The next chapter!

So it's official, Jeff finally has his Masters degree in Metallurgy Engineering. All I can say is it's about flippin time! For the past nine months I've felt like his masters thesis has dominated our lives. Put ahead of everything else. It's weird but once I heard he was done and had been accepted a huge weight lifted from my shoulders. We have so much to do to get ready for Norway and now we can really focus on that. It's so nice to have one major hurdle down. Not that we don't have sixteen thousand more hurdles to cross over the next four months but hey one down is better than nothing!

What's next you might wonder... the house and the cars. We need to get the Fusion sold ASAP and the house painted - hopefully that'll happen in the next two weeks. Then it's on to the kitchen and all the other little shit we need to do to get our house ready for market. The goal is to get it up for sale by the end of Oct. Jeff just found out that NTNU wants to fly him out in November for another PHD's dissertation. This will be the perfect opportunity for him to check out rental properties. Rentals are crazy expensive in Trondheim and very little compared to what Americans are used to. It's going to be a challenge going from an almost 3000 square foot home to a 8-900 square foot apartment, so my goal over the next month is to start weeding out the crap. By the crap I mean all of the "stuff" we have accumulated to fit in every nook and cranny of our house. Who'd of thougth we could accumulate so much crap over 3.5 years! This is going to be quit the task in itself. I have a feeling as other things get checked off the list the weight will keep lifting until our goal of making it to Norway is attainable. So if I've been a little lax on blogging and continue this trend these are my excuses. I think they're pretty damn good excuses too!

So as this next chapter in our lives moves forward, I will try to keep everyone updated on where we're at and what's new.

Behind

Things have been a little crazy lately at our house. We have about a zillion home projects going on and we're still trying to enjoy the summer which makes for hectic and crazy nights. I guess this is basically my way of saying, I haven't had time to download pictures and really keep up with my blog. So today I am attaching a phone picture. Here's the little munchin this morning. We finally cut her hair but of course I haven't gotten the pictures down loaded yet so here's a little glimpse. I'm hoping to get that post and a post from our great weekend with my bro/sis in law and nephew up soon. For now I've got a story....

Last Monday while picking up Ave's room she grabbed onto one of her new sandles and took off with it. At the time I remember thinking, "I should go get that from her," but I continued picking stuff up and forgot about it. That is until I cleaned upstairs last night and did not find the sandle. It's not showing up on any of the other floors either. So this morning I asked my preciouse girl what she did with the sandle. You know what she told me. "In the garbage Mommy." I asked her a few more times and each time got the same answer. She even went up to the garbage, opened the lid and pointed into it. So tonight I get to go through two trash bags to see if she really did throw the shoe away. On the bright side, at least she fessed up!

Huckleberry picking

Last weekend we went camping up in the Seeley area. Our goal... to find and pick as many huckleberries as humanly possible in one weekend. We met our friends, Robin, Trev and their little boy Jake and our friend George and his son Reece. It was a great relaxing weekend and we ended up picking seven pounds of the little purple treasures! For some reason my new camera's pictures turn out grainy on the blog. If you click to enlarge the image it looks much clearer. I'll have to figure that out.

The campsite.
The boys playing with the b b gun.
Jake
Jake and Robin
Avery wearing a bowl as a hat.

Ave could pick for about 15 minutes at a time before she got bored. At one point she was just squishing the berries between her hands, messy um yes. That's about the time that we stuck her in the car with a movie!

The bushes were like this everywhere!

Yard Sale

Last weekend we had a yardsale with the McGraths (Teresa, Jeff and Lucas). Each year their neighborhood puts on a yardsale which is awesome since it attracts a lot of people. We ended up making a couple hundred dollars so I think it was worth the hours of collecting, pricing and setting up our junk. None the less it was a fun day, here are a few highlights.

Batman, aka Lucas. He kept running down to other garage sales and buying stuff. He came up with this entire batman costume. He even offered to sword anyone who tried to steel anything.


Avery and batman.
Avery really took to Lucas's harmonica. I think we need to buy her one. Here she is blowing into it. Check out all of our crap!
This was just funny. Look closely at the car driving away. you may want to blow the picture up. Teresa's father in law sold them a exercise bike. They tried for like twenty minutes to fit it into the car. They never tried to get it into the trunk. The solution they came up with was for one of the ladies to sit in the back seat and hold the bike while they drove away with it hanging out the door. We're hoping they didn't have to go very far!

The State Fair

We cruised to Great Falls the other weekend to take Avery to the State Fair and see Jeff's cousin Chris and his family.  Ave liked the fair but it was pretty hot so she only lasted a couple of hours.  

On the way to Great Falls.  She threw up in the car which meant a roadside clean up.  I hate those.  Luckily it was a one time thing and we made it the rest of the drive without another incident.  Here she is looking cute pre-throw up.  
Tonya, Ronnie, Jeff and Avery rocking the fair rides.
Me and Ave on the train.  It was like 100 degrees in there.  She didn't want to get off, I had to drag her out because there was no way I was riding that thing again. 

This is later on the ride with Daddy, Ave decided it was a little scary.  We had all the grandparents with us.  She's a lucky little girl to have so many fans.  

On Sunday we hung out at Grandma Lori's.  Ave said she was fishing with the fun doodle.  I think Ryley was playing swords.