We are approved!!!

We are excited to say that our adoption agency approved our application today and our profile is now viewable online! All the information needed to see it is at the left, including the link directly to our profile which has a letter to birth parents, photos with captions, a "getting to know us" section, and contact information.

So please freely pass this information along to any who might benefit from it. Anyone can also view our profile by going through http://www.itsaboutlove.org/ as a "guest" - they don't need to sign in or be registered. They can find us by simply putting in our first names and select the state of Utah. We will be sending emails out to family and friends with the links in case they have not seen our blog.

If you can't sing, learn to play an instrument...

Our recent purchase has much more to do with my inability to sing than with Jared's. He and his whole family can sing very nicely and many of them can play the piano. I have talked for a long time about learning to play the piano and I am finally on my way! Since we bought it almost a week ago we both have been playing each day, and I hope that doesn't change. I am nearing the end of my two beginner books and I want to get a book to help me learn to play hymns. We went digital, a Yamaha, because we weren't interested in the piano in terms of appearance, although they can be really beautiful. Thanks to advice from my mom and Jared's sisters, the piano has weighted keys and headphones so that we can play without worrying how we sound to anyone else in the room. I really like that I will be able to easily move it to another room or downstairs. It also has several other functions, a metronome, adjustments for brilliance, reverb, effect, and touch. We can also connect through a USB to save and download music. At this point, of course I am still trying to comprehend sharps, flats, and recognize exactly which note I am playing. But I am loving the process.

The Old House

This log home was built in 1873 or 1874 and has been in Amy's family since 1894 when Amy's great grandfather purchased it along with some farm land. Amy's father and his siblings were raised in this home. Currently Amy's aunt owns it and has rented it to family over the course of the years. Our home is currently on a piece of the farm land that Amy's great grandfather farmed. As you may have guessed, we live around many other family members who also built homes on the farm land.

Amy's father, cousins, aunts and their friends did a great deal of work renovating the log home prior to renting it to the first non family member ever!!! Amy is helping remove tape from the windows.

Amy's Garden Gourds

I was so excited to have a large garden this year. We grew peas, tomatoes, peppers, corn, spaghetti squash, gourds, raspberries, peaches and pumpkins. The gourds were really fun to watch grow - we trained the vines onto a fence so they could hang down and retain better form. This worked really well and definitely saves space in the garden. We ended up with about 49 gourds total - now we have about 44 since some didn't make it. My whole aim of growing them was to dry them and then...? I'll probably put them on top of our high cabinets for visual interest, kind of a gourd grouping. The photos show them in various stages of drying - the brown ones are dry. If you shake them you can hear the seeds rattling around inside - I love it. I am so easily entertained. The last picture is a close up of one that my niece claimed as her own, we both liked the pattern on it.

Snow Covered Timp

A beautiful picture from our back yard of the snow covered Mount Timpanogos. We are so lucky to live in such a beautiful location.

Books Jared read in 2009

• Outliers
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• My Antonia
• East of Eden
• Predictably Irrational
• Grapes of Wrath
• Rescue of the 1856 Handcart Companies
• Handcarts to Zion
• The Man Who Listens to Horses
• Ghost Soldiers
• Tears in the Darkness
• The Undaunted
• The Partner
• The Tipping Point

More than five thousand pages read. Who would of thought I would enjoy reading. There is hope for others!

Family party

We loved having everyone at our home on Saturday. Someday we will have our basement finished so we can do a giant sleepover. It was so fun to watch the smallest kids sled down our little hill - especially when they crashed. As long as no one got hurt right? Thanks to Mom for the pizza. Here are a few pics from the shindig.