Molly's 1st Birthday!

Molly's birthday was such a fun day. I want to start a birthday tradition with our kids of filling their bedroom with balloons the night of their birthday. That way when they wake up on their birthday there is a party in their room! So Jarom and I blew up a bunch of balloons the night before and threw them all in her room. When she woke up on her birthday we went in there together and we put all of the balloons in her crib. She loved it.

We drove up to Gilbert that morning and met Grandma and Grandpa Walker for lunch. Molly was hilarious and wouldn't sit in her high chair. She had to sit on the table all leaned up against her grandma. Crazy girl.

After her birthday lunch we headed over to my parent's house. She took a nap and then we got her all dressed up for her party. She was a little obsessed with her presents and we had to keep pulling her away from them.

We took her outside while waiting for everyone to get there and she thought she was all big and had to walk in the street. She has this weird obsession lately with going in the street! I don't know if it's because I tell her not to or what. But it drives me nuts. Anyways, it was her birthday, so we let her. My mom and Taya and I were in a circle around her watching for cars.

Then it was time for her birthday dinner with Grandma and Grandpa Rogers! She seriously has too much personality. We love her for it though.

Then the Walker's all came over for cake and presents! She was seriously so spoiled. She got clothes, shoes, a doll, a swing, bath toys, and a rocker/scoot toy.

She loved the cake and made an awesome mess!

Birthdays are so much fun. We love our little 1 year old!

Halloween 2015

Molly's First Halloween! It was kind of fun that she was a little older and walking for her first Halloween. It meant I could take her trick-or-treating {free candy} without getting judged for it! Sorry but a 2 month old should not go trick or treating. It's pretty freakin' obvious who the candy is for. The night before Halloween our ward did a little Halloween party. Unfortunately it was cold and rainy and the party was outside. So it all went rather quickly.

Molly had two costumes for Halloween {thanks Jolyn!}. So for the ward party she was Molly Mouse. And she was stinkin' adorable if I do say so myself. And she loved carrying her pumpkin bucket. When it came time for the "trunk-or-treat" part of the party she got one piece of candy in her bucket and she couldn't get past it. So she spent a lot of time like this:

I eventually convinced her to get more candy but after each piece she spent quite a bit of time going through her stash. Ha! On Halloween morning we decided to go the Marana Pumpkin Patch and oh my goodness it was totally worth it! It was like $10 for each of us to get in (not Molly) and it included pretty much everything. There was a huge hay stack, a train, a trailer ride out to the pumpkin patch, multiple corn mazes, a petting zoo, air pillows, and a ton of other stuff.

We totally wore Molly out there and I think that is going to be a new Halloween tradition for us! That night Molly was dressed up as an Owl. Quick side story: Molly had this Halloween book about an owl named Wickle Woo that she was obsessed with! We read that book so many times. She eventually shredded it {her love is a little rough sometimes}. But we called her Wickle Woo in this costume.

When we lived in Mesa, our neighborhood was horrible for trick or treaters. We only stayed home one year to pass out candy and we had about 10 people the whole night. We weren't really sure what to expect in  our new neighborhood, but there are always kids at the park by us so we were hoping for a good trick-or-treating neighborhood. And it was! We were a little under prepared and ran out of candy at about 7pm. Oops! While Jarom passed the candy out, I took Molly trick or treating to a few houses. We didn't make it very far because after each house she had to spend several minutes going through her stash again.

When we made it back to our house Molly became a huge fan of giving the candy out to the trick or treaters. She actually did a good job at it!

Halloween was so much fun with a kid. I know next year will be even more fun when she "gets" it just a little bit better!

Kitchen Remodel {Part 2} - Cabinet Installation!

So once we finally had all of our cabinets it was time to install them. Keep in mind we had never done a project like this before. And we were doing it all ourselves. So youtube became Jarom's best friend. He did a lot of research and video watching trying to figure out the best way to install the cabinets. We decided to start from the corner and go down one wall, then go back to the corner and head the other way. To keep the bottom of the cabinets level (and to make it easier to hold the cabinet up while it was getting screwed in) we screwed a long 2x4 board into the wall that we could rest the cabinet on.

Our kitchen after removing all the old stuff and before the new stuff got put up. It was a hot mess.

Let me just say that our kitchen was a DISASTER during this period. Not only was it completely non functional, it was just a horrible mess. We had boxes of new cabinets EVERYWHERE. It was insane.

And this was our family room. You couldn't walk in it. At all. 

So we wanted to get started on this project but finding a completely free Saturday is pretty hard to do. We ended up starting the project one afternoon and thankfully Kaitlyn and Josh were able to come down and help us get started on it. The installation took us way longer than we thought. On the first day, we got the top cabinets of one wall (probably the smallest wall) done. And that was it. Not exactly encouraging.

After Day 1 of installation.

Over the next week, Jarom and I spent every spare minute working on it. The only problem was that Molly was scared of the noise the drill made, but somehow she could sleep through that noise! So naptime and late at night became our working hours.

We discovered that houses are built really crappy. Walls are not straight and floors are not level. At all. It made it difficult in some places to get the cabinets in place. And I wasn't as good of an assistant as Josh. I'm pretty positive that frustrated Jarom on more than one occasion. It took us about 3-4 days to get all of the top cabinets installed. Then it was time for the base cabinets. This was easier because Jarom could do it on his own. And we didn't have to hold the cabinets up in the air. It was going pretty smoothly until we got to the second corner and then we had some major issues.

So we get to the second corner and we are supposed to put in a 6 inch spacer and then the sink cabinet. Well we center the sink cabinet on the window and there is a 12 inch gap between it and the next cabinet. It is only supposed to be 6 inches. So we start looking into stuff trying to figure out what happened. Turns out the window measurement got put into the computer wrong so that whole wall is off by 6 inches.

The troublesome corner. Jarom actually had a lot of issues with this corner in pretty much everything we did. He hates that corner.

The 12 inch gap that should have been 6 inches. That is the spacer that was supposed to go in the space.

We have 2 options: a) just go with what we have and have the sink be off center of the window or b) buy a 12 inch cabinet to go in the space. We opted to go with option b. So we go to home depot (luckily that cabinet was in stock and we didn't have to wait for it to come in) and buy the cabinet and finish installing the base cabinets. However, the problem now is that the counter top for that wall is 6 inches too short.

After installing the 12 inch cabinet.

Now we had to figure out what to do for the counter. I had the idea to buy a butcher block counter and insert it into the counter somewhere to make it longer. And then we would have a built in cutting board and I thought it would look really cool. We were super excited about this idea and started looking into it. Long story short, we thought it was going to work out so we cut the counter where we wanted to insert the block but then it didn't end up working out. So we had to buy another counter top for that wall. Bummer. We had to wait like 3 more weeks for that to come in. But the original counter for that wall (the one we cut) we decided to use on a different wall as a built in office/work space! I'm super excited about that and will post about it once it is all done.

So anyways, that was the drama of our cabinets. It was miserable having to live through it, but it doesn't sound as bad all written out. Next I will post about the counter top installation and the floor installation!

My baby is 1!

1 week old Molly

1 month

As Molly has gotten older, I haven't really been sad at all. I've actually been really excited! We were all for sitting up, crawling, walking, all that fun stuff. It was exciting to see and fun to watch her learn and grow.

2 months

3 months

4 months

But then she was eating lunch the other day. She ate a hotdog, string cheese, and raspberries. All by herself. With no help from me. My little girl can feed herself. The one thing that she completely relied 100% on me and only me for, she can now do by herself. For some strange reason it made me really sad.

5 months

6 months

7 months

  My little girl isn't so little anymore. She can walk. She can communicate what she wants (mostly by pointing). She plays with us. She can tease us. She is pretty dang independent.

8 months

9 months

10 months

The past 12 months have flown by! They really have. But at the same time, this sweet girl has been a part of our family for ever and I can't believe we have only had her for a year!

11 months

1 year!

Happy 1st Birthday miss Molly! We love you so much!

Rocky Point

Before our kitchen remodel project really got going, we were invited by David and Jayne (my aunt and uncle) to come with them to their house in Rocky Point! They would be there for a week, but it only worked for us to go for the weekend (General Conference weekend). We still jumped at the chance though and are so glad we did!

We headed down to Mexico on Friday afternoon when Jarom had finished work for the day. Jayne had said that it is much easier to find the house before dark, aaaandd we really didn't want to be driving around Mexico at night. So we left at about 2:45pm and it's a 4 hour drive so that would give us a little bit of extra time to get there before dark. Well we didn't account for it being a Friday afternoon/evening and a lot of people heading down for the weekend. In Why we had to wait in line about 30 minutes to get our Mexican insurance and then there was about a 30 minute line to get into Mexico! So we were getting a little stressed about getting there before dark. Oh and since we were in Mexico (international) we couldn't use data on our phones without getting charge huge fees. And we couldn't text or call anyone. And we had never been to their house before (well I had a long time ago but had no clue how to get there). So we were using screen shots I had taken of some directions Jayne had written out with landmarks to look for and directions that they had gotten us from Google Maps (those had street names but the directions were in Spanish...). It was dark by the time we got to Rocky Point and pretty much impossible to see any street names so we were pretty much relying on the landmarks we were told to look for. One of the landmarks was a police station. We found that pretty quickly, but none of the other landmarks were nearby. We circled that area FOREVER looking for the rest of the landmarks to try and figure out where to go. After almost an hour of being lost we finally pulled into a gas station and Jarom asked them how to get to the neighborhood we knew the house was in (I am so glad he speaks Spanish). Turns out we weren't looking for a police station. We were looking for a fire station. And it was about 2 more miles up the road. Once we finally got those directions we found the house pretty quickly!

We had such a fun time down there! Molly LOVED the water and the sand. She played hard all day long. Jarom went out kayaking, sailing, and quad riding with Uncle David. It was so fun to spend time with family and relax for a little bit! We can't wait to go back (especially now that we know how to get there...)

Kitchen Remodel (Part I)

Pretty much ever since we moved to Tucson, we have been working on remodeling our kitchen! When we sold our Mesa house, we made a nice chunk of change that we decided we would use to do some changes in our new house. It was a debate between the backyard and the kitchen (bet you can't guess who wanted to work on what) but after a week or so of living in the house, the kitchen won! So we had enough cash to get the supplies, but not pay for any labor. So we did EVERYTHING ourselves! Electrical, plumbing, cabinet installation, floor installation. Everything.

It's not that the kitchen was super outdated or anything (the house is only 5 years old...), it was just horribly designed. It is a massive space, but there were hardly any cabinets in the room! And the "pantry" was embarrassingly small. The door to it was seriously half a door. I've never seen a door the size it was. So here are some before pictures:

By the time I remembered to take "before" pictures we had already done some work. So originally the fridge was in the spot between the cupboards and the pantry. We decided to move the fridge to that blue wall to get some more cabinets and counter space in, but to do this we had to knock out the pantry and redo some electrical and plumbing stuff. The light switch that controls the lights over the main cooking area was originally right where we wanted to move the fridge. So we moved that switch down to where the other switches already were and while we were at it, Jarom put a ceiling fan in the kitchen and added a switch for that. It's best for a fridge to be on it's own circuit, so Jarom did some rewiring and put in a new outlet on its own circuit where we wanted the fridge to go. He also had to move some outlets up so they would not be blocked by the new cabinets. We also had to drop a new water line down to where the fridge is now which actually turned out to be the easiest part of this whole thing (Jarom thought it was going to be super difficult)!

The next project was to tear out the pantry. This wasn't super difficult, just messy. Along with tearing out the pantry, we had to remove all of the old cabinets and counter tops.

Over Labor Day weekend, we took advantage of some sales, sat down with a designer at home depot, and got a bunch of cabinets and counter tops ordered! We decided we wanted to do a white kitchen. I love the crisp and clean look of it! So we went with white cabinets, a white/gray marble looking counter top (it is laminate), a dark gray tile backsplash, light gray walls, and a dark wood floor. We are a month into this project and we are so close to being done! Next post will be about the installation of the cabinets!