Our first "home"

The itty bitty kitchen. I so do not miss you.

The dining room.

The wood fireplace that we never used once. It's a lot more convenient having an electric one we can turn on with the switch of a button!

The computer area.

The living room.

We'll miss you apartment C-304. Thank you for being so good to us.

HOME OWNERS

{April 23rd}

We are all moved into our house as of April 30th! We picked up the keys on the 23rd and that was our first day in the house as official owners. Leaving our little apartment was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Even though it was small and we were really starting to get cramped, that was our first home together and it treated us really well. As we were doing the final cleaning at the apartment I kept singing in my head the song, "You're gonna miss this" by Trace Atkins. It's a chapter we are closing in our lives. We're going from no worries and simple living, to the responsibility of a HOUSE. Eeek! And while I'm sure we'll look back and think wow, those were the simple days, we are so excited to be on this new adventure. We know this was the right decision for us at this time and we are already adjusting really well to life in a house. Birds nesting in our dryer vent and all! (that's a story for another time) We really love the neighborhood, we love the house, and we love our neighbors. Who have made us feel extremely welcome. Before we had even moved our stuff in we had a welcome card from one neighbor, another that came over to ask if we needed help with anything and let us know all about the neighborhood, and a third that offered to help us bring our grass back to life and that we could come over and borrow his tools any time we wanted. We feel really blessed about that. It's always a little nerve wracking moving to a new place, no one wants mean neighbors!

So to make a long story short, life in the Winkler household is all good. :)

HOME OWNERS. (still weird to say that)

Here we go...there's no turning back now! :)

Closing day

Today we signed all the papers and closed on our house! We get our keys on Friday and move in next weekend. We ended up closing a week later than we were planning on so that's one less week we have to paint and clean and everything before we move our stuff in but oh well. We are just so excited and can't wait to get in there and make it a home!

General Conference

"Preach the gospel at all times, and when necessary, use words."

-President Dieter F. Uchtdorf

I loved this quote President Uchtdorf gave during General Conference. How blessed we are to have these uplifting and inspiring men of God to listen to in a world that is filled with so much chaos and confusion. I'm thankful for the comfort and love that I feel when I hear the words that they speak. I know they are coming strait from my Heavenly Father. I hope that I can take those words and be a little bit better, try a little bit harder to be the person Heavenly Father expects me to be. 

Woodland Park Zoo

We babysat for a week up in Sammamish for the family I moved up here to nanny for. We love when they ask us and always have so much fun with the kiddos. We went to the zoo on Saturday and thankfully it ended up being a pretty nice day. It only sprinkled a couple times on us. When we were driving home it started pouring so we got lucky! 

Being silly on our way up to the zoo. And seeing crazy cars along the way.

This peacock was just out walking around and they were feeding the lions just as we got there. Pretty cool!

Two peas in a pod.

The elephants are my favorite!

We had fun feeding the birds (even though one totally pooped on my shoulder). 

We also saw the cutest orangutan and the hugest eagle I've ever seen. 

The gorillas were our favorite part! This guy right here was the head honcho, all the other ones would run away when we walked past. He was a big dude and definitely the man in charge!

This silly gorilla was throwing up in his hand and then eating it. He just kept doing it over and over again. 

The girls thought it was hilarious! Crazy gorilla.

Love these girls.

This leopard was so gorgeous! The girls loved watching it run around. 

This was Erich's favorite animal. We came back a couple times to look at it.

Sitting in this little bubble made it feel like you were in there with the penguins! 

It was just an all around great day. A day at the zoo always is.

Snoqualmie Falls

We took a drive up to Snoqualmie Falls on Sunday in between sessions of conference. The river was just raging and the falls were so big. We ended up getting pretty wet from all the mist that was coming off. It was so gorgeous though, the perfect Sunday drive.

Blog slacker and other news

Geez I have been such a slacker lately! I'll blame it on the fact that we have been sooo busy lately, and we're only going to get busier! I feel like I have been running around like a chicken with my head cut off. I have been so busy at work, which is where I usually find time to do some of my blogging (hope my boss isn't reading this :) but there has been no time for any of  that. And on top of that we've been house hunting which took up most of our spare time. But I am happy to announce that we finally found the perfect house! Yep that's right, WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!!! We are so beyond excited! It's up in Lakeland Hills in Auburn. We are so sad to leave Kent, and I am so so sad to leave the Young Women but we found a house that we feel sooo good about. It's in the most perfect neighborhood surrounded by parks and the elementary school just a couple blocks away. We just know it's exactly where we are suppose to be and the place we want to start our family. Not to mention we got a steal of a deal! I guess that's one benefit of the ecomomy sucking right now. I'm really thankful we are in a position to buy at this time.

Our closing date is scheduled for the 14th of April (wow that's like a week away, eek!). We don't need to be out of our apartment till the end of the month though so we will have that time to clean and paint and get all moved in. I am definitely going to have my work cut out for me! It's going to be a little bit of a shock going from a tiny one bedroom apartment to a big two story, four bedroom house! We're going to have so much space we won't know what to do with ourselves! It's going to be so nice to have a garage and a yard.  I can't wait to finally get all moved in! I've been running out of places to cram things where we are now.

What's most exciting though is knowing that this is the house we'll be in when we find out we're pregnant for the first time, where we'll bring our first baby home from the hospital, where that baby will crawl for the first time and take it's first steps. We are going to have so many things happen to us in this house and so many firsts. It makes it so much more exciting to think about all of that. I'm looking forward to the many memories we are going to make in our first home. :)

Isn't she pretty?! Home sweet home. :)