Arizona, part 1

Hi All,
We did make it, finally, to Arizona. It was a massively crazy time getting here. We started with a house hunting trip in May. We drove to Utah with the kids, left them with aunt Peggy, and then flew from SLC to Tuscon for a fast paced weekend of house hunting. Now, I'm a pretty good pregnant lady, I think, but boy was it a rough trip. We had part of Sat and all day Mon to try to find a house. Eerily reminiscent of our move to Nampa in which we also had a weekend to find a house. I was expecting then too. Well, I THINK we must have looked at 50 houses. Randal says it was more like 30. Either way, it was exhausting. And confusing. Old houses were the same price as new houses. Three bedroom houses were the same price as a six bedroom house. No yard houses were the same price as houses with fully decked out yards. It really is a buyers market I guess. Anyway, we did find a house we like and I'll try to find it's picture. It's a model home, so it has lots of upgrades. Unfortunately, the decorations don't come with it, so who knows what it will look like once we move in. I never have found one decorating style I like and it isn't my talent. DARN IT! Do you want to help, Alli?
Parker will be getting his own room though (except when company comes), so he is pretty excited. It's a two story, four bedroom house + a loft area. No pool, which comes with mixed emotions. We wanted one BECAUSE IT IS SO DANG HOT HERE, but I also had visions of Perry or the new little one drowning, So...there, no pool.

One interesting thing we have discovered is there are "cool down zones" in AZ. I don't know what all of them are, but the one we discovered was a "splash pad." Think Roaring springs kids area, but smaller. And Free! It had the flower showers, dumping water buckets and spritz tunnels.

But back to our house hunting trip. Did I mention our realtor has an H2? It's sleek for sure, but climbing in and out, in and out for all those houses was not fun.

Sunday, because our realtor was busy, we just tried to find a ward we might be in and then went site seeing. It took us three tries to find the right ward. I guess boundaries are fairly new here, or at least confusing, because no one was sure about what ward we should even look at (in?) But I guess that is skipping ahead to when we actually found the house.

Monday was the longest day ever! About 2p.m., I told Randal to buy whatever house he wanted and I promised to be happy. I was DONE! They made the prego lady keep looking until 5 p.m.! And then we were supposed to have dinner with people Randal was going to be working with. And I was supposed to be good company??? The people he works with seem like just genuinely good people and I THINK they understood what a day it had been, but we still didn't get back to the hotel until about 9:30 p.m. Dinner rocked though. An italian place called Gavi's. I was missing Parker, so I ordered Ravioli, and it was Goo-ood! (Parker has recently discovered canned Ravioli and decided he likes it, which is amazing!)

Tuesday was a lot of paper signing and I can't even try to make that sound interesting! And check writing. Then a flight home. I still don't like flying and flying through thunder clouds/high pressure systems it yucky! Again, Randal says I exaggerate, but I think when you hit turbulence and all the passengers let out and "Oh," and some (okay, probably just me) grab a hold of the arm rests, things are pretty bumpy.

Meanwhile, our kids were living it up at Peggy's and making friends and were SO BUSY we couldn't even see them until WED, because they had been invited to a BBQ Tues night!

We visited with them Wed., then snuck out at nap time for Perry, and came back to Nampa to clean and supervise packing. The packing/cleaning went well. So many people helped out with the cleaning. THANK YOU!!! Then it was back to Utah to pick up the kids. Lots of traveling and we still haven't reached AZ! I'll leave the story there and pick up later. I've blabbed too much as it is.

For those of you wondering, Perry still hasn't forgiven us for sneeking out on him. I am not usually allowed out of his sight. And now we have nightly visits from the youngest pro-wrestler I have even known. The plus is, he seems to be talking better. He loves "kacky," his word for cactus. And he is getting very good at mimicking words he doesn't even know. Things like shopping lists and store names. Peter and Parker are truly AMAZED AZ has things like Pizza Hut, Target, Kohl's etc. Peter especially is thrilled everytime I fix one of his favorite dinners, like Pot Pies. He didn't think we'd have them in AZ. I guess he was expecting rice and beans, jalepeno peppers, etc.