Our New Home

In the time span of one year we have lived in five different apartments! In her nine months of life Brylee has lived in four.  This Pennsylvania apartment may not be my favorite apartment but I am excited to be somewhere for more than a few months and for a place to really feel like home.  Every time we moved I knew we weren't going to be in the apartment for long so I never got to unpack all my boxes, but I finally did!  We never got to see the apartment before we moved in so we talked and said that if we didn't love it we could always move when the lease was up.  After all the moving we've done recently I decided we are Never, ever ever moving again until we are leaving Pennsylvania!  Luckily, I actually like the apartment.  Housing is crazy expensive here, and everything is really old.  Our place has done a nice job of renovating.

We love the little town we're in, it feels very safe. There are trees everywhere, its gorgeous! So here are a few pics of the new place:

Living room, it looks a little bare with just our loveseat and recliner.  Definitely regret selling our couch and loveseat in Rexburg!

 One of the worst things about our apartment is the tiny kitchen! they recently renovated so the cabinets and counter are cute, they just forgot to put some on the other side of the kitchen.  There's hardly any counter space or storage.  There is only one tiny little drawer.  My kitchen is extremely cluttered because there is no space, thus i am storing my kitchen knives on top of the refrigerator, I know not the safest place. Brylee loves that we store our food on the carts, she thinks its so fun to play with! 

Dining room,, we still need to get a table.

Our tiny little bathroom!

 Sam's favorite part of the apartment is the intercom.  There is a door to our apartment building that lets you into the different apartments (like Seinfeld)  you have to have a key to get in or have someone buzz you in.  Instead of taking the key with him when he leaves Sam makes me buzz him in, and he won't come in until I actually talk over the intercom!

We have a balcony off of our bedroom, and we love our view. Here's a few more pics of the courtyard.

Now for the slightly scary part of the apartment.  unfortunately we don't have a washer and dryer in our apartment, but there is one in the basement.  The basement is kind of creepy especially if the lights are off.  The good news is, if we ever have a tornado we have a place to go!

Storage Room

We're enjoying this apartment and look forward to living here long term, which for us is more than four months!  I'm still working on Bry's room, it's turning out pretty cute.

The BIG Move

Whew...I can't believe we've already been in Pennsylvania for almost two weeks! We're finally all settled in.  Sam Started school this week, well just orientation so no homework yet!  It has been so fun having him home all the time, Brylee has sure loved it.

We were sad to leave Oklahoma and all of our friends there, but we love Pennsylvania.   Oklahoma will always have a special place in our hearts because its where we became parents for the first time, and where our sweet little girl was born.

The drive across the country was a looooooooooong one.  It was definitely more beautiful than the drive to Oklahoma from Idaho, no grass-less Wyoming or flat Kansas to drive through.  The East is beautiful, in the words of my father-in-law "it kind of makes you wonder why people even moved out west." (Except for Montana, which will always be the most beautiful place in the world to me.

We reserved a 16' Budget truck but when we got there we realized it was a two seater, which posed a problem since there were three of us.  They gave a 24' truck, which had much more room than we needed!  We also towed our car, good thing Sam was the driver or we might not have made it.  As much as he got tired of driving the truck for three days straight he never got tired enough to trust me behind the wheel!

Brylee was in her element for the first day and a half.  Normally she's in the backseat and has to arch her neck way back to catch a glimpse of mom and dad.  She loved sitting in the middle between us.  We supplied her with lots of snacks, toys, and entertainment (Both of us belting Taylor Swift at the top of our lungs, yes Sam is a Taylor fan).  I also taught her a few veggie Tales songs which she thought were hilarious.

Singing along with mama.

In order to save money and time we brought a cooler and bought some groceries instead of eating out. I thought pb&j's sounded good.  I've always thought the idea of peanut butter and jelly in the same kind of gross and for extremely lazy people. However on a road trip across the country it kinda made sense, so I tried it for the first time, not bad.

We stayed in two hotels.  We'd pass places advertising really low places, but it never failed both the towns we stopped  in had something going on making hotel prices really high, even for the not so nice hotels/motels.  I guess that's life though.

By day three Brylee was done riding in a car seat all day.  Every time we'd go to put her in it she'd arch her back and scream.  Once she was out of that thing, boy was she a happy girl!

When we left Oklahoma City Sam told me to grab our change bag for the tolls, well that worked for the first toll...We were shocked when we learned we had to pay a ten dollar toll twice...then we got to Pennsylvania where we paid a fifty dollar toll! our pennies and quarters certainly weren't enough, luckily there was an ATM at a travel plaza along the way!

We were so excited to finally make it.  We found our complex, but the roads were narrow and we couldn't find a place to park.  We couldn't turn the truck around so we decided to loop around the block.  Unfortunately in PA there is no such thing as just around the block because the cities are not laid out on grids.  Streets don't connect and make figure eights.  So after getting slightly lost we referred back to Janice (our GPS) and found the apartment again.  We went to unload the car, and realized it was dead.  which was wonderful since we had lots of Friends and neighbors we could call to help us jump it...not. Lucky for us this really sweet neighbor who lives across the street asked if we needed help and jumped our car.  The people are so nice here (as long as they're not driving).  We met most of our neighbors.  Also our ward came to help us move in!  I put Brylee in the backpack and we got the truck unloaded!

Our little town is so cute we love it, accept the roads!  there is one road we take everywhere, and its the strangest thing, you have to make multiple turns in order to stay on this road.  Multiple times we've gone straight ( because normally that's how you follow a road) only to find that we were on a different road.  I think the people out here got confused, normally if you have to turn that means you are on a new road, I guess they didn't get the memo.  I would not survive without the GPS!  The drivers here are crazy, Utahans would fit right in!  They are not remotely courteous!  I miss the Midwest.  In Oklahoma if you had to merge or change lanes all you had to do was turn your blinker on and people would always let you in, they'd even change their speed for you. Here, you turn your blinker on and the person automatically speeds up to make sure you can't get in!  Within five minutes of being here we had two people honk at us, one person use a middle turn lane to pass us, and another passed us on a double line, mainly because we were going two  miles under the speed limit! Ah, oh well guess We'll just have to get use to it.

View from our bedroom.

Another thing we noticed is there isn't a lot of  chain stores here, especially when it comes to restaurants.  There's tons of mom and pop shops which is fun!  But I do miss Chic-fil-a!

We love our ward here, there are lots of grad students, so tons of little babies for Bry to play with! There is so much history around us, hopefully we'll be able to see everything in the two years we're here!