Outdoor Preschool

You like my big blast of blog posts? haha! I got pretty behind but I wanted to get caught up before I only want to spend time on Armenia photos. So, this week for preschool it looked like Lindsay's girls were going to be sick so I bagged my lesson for a bit and Marissa and I decided on an outing to the forest. It turned out that Lindsay's girls were feeling much better Thursday morning and were able to go with us. We were so glad! It ended up being the best "lesson" we could have had. Lindsay and her family had never been to our favorite forest and my boys were excited to show them around!

We even had a forest scavenger hunt with little science notebooks. Lacey really got into the scavenger hunt. Miles liked holding his clipboard but not really finding the things on his chart. Charlie and Tali liked running ahead of everyone.

They often stopped to "compare notes." Super precious if you ask me.

 

Checking out a bug-eaten log.

Tali liked to always keep track of William.

The preschoolers! I can't even say how happy it makes me that all 6 of the parents of these children grew up in the same city and have all been friends for so long! And now the kids get to create these amazing friendships.

Everyone was happy to be outside! Miles was hugging (and licking?!) trees again.

And there you have it, another fun day doing preschool, but really, sometimes I think this is more beneficial and fun for us moms anyway.

Hayastan

Less then a week before I depart to Armenia and I realized that i never really made a blog post about me deciding to go to Armenia, I feel that it is significant and should be documented. Haha!

Many of you know that my former companion and great friend Anna Pew Harrison is also an amazing photographer. She has documented many portions of our life including our wedding and many family photo sessions. Nearly a year ago she was telling me about National Geographic photographer that she follows on instagram, who had done some photography in Armenia. Around this same time she had the growing idea of a photography related non-profit that she was wanting to move forward with, she took the time to e-mail this photographer about her ideas just to get them out there. She was not really expecting a response but much to her delight, he did respond and seemed thoroughly interested in her ideas and passion. In the meantime, I looked up this man's work, His name is John Stanmeyer by the way, and fell in love with the photos from Armenia. It was so beautiful to see someone capture the details of that beautiful country. Exciting right? SO then, Anna was planning a trip, for her and her husband to go to Armenia last Fall, but as they prepared, they felt strongly that it wasn't the right time to go to Armenia. It was strange because they have been waiting and wanting to go for so long. Anyway...come December. I get a call early in the morning from Anna saying she's going to Armenia in March and she needs me to come with her. The day before she had just casually been going through Instagram and her heart started pounding when she saw John Stanmeyer was hosting a Photo Storytelling Workshop in none other than Gyumri Armenia. (The city where we were first mission companions) When she first told me, I thought there would be no way I could go, the dates were interfering with what we thought would be our Chile trip and there was no way I could spend that much time away from my kids. However, I have been hungering for more training in photography. Most of what I have learned is from Anna. what better way to learn more than to go to the country I love so dearly with my mentor/friend and another professional photographer who understands the sacredness of that country! I had no idea how it would happen but from that point, I couldn't stop thinking about it. And you know that supportive husband of mine...he was all for it from the beginning. He has never been one to deter me from my ambitions, he has always been the one to say..."let's see how we can make this work!" and I love him so much for that. Yes, he will take on single-fatherhood for nearly two weeks but he does it without complaint because he is truly amazing. The pieces fell into place and we were really able to make it work and I still can't believe that I will be returning.  Here are some photos from my time as a missionary there, you can look forward to much better photos coming soon! PS, Anna, I hope I didn't butcher your story, but rest assured you are one of very few that will read this, haha!)

Valentine's Day

A couple days before Valentine's day Max and I were both realizing it was coming. He had asked me if I had made any plans and I told him that I had barely thought about it (which is 100% true, I was not trying to by a conniving woman) He confessed that that had made him love me more since I didn't have grand expectations. Haha! I'm glad we were both in the same page this year, We still did manage to have some family fun though. 

On Saturday, the day before Valentine's Day we went as a family to the Kennedy School theater. This was a place we've been wanting to go for a long time. If you google "things to do in Portland" this inevitable will show up. We had a gift card so we finally made it happen. It's a 100 year old elementary school that has been converted into a restaurant, brewery, movie theater/restaurant combo, and a hotel. And maybe it's just me, but I love the old elementary school feel! I took limited photos on my phone. The detention room was a cigar room, the teacher's lounge was now the hotel pool, I believe the cafeteria is now the theater. Anyway, pretty fun!

    

The movies were older but nice and cheap. We got there just before the movie (The Good Dinosaur) was about to start and we bought our tickets just before they sold out. It was a bit of a madhouse, Charlie and I went to find seats while Max went to order food. All the seats at tables were filled so we sat in the back. The room is filled with comfortable living room furniture as opposed to movie theater seats.





Charlie loved the movie from start to finish. This was Miles first experience in a movie theater, and although he loved the movie, he was quite chatty and noisy.
They brought us our dinner and we ate while we watched the movie. It was a little tricky with out a table, eating in the dark with a wiggly toddler, but only a few mini corndogs were spilled and life was okay! The food tasted good, Miles got a little restless at the end but all in all it was a good experience. We plan to go again, perhaps on a weeknight when it isn't so busy, when we can eat our food at a table, and get it ordered before the movie starts. We got home, put the boys to bed and enjoyed some ice cream together.

The next morning, Max left early for meetings at church. When I came downstairs with the boys we all found little surprises on the table. The boys got little boxes of chocolates that aren't pictured, probably because they grabbed them so fast.



I opted out of making an awesome breakfast because getting the boys to church on my own is always a busy a frantic race in the morning. We enjoyed some tasty cereal and left to church (and were late of course)

After church, Miles went to nap, Charlie had some quiet time in his room and Max and I were able to nap, well, I'm not much of a napper so I eventually got up with the boys so we could make Daddy a Valentine. The boys loved this. We made tissue paper water paintings and glitter hearts.



I'm glad he was painting with water.


Charlie was proud that he turned his L into and I. But apparently turning the A into an R was a complete surprise to him.


This is Charlie's "hippo with a shirt on"


Then we made dinner, puff pancakes (dutch pancakes?) with heart strawberries! A family favorite but this time in heart-form!


And then the boys went to bed. I did my usual Sunday night budgeting then we pulled out the strawberries again and dipped them in chocolate and had a wonderful home date.
And it was sweet and simple and full of family love. Maybe next year we will go all out, and that will be fun too. But I am truly happiest with the people I love and it was a fun way to celebrate.

Business and Blessings

I started this blog post a long time ago but I got distracted and busy in great ways, I was also kind of waiting to see what was in store for us

On January 9th Max was informed that he would no longer be working at his current employment and that it would be his last day. There are a lot of details that went into this decision by his boss and Max wasn't totally surprised. Just over a week earlier, on New Year's Eve we had written a goal that this year Max would quit his job sometime in the year 2016. We had plans of getting our real estate business going and then he would be able to leave his job and do real estate investing full-time. It is something he has wanted to do for years and we finally found a route to go about it last September. Our goal was to have enough steady income by the fall of 2016 that he could leave his job.

Something about Max is that he is a hard honest worker. He takes on a lot of responsibility that benefits his family and he becomes so busy with good intentions that it can be completely overwhelming, and it is challenging to determine what needs to be dropped because they are all good things. Max had some big projects here on the property with a significant remodel of one house and a vacancy in another house. Max completely took over his parents finances to get them in a better spot and he has worked miracles for them. He serves diligently in his church callings, and was working a full time job. He is an amazing father and husband and takes time to be with us. Along with working a full time job, and creating a new business (which will eventually allow us to be in charge of our time)  he became completely stressed. He had been praying to know what to let go of so he could better focus on the things that matter most. We didn't think that him dropping his full time job was an option yet. We were working hard to make that an option later in the year but he couldn't just walk away from our family's main source of income just yet (or so we thought). But I must tell you, that I know our dear, loving, and aware Heavenly Father knows exactly the struggles we were facing. And Max being laid off was a complete blessing. In the days that followed Max mainly felt relief. He was able to let go of a whole huge chunk of his life that was causing a lot of stress. Within the first week of him being home, he was able to get renters in one of our units (the main money-maker one) We also had our first offer accepted for a distressed house that we are planning on fixing and selling.Then in the days that followed we had 2 more offers accepted on other distressed properties and then another. We were able to dive into our business and focus on building it up and learning a ton. It helps that we feel strongly that that this is the right direction for our family. Max is thrilled that we are finally making it happen and that he is able to spend the time on it.
Out of our 4 houses we let 3 of them go because they were slightly riskier investments and we want to really focus on the process for one house and get all our systems in place. But we do plan on doing multiple flips at the same time and we feel so grateful that we have 40 extra hours a week to focus on it.

And a couple weeks ago we closed on our first house and construction started shortly after and it's going to be amazing.
Here are some before photos...

It is a beautiful house in a high demand area with a scarcity of houses, we've analyzed it a ton and we shouldn't have a problem selling it.

The kitchen was all torn out so we get to start fresh! there will be white cabinets and gray quartz counter tops!

We will be finishing the basement and it will look something like this.

We are thrilled to be taking our family down this route. We wanted to get our boys involved, so on one of the demolition days we took them over to the house with hammers, hardhats, and goggles. Oh man, it was a dream come true for them. Free reign of the hammer! Before our kids were born we always wanted to have some sort of real estate business or investment. We hoped that our kids could take care of a rental property to help pay for college or a mission Eventually we want to accumulate rental properties as well but this here is where we're starting. It makes me so happy to be on this path. And feel completely guided by the Holy Spirit.

Here are the boys doing some demolition...











The basement is being dug out so we can have higher ceilings. (in case you were wondering why there is dirt in our house)

And it's only been a little over a week and it's amazing to see the progress that the cnotractors have made! I will try to keep you all posted!