Our House

So it started when we found out that our rent was going to go up when our lease was up, and then we did some research and found out that a mortgage would be pretty much the same as paying rent. If we're being honest (I'm still adjust to hot and humid) we're going to be in San Antonio for awhile. My rockstar husband has a job that he loves, and they love him. Because of this rockstar job we have a pretty sweet life. Maybe I'll staple some fall leaves to my tree. Anyway.. back to the subject.

Scott started looking at houses to rent and it put him in contact with a really great team that made the decision whether to rent or buy pretty easy. We started looking seriously at houses over General Conference weekend. We found a house in our budget that we really liked. It had a fantastic kitchen and was close to the temple. They had ripped out a pool in the backyard and were offering money to landscape it. Being a little naive we thought we could tackle that and rip the carpet out of the bathroom. We had everything lined up and were ready to put an offer in, and then that night I was looking at some more listings and found a house in our ward, cheaper, much less landscaping to do. It felt right that we needed to wait to put in an offer on the first house. We called our realtor and asked if we could see the other house the next morning. Houses move fast down here, we have a lot of military families moving in and out. When we walked into the new house it felt like home. We wouldn't have to move wards and it was closer to work for Scott. It was a no brainer. This was our house. We were the first showing and we put in an offer an hour later. Our realtor told us it was priced for a bidding war so since it was cheaper than we were planning on we put in a big offer. They accepted that day and we decided to close June 1st. The longer we're here the more and more we know this is where we're supposed to be. This is where we want to raise our kids, and dance in the kitchen.

Waiting in the driveway for the final walk through. 

Serious adulting!

Our first home! 

We got the keys pretty late in the day so we brought the TV, our airbed, and Scott magically produced the Women's College World Series Championship game. 

This is the stuff of dreams. 

Shamu Club

For Memorial Day Scott woke me up with season passes to Sea World here in San Antonio. Little did we know how quickly we were going to fall in love with this place. It's absolutely perfect. Our passes give us free parking and 20% off of everything. They just opened the Pacific Point Preserve with a new sea lion show and it's hilarious! I love Sea World. It's so relaxed and I love the animals. There's a couple big roller coasters and lots of wonderful shows. With the Pacific Point Preserve the opened Harbor Market as well. For being a theme park the food is reasonably priced and its really good. I would much rather have an Italian Panini than corn dogs and hamburgers. We have probably gone every week this summer. We also bought the pass that gives us access to Aquatica, Sea World's waterpark. They have this really cool waterslide that takes you under the stingray tank so you can see the stingrays above you. It's also really clean, major bonus! Sea World came out with an app for it's 50th anniversary and you can collect badges for answering questions and learning about marine life. Once we collected all the badges we got free ice cream. I definitely think this will become a yearly thing that we do.

The Steel Eel is a roller coaster of nothing but Camelbacks, my favorite! Scott's, not so much. It was hilarious! 

There's an aviary in the lazy river, this bird if from the part of Africa where Scott served his mission. 

 Free Shamu Ice Cream

We were hanging out in the conservation center and a Zoologist invited us and some other people on a behind the scenes tour of some more animal exhibits they're building. The lemurs were really cool. 

We've been going so much we decided to invest in Sea World/Waterpark wear. We like to travel light.  Coordinating was unintentional, but I feel really good about it. 

Thanksgiving in Texas !

Scott's parents came to visit us for Thanksgiving this year. We were so excited to have family visit! It was nice that I didn't have as many responsibilities at the store this year and had time to enjoy family and make my first Thanksgiving.

It was definitely all about the food this year. I brined my turkey (first time!) this year. We had a wonderful time watching old family movies together. Aside from our engagement weekend, and the wedding (which I don't think counts much it was so busy!) I hadn't really spent a whole lot of time with my in-laws. Who are absolutely incredible. We had so much together! I love seeing where Scott gets so many of his amazing traits from. I really won the lottery on fantastic in-laws.

We went downtown and saw the sights and Scott got us tickets to the light parade on the riverwalk. It was a perfect weekend. I can't wait for our next visit.

Scott put together this wonderful montage of our Thanksgiving. I'm so grateful he started putting these together.We're working on how we keep our family history and I love how these turn out.

Because if you aren't bathing the turkey in butter in your pajamas you're doing it wrong.

Settling in.

With both stores up and running, it was time to make this place home. A few Craigslist scores, and a husband who knew how to hang things we were living in a fairy tale. 

First real dinner in our new place. It took me 15minutes to get to the grocery store and I called my sister Lindsay freaking out that I didn't know how to make dinner. A girl with a degree in food doesn't know how to make dinner. Thanks to her we had Chicken Tacos and Scott thought I was amazing. So much to learn haha. 

We ate our way through nearly 25+ flavors I'm sure those first few months in Texas. It became our nightly ritual. A bowl of ice cream and we would talk about our days. 

Homemade pizza and football quickly became another one of our favorite traditions. 

Married//Cross Country Move//Open a Store

Sure.

Why not?

It was a complete whirlwind getting married and honeymooning. While the honeymoon still isn't over (a year later) there definitely was a lot of reality pulling out of my parents driveway after the Flagstaff reception. It's been my joke this year that if my husband wasn't so cute I wouldn't have moved to Texas. Which is true. I'm loving it now, but it was really really hard to drive away from the west and everything I knew. I can only imagine what Scott was thinking leaving Arizona with his new bride, headed to the place he picked, to the dream job he wanted. Except his new bride cried all the way to New Mexico. (We have learned a lot this year. )

I think I was grateful when I got the call from my Boss asking me to come back to work early. Kneaders was something I knew very well, and being needed in San Antonio for work made it feel like we were just going there for work. Not because we were moving there forever. Originally I was going to take a week once we got to San Antonio to get settled, but the permits for the store had come in late and it was Wednesday afternoon and they had just barely been allowed into the store. Meaning they had lost three days of prep work and needed to open in 48hours. As much as my boss apologized  for asking me back early I ran whole-heartedly back into my kitchen. I needed something high-stress and chaotic to feel grounded. Crazy how that works right? Well it was the hardest, most chaotic, stressful opening I've ever done. I walked in the kitchen Thursday morning  and less than 48hrs later we were open.

Those two weeks of getting that store off the ground were insane. As soon as they seemed relatively stable I flew to Denver to open another store there.

San Antonio Kneaders was up and running, out to dinner to celebrate! (Married two weeks)

I was running Valentine's Day when we went on our first date and was under a lot of stress at work, but I fell in love with Scott on that first date because in those three hours he made all the stress disappear and the chaos stopped. Things were comfortable and I knew I wanted that forever.  In between working at the store I unpacked the house and tried to learn how to make dinner for Scott. We started to get settled and even with everything around us being non-stop we were (are) blissfully happy. New job for Scott, new house, new marriage, work moving at warp speed for me, but we got to have family prayer together each night and lay our heads next to each other. Which was more than we could have ever asked for.

Pizza on the floor our first night in our new apartment. 

Couldn't be happier. August 18th, 2014

Unloaded in San Antonio!