Brock's Birthday

I don't know where time goes so quickly.  I can't believe that Brock is 11.

I made a birthday banner and put pictures of Brock from birth till now around the banner.  It is fun looking at the pictures and seeing how much he has grown.

I also wanted to do something fun for Brock when he woke up and so a gave him a balloon bouquet--upside down style for when he woke up :)

Made him a ping-pong table cake.

We had the family come over to help us celebrate.  He opened his presents and we had cake.

One of his presents was a trip to the rock climbing wall.  He loved it!!

We are grateful to have this fun loving boy in our family.

Scout Awards

The Blue and Gold Banquet was February 15th.  Since we had only been in our ward for a month--we decided to finish up Brock's scout awards in the Ammon 21st Ward.  

Brock worked hard to receive his Webelos Badge and Arrow of Light. 

His Webelos Leaders were Zsahnae Bell & Dani Griffeth

The Cub Master was Brother Timothy McDowell

 Jaden also received his Webelos Badge at this pack meeting.

We are getting to know people in our new ward but it sure is nice being around familiar faces and people in our old ward....

New House

After Russell started his new job we decided that we could look into getting a loan and looking for a new home.  This was a fun idea.  So I began to look at homes for sell on line.  I started keeping a list and also called our Realtor.  We had a few things on our list that we wanted.  5-6 bedrooms, a piano room, a fenced yard, a third car garage, and to be in the high school boundaries for Brinton.  This ended up being a little bit harder than we thought it would.  We also wanted to get a good deal.  It seemed like we had given our other house away and we wanted someone else to do the same :)  After a few weeks of looking we had a few options 3-4 houses that we thought would be good for our family and 2 options that would mean that we would stay at Russell's parent's house for a few more months while we built a new house.  We decided to take our friends and family to look at the existing houses and they could get a feel for what we were looking at and maybe give us some advice.   After looking our family had some great advice for us.  They liked all of the houses but the Stafford Cove house was the one that they all liked the best.  (This house was Russell's first choice and Joy's second choice)  We decided that we would make an offer and see what happened and that would also help us make our decision.  We put the first offer in and they counter offered.  We also counter offered and they just didn't want to budge on the price.  So we told our Realtor no thanks and were ready to make a different decision.  Then they came back a little bit lower on their offer.  We again said no.  Our Realtor came back and said he would put some money in and would also try to get the other realtor to put money in the pot so that we could get the house.  We ended up going a little bit over our budget so we could get into our house.  We wanted to move in just after Christmas but they wouldn't agree to that--so our closing date was January 6, 2012.  We were very excited,  we signed the papers and then I headed over to the house to clean.  Saturday morning we had a moving crew ready to move our things in. 

We love our new home.  It is a wonderful space for our family, in a great neighborhood.

This is where we are supposed to be :)

{This picture doesn't show the third car garage}