The Garden

One thing we love about living in Vancouver is gardening. Everything grows so well here! We harvested our first crop a few weeks ago, radishes. We are reading this book called Nourshing Traditions and it is getting us stoked on eating the way people use to before industrilization. We found a local source for ranch eggs and raw goat milk. The goat milk taste like a farm though :-( One day we would love to have some land an plant an orchard, have a garden and practice some grass-based animal husbandry.

sam the camper

Here is a picture of Samantha when we kind of went camping in June. She loved it so much... but then we had to put her to bed in the tent and she was not into it. So she cried and cried and cried until finally at 11:30 pm the camp host came up to our tent and asked if our child was o.k. So we got the hint and packed up everything in the dark with pouring rain. We got home at 1:30 in the morning and we made a vow to never camp again this summer! But isn't she so cute?

Basket Case

Oregon Coast

Last weekend we went to the coast with the Fitche's (isn't it funny that we call it the coast in Oregon and the beach in California). On Saturday we met up with Erik and Marnia Koslow and the dudes went surfing at short sands. It was really fun for several reasons:

1. Samantha can really enjoy it at this age.
2. We haven't seen the Fitche's 4 eva.

3. It was my last free weekend without homework. (I started a Masters in Teaching program)

4. There was a camp fire on the beach to warm ourselves after we surfed.

Washingtonian

It's official, Heather, Samantha and I are now Washingtonians. On January 2nd I interviewed for a job with Forward Edge International, on January 12th they offered me the job, on January 30th we moved to Vancouver, Washington, and on February 28th we got Washington drivers licenses and plates. The move finally felt official today! So far so good, we really like living up here. It is interesting moving to a new place because you never know how long you will live there... 1year, 5 years, the rest of our lives??? We don't know how long but we have decided to act like we will live here forever. Without that mindset it is difficult to put down roots and invest in relationships.

Samantha Walks!

Samantha Talks!

The hunt for the perfect Christmas tree

So last weekend my parents invited us to "beat the snow" and go cut down a Christmas tree. It was a brilliant idea so we said yes. So we headed to a high elevation in the Cascade mountains where we knew we could find the coveted noble fir. We usually go to this spot every year in the snow but this year we were early and to our dismay we found ourselves walking through the thickest tallest brush ever. We found "the tree" about 1/2 of a mile away from the road. I didn't want to walk back through the crazy brush so I took heather and samantha on a 2 mile hike through... yep crazy thick brush (and I fell off a 10 ft. cliff with the tree in hand) and 2 hours later we made it back to the car guided by the sound of my family calling for us. Next year we will wait for the snow.

Halloween

On Halloween our good friends Gary and Courtney Christenson did a little photo shoot for us at Shevlin park. It was super fun and they took some amazing pictures. Afterwords they came over for pizza and Canasta (card game) and we handed out candy to little lady bugs and fairy and teenagers dressed in togas. It only took 45 minutes for us to run out of our candy (3 bags) so then we had to start passing out cigarettes. Here are some of the photos.

Since we haven't blogged forever...

Since we haven't blogged forever here are a few updates:

July: We were going to move to Redmond into a rental we owned but we really didn't want to so heather put a sign in the yard "for sale by owner" and it sold 1 week later and closed in 3 weeks (that's what we call a miracle folks).

We also took a week long family vacation to "the Chaz Mar" heather's families beach house on the Oregon coast. It was nice

August: We had a full on garden (to us at least) and we harvested tomatoes, zucchini, yellow crook neck squash, sweet peas, lettuce and we had a bunch of sunflowers!

September: We moved into a new house with 4 bedrooms (the McGarry's old house). With all the extra room we were able to get a roomate (Jeremiah Spanbaur) as well as have my good friend Adam Short stay with us for 5 weeks while he was doing a rotation for his physicians assistant program.

October: I started a new job at the Church as director of the kid's ministry (and I love it), and we hired a new part time worship leader named Chris Chabot (and I love him).

Heather turned 30 years old! I had a little suprise party for her at our house. We got home from dinner and everyone was hiding in the kitchen. Heather went straight up stairs to feed Samantha, put her to bed and then Heather went in our bathroom to get ready for bed. 15 minutes later she comes down stairs and everyone yelled suprise :-)

Also our really good friends Gary & Courtney Christenson had their baby girl!