Happy Memorial Day! We've had a great weekend together. It seems like the first holiday weekend in a looong time that Jared didn't have to work at all. On Saturday we went on and adventure to Martin's Cove, walked through the visitor's center, and did some hiking. I'll do a post with pictures from that day later this week.
Today we started our holiday with a ward breakfast in the neighborhood park. Jared was in charge of it, but luckily I have a friend in the ward who loves a good party and even loves coordinating everything, and she also was recently called as RS president, so she really helped us pull the whole thing together. Turned out great. We had plenty of food and a decent showing.
We spent Jack's nap packing up a few boxes. We took on the "sentimental stuff" category today, which is in my opinion the toughest category because it's easy to get caught up in the nostalgia and decide what stays and what goes. We had fun going through old letters and photos, but it feels good to be onto the next category. We did a big chunk of our packing before we listed our home for sale, so now we're able to just do a few boxes here and there and not feel like we're drowning. After Jack woke up we played and had a yummy dinner and roasted pastry dough cooked over the fire on these "Wolf 'em" roasting sticks I got for my birthday from Jared's parents.
I think you're supposed to use biscuit dough, but I had these little pastry dough rounds on hand and they turned out incredible. It makes a little cup that you can fill with chocolate, jam, whipped cream, whatever. My favorite version was s'more style. Pastry cup stuffed with toasted marshmallow and chocolate.
Then Jack got ahold of my camera and went into photographer mode. Love me a good 3-year-old capture:
^^All of these were taken by Jack. Then we finished our perfect lil holiday with Jack's favorite game: "Wild Jack." Basically Jared chases Jack around the yard with a big blanket and throws it at him to try to catch and tickle/eat a "wild Jack." Jack goes bananas for this game.
We had a full but wonderful day. I hate that we're at this point where I can count the number of weekends we have left in Casper on one hand. We'll have to make the most of them!
I guess I kind of left you hanging about the job situation, so an update: Everything looks like it's going to work out with the dream Washington job! They answered Jared's questions and he signed the contract. We just have to wait for them to dot a few i's and cross a few t's, and the contract should be official in about a week. At that point we're hoping to visit Washington to explore the area where Jared's job will be and decide on a radius of where we'll look for a house. A rental home would cost us so much more than a mortgage so we're hoping to squeeze into a home before Amazon's latest fulfillment center gets up and running in the city we're moving to and new hires flood the housing market. We'll be in a more rural (but not crazy rural--about 25k population) area of NW Washington, just an hour or so north of Seattle.
It seems like the location is a winning combo of being absolutely beautiful (within a half hour of the ocean and also the Cascade mountains), rural enough not to feel crowded but dense enough to have a Costco, and far enough from the big city to not have to deal with traffic much, but close enough to drive in if we want to. Also just about half an hour from Jared's parents! There's still some lingering sadness that it's not the right time for Utah yet, but we're starting to get excited to explore Washington in the meantime. I'll be sure to take some pictures to share when we go up to visit in two weeks.
