nearby!

Doughnuts at Greenbush Bakery.  I've had a couple people recommend the place to me, and it did not disappoint!  We've been twice already.  Check out the size of their apple fritters!

Last Friday we went to UW campus in search of their meat store.  I always got my beef & pork from the vet school at UF (they have a butchery class), and the meat was always great.  So, I've been looking forward to checking out UW's version.  It was almost impossible to find, it's pretty set  back in a random building and there was also construction, but after about 15 minutes of driving around we finally found it.  Sadly, it was nowhere near as impressive as UF's store, so I'm not sure if we will be going back, but at least now we know.

 Garrett got out of work early one day so we headed down to UW campus for some ice cream.

As you can see, we are keeping busy!!  One more full week of summer until school starts, so we are enjoying the freedom while we can!

Changes

I have been waiting to get my pictures in order before writing another blog post, but we got a new computer and I'm still trying to figure out how to use it (Apple), and I just don't see that happening anytime too soon.  So, instead of putting it off any longer, I decided to just write something before I forget any details!

We have moved!  We are in Wisconsin, still settling in.  I love it so far.  The weather has been wonderful (although I was a bit surprised that our first week here the temps were in the 60s!  Thankfully that wasn't normal for the first week of July, and it's warm again).

We left Florida around July 25.  We drove to SC for a few days to spend some time with Garrett's sister and her family.  We had never been there before, so we figured we should go that route before we left the South!  We had a great time, visiting a water park and doing some other fun things.  After that, we drove to TN to spend a day with Garrett's parents.  After that, we made the long drive from TN to Madison.  We arrived around 9:30pm and spent the night in a hotel before meeting the landlords at the house early the next morning.

The house is great!  Since it has a finished basement, it feels huge and it's more than enough space for us.  In fact, we haven't even touched the third bedroom - it still has empty bookshelves and unopened boxes that I may or may not ever get around to unpacking.  I'm considering making it my sewing room.  The girls are still all sharing a bedroom - it's in the basement, just off the playroom.  The kitchen is wonderful and the cabinets and deep shelves provide more than enough space for everything.  In fact, some cabinet shelves are empty!  I love it.

The house is on a dead end street (second from the end), which makes for a very quiet neighborhood.  We have met a few of the neighbors and everyone seems very nice.  There aren't any kids, really, but that's fine.

We are spending lots of time exploring the area.  Most nights after dinner, we drive to a new park or trail to check out.  So far, we love going to the lake the best.  We live about half a mile from a great little park right on the lake, and we've had a handful of dinner picnics there, right next to the water.  We are seriously loving the summertime here and I can see why people love this place so much.  It's beautiful, there is great shopping, and the people are so nice.

That being said, we still don't have any friends besides the ones who moved up here from Gville with us.  Our ward is nice, but everyone seems to have their own friends already, plus most of the ward members with kids seem to live in a newish small town that's about 20 minutes away.  Not far, of course, but far enough that we won't be hanging out with people every day.  It's no Gainesville, that's for sure, but I'm actually fine with it.  I totally understand that when people hear that we are only here for a year (only 10 more months at this point), they might write us off.  That's okay.  I'm really looking forward to getting a lot of good family quality time in, enjoying a new area, and making some fun memories.

And now, the REALLY hard part begins.... job hunting for next year.  The next few months will probably be pretty busy with that.  This feels a lot more stressful than the other steps along the way.  Moving for medical school wasn't hard - he applied late in the process so he only got into one school, so that's where we went.  For residency, he make a rank list and then was told where to go.  For fellowship, he applied to a bunch of places and took the first offer (plus, we figured we could move anywhere for a year, so it wasn't that scary).  For a real job... it's much more permanent and it feels like there is a lot more on the line.  We won't have an easy "out" like we always have had in the past (school/residency/fellowship all have an end date!).  So, it's hard!!  We've made a list of 4-5 cities where we would like to end up, but admittedly I've never really been to any of them, so that's also scary.  Word of mouth is big in Garrett's specialty, so we are trying to contact anyone we know in those cities to help us get a foot in the door somewhere.  We are also trying to keep an open mind about other locations that we might not be considering.

I know something will work out, I just hope that we get a strong impression about a place once the ball starts rolling.  It's hard to feel in the dark about the future - everything is so unknown! However, it's exciting at the same time.  We've been looking forward to this time for 11 years now, and now that it's here I'm going to try to enjoy it!!

Hopefully I'll figure out in the next few days how to get my pictures uploaded, and will share them in the next day or two!