One thing that I love about our sweet girl is that she's so sweet and wants everyone to always be happy. She gives good hugs and kisses when you're sad and will always try to cheer you up. My favorite thing is when I'm getting ready and she comes up and spontaneously says "Pretty, Mommy! You look pretty!" She'll also help me choose something to wear if I ask her for an opinion, though she usually chooses a skirt or dress (probably because the closet clothes are easier to see than the ones in the drawers), but I appreciate that she tries to help and then compliments me afterward. I know I need to appreciate this now because in a few years, she'll be asking asking what I'm wearing because it will probably be embarrassing, so for now, I'm loving it!

Nashville Happenings

So we get this funny little local paper for the neighborhoods near ours in this area of Nashville that I always look forward to reading because of the funny things that it has in it. Some of my favorite things about this paper is the guilt-people-into-doing-things-they-should-on-their-own section and the Social Pages. The guilt section is where they post photos of something that people are doing that they shouldn't. Last week there was a photo of a branch hanging over the road that could fall at any moment and kill or seriously maim an unsuspecting pedestrian, with the address of said tree branch. This week the article was followed up by a photo of the corrected dangerous branch. Nice, eh? I just hope our address and photo don't ever show up in the paper! Now that we fixed our nasty mailbox, though, we should be okay and not a huge eyesore to the neighborhood. The Social Pages section is 3 to 7 pages long and has pictures and descriptions of different social events and parties around the neighborhood. It's really interesting to read.

The front of Big Kenny's house - the "Chateau de Amore" as noted on the plaque by the gates. Pretty incredible, eh?

Hands down, though, my favorite section is the "Ticked Off" section "where freedom of speech is alive & well!" (that's their real tag line). This is where Nashvillians can vent their frustrations about whatever suits their fancy including the quality of films produced these days, what terrible drivers there are around the city, traffic lights, etc. So last week someone wrote in about how awful and tacky it is that Big Kenny of the country music group Big & Rich (you know the song "Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy"...) parks his tour bus in his front yard. This week the conversations was followed up by a few more notes in "Ticked Off!" about some people liking it or not minding it, and others hating on it. So of course, we had to check it out!

"Big Kenny's Love Everybody Traveling Musical Medicine Show" bus in his front yard.

This afternoon after our midwife appointment, Rob, Grace and I set out to find Big Kenny's. It's only a couple minutes from our house, but we weren't sure exactly where the house was. It was really easy to find, and really I didn't think that the "Love Everybody" tour bus was too tacky since it was mostly hidden behind the wall that encloses his property.

I just don't know if I'd like to look out my window into my front yard and see my big 'ole face smiling back at me! (Sorry for the picture lopsidedness...we were driving by being really inconspicuous!)

While we're talking about star-sightings, the other day we saw Shane Tallant, the host from HGTV's Designed to Sell, in our Target that we regularly shop at! It was a very exciting moment for a very mundane day. There are lots more stars and famous people who live in this area, so you never know who we'll find next!

Gracers

She may look mad, but it was the best smile I could get out of her for the camera. She's a bit lens-shy these days.

Grace is a funny little girl - here are some things she is doing these days:

When both Rob and I are home, she calls both of us "Momdy" :) I guess it's covering all her bases by mixing the names. Now I won't feel badly when someday I mix her name up with her siblings.

She calls towels "dry drys." Probably our fault because after her bath we tell her she needs to be wrapped up in her "dry dry" so we can snuggle.

Grace has been really good for at least a year now on what to do during prayers. At church (or anytime that is like church) after every song she immediately stops what she is doing and folds her arms and closes her eyes, since prayer is what happens right after songs. Recently she has decided that it's Gracie's turn to pray. We ask her who she wants to pray, Daddy, Mommy or Gracie. Most often she'll choose one of us and when we start, she'll say "NO! Gracie turn!" We're working on prayer reverence :) When she does pray, she uses this little high pitched voice and just makes some repetitive noises and then says "Amen!" I'm hoping that someday soon she'll start allowing us to help her with what words to say again, but for now I'm grateful that she wants to pray and is learning step by step how to.

This is how we found her sleeping the other night. Covered in pillows...funny girl!

Grace has a funny little routine when Dad leaves for school in the morning. She has to stand on the porch of the house, outside, and wave and yell bye bye to Daddy as he drives down the street. We have the heaviest screen door ever though that she can get out of but can't get back in, so I have to be sure to be nearby to let her back in. I just hope that the neighbors aren't watching too closely because I am not-so-presentable in my jammies at those times.

Grace loves to sing, as I've mentioned before. She'll sing anything. And she sings it loudly and proudly. She often makes us sing while we drive around. She makes up songs and tunes, but she's fairly good at the words of the songs. I got the name of the song Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in my last post wrong though, she calls it "Twinkle How I Twinkle." Last week at church she was "singing" the hymn so loud that she got a thumbs up from the pew across the aisle for her awesome effort. This morning Grace was looking at a little flip book I made for her two Christmases ago with pictures of each of the family members and singing "I am a child of God", but not to the right tune, so it took us a while to figure out what she was singing. She'd sing some jibberish then "kind and dear!!!" really loudly. Good thing she got the best part down ("with parents kind and dear")! She often gets her animals and babies out and asks them if they want her to sing to them or read them a story...what a sweet, thoughtful little girl!

Snuggling with Bunny and hiding from the camera. She has a funny shy streak these days where she doesn't want anyone to look at her or she'll try to hide.

She loves kids and our ward here in Nashville is great because there are so many. It's been a change though, coming from the Avenues where there were no kids, to our ward here where there are tons of them. She's learning how to play with them and isn't so nervous around so many of them anymore. Our favorite time of the weeks is Thursdays when playgroup meets at different parks throughout the ward to play while the Mommy's get to socialize.

Princesses are Grace's new obsessions (about equal to Barney - what is it about that purple dinosaur?!?!). She wants to watch princess sing a long songs all. the. time. I must admit that I've gotten pretty good at belting out a few of those songs myself. Rob and I will often turn to the other and start singing whichever one is in our head at the time to share the love with the other :) I am going to try to make her a princess dress for Halloween and dress up...wish me luck on my first time using a pattern and without any of my sewing expertise that I had in family and friends back in Utah!

Grace also loves to draw. Not so much on our furniture or walls anymore (thank goodness!!!), but more on paper and mostly on herself when I'm not watching closely. Thanks to our sweet (and funny...) friends, the Holley's who gave Grace some washable markers after our permanent marker fiasco, we can easily clean up those messes. And can I just say how impressed I am with the washable-ness of the markers? Much better than I ever expected!

Our little tattoo artist even got the bottoms of her feet!

She is a sweet little girl and we're so happy to have her in our family. She really brings a lot of love and laughter to us! She's getting excited to become a big sister soon, and I can't wait to see her blossom and be able to show her nurturing side to her little sister and to teach her all the cool things that there are about being a little girl!

Then and Now

I can hardly remember when Grace was this small:

Because now she's this big:

We got the car seat out the other day so I could see the colors again to find some fabric to make a cover for it (they didn't have those newfangled things when Grace was born 2 years ago!). Grace has loved playing and sitting in the seat. It's so funny to think of her as a teensy tiny infant in that same seat just two short years ago!

Our House - Painting

One very exciting thing about moving here was that the landlady told us that we could paint. So exciting after so many white Utah apartments that had to stay that way! The first thing I knew we needed to paint was the "blue room" which used to be a baby boy's room, but which was now our room.

Before:
You can tell I'm late in posting these pictures since that's Brian working hard over there in the corner and he's been gone a month!

I know you love the two tone baby blue-ness going on with our paint swatches on top of it! We chose the one on the right on both walls, by the way. It was really interesting how different the two colors we chose look on the two walls - those are the same two colors on top of the two different background walls, can you believe it?

After:
By far, the best part of this picture is the funny little nakee girl playing in the doorway. She went through a little phase there where she didn't so much like to wear clothes.

Our next challenge was our living room. This room posed oh-so-many challenges. The first was that all of our furniture didn't fit into the room. Yikes! So we sold some stuff to almost completely pay for a new TV that would take up far less space. (Plus we love that since we don't have cable now, we can easily hook up our laptop to the TV and watch almost whatever we want that way!)

Before, courtesy of Brian:
Sorry for the blurry. Yeah, we had no idea where things were going to go...

Later that afternoon, the plan formulates...what started as a joke about hte only way to fix it is getting a new TV turned into truly the only solution, since as you can see there was absolutely no place for an entertainment center and TV in here!

We loved the layout, but as we were hanging pictures, we realized that the entertainment wall was direly lacking something, so we decided to paint it. We chose a gray-green to be muted but still have some color and to go with the rug and existing furniture.

After:
We are so pleased with how everything has turned out! It's so much fun to paint and be able to make these rooms match our personality. After my many years of living in don't-touch-the-walls stark white Utah living, I have to say that I felt really guilty the whole time we were painting, thinking I was doing something naughty. Funny how things like that are so ingrained! I wish we had the budget/time/energy to paint all the rooms!

Ah, Saturday!

Today we had a delightful Saturday. It was warm, but there was no humidity today! Oh how I love the Fall. It was beautiful! We busted out Grace's sprinkler and bubbles so she could play while Rob worked on our new mailbox and I sat on the porch in the shade :)

Grace and her cool sprinkler that shoots balls out

See the ball balancing on top of the fountain?

Seriously playing in the water could not make her happier...so don't mind her face. Every time she looked at me she made a funny face today.

Funny face case in point, but isn't she sweet?

So we had the lamest mail box ever. Plus it didn't have a flag, so the mailman hasn't picked up our Netflix for 2 days now, c'mon dude, we have movies to watch, we can't just sit around waiting until you decide to reach into the mailbox! :) So because of our Netflix issue, we decided just to go ahead and install a new mailbox (they're pretty cheap!). Easy enough, right? Ha.

Our old mailbox was connected to the pole in a strange way, so Rob had to figure out a new way to connect a mailbox to our existing pole (while Grace laid on and rolled around on the floor in Lowe's and kept asking for a couch so she could sleep, haha!). He very smartly did so, but had to drill new holes in the pole. It's now almost 8 o'clock and he's still working on it. Hopefully after sanding and painting the pole, 3 broken drill bits, many, many charges for the cordless drill, and the 3 trips to Lowe's today we'll get this thing up and our new Netflix on its way!

It's dark now, but when we get it up, I'll post some before and afters along with the painting we've done inside. Too bad Rob didn't get any homework done because of this dang mailbox!

One Month

Well we've been Nashvillians (how funny is that word?) for a month now. I'm starting to be annoyed by cars that have a license plate other than Tennessee, because they obviously don't know where they're going (even though mine still says Ski Utah!). What a fun place to be, but only if you don't have to drive down Hillsboro Pike (or anywhere really, but Hillsboro especially) after 3:30. Besides the traffic, we're finding Nashville to be a really interesting place to live. Some highlights:

The traffic. I already mentioned this, but here are some interesting tidbits. Because there are too many cars for this little city, we've been creative in finding new ways to get anywhere in the late afternoons or evenings. This has led to some driving in gorgeous neighborhoods. I think probably only here in Nashville is the fastest way to get around Hillsboro is to drive in the fanciest neighborhood around, Belle Meade. The likes of Al Gore, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, and so many more stars grace this neighborhood which I drive through just about every day to get somewhere. At least the scenery is beautiful!

The history. There are signs everywhere in Nashville along the roads documenting events that happened there from famous settlers who had a log cabin there or did something there, to Civil War battles and movements, to bad train wrecks. I really appreciate these little signs when I'm stuck in traffic - it gives me something interesting to do :)

The food. Delicious. But did you know that they don't eat much medium cheddar cheese here? We found this out when I was frustrated by only finding sharp and extra sharp cheese at Costco and exclaiming too loudly "don't they eat medium cheddar here in the South?!?" To which a nice lady responded that they didn't, they mostly like the sharper versions. Oh Tillamook, how I love and miss you! The first week of school the partner's association for the MBA school threw a BBQ. I was expecting a delightful time with grills and hot dogs and burgers. Nope. BBQ here is catered slow-cooked falling apart chicken and pork served with BBQ sauce, baked beans, macaroni and cheese and some other delightful sides. It was delicious, but not what I was expecting. Apparently the dogs and burgers type of BBQ is called grilling, or something like that. Good thing I like BBQ in whatever form it comes to me!

The lingo. Keeping up with my mistake of using the wrong term, here are some more things people say that are different from good 'ole Utah. They call shopping carts "buggys" - how cute is that? And a soda (or pop for you Utahns) is a coke here. They ask if you want a coke, then when you say yes they specify what kind of coke you want. Nashville is so full of transplants that I rarely hear a southern accent, but when I do, it makes me so happy. I love to hear those southern women drawling out their speech in the checkout line at the grocery store.

As a family, we're doing great too.

Rob just finished half of his first term in school. They're on a "mod" system, which means fewer classes for 6 weeks, then a week of finals, then a "break" of some sort and then again. Each school year he will complete 4 mods. He also was chosen to be a part of a case competition for HOP (human organizational performance, or HR related stuff - his concentration). He was chosen as one of 3 first years to be on the team, which is pretty big stuff. Owen (the business school) has a history of doing really well, so we're excited he gets to be a part of that experience! He's staying really busy, but it's much more manageable than I was expecting and he tries really hard to be home for dinner every night to spend some time with Gracers and me, which we love.

Grace is her funny little self. She's getting so independent and talkative. She loves to point out Target every time we drive by, which we do pretty often because it's right outside our neighborhood. One day Rob made the mistake of telling her that if she said "please" we could go to Target (that day we were planning on going anyway). So she did and now every time we drive by Target, Grace says "Target, please! Please, Target!!" (Side note: I believe that my sister, Emily, taught me to do just about the same thing with K-Mart when I was about Grace's age...apparently we are born to shop around here!) She's a really good girl though, even in the face of that much disappointment of not getting to go to Target every day. I love that she loves to give spontaneous leg hugs where she runs at full speed toward your leg and hugs it so tightly, she might just knock me over one of these days. She also loves to sing. She sings a song called "twinkle, twinkle, ABC" which is (if you haven't guessed already) a beautiful combination of twinkle twinkle little star and ABC. Other favorites are "I Love You" (the Barney song) and "Clean Up" (another Barney classic) both of which I've heard coming loudly from her room as she's supposed to be napping - stinker! I think she's starting to realize now, though, that they are actually two different songs. She also, like her daddy, likes to make up words and songs. It's really fun to hear her singing all the time.

Baby Girl. Good, growing a lot. We had an appointment this morning and the little stinker wouldn't hold still to let the midwife hear her heartbeat. She kept on flipping back and forth like it was a game...if this keeps up...yikes! Still no name picked out for sure for her yet. My planner-self loves to have a plan and so not having a name is stressing me out, but it will come, I'm sure (and really, at some point, it will have to).

Me. I'm good. I really miss having control of my body. Just this afternoon I was on Amazon drooling over the new Jillian Michaels work out DVDs and fantasizing about the day when I will once again be able to exercise and be comfortable again! My back is almost completely better (I threw it out something fierce a few weeks ago and could barely move), so that is a blessing and a half! Apparently backs are really important for every aspect of daily living...who knew!? :)

That's us in a nutshell, or really an epic blog post. We miss living in Utah, but Nashville is growing on us, and hopefully will keep doing so until we're sad to leave this place too!