A Celebratory Miracle

WE FINISHED THE PUZZLE!!!

Holy cow. It's finally done. We started this puzzle on December 21, 2010. It has taken us one year, nine months, three weeks, and four days to complete it.

Here is a review in pictures of the life of this particular puzzle.

what we had to show for the first night of work

results of four months of sporadic work

June 21, 2011, 2:37 PM

June 21, 2011, 3:58 PM

June 21, 2011, 6:02 PM

family gathering to salvage the wreckage

progress between July 2011 and October 2012--with the side note that my uncle lived in our basement for six months during that time at which point we didn't work on the puzzle at all

Ta-Da! Once we really got to working on it consistently again, we finished within just a few weeks.

For anyone's curiosity, we do glue our puzzles. It's a fairly basic process. Step one: Finish the puzzle.


Step two: Pour a bunch of Elmer's glue over it.

Step three: Spread the glue around with your fingers.

Step four: Do it again. And again. And again. Until you've gone through roughly two and a half bottles of glue, though that fully depends on the size of the puzzle.

It certainly bears mentioning here that this was a 6,000 piece puzzle. Despite taking well over a year to finish it, including one episode of temporary destruction, there is not a single piece missing. Impressive, don't you think?

One Year Older & Wiser, too

Megan Leigh turned 3 on October 6th! She's getting old.

We started the morning off with presents.

Most of her day was spent with Jane and Grandma Karrie. They had all kinds of fun in Draper and at Grandma's house. It was the Saturday of General Conference, so between the afternoon and priesthood sessions, Chris and I took Megan out for dinner while Jane and Ben hung out with the neighbors.

Megan requested french fries and applesauce, so we went to Village Inn.

Good times. :)

While Dad was gone for the Priesthood session, we celebrated with cake.

I admit that I enjoy my kids still being rather too young to have opinions about what kind of cake they want. When it's up to me, it will always be funfetti cake with rainbow chip frosting. Just sayin'.

Happy Birthday, Megan!

I was their angel

Remember yesterday when I said that life just keeps happening, regardless of how much else is already going on? As if in perfect proof of that statement, I was in a car accident last night.

All of these pictures are from my phone. That small tan car on the left caused the accident. I never heard for sure if the driver was drunk or not, but he certainly wasn't walking straight and he told about seven different stories as to what happened. In short, there were three cars stopped at the red light. The first car slammed into the truck,

who slammed into a blue car,

who slammed into another car.

At least three of those cars are totaled. For the one in the front that was only hit on the rear, I'm not sure if it's repairable or not.

I guess I would be called the lucky one in this little fiasco. The blue car in the middle only barely slid into the side of my van and came to rest there.

There was very minimal damage. I took a picture of it this morning.

And then I wiped off some of the dirt and paint and took another picture.

See? Not really anything.

At the end of this story, I 100% believe that my car was so minimally damaged simply so I would remain on the scene. The car in the front, that was only hit in the rear, had a young mom, her mother-in-law, and three small children inside (ages 5, 2, and 6 months). Once all the paperwork was done and the police cleared us to leave, I was able to give them all a ride home. Each of their husbands were out of town on a fishing trip and they had no other family to call. I was there with an empty minivan which conveniently contained no less than three car seats. Coincidence? Ha. Right.

God knew that they would need a ride home, and I was the perfect person to provide that. It couldn't have worked out better.

Brain Dump

You may have noticed my blogging absence over the last few months. You may note that I had only two posts for the entire month of September. If you are a regular follower of this blog, you may have realized that such a small number of posts is unusual for me. And you would be right.

To clear up any lingering questions from that last post--particularly if you didn't follow the Facebook comments--our family is moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico. It has been a long time coming over a rather bumpy and unforeseeable road, and because of that, I've avoided talking about it. I am fabulous at keeping other people's secrets. I'm less fabulous at keeping my own secrets. So I just stopped blogging since my life was pretty much consumed with Albuquerque but I wasn't talking about it.

P.S. Don't be surprised if I use the entire word "Albuquerque" often in coming posts. I am practicing my spelling skills. I figure if you're going to live in a city, it's good to know how it's spelled.

P.P.S. "P.S." stands for Post Script, meaning a note that comes after a piece of writing, like a letter. Since I am not actually done writing, it's not technically a post script. It's like a Mid-Script. But MS usually means something else...

P.P.P.S. A post post script would come after a post script. If I have a post script after a mid script, would it then be a P.M.S.?

P.P.P.P.S. Sometimes I think I'm funny. Do you think I'm funny?

Here's the short version: Chris has applied for a job with Sandia National Labs in Albuequerque Albuquerque. (Keep practicing.) He wants to go to grad school and Sandia has several program options that will pay for grad school. Sweet.

He originally applied at the end of June, had a phone interview in July, then he flew down to Albuquerque in August for an extended interview. It's now October. Long story short--we still don't have official paperwork in hand as the options have been changed/discussed/revised/altered several times. Hopefully this week we'll know something solid. Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, our house is for sale. Let me know if you know anyone who is interested in buying it.

In the chaos of not really knowing what's going on but moving forward anyway since God told us that's what's right for us to do right now, life still somehow manages to happen. For example--Megan turned three! And we finished the puzzle! And and and...I would love to be caught up on my blog again. So, I'm dumping my brain out for the moment and I will continue in the next few days to post about all the grand thoughts and pictures I've kept stored up lately. It'll be epic.

Consider this an Announcement