The Rainy City

This is where we live. Just a mile from Portland State University campus, and right outside of downtown Portland. City life. Lights are awesome at night. This is the view from our apartment:

In Need of Suggestions

Okay, I just realized that when Eliana comes, I will have to change the title of this blog. "Just the tew of us" will not be true anymore. Any suggestions?

Portland

Here's an update:

The location of our apartment is perfect. We are right off the freeway system, and only about a mile from the PSU campus downtown. Our apartment is a one-bedroom and has 1.5 bathrooms! Another plus is that we got an on-site manager position, which takes $100 off of rent each month! And all we have to do is handle keys when people get locked out after office hours and vacuum the hallways. Pretty sweet. We were praying to find a place to afford that would be big enough for us and a new baby, and Heavenly Father totally answered our prayers.

Our ward at Church is amazing! When we finally went to the right ward (we caught the wrong ward the first week) we just felt like we belonged. As I was sitting in sacrament, I felt like I knew all the people there, even though we hadn't met anyone. After the meeting, Merrill and I were going to rush up to meet the bishop, but instead he and his counselors rushed down to meet us before we even had a chance to stand up! That's never happened to us before, in all of the wards we've been in. And we couldn't have been in a better ward at this time when we are expecting; half of the ward is made up of young families--student couples with 1-3 kids. It is a family ward, though--complete with primary, young men and women, middle-aged couples, elderly couples, and missionaries. And the students in the ward are mostly medical and dental students. :D

Still trying to find a doctor. The doctor people recommended at church (Dr. Bair) isn't taking new patients. So I'll be looking for anyone who can take me so late in my pregnancy. But the last time I went to the doctor (about a week ago), he said Eliana is still average size, even though I'm kinda small. So, everything is still looking good, no problems yet. Thank goodness.

New Address

We finally moved into our new apartment! We have no furniture except for a bed and a dish chair. But at least we have a place to sleep :P

Here's the address:

010 SW Porter St. #101
Portland, OR
97201

Week 30

I've made it into the last 3 months--and I'm beginning to feel it! I never realized how hard it is to go from sitting down to standing up with such a big belly (being pregnant motivates me to never want to be fat). And I'm only going to get bigger! Yikes! Little Eliana is moving a LOT. I'm lucky she doesn't have kicks and punches--she just squirms most of the time, almost like she is stretching. Maybe she'll be a dancer...

Merrill and I are trying to find an apartment in Portland. We were hoping to live on-campus, but we only made the waiting list. So, we have to search a big city that neither of us are familiar with. Hopefully we can find something affordable and relatively close to campus before January when Merrill starts school.

I can't wait for Tuesday to come around! I'll finally get to see friends and family, some who I haven't seen in years. And what better time to catch up and be together than during the holidays?

The Neighborhood Zoo

Merrill and I are currently house-sitting for a family in the ward for a week while they are visiting family in Arizona for Thanksgiving. And it has been so fun! These people have SO many pets! 1 fish, 2 cats, and 4 dogs. 3 parrots and 2 crazy cockatiels in the living room. They have 8 canaries, 2 parakeets, 2 parrots, and a rat in the kids room. Then there is the garage, full of mice, more rats, more parakeets, and more cockatiels they are breeding. In the backyard they have tons of rabbits and some guinea pigs, and some more parakeets. Luckily we don't have to worry about the backyard animals-they got another person to take care of them. The birds in the living room keep us busy enough. One of the parrots doesn't have clipped wings, and it flies in circles all over the room. Another parrot sounds the alarm when the flying parrot tries to make the third parrot convinces her to escape their perch and run all over the house. One of the cockatiels (Einstein) walks around the room trying over and over again to climb up our legs and perch on our shoulders. The other cockatiel always follows a short time later. We don't like them perching on our shoulders too long-if they get comfortable, they tend to poop on us. But depsite the daily feeding schedule and trying to get all of the different types of food right for each of the different animals, we have had a lot of fun.

3...2...1...BLASTOFF!

I know most of you will shop online this year--why not do it with Blastoff?! Merrill and I joined this amazing network that offers discounts and an opportunity to get paid for shopping online! Go to this site and join our network: www.ppl.blastoffnetwork.com/animo!