Happy Thanksgiving!

For Thanksgiving this year we were invited over to Bishop Nealon's house. We ate a delicious dinner with the Bishop and his family. They had 3 of their 4 young single adult children at home with them. I didn't take any pictures, but I should have. I brought sweet potatoes and a cranberry salad. More neighbors came later on for the pies and dessert. Everyone loved Ethan and wanted to hold him.

After dessert we went to another member of ward's house for a game night with some other families. There were probably 15 kids ages 11 and under and it was imaginably loud and chaotic. Ethan didn't do very well with all the noise, etc. so it was a little rough and it took a really long time for him to settle down and go to sleep. The adults played a version of a game called celebrity. Jason and I never excel at any games that have to do with pop culture. We're both pretty clueless in that genre. :) It was fun to get to know some other families in the ward and they were really nice to us.

The rest of the weekend we spent getting Christmas decorations up and looking for a car. Since we sold my car in Utah, we've been on the lookout for another one here. We thought we had found one that would work, but were disappointed when it didn't end up working out. We're just trying to be patient for the right one to come along.

We are so grateful for the Church and for the gospel. I don't know how other people just move across the country without another immediate social network to tap into. It's been so helpful and reassuring. We've definitely been missing having family close by, but we're grateful for the many blessings we have, including access to phones and Skype to still stay in contact with people we love.

Greetings from Kentucky!

Well, we made it to Florence, Kentucky! The last month has passed by like a whirlwind. After Jason returned from finding us a place to live, we spent our last two weeks in Utah packing, taking care of errands, and saying our goodbyes. None of it seemed real. And of course everything took longer than we thought it would. I still get a little teary-eyed thinking about the MANY family members, friends, neighbors, and practical strangers that came to help us even when we thought we could do it on our own. It’s a tribute to them that we didn’t have any all-nighters of packing, cleaning, etc. And since this is the month of Thanksgiving, I wanted to give a shout out to a few of them, although I know I’ll miss some since they are too numerous to mention them all.

Thank you to my friends and co-workers at Imagine Learning that truly cared about me and were so kind to me while I was there. It was hard to say good-bye.

Thank you to my neighbor and friend across the street for buying my car and connecting us to a large stack of great packing boxes from the hospital.

Thank you to Mom B for helping us pack and making dinner for us so we could keep packing. Sorry we were so boring while you were here to visit! J

Thank you to my parents for taking an extra week off of your Church Service Mission to help us pack.

Thank you to my childhood friend Marilee for coming and helping us pack and clean for several hours, and then coming back the next day and helping several more hours just because you could tell we needed more help.

Thanks to my siblings for storing and donating unwanted furniture so we could have something to take with us.

Thank you to the Relief Society President and Young Women’s President who showed up on our last day and cleaned most of the apartment. That was so helpful!

Thank you to the Young Women and leaders of the Sharon 8^th Ward for letting me be a part of you for a little more than a year and for helping me in more ways than I was able to serve you.

Thank you to the sisters of the Relief Society and to Sally for feeding us meals the few days before we left when we didn’t have time to cook or dishes to cook with.

Thank you to several of my neighbors/friends and to Chelsey who took Ethan for a couple hours at a time during really crazy packing and loading times.

Thank you to the Elders Quorum, Teachers Quorum, and my brother Keith, for showing up, even at the last minute, to help load and arrange our belongings in the truck. And a special thank you to Kameron Bascom who brought his three children in the car and left it running for an hour an half so that they could watch a movie while he helped us pack the truck!

Thank you to my parents, Mike and Desi in Colorado, and Andy and Kimra in Illinois, for feeding us and letting us stay overnight with you while we drove the 2000 miles of our journey.

Thank you to our new Relief Society President in Kentucky for coming on the day we arrived and welcoming us with a warm home-cooked meal.

Thank you to the Northern Kentucky Elders Quorum and Priests Quorum for helping us--people they had never met--unload the truck in the rain for over an hour.

And thank you, Lord, for helping Jason find a good job and us a safe place to live, and for blessing us with such dear friends and families.

Just thinking about all this service makes me feel so loved. What little have Jason and I done to deserve all this?!? That’s how I feel when I think about all of this.

Home Teacher, Elder's Quorum President, and Young Mens Presidency helping pack our stuff into an ABF truck. We paid by the footage, so we tried to pack it high and tight.

Halloween! The morning we left to drive across the country.

Our 5-yr-old nephew Grant LOVED to hold Ethan and usually asked to hold him several times each day. When no one was close by Grant would sing Ethan's favorite song, Popcorn Popping, to him to try and make him smile. Grant also asked if Ethan could eat candy because he wanted to give him some of his Halloween candy. So sweet!!

Ethan was definitely the favorite!

I think this is a great picture for "She who rocks the cradle rules the world!"

Just hanging out with Andy and Kimra and fam

Our stuff arrived all in one piece!

Our building in Florence. We live on the middle floor on the right side.

Here's Ethan sleeping like a baby. Which is pretty representative of how he took the move. :)

This little gym toy totally saved us. Thanks to my co-worker Sherry for giving this to us just in the nick of time to help Ethan not be so bored while we've been packing and unpacking. Perfect timing!