change.

i spent the majority of tonight straightening and fluffing and photographing my nest so my in-laws (who own this home) can get it listed in the next few days.

our downstairs neighbors, and dear friends, are busy packing and getting ready for their big move across the country early next week. i remember the day they brought their baby girl home from the hospital and ryan banged on the ceiling to tell me i should come down and see her. now, she is 3.

tonight, i laid on my bed and watched the setting sun through my windows and felt so sad about all of it. normally, i love change. i get bored easily and a new place or a new job or a new view is welcomed and refreshing. this time, i only feel sad.

i love this home more than any place greg & i have shared together. we brought our first baby home through these doors and we grew the most as a family and as individuals inside this space. we have dear friends and great memories. the house is full of twinkling lights and sunshine and everything i love.

i will miss it so, so much.

life outside my windows.

i've always been a lover of the night time, but evenings here at our little home in the sky just slay me. there's just something about those city lights through my window. today was such a long day. evie is sick, again, with a fever that's lasted two days now and she is as miserable as can be. after a day of non-stop whining and crying it's so nice to put her to bed, turn off all of the lights in this house and just watch the city through my windows. the lights pulse and move and sway and it all seems to be one big reminder that life goes on. i love to wonder what all those people out there are up to, racing through the darkness in a furry, moving through time and space to destinations all their own. it's crazy to me that every light i see represents an entire life, unique and meaningful, like mine.

i don't know what it is i love so much about those city lights. i guess they just speak to my romantic heart.

yesterday afternoon.

yesterday afternoon, when i opened my kitchen door to go put a load of laundry in (our laundry room is downstairs) i was greeted with the most glorious and unexpected burst of warm spring sunshine. it had arrived completely out of nowhere, and it warmed my soul from the inside out, that sunshine did.

after the clothes were spinning and the chores were finished evie and i decided to spend the rest of the afternoon outside. we harnessed the dogs and threw on some jackets and headed off for some adventure. i decided to snap some pictures along the way, because i love where we live & i know we won't live here forever.

last week, my friend lindsay and i were talking about how much she is loving the neighborhood she just moved to with her family and she told me she loves going for walks now without running into huge cracks in the sidewalk (her neighborhood is new). so linds, i took all these pictures for you! i mean, i really wouldn't know what that's like!

 this house. spooky. riiiggght??

 we made a pit-stop at the neighborhood library. can you see the pups through the window?

on our way home mr. toby decided he'd had enough. he planted his little paws and sat his little bum down and refused to budge. we'd tackled many blocks and a few hills, and yes, okay, my calves were hurting too, but c'mon toby! what a wuss.

  he spent the rest of the walk in the stroller. it wasn't a proud moment for him.

this house. i love.

when we finally made it home, we collapsed on the lawn and shared a bowl of berries on a blanket with our friends until it was time start dinner.

it was a great afternoon. i hope my old pal, mr. sun, decides to come again soon!

the aveNEWS.

yesterday i put on my big girl pants and went visiting teaching for the first time, in, oh i don't know, six months? (i am a really good visiting teacher, you should know this). i was running late when i arrived (a whole three minutes late- it was g's fault!) and felt a little unprofessional and irreverent to be running up to the house three minutes late and all, but then my visiting teaching companion ended up being an hour late, so like, no biggie...i was THE HERO!

well hero-ish, i would say, because of the part where i sat down, starting chatting about things completely unrelated to church or reverence or spirituality of any kind and then ended it with, "hmmm, well, i didn't prepare a thought or a scripture or anything, i'm kind of ALL CHURCHED OUT today, so...".

what?!

yes. those are the exact words i spoke. i told her i was "all churched out" and it wasn't even a sunday or anything. i mean, you guys, can you even believe this nonsense?!

anyways, it turned out to be just fine and dandy because the girl i visit teach is rad and we kind of just sat around and talked about how weird some of the people living in the avenues are (WEIRD!) and discussed how much we love our neighbors who fly their rainbow flags and go rollerblading in skin tight apparel while singing britney spears songs at the top of their lungs (we love those guys a lot and we hope to be invited to one of their patio parties some day) and then we decided upon going out for ice cream next time and closed the whole thing up with a prayer.

amen, right?! amen.

if you would like to be placed on the waiting list for those who wish to have me for a visiting teacher please just let me know. but, fair warning, the list is LONG.

anyways, back to the avenues. 

i have recently decided the avenues is a weird place to live. the avenues is nothing like my motherland: the cottonwood heights and not nearly similar enough to my one true love: the sugarhouse. 

sometimes i like to sit on my front lawn with my baby and those pesky dogs who don't listen to me anymore and just contemplate the avenues. i mean, the avenues, can be strange sometimes and the people who live here can be stranger. please note: myself included.

case in point: saturday afternoon.

last saturday afternoon the avenues held their annual avenues street fair. we'd been seeing signs for it all week and hearing lots of hype and so naturally i thought FUN! and naturally g thought LAME! and so obviously, we went.

i could spend a long time discussing the people and things we saw at the fair that day and give you some thrilling details, for example: it was really hot and crowded and it smelled like indian food (which tastes good!). there was a tent specifically designated for mothers to nurse their babies-the breastaurant is was called!- and i thought rad! because well, i'm a nursing mother and why not go nurse with all those other nursing mothers, so what if their babies are 4 years old, right?!? also, i bought myself a chocolate covered ice cream bar coated in almonds from the famous hatch family chocolatiers (reality show!!) and g didn't buy anything and thought most everything we saw belonged in the garbage. but in g's defense it was seriously hot outside and he was missing a football game on tv, so try not to judge him.

i could go on, but honestly, it's 11:30pm and the husband says i am staying up too late these days and refuses to cuddle with me at all when i climb in to bed at 12:01am, so perhaps i shall just leave you with this short video of sister hoola hooping hippie and leave it at that.

i just think that sums things up quite nicely, don't you?

please note: i love living here.
please note:  evs and i can take our walk at the gateway if we feel so inclined. (we only feel so inclined on days in which we have showered and our hairs are curled (so, not that often, really).
please note: i drive past temple square any gosh darn time i please.
please note: good restaurants! everywhere!!
please note: the trees are GLORIOUS!
please note: gjo better be awake and ready to spoon.

i am here.

i'm home for a little while.
not my home, not that little home in the city, but home.
home where i came from.

it's so nice to be here.

it's so nice to sit on the deck and rock in the shade of the pine trees while my mom waters her plants. it's nice to hear music streaming from the kitchen all day long. it's nice to sleep under the same arched windows i looked out as a child. they provided the perfect view of santa's sleigh in the sky or a boy waiting for me in the driveway. one of them shined a flashlight in through those windows many years ago and lit up the darkness with a beam that danced and shimmied across my ceiling.

my mom has sanded and painted and stained her heart out all over this place. and that is why i love it. when she painted the living room all those years ago, a dark crimson where white had once been, she first wrote "i love jess" in giant red letters that stretched floor to ceiling. as a child, i giggled and marveled over the rebelliousness of it all. sometimes, if i stand at just the right angle, under just the right lighting, i swear i can still see the words she wrote.

our names are carved in the dining room table. it started out with scribbles; childhood drawings and math problems that etched their way into the soft wood and left marks. eventually, my mother saw the beauty in it and gave us a sharpened pencil and instructions to leave our signature. now, greg's is there too. and someday evie's will be also.

this place shaped me. i was lectured at the kitchen table, pitched to in the backyard and kissed in the basement. the lamps are always turned on, music is always playing and an endless bowl of microwave popcorn always sits on the coffee table. there are a million memories living and breathing and filling up this space.

it is home, and always will be.