Signs that you've been eating too much fast food.

Have I mentioned how happy I am that our kitchen is functioning again?

Who knew there was so much to do in Ogden.

We tried to take a few day trips while we were living in Salt Lake because we had a long list of things we'd been meaning to see and do and never seemed to get around to.  First on our list was spending a day playing on Ogden.  We started out at the Treehouse Museum.  My sister-in-law Janelle met us there with our nephew William and our one and only adorable niece, Lucy.  Creed had fun pretending to be president in the replica of the oval office.

 It was funny to see that Ollie and Lucy are about the same size, but Ollie is a year older.

And this is the only picture that I caught of William because the kids were all on the move exploring.

 After lunch, we visited Odgen Eccles Dinosaur Park, which we loved even more than the Treehouse Museum.

 There are dinosaur statues all over the park and Ollie thought the dinosaur sounds were hilarious.

 Creed and Larry had a blast pretending the dinosaurs were real.

 This photo of Creed might be one of my favorite pictures of him ever.

 There was a really kitchy playground there and since it was a cloudy day, we were the only family there so we played the day away.

 They have a museum inside with the typical dinosaur bones that you would expect. Then upstairs they had some animatronic dinosaurs.

 Creed had a hard time believing they were not real.  He didn't want to be anywhere near them, but he would have watched them for hours.

If you are in the area, I highly recommend a visit.  I have to say, Ogden is sort of little boy heaven.  You can see a lot of cool old trains downtown at Union Station and next time we're up there, we're hoping to visit the Hill Aerospace Museum just outside of Ogden.  Good thing we have cousins up there to visit!

A Place To Call Home

Each time we move, I like to take pictures of our little family on the doorstep so we can look back and show the boys how little they were when we moved in.

I wish I could show you the versions with the whole house in the background, but, you know, stranger danger and all . . . 

These boys are so very, very adorable.

 They have my heart!

 And so does this guy!

 We're so happy to finally have a place to call home!

Our kitchen, so far

So the kitchen of this house was remodeled two years ago.  The finishes weren't exactly what I would choose, but they were nice and we probably would have kept them, but they just didn't take advantage of the space.  

 Since there were no upper cabinets and only a narrow cabinet next to the fridge, there was very little storage space.  In fact, from our tours of the house, it looked like the previous owners kept all of their food in the basement pantry.  My friend Kersten commented that the family had seven kids so they could just run one of them down there when they needed something, but that wasn't going to work for me.

 Since we had one month before we moved into the house, we started renovations hoping they would be done before we moved in (ummm, not even close).

 Behind the fridge, there was a hall closet eating up kitchen space so you previously walked in from the entryway to walk around this to enter the kitchen.

 Luckily, the wall was not structural so we ripped it out and were left with this teeny broom closet

 and all of this kitchen space! (pardon the pictures, it was cloudy when I took them, and I forgot to edit them before I uploaded them)

 There is still work to be done obviously.  I'm having trouble choosing a backsplash and that hole in the island will someday be home to a microwave drawer.

 I think one of my favorite things about the kitchen are the pull-out pantry cabinets on the sides of the fridge and freezer.  Oh, and the giant fridge and freezer.  They are not fancy built-ins, just separate units squashed together to look like it, and we opted to skip the trim kit to make them look really built-in, but Larry and I still ooh and ahhh each time we open them and see all of that space.

 It's hard to get perspective in these pictures because everything is a little bit oversized, but I also love this big sink that we got from our friend/contractor Geoff Tice.

 And we FINALLY got the range hood back up this week so it's feeling like a little less of a construction zone. The guy who came to install it has come four times and always has a reason that he can't do it.  This time, he didn't have anyone with him to help lift it so he said he'd have to come back in a week, but I promised him I was up to the task.  Imagine me standing on the stove, balancing the hood on my head and shoulder.  It was not pretty, but it was worth it not to wait another week.

And after an extra coat of finish on the floor, we were finally able to bring in our table and chairs.  That table seems so puny in there, but we were already planning to buy a new one.  Larry and I bought the table and chairs in a set for $120 at Shopko when we got married and it's in bad shape, but we were trying to hold on until we were settled somewhere.

 Oh, and remember this laundry room/computer closet off of the kitchen?

 It now looks like this.

 Larry would like you all to know that he picked out that faucet.

 It's actually the only things he's picked out for the house, but don't you think he did a good job?

Our Laundry Room, so far anyway

When we bought this house, the laundry room was off of the kitchen on the main floor of the house. As much as I loved the orange laminate counter top (I should have taken a close-up of it, it's sort of hidden in the photo) and the linoleum backsplash, we decided to make some changes.

Because upstairs in a bedroom closet was a second kitchen.  You heard me right, a second kitchen, in a bedroom closet. And I didn't really want my toddlers to have access to a stove in their bedroom in the middle of the night.

And since we were tearing out the kitchen, and it already had plumbing, it seemed like a good place to move the laundry room.

 Our budget for renovations before we moved in was fairly small so we kept the laundry room simple, and hopefully we'll finish it off later.  We started off by extending the hallway so you didn't have to go into the bedroom to get to the laundry room.  Then we tore out the kitchen, swapped out some of the plumbing, fixed up the drywall, painted the room white (Have I mentioned that the previous owners painted the whole house tan a few months ago?  THE WHOLE HOUSE.  Even most of the ceilings), we popped off the peel and stick laminate tile, and tiled the floor with 2" marble hexagon tiles.

We are happy to leave the last year of using the laundromat behind us.  

 Now we just need to save our pennies so someday we can get a sink and some cabinetry in there. The washer and dryer are enormous so I don't really know what to do for cabinetry or organization.  Let me know if you have any good ideas.

Our Love Is Here To Stay

I can't believe I've been Mrs. Ford for ten years!  Larry and I celebrated our tenth anniversary on Wednesday.  We weren't making grand plans because we sort of bought a house for our tenth anniversary (Actually, what could be grander than that?)

Of course, Mr. Ford had to step things up a bit an surprise me with these postcards with handwritten love notes on the back of each and every one.  They were stashed all over the house for me to discover throughout the day.  When I took this photo, I didn't know I still had a few more to find.

Thanks to Larry's mom and step-dad, we also had a nice dinner out at Communal, just the two of us. Sheesh, it had been way too long since we'd been out on our own!

In honor of our anniversary, here are a few more interesting tidbits about Mr. Ford:

1. He downloaded mmmbob
2. He's very anti piracy. He would never download anything without paying for it.
3. He will never wear corduroy due to a traumatic elementary school experience
4. Creed thinks he's really magic because he can take his finger off
5. He always volunteers to change Ollie's stinky diapers
6. He's adopted his dad's motto of, "If it doesn't bleed, I can't fix it."
7. He took Latin in high school
8. He loves to watch the cartoon Phineas and Ferb. He's even DVRed episodes and watched them by himself.
9. He is the one who fell in love with our house and had to have it.  All the houses we saw before this he was like, "It's fine.  It'll work. Whatever, let's just buy it." and I kept telling him I wanted a house we LOVED because I'm sick of moving. I know he's happy that I made him wait.
10. His favorite artist is Mark Rothko.
11. He loves to travel. Since we've been married, we've been to the Mexican Riviera, Vancouver, Toronto, New York, Boston, Knoxville, Louisville, Washington DC, Chicago, Las Vegas, Nauvoo, Yellowstone, and many trips to So CA.  We can't wait for the boys to get bigger so we can travel a little further abroad.
12. He gets more excited about trips to Disneyland than the boys do.
13. I think I've finally convinced him that Jimmy Fallon is funny, but it's taken him years to come around
14. He never minds making dinner, but he says if a recipe calls for more than three ingredients, it's too complicated.
15. He has a heterosexual man-crush on Zack Braff
16. He can make the boys laugh so much harder than I can.
17. We don't see eye to eye on how to furnish the house. I tend to head for modern with clean lines and he tends to look for crazy modern or keeping it vintage 70's
18. He takes longer to get ready than I do.
19. He was recently asked to teach a group of rowdy 11-year-olds at church.  He's only had one Sunday with them so far, but I think they are going to love him.
20. In his teenage years, he loved heavy metal and wore mostly black.  There may have even been a time or two that he wore black lipstick and painted his nails black.
21. He told me to stop buying him books because he never has time to read them. Any spare reading time he has is spent reading medical journals to stay up-to-date.
22. When we got Ipods, we agreed to only download one song a month because he was in medical school and even that was stretching the budget, but he still sticks to that agreement, which makes I-tunes gift certificates his favorite gift. (which also makes #1 funnier)
23. He'll eat anything that I make for dinner and pretend to like it, even if it was an experiment gone terribly wrong. 
24. He always tries to keep my car filled with gas. I rarely have to stop at the pump.
25. He takes care of making sure Ollie gets his medications and keeping them refilled.

He is the love of my life, and I'm so lucky to have him!