Family Update :)

The past few weeks have flown by and have felt so busy…maybe because I’ve been working a little bit more.  You’d think only working 2 days a week wouldn’t be that stressful, but somehow we manage to fill every other minute with…something!  Here are some random thoughts/tidbits of what we’ve been up to:

Last Sunday after church, we packed up the fam and headed to Silver Falls State Park to enjoy the beautiful nature.  It is literally our backyard Hawaii!  There are 10 huge waterfalls along the 8-mile trail, moss covering everything & ferns in every empty open piece of ground.  It is beautiful.  It was a perfect trip except for the fact that we took probably close to 20 pictures and somehow by the time we made it home there were only 4 left on the camera.  We don’t know if it turned on while in the backpack or what, but it was a major bummer.  Other than that it was a fantastic family day!  One random thought for that day – we used our GPS to get there and were reminded again how technology, despite being very helpful, is not perfect.  Our GPS makes several mistakes on its “voice mode” that just make us laugh.  For one, any time a street name includes “Dr” for drive, the GPS says doctor.  It’s pretty humorous being instructed to turn right on Silver Creek Doctor.  Come on, its whole purpose is to give road directions and it doesn’t know the abbreviation ‘Dr’?  It also mispronounces words such as Butte.  Whenever we use it to drive to Spencer’s Butte Park, it informs us at least 3 times that we are approaching ‘Spencer’s Butt’.  Also very entertaining.  And for highways etc that use state abbreviations, it always says “or” for OR (Oregon).  It says Utah for UT, but instructs us to ‘merge onto or highway 105’.  Another one of those things that I just want to say, “Seriously? You were built for road directions!”  Anyway, random thought!  

As for an update on Nate, he had a crazy transition to his new job but is settling into it and starting to feel more comfortable.  The clerk who was supposed to train him got another job and his last day ended up being Nate’s first.  They overlapped for about 4 hours – and that’s about all the training Nate got!  After that the attorneys started giving him projects and despite feeling a little bit overwhelmed, he jumped right in.  After being there for one week he was asked to train the other clerk who started a week later.  Yesterday he spent the day drafting witness questions and prepping witnesses for a trial today.  I think the attorneys have a lot of faith in him!  He is doing great and I am so proud of him.  We also have loved that Nate can leave all his work at the office and just be with us in the evening. With schoolwork he was usually feeling guilty at night knowing he needed to be studying.  Another bonus of his job is how close it is to the hospital where I work.  We’re just a few minutes apart so we carpool every day we both work and a couple times have been able to meet for lunch.  It’s almost like getting to go on a date in the middle of the day. Simple pleasures!

In other Wolfley news, we have been really working on food storage and recently bought a deep freezer.  Not very exciting to most people, but we were pretty thrilled about it!  Not to mention it has really helped clean out our fridge and freezer – a great accomplishment, especially since last Friday I spent about an hour cleaning a half-gallon of spilled ranch out of our fridge.  It was put away without a lid (probably me) and dumped down the back, on the shelves & under the drawers.  NOT a fun mess to clean up!  But on the bright side, we now have a very clean refrigerator!  We also recently set up our Shelf Reliance can rotating system & I am in organizer heaven.  Thanks Nate (he was very reluctant to let me buy it…but I think he now enjoys it…he just might not admit it!)

Our little Miss Sage is following in her sister’s footsteps and loves to sing!  She can sing “Twinkle, Twinkle”, “Jesus Wants me for a Sunbeam”, “Eensy-Weensy Spider”, “Old Macdonald”, “Pat-a-Cake” and the ABC’s all by herself.  Quite a list for 20 months!  She does skip a few words here and there, but I still think it is pretty impressive…and adorable!  Since I’ve been in video posting mode lately, here is a sample of her singing. :) Love it! 

As for our projects, Nate finished our kitchen table!!  We inherited it from Nate’s parents almost a year ago and have since been working on sanding and re-staining it.  We never could have imagined how much work it would be!  The detail on the chairs took hours and hours to sand and Nate literally worked on it for months.  He was so patient through my nagging and lack of help (I am the world’s worst sander & absolutely can’t stand the fine layer of sawdust that covers EVERYTHING within miles of the object being sanded). Needless to say, Nate was sweet to do it all on his own and it was SO worth it!  The finished product looks fantastic and it will be a great table for us for a long time.  I am so happy to finally have a table with a leaf & six chairs so we can seat everyone whenever we’re entertaining. Thanks again to my very hardworking husband, I love you!

Our chairs: before, during & after!  You can see all the tiny details that Nate had to deal with...he did a great job!

 

The finished product, minus the leaf & 2 chairs

 

 

I also want to send a thank you to my sweet sister Allison who gave me the fabulous idea to start a dinner exchange group.  She has been doing it for several months with some neighbors and it sounded heavenly so I talked about it with some good friends and we got a group going for ourselves.  Basically there are 4 families and we each cook dinner for the other 3 one night a week.  That means Monday-Thursday I only cook once but each night we have a delicious hot and home cooked meal.  Sound amazing?  Oh it is!  We have so much more time to spend as a family in the evening, we eat earlier, we get to try new recipes, and on days I work we have dinner waiting for us when we get home.  I don’t think I ever want to stop!

As for our friends, the bummer about being in school is that every summer we inevitably lose some great friends who have graduated.  In about a week, Bryce & Melissa Huff are moving back to Utah. They have been such wonderful friends and we have loved spending so much time with them and their two cute boys. Melissa is one of the women in our playgroup that I have gotten together with every single week for the past year.  She has been a great support to me and has felt more like a sister than a friend. They are an amazing family and while we wish them the best of luck in their next adventure, we will be missing them here!  We love you guys!

Me * Chelsea Belton * Melissa Huff

 

Playing at the park

 

Simon & Calvin Huff

 

All the kiddos :)

 

Calvin * Mac * Simon * Sage

Well, that’s been our last couple weeks in a nutshell.  Things are busy, but life is good! :)