Week 3

I haven't been feeling well, sorry this is a day late...

On Saturday we went to a cattle auction. It was an interesting, but fun, experience. As you walk in the front doors of the auction house you will notice a little family diner on your right and a cashier desk on your left. In the middle is a set on double doors that lead to the half stadium. There are probably 10 rows up and we sat on the 9th. As you look down you will see a small corral, the floor of which doubles as a scale for the cows. About 11 cows weighing 500ish lbs each could fit on the scale at one time. There were some screens telling us how many cows were on the scale, what the total weight was, and what the average weight was, it was rather interesting and we plan to go again once we are settled in our humble abode  :)    Husband has finally settled on doing a cattle ranch (our bishop is a rather successful cattle rancher and could give him much advice on the subject).

Speaking of which...we have been going to church in our projected ward and are very much pleased with it. But first I must tell you about the ward house...

...we got the address and after we typed it in to Mapquest we found out it was 1 hr 45 min away from our current abode...luckily that means it was only 45 min away from our soon-to-be little nest...

...we started off and after driving for what seemed like 2 hrs (oh wait! It WAS 2 hours) we were supposed to have arrived at our destination...we were in a little town and of course we were looking for a steeple of some sort when driving down the road I saw to my left 2 men in white shirts and ties...and was that a sign in the window reading "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints?!?"...What a wonderful site!!! Turns out our church house happens to be a former furniture building...crazy! It is super cozy with no walls that completely reach the ceiling and 1/3 of the walls are temp walls that get rearranged between each meeting. It was definitely a new experience for me...but all the people are so warm and amazing and they quickly let me know that there is a new chuch building being constructed that we will go to. They say it will hold 3 wards and a little family history center...so I imagine it is probably as big as our stake centers back home...They also informed me that they used to meet in the high school gym, so this was definitely an improvement :)

Our bishop introduced him self with a smile and pointing to his family said, "See that family over there? The multi-colored one? Ya, They're mine." He said it with such fondness that I could not help but ask how many kids he had, to which he replied 25. Yes, 25. I grew so much admiration for this man in about a mili-second! He was not going to think I was crazy for my want of 12 children! How happy!

At church, during Sunday School, we sat on the same row of foldable chairs as another young couple that has a baby only about a month older than Baby. At one point during the lesson, Baby was standing on Husbands lap and he was (we believe) involved in quite the staring contest. It lasted about 5 minutes and was super cute :)

Gee...this has been longer than intended and yet I'm not finished...

Baby attended his first ever football game tonight. Yes...I realize we were sitting in Applebees watching the game on a flatscreen, but it is the only way to get BYU games out here. He even went in a "Y" onzie that a girl in my previous ward made for him :) I will post pics as soon as I'm feeling better...

Week 2

Can I just say, there is nothing that quite compares to the 6 AM donkey EE-AAW that we wake up to every morning?  Yes my dear family and friends, this is him...

Not sure what his name is or why he puts us through this ever day, but...I can't get mad at him because he is just so cute.

We found out this week that the house we are buying appraised for our offer and, henceforth, financing will go through! We are so excited!!! This is also really good news because our realtor just told us the lady that we are buying the house from is already moving out :)  (we were glad to hear all of her hard work moving out is not in vain).  Other than that there is not really anything new to announce...

No, wait! Robert loves eating his elephant.  That is worth announcing :)

Oh! And we are going to a livestock auction this Saturday!  I think these auctions are going to replace the auto auction that we miss so very much. But the good news is these auctions happen every Saturday instead of once a quarter :)  I'll keep ya posted on how it goes. Love you all!!!

Week 1

A week and a half ago we arrived in MO safely thanks to prayers from friends and family.  The only trouble we had was a burned out tail light on the trailer which cost us a couple hours, but Uhaul was good enough to send somone out to fix it. We got in at about 5 AM Sunday morning and passed out at the hotel. We had set alarms to go to church, snoozed them a few dozen times and when we finally got out of bed we had 5 minutes to be at a church meeting that was an hour away...oops.

Our first week here, we got the key to our temporary house (yes, house, not hotel or apartment) on Monday (such a blessing) and Husband started his first day at work. He is in New Hire training and is enjoying it as much as you possibly can, if you catch my drift.  We unloaded the Uhaul (or I should say Husband unloaded the Uhaul) Tuesday night and delivered it Wednesday to the storage facility. I met a really nice antiques dealer that day as well. Nothing else exciting happened until Saturday when Husband took us to the state fair...

It was a BLAST! It is such a big deal here compared to the one in Utah, which should not have been surprising to me, but alas, I was blown away with shock. Here is what blew me away...try to stay in your seat...
John Deere tractors pulling carts around with people in them, and it only cost 50 cents a person to ride!
Insane amount of rides
Multiple "big name" country artists performing
Pig races (yes, you did read that correctly)
Budweiser Clidesdeils (the tack these horses have...crazy beautiful!)
The most amazing ice cream I've ever eaten
1/2 lb hamburgers (yes i did eat one...in one sitting)
 A whole section dedicated to John Deere tractors
Pony pulling events
6th generation circus performers
$5 camel rides (SO tempting)
Bull riding events every night!

I know...so much to do...and we did almost all of it in 9 hours! We will definitely be attending again next year! (Even if it does take 2 hours to get there)

Here are some pics...

The Beginning....

So...I have decided to start a blog :)   I want to be able to keep ya'll informed on our life and travels here in MO. First things first...I am going to very vague on names because of all the fraudsters out there (you can thank my mother and husband for the fear of fraudsters, but hey, I guess after you work in fraud for a few years...it happens). So for everyone's info I will be Wife/Mommy, my husband will be Husband/Daddy, Son will remain Baby...up until we have other additions and then I will have to be more creative :).  Buddy will remain himself, ditto for Kitty.

I know everyone has their own theories and opinions on why we have moved out here, and I would like to debunk them all :)  Let's start from the beginning...because that is the best place to start. I have always loved horses and have always wanted a large family (6 children at least...moving to 12 because husband is fortunate enough to provide for that many), facts that I'm sure everyone has always known lol. Husband has always loved the east/humidity and has taken me back a couple of times, both times I had a strong feeling I would eventually end up here. He also has always wanted horses/ a farm...hence why I married him :) (horse lovers must stick together of course).

Now for the events that led up to the move and left everyone very uninformed and confused, both of which I apologize for. As all of you know we had our house up for sale last year and nothing happened. We then decided a few months later that we were going to stay in our little West city forever and just add on to the house. Once we made that decision, a realtor came to us and told us our zip code was HOT! so we let the realtor put our house on the market again, 4 days later it was under contract...can you say rug pulled out from under us! We started looking for a house that would meet our requirements...big...lots of land (so we could grow our own food + food for horses, hence fulfilling all my dreams and most of Husband's). Utah does not have anything under 300,000 (which is a super low estimate) that can meet those, so we started looking out of state. We found a 4 bed 2 bath house that we can add on to whenever we want and however we want (no building codes to comply with) that has 40 acres, plenty of land to self sustain, that is only 45 minutes away from a large city that Husband can work in so that we do not have to rely completely on the farm. All of our dreams were met so Husband looked for a job, came here to interview and got a job comparable in EVERY way to the one he had in Utah, things were all falling in to place so fast! How could it not be meant to be!?! By the time we found out that Chase wanted Husband here in a week, we did not have time to let everyone know that we had a job, a future place to live (that had an accepted offer) and were moving out of state.

We were kind of stuck between a rock and a hard spot...Sound CRAZY...by telling people we found a house out of state, but didn't have a job or temp place to go...OR wait and then not have enought time to explain all the details. We banked on the fact that it would sound SO much better to move out of state with a job, house, and temp living, but not explain every detail. We did not want everyone to worry, but it created more worry than expected, for that I apologize. Had we had more time we would have been able to have a real going away party, but as it was, we only had time for immediate family things.

Our travels here to this wonderful state began with a bunch of help from friends and family whom I would personally like to thank. We really couldn't have done it without all of you :)  Baby was a joy to travel with. He ate, slept, made his diaper dirty and continued on like that for most of the trip...with a few wonderful smiles mixed in :)  I can not say the same for the dog or the cat...but hey, they tried i guess.

So if I think I've chatted enough...here are some pics of Baby...hope you enjoy!