Moving Journal: Day One

12:18pm, MST (1 hr 15 min in the car)

Well, we are on the road. The morning was a little rough. Many tears were shed. I know people will miss me and Amy, but I know that really the Grandma's will miss my kids.

So far, the road has been good. The weather is great, which is a blessing. And the boys are happily watching Nick, Jr. Favorites Volume 1. "Blue's Clues" and "Dora" were hits but Noely nearly lost it when we got to "Lazy Town." We made a rule for the road trip that we are just going to watch the videos straight through and not spend all of our time catering to the whims of a 2 year old. The breakdown was averted by a sheet of stickers that our friend Lisa packed in some road trip bags she gave our kids (Thanks, Lisa!!) Now Noel is happily sticking stickers to things. I have a helicopter on my hand that says "Well Done." Well done, indeed! They should distract him for 22 minutes until our next Nick, Jr. Favorite starts.

Amy and I are having our 1 hour snack of Peach Rings. Yummy!! (Thoughtfully given to us by our friend Reyna in a road trip care package - said package also included Lindor Truffles. Thanks, Reyna!) Do you remember when I was in college and I told my friend Chanel "Those Peach Rings are calling my name. 'Peach Rings! Peach Rings!" And Chanel said, "If they are saying 'Peach Rings! they are calling their own name." I'm a little dumb sometimes.

Note: These are not my actual packers

Note Number 2: This was written last Thursday, as my lovely Millcreek home was being stuffed into boxes. I just haven't had internet until now.

Well, it is moving day. And I am sitting on my couch as a group of lovely ladies wrap all of my worldly possessions in bubble wrap and paper and stick it in boxes. It is a little odd, and a little nice that I am not the one doing it. And a little sad.

When Amy and I moved to this house, it was with the intention of never leaving. When we first got married and moved from California to Utah, a day that will live in infamy, a day that we still never speak of, we vowed that we would move two more times in our lives. Once to a starter home (we were moving to an apartment at the time) and once to the home where we would live out our days. So when we got to this home, we thought, "This is it. This is the home where we will live out our days. . It had everything we needed. It was a little old and needed some updating, but we figured we would do that someday.

We have great memories in this house. Noel was born about 4 days after we moved in, so he has spent his whole life here. We have had parties and BBQs and family gatherings and [events] and floods. But as Jonah has informed us several times lately, "This house is old and falling apart and we need a new house in Portland." He has also told us that when we get to Portland that he will have a whole bunch of friends waiting for him in the new house and if he doesn't have friends in Portland, he is going to cry. So, no pressure.

Bottom line: I love that house and I will miss it. I am trying not to dwell on the specifics because it will get me sad. I am trying to focus more on things like that at my new house we won't need to turn off every light in the house before we vacuum so we don't blow a fuse. And that my rain gutters in Portland flow freely (for now.)

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

As I am stuck at home with an ear infection (You heard me right - and if you are wondering, I am not an 18 month old. I am a 30 year old man) and I just don't feel like watching one more episode of Make Me A Supermodel I thought I would give you, gentle reader a tour of the Hillsboro Home.

Here, again, is the outside. I see lots of plants that I won't know how to take care of...














When you come in the front door, to your right is the living room with the loverly bay windows. We hope this room will someday house my wife's baby grand piano in turquoise. (Ok it won't really be turquoise. I just liked the sound of that.)














On the other side of the living room is the dining room. It needs a new light fixture, but it has a great big window. And why do people carpet dining rooms? We will be getting some sort of cleanable rug for this room. Come over, have dinner with us! (We just bought new Global Bazaar plates from Target (on sale!) so that we have enough place settings.)














Here is the eat-in kitchen. It has a gas-range (yeah!) and is clean and new. This is first time that we have cupboards that are younger than us. We like the tile, too.














Here is our little family room off of the kitchen. The gas fireplace seems nice, but we have one now and we haven't used it but once in the last two years. I am sure we will spend lots of time in here watching our stories after the kids go to bed.















When you come upstairs, there are 4 bedrooms (not pictured as they just look a lot like bedrooms and our nice master. This is also the first time we have had a master bedroom, too. With our own bedroom and closet and everything!! YEAH!!! Don't you like their bedroom set, by the way? I am afraid ours will not look that cool...it needs a little updating.















Here is the backyard. It isn't huge, but it has a big nice deck (there will be many, many BBQs there) and a hot tub.














So there you have it. It will obviously be much more thrilling in real life - so come and visit!!

Stop EVERYTHING!

Do you have plans for tomorrow night? Well, you do now. Run, don't walk, run to your nearest California Pizza Kitchen and have their new Red Velvet Cake. You can, and should, have Pizza too. But finish up the night with the Red Velvet Cake. It is fantasgreat. It has white-chocolate curls pressed into the vanilla bean cream cheese frosting and is drizzled with a vanilla bean sauce.

I love RVC but it can sometimes be so disappointing. But this one is moist and delicious and rich and satisfying. Were you bummed when you learned that RVC is red because of insane amounts of red food coloring inside and not some exotic flavoring profile? I was. But I still want to eat it every day.

Love is Not All

As long as we are traveling down memory lane, I thought I would share. Amy and my wedding was the most amazing, beautiful, breath-taking wedding you ever did see. (Amy was the key planner, so I take no credit.) It started at about 11 am. We got married, took a handful of photos (didn't want our guests sitting around for 7 hours as we posed on that one bench under that one tree at the SL Temple) and then had an amazing lunch, with great desserts and a program. It was a ton of fun, and we were done by about 4 pm. We wanted it to be short and fun and for us to really be able to wallow in the love of friends and family.

The program was the part of that afternoon that sticks out the most in my mind. We had tributes, or toasts if you will, done by some close friends and family. Our friend Chanel MCed (who else?,) our friends Becky and Reyna sang a beautiful duet, my little brother and sister gave me a gift of a decapitated mannequin head, two of Amy's good friends from college did a tribute, and our friends Chris and Lisa did a tribute as well. I re-watched our wedding video today and was stunned at how much hair I had, and at how many kind and wonderful things were said about us. Our life would be so different without our amazing friends and family. And as this pending move looms closer and closer, and we know that we will be moving further away from some loved ones (and closer to a few, fortunately) I count us lucky for every day that we have had to be surrounded by our "tribe."

One of the tributes that has really stuck in my head is what Chris read. It is a poem called "Sonnet: Love is Not All" by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.

I love this poem. And it seems appropriately fitting this weekend when romantic plans of rainy walks in downtown Portland and dinners at the Cheesecake Factory were traded for frozen Tony's Pizzas and Project Runway (seriously, how glad are you that Ricky and that hat are gone?) The reality of our lives is that it is filled with much more nose wiping and early bedtimes than candle-light dinners and rose petals. Our love has changed too, to include two little monkey boys (who are both hitting me right now, BTW) who have pushed both of us nearly to the proverbial edge this week with sleepless nights, and crying, and refusal to take medicine. Sometimes love is more about being the one who gets the cold enough water in the middle of the night for Jonah, or takes Noel on a drive just to get him out of the house so his life isn't ended prematurely, or being willing to sit through Max and Ruby one more time to calm the tears.

When I travel for work, I am sometimes reminded of how awesome I once was. I go out to eat and laugh at awesome jokes, and wear great clothes and go to movies. But I'm happier when I take Jonah to the Sinclair to get him a chocolate donut that he will only eat the outer edge of, or when I watch Noel do the Pinky Dinky Doo Dance, or when I cuddle with my wife on the couch and watch our stories.

Sometimes life takes precedence over love. But I wouldn't trade it away. I do not think I would.

Five Years Down. . .by Amy

So it's 5 AM.  It's supposed to be my anniversary celebration today.  My 5th anniversary.  A biggie.  It started out with a grand idea to go to Vegas.  Then we analyzed our financial situation, and my husband planned, instead, a surprise trip to Portland on frequent flier miles.  Then we had to buy a house, so we changed it to a romantic night over in SLC so as to not leave the children for another weekend.  Then we got deathly ill.  The two kids and I had a fun, joint doctor's appointment together yesterday.  I want to put myself into a self-induced coma until it goes away.  Josh is in Portland watching Cloverfield and eating CPK (and also doing work, but that's hard to focus on right now, isn't it?).  Did I also mention that it's my birthday?  And Valentine's Day?  Oh. . .and part of the "getaway" was shopping for birthday presents, so I guess we won't be doing that.  So instead of continuing to wallow in my pity, I thought I'd share, on the day we were to be celebrating our anniversary, the reason I married the best man I know.

Some of you already know the story (yes, you, single blog reader).  Josh and I met on our LDS missions in Rome, Italy.  And when I say "met," that's really what I mean. . .not like some of those couples who "meet" on their missions and then sit on the stand with each other at their Homecomings.  In our mission diaries, Josh describes me as "the tall sister with the video camera" (swoon.) and I speak of him as a "great guy!".  When we arrived home, we kept in touch through our mutual friend and fellow Anziano, Seth "Jeppie" Jeppesen,  whom we no longer see but hear sightings of like some sort of Loch Ness Monster.  Josh spent some time selling turkey legs in Florida, which turned out to be an extremely lucrative career move (note:  had to borrow money from parents for return ticket home) and I did a study-abroad in London where I sometimes think I left a part of my soul.  It was there that I decided that I might be interested in him (remember, Annie?).  He made me laugh. . .we wrote long e-mails and worked up huge phone bills (sorry, mom!).  So a couple of months later, I told him that.  And he said no thanks.

This is 1999.  My heart was broken. . .at least for a couple of days.  I remember going over to his house and making him "talk about it."  Not at all uncomfortable.  I liked seeing him squirm. Josh loves confrontation.  And then. . .as quickly as it came, it went away.  We were best friends for two years after that.  My mom still insists that I was in love with him this entire time, but I wasn't.  I distinctly remember, after traveling with him on one of our various vacations, that I had "dodged that bullet."  He was the best friend a girl could have.  When I decided to pick up and move to L.A., he was the one who made the drive with me and my parents and hauled my furniture up two flights of stairs.  He didn't judge me or think I was crazy or question some off-the-wall decisions I was making during those years  -- he supported me unconditionally, and still does.

After two years of traveling and partying with friends, I was driving my car to work (this was November 2001).  I was thinking about this rather cute fellow teacher that I worked with and whether I could get his attention somehow that day.  And then. . .bam!  The voice:  "You need to tell Josh that you need to start dating."  Um. . .what?  Been there, done that.  Wasn't that enjoyable the first time.  No thanks.  Unfortunately, I couldn't shake the feeling.  I decided that, when I went home for Thanksgiving, if I still had those same thoughts, I'd THINK about talking to him again, even though masochism is on my short list of things I like to avoid.  I was in trouble -- he was wearing these brown corduroys. . .and my heart flipped, which it hadn't even done in 1999.  

I put it off until my Christmas visit that year.  And then I told him what I'd been thinking, and I heard those words every woman has been dying to hear all of her life. . ."Um, sure. . .we could give it a try." (pitter, patter).  And the rest was history.  A really slow history, though, since we'd already been best friends for 4 years.  He moved out to L.A., we dated, we got engaged 10 months later, he set the wedding date for another year in the future, I cried, he moved it up, and we were married on February 8th, 2003.  Not without effort, wouldn't you say?  He was absolutely worth it, though.

I look at my two boys, overwhelmingly grateful that they'll be able to love their mom, but really emulate their dad.  I see in them the kind of traits I know they got straight from him:  their earnestness, loyalty, kindness, optimism, charisma, and endless capacity to love.  Their long torsos.  Their ability to, at 3 and 2 years old, polish off a large pizza.  The most beautiful, long-fingered, graceful hands.  Their comedic timing.  Their unbelievable imaginations.  

Here's to new adventures that await us, and hopefully a sixth anniversary that's better than this one. 

Hi, I'm Susanne Wong

We did it. We bought a house. After the successful selling of our house last week, we decided to head out to rainy Portland to find a place to live. We were greatly inspired by the fact that we need to be out of our house by the 21st and want to limit the amount of time we live in our in-laws basement. Our in-laws are lovely to offer to let us live in their basement (actually I don't think they offered - I think we just told them we were moving in,) but we hate to wear out our welcome. We flew in on Wednesday and went house hunting like an episode of House Hunters on crack, except without Susanne Wong reminding us of which houses we liked and which we didn't. By the end of the day we were exhausted, and all the houses were starting to blur together. Our conversations sounded something like this:
"Which house did we like?"
"The one with the alcove."
"Did it have a kitchen?"
"Yes."
"But not the one with the bassett hound and the owner's underwear laying on the floor, right?"
"Right."

We really had narrowed it down to three. (Just like on House Hunters!) Which one would we choose:

A) Seventies home on a big lot.









B) Newer development with a little yard









C) Charming neighborhood, charming home, perfect!










Which one did we choose?...(cue House Hunters' theme song)...

The charming home in the charming neighborhood!
We are thrilled. It is the right size, for the right price, in a really cute neighborhood that seems to have a lot of kids. It is in a good ward and in a great stake. (Chanel's stake, to be exact.) There is a Trader Joe's 5 minutes away, a Costco 10 minutes away, and 2 Target's, each within 3 miles. What more do you need?!?!
We made an offer, and it was accepted. So we are moving...gulp. We are terrified, but happy and relieved to know that we have somewhere to live that we are excited about. There is a 4th bedroom, so come and visit! No, not you, creepy random blog reader. I am referring to our lovely friends and family.
I will post more pics and info soon. I am getting on a plane.