Colorado

So, I'm kind of back tracking, but I wanted to write about where we've been in the last couple of years. So, in fall of 2012 we moved from a house by my parent's house into a little town home in Provo up by Canyon Rd on the East side of Provo. Our goal was to save as much money as possible, and Ric and I were both working for a company called Engagex. We were planning on staying here for a while until we eventually were able to save for a house. We moved there a few months before Christmas, and that's where we got our dog, Kira, from Santa. He was so kind to leave her at our door dressed like a reindeer, barking her face off! The girls were SO excited! I realized that Santa may have made a mistake and wanted to give her back after 2 weeks! She barked at every single sound, and because our neighbors were night owls and we could hear them yelling through the wall, Kira would go crazy trying to figure out what was going on. Her bark would send me leaping out of bed in the middle of the night; my heart beating out of my chest. She also threw up in the house multiple times and got into something that gave her an allergic reaction; swelling her face up beyond recognition. We finally changed her dog food and that seemed to help. But still...the barking! With all that said, we still have Kira and she has followed us on our crazy moving around everywhere. 

So, through some networking, Ric actually found out about a job with a large security company called Protection 1. They offered him a job, but it would require us moving to Colorado. We felt the benefits like salary and health insurance outweighed the cons. This is a move we weren't anticipating, but after praying about it, we felt that it was an opportunity we just couldn't pass up. This is the first time in all our moves that we've actually had a moving company move us. We had downsized a lot already, so we didn't have a lot to pack. I thought it was funny that they sent one person to come "pack us." We visited in the kitchen as she packed my dishes and she told me stories about her grand kids. I think they must have paid the moving company by the hour, because they were certainly not in a hurry! So we finally got all packed up and luckily our landlord was ok with everything. Ric drove our car down, and the girls and I came later via airplane. That was an exciting trip into Denver! 

After looking for weeks, we finally found a house in a town called Westminster. It's in between Denver and Boulder. It sealed the deal when we found out the owners had a black lab too, and when I looked at the house on google maps, there were chalk drawings in the middle of the culdesac; meaning there were kids nearby! Come to find out, the teenage girl next door would draw a big dinosaur in the middle of the street every year, and then the neighborhood kids would come color it in. It seemed like the perfect scenario. 

When we arrived in the middle of winter, it was not like I imagined at all. It was 50 degrees out, and kids were out riding their bikes around! I was just picturing a whole winter of deep snow! Come to find out, the winters are very survivable. It will dump snow for a few days, and then the sun comes out and melts everything and you have a beautiful week! 

Our ward seemed really small compared to all the other wards we've been in, and we drove about 20 minutes to get to the building. We got the girls enrolled in school and our Colorado life began. I never would have imagined us in Colorado, but it has been one of our very favorite places to live.