Halloween (Costume Success)

After not feeling like dressing up for Halloween last year G and I started brainstorming months ago about what to dress up as this year. We went Halloween costume shopping multiple times and nothing caught our eye. We decided that we wanted to have a family theme and so we tried to find costumes for Mario, Toadstool and Princess Peach (video game characters) but we did not have much luck. Ultimately, we decided that it would be entertaining to dress up as Mayo (G), Ketchup (Me) and Fry Sauce (Mr B).

As you may have guessed, Mayo, and Fry Sauce are not your average Halloween store costumes and so they would need to be handmade. This would be no big deal had the years of my mom trying to teach me to sew left me with an "an actual ability to sew" rather than the "ability to plug in my sewing machine and stare at the thing." Nonetheless, I decided it was high time that I conquer my fear of my sewing machine, take the thing out of the box, plug it it and actually sew with it.

G took pity on me, and googled how to operate my sewing machine and youtube (the internet video site) had a video that could help us. So with the machine set up I was ready to go. Well almost, because our costumes were so unique I had to design the costumes myself and so I painstakingly cut of pieces for each of our three costumes (I am incredibly scissor challenged so this was the hardest part by far).

I started sewing Tuesday night and about 5 hours later (over that night and the next two) I finished. As seen by the pictures they are of questionable quality but they were entertaining. So much so that we won the ward costume contest award for "most creative." That should have been what left me feeling proud, but I am above all else proud that I finally conquered my fear of sewing, and actually completed my first "unassisted project" and it feels great. I know actually want to sew things, my next project is a BYU carseat cover for Mr. B (hopefully it turns out well).

Farewell Single Student Housing: Hello Married Apartment #3

I am not sure if G and I mentioned it yet, but anyhow it is definitely time that I mention that we no longer manage student apartment complexes. The whole thing began early in September, when we started toying around with the idea of moving and leaving our jobs as apartment managers. at that time we did not find anywhere that fell into the category of somewhere where we could both afford and enjoy living in.

About a week after that G brought up Wymount (BYU's married student on-campus housing), I had been there before and thought that they were a great place to live, so we began to see if they had any openings. Since Wymount is notoriously hard to get in to, we feel incredibly blessed that an apartment opening was posted while we were online looking. Low and behold it was opening up on September 17th and so we could move in the next week.

We are so thankful for all the friends, family, and ward members that pitched in to get us moved in record timing. Not a small feat given that we moved from and to a second story apartment. I ended up needing to work for part of the morning that we moved and so I was super impressed to hear that it only took an hour to unload the moving van, and this was not do to a lack of stuff, but rather was the result of substantial teamwork.

We have been settled and unpacked for awhile now and we are loving our new place. Although I continued to return to the complex to train my replacement, as of Friday I completed my last day of work and I am now a stay at home mom. It has already been so delightful to spend my mornings walking around the beautiful paths at Wymount. I shamelessly try to strike up conversations with all the women I meet. Although I feel like its hard to be new in a place where there are so many other "new people" (as married student housing has a huge tenant turnover from month to month) we feel that as we continue to meet our neighbors that we will begin to love it here, even more than we already do.