Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Tender Mercy


I had a neat thing happen to me tonight. One of those things that you think might be a prompting but you're not sure so you follow it just in case...

I was ordering some pictures on Walmart.com for a photo book for my mother-in-law's Birthday (100 photos to be exact) and got to the confirmation page. You have to understand that I really NEVER print off the confirmation page even though it says print for your records. I set up and pay for things online all the time and I think I save a lot of trees by not printing that page every time. Anyway, I got to the page this time and had an idea (now I KNOW it was a prompting) to print the page and take it with me to pick up my prints, even though I couldn't even think of a plausible reason why I would need it.

Fast forward a few hours and I'm at Walmart with the prints in front of me and the cashier is telling me I owe just over $20. I was a little surprised because my total before taxes online was $10 exactly and I'm sure that taxes haven't gone up that much. After some confusion on both ends and the cashier telling me that the ones I ordered were $ .19 and not $ .10 like I thought they were I remembered that I had the confirmation page in the diaper bag and pulled it out to show the cashier. Now she was confused, but after a few minutes she realized the mistake that had been made and I was able to leave with my prints (which were really only $10.69) and save almost $10. I'm glad that I followed the prompting.

As I was paying she mentioned something about the shirt I was wearing, a girl's camp shirt that says "All things bear witness of Him". And as you can see, they do!

Friday, June 18, 2010

No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers dirty looks... well at least for a while. . .

Sean graduated! YAY!!!
Sean received his Bachelors of Science from Weber State University April 23rd.We have had so much more time to spend together and to work on little projects here and there on the house since graduation. Sean also quite his lab aid job at Weber State when he graduated. So he's gone from one full-time job, and one part-time job, AND full-time school to just a full-time job. He still works nights so we don't get to have dinner together but we get breakfast and lunch together and he's not gone from 8 AM to 11:30 PM so I'm not complaining!!!


Graduation day was rainy, luckily I brought our umbrella!

Sean is SO Happy and Cadence can't believe we just made her sit through such a long ceremony.




President Monson spoke at the commencement exercises, it was really neat and he gave a wonderful talk.
Now we're on to the Graduation Ceremony for the Science Department. Sean is Patiently waiting his turn.
Here is Sean shaking hands with one of his favorite professors Dr. Oberg.

Look at those proud parents! (and the diploma, yahoo!)
Yay! Sean, you are amazing!
Cadence was pretty patient with the whole day and all the graduation events...
But eventually she just zonked out.
Here's everybody that came to support Sean. (Notice the sleeping baby on Grandma's shoulder.)
So now Sean is working on getting a few letters of recommendation (since Weber state lost a few of them) and then he can submit his Dental School application for the Fall of 2011. We are applying to 12 schools and his application looks much more promising than it did the last time around. We'll see what happens now...

Institute graduation



Well, I forgot the camera for the actual graduation, but I got some pictures afterwords. Sean graduated from the Ogden Utah Institute of religion. Great job Sean!

Easter- Better late than never...



We had a fun Easter at Grandma and Grandpa Chapman's house. Grandma gave her this beautiful dress and the girls had a fun little Easter egg hunt.









The 3 Chapman granddaughters.

We're still alive!

Well, it's been a WHILE! Sorry about the big gap between posts. Since Cadence hasn't become any less cute I'll need to post a lot of pictures of her to catch up...
Here's a brief summary of the last few months for us.
After FINALLY closing on our house, we began work on the basement right away while we waited for our tenants upstairs to find somewhere else to live. They were able to move out by Nov. 15 which was great, then we began work upstairs. Basically, the basement was updated recently and looked pretty good at first glance but it was really kinda grimy when we got to cleaning and sadly a lot of the work that was done was very sloppy. But, the basement was still in MUCH better shape than the upstairs. We spent a few weeks driving from Roy to clean the basement before we were able to start working upstairs and at that point almost everything was already taken care of downstairs. Then my cousin and her husband moved into the basement and have been wonderful renters since.
(Sorry, I didn't take any pictures before they moved in.) Now for the upstairs... Well, we really had no idea how much work we had ahead of us. Every time we walked through the upstairs before, the tenants were there and we just walked through pretty quickly so we didn't really notice a lot of things and the tenants left it pretty gross when they left. So, we started cleaning, prepping for paint, ripping out some carpet, shampooing then ripping out some other carpet, and shampooing and cleaning some OTHER carpet. We put in laminate floors in part of the house, wired a light in our front room, (thanks to the smart designs of the 5o's that didn't include any ambient lighting in living rooms) then we textured a few of the ceilings and did some painting. All in all, we had to move in way before all of the work was done. So we're not really all of the way moved in and there are tools and construction junk all over. BUT, the changes we have made have made such a difference and we're excited about owning and improving our own home.
This is the hallway before we did anything, obviously the carpet was the first to go...
Now we're working on tearing out the paneling. Also, the door on the right is a closet that had no shelves and was a lot of wasted space so my amazing husband and I built shelves into it so we could use it for a pantry.Ok, now we'll start with the front room...Now the kitchen...

Not much has changed in here, but there are big plans for the kitchen.Cadence's room/ laundry room

The nasty blue carpet that was first to go.Here's Cadence's room after we replaced the floor but before we really got it cleaned up and painted it.
This is where the washer and dryer were... no pan to catch water, no proper drain... after pictures of this to come. (if you haven't seen them on facebook)

Bedroom
Now this is the carpet that was in our bedroom, didn't look awful, but we couldn't really get it clean so we tore it out and we were glad we did. The bottom side of the carpet and the pad looked and smelled horrible!
This is how our room looks now!


Now for the fun stuff, US!
I'll try to post these as close to chronological as I can...


Eating the toes and reaching for them.



Cadence ALWAYS sleeps in weird positions now.
First ponytail Yay! (they're easier now that her hair's grown more.)
So, during this time, Cadence started crawling. The picture below was taken before she started crawling. She would lean forward in this funny frog position and act like she was going to crawl, it was pretty cute and pretty funny. Now she crawls all the time and goes up and sometimes down our two little stairs. She stands up whenever she can and we think it'll be a matter of days or weeks before she starts walking.


Valentines day in our back yard. (ps the tree behind us has a trunk that's 5-6 ft in diameter)




Our Valentines Day feast. I made Sean's two favorites, chicken Parmesan and Fettuccine Alfredo.
Valentines dance at the institute...







Note how her legs are positioned, she loves pulling her right leg up and sticking it into the slot between the pad and bar.
Love it, the daddy daughter dance.

Aunt Holly reading Cadence a book.