Puppy Love

What's a house without a dog?

Brian and I have been wanting a dog for a long time, and really the only thing stopping us from getting one was not having space for one. Now that we've got a house and are settling down we are so excited to add a furry member to our family.

We started researching what kind of dog we wanted as soon as Brian accepted a job offer, and Corgi's kept coming up as the perfect breed for our little family. Corgi's are great with kids, they love lots of snuggles, and they also need exercise and want to run around and play. They are also a good size since they are small enough that Brian is okay with them on the couch (which is a must for me), but they're not tiny, yappy dogs.

Once we decided on a breed we got in contact with a breeder and found one near us with a litter due at the perfect time called Stafford's Corgis. Stafford's Corgis is a wonderful small breeder in Spencer, VA who truly loves and cares for her dogs and pups. She's been great at giving us advice on owning a new puppy, as well as letting us come and visit our puppy as often as we want.

6 Weeks

We first visited the litter when they were 6 weeks. Celie (the breeder) told us that one of the two fluffy girls would make excellent pets for us and that the lighter of the two was going to be the best fit for our family. We played with the pups for about an hour and we agreed the light fluffy girl was the best for us. We named her Ginger.

Ginger at Six Weeks

Neville the Tri-Colored boy

Waffles the Fluffy Girl

Ginger and Neville

Me holding Ginger for the first time

Brian holding Ginger for the first time

Ginger loves belly rubs

The whole litter tired after playing, Ginger is the one on the top left

9 Weeks

Even though we wouldn't be picking up Ginger until she was 12 weeks old, we couldn't resit another visit at 9 weeks. It was great getting to run around with her in Celie's back yard. She didn't know her name, but she knew that she and her litter-mates were called puppy. It was really cute to see her face light up when she realized that when I was calling puppy that I meant her. She'd run over to me as fast as her little legs could carry her and as soon as she got to me she'd want to be picked up and held.

I may be biased but I think our pup is the best pup out of the whole litter.

Ginger after a big run

Ginger loves Brian

Who could resist squishing that face?

Celie the breeder and Ginger

The whole litter at 9 weeks, Ginger is top left

12 Weeks

We brought Ginger home last night and she was so good even though the car ride was an hour and a half. We fed her a little bit of food and let her explore the house and the backyard. When it was time for bed we put her in her crate and she only fussed for 5 minutes before sleeping through the whole night.

She is already well on her way to being potty trained, and she's just as cute as cute can be. We are so happy to have a little furry addition to our family.

Our House

 We got the keys!!!

Now that the house is officially ours here's a tour...





Our house is a split level. Meaning when you walk in the front door you can either go up half a flight of stairs to get to the main level, or go down half a flight of stairs to the spare bedroom, laundry room area.

At the top of the stairs on the main level is our living room. Those two doors go out onto our deck in our back yard. If you turn right while standing in the living room you'll see the kitchen.

There are a lot of pictures of the kitchen because it is my favorite thing about the house. I love the peninsula, and the fact that we get two pantries. The white door in this picture is a typical sized pantry, and the previous owners added the cabinets between that door and the fridge.

All the appliances came with the house, which is a huge blessing. We have an amazing fridge with double doors and a slide out freezer. Also the stove top and microwave are new and super nice as well.

I love the back-splash in the kitchen it really makes it look finished.












This one of the two "kid's rooms". It's a pretty typical bedroom with a nice window and closet.

This is the second of the two "kid's rooms". It's almost identical to the first except that it's painted blue.

 This is the main level bathroom, it's pretty typical.














 This is the Master bedroom, it's hard to tell in this picture but the walls are painted brown and there is a darker brown accent wall.

This is the Master Bath. Again it's hard to tell in this picture, but it has a double vanity, and two really cute oval mirrors above the sink.

 Here's our walk-in-closet which both Brian and I are super excited for because that means he'll have room for his clothes in the closet too!

Down stairs is where the spare bedroom and third bathroom are as well as the garage and a storage/laundry room. Here is the laundry room with the washer dryer the sellers left for us.

 In the laundry room/storage room is a second fridge that the sellers left for us as well as some shelves for storage.

This is the spare bedroom which we'll use as a playroom/guest room. It's really nice since it is almost as large as the master bedroom and has it's own bathroom and walk-in-closet as well.
















 Here's the walk-in-closet in the spare room.

 Here's the bathroom attached to the spare room.














One of Brian's favorite parts about the house is the over sized two car garage. I like it because I could park two cars in it and Brian would still have a lot of space in the back of the garage to use as a work shop space.

Brian's other favorite thing about the house is the back yard.We have almost .4 acres with a deck a nice retaining wall and lots of side yard space.

Our backyard line goes just passes where Brian is standing in this picture. Basically right up to the neighbors shed.

We are so excited to have the house be officially ours so we can start planning our next adventures; like getting a puppy, and preparing the nursery for the future little Marler.

Baby On The Way

I'm Pregnant!

We are happy to announce that we are expecting! Our little one is due April 1st 2014 and we couldn't be more excited :)

I had my first doctors visit a week ago and up until that point it seemed so surreal that I had a live, little miracle growing inside of me. I mean I was definitely feeling all the usual symptoms of being 9 weeks pregnant, but it was still such an abstract concept to me. When Brian and I looked at the ultrasound screen and saw our little baby's heart beating away it really sunk in for me. We're having a baby!

Today I am 10 weeks pregnant, and in the middle of my "morning" sickness phase. Luckily it hasn't been as bad as I know it could be, and pickled ginger has been such a huge life saver. 

I will keep posting updates about the upcoming baby bump, cravings, gender, and all the other exciting announcements to come. We feel extremely blessed and are so excited to share our news.

The House Hunt

We are so excited about our future new house, but it took a lot of searching to find our perfect home.

The house hunt started long before Brian and I ever got to Virginia. As soon as we had decided to accept the offer from Celanese to have Brian be a Reliability Engineer in their Virginia location, we started looking at the housing market. We did research on housing websites, looked at our financial info and did a lot of in depth budgeting to see what we could afford and when. We then came up with a list of about 25 houses that we ranked in an excel spreadsheet that we definitely wanted to see in person.

So with our list we headed out to Virginia two weeks before Brian had to start work. We were able to see our top 15 on the list in the first three days of being out there and we agreed our number one choice seemed perfect for us. The only problem was another family also thought it was perfect for them and they were preparing to make an offer. We made our offer Wednesday afternoon, confident that ours was better that the other family who put their offer in the night before. We got a call from our Realtor that night that the seller countered the other family's offer and the other family accepted. Our Realtor was able to find out that our offer was better, but the seller wanted to counter the people who put their offer in first.

It was hard news to hear, and even though we knew there was another family wanting the house, and we tried not to get our hopes up; we were still pretty sad and could hardly think about going out and looking at houses again.

After a good nights sleep we got right back on the horse and started looking at houses that we hadn't had on our excel list, but that our Realtor knew that we would like. We found three houses that we liked, though none were as good as the house we lost. We did a lot of research on the three houses, weighed out pros and cons and were having a hard time making any decision. One was so charming and had a ton of square footage, but it was older and had problems that come with an old home. One was new and had everything we wanted except for an extremely tiny backyard, and we'd have to negotiate the price down to get it into our price range. And the last one was newer and had a great view, but it needed a lot of work to get the number of beds and baths we wanted and a usable backyard. We weren't in love with any of them.

Tuesday the next week our Realtor called us up and said there was a new house that another Realtor in his company is selling. It wasn't technically on the market yet, but he and the other Realtors of his company got a tour and he thought it'd be perfect for us. We were the first ones to see it that Wednesday morning and after we walked though it we felt great about it. We split for lunch and then that Wednesday afternoon made an offer. Again we tried not to get too excited, and when our Realtor called that evening I tried to brace myself for whatever he had to say.

When he said they accepted our offer, I started jumping around the apartment. We are so happy to have found a house that we like better than the house we lost, in a fantastic neighborhood, with all the beds and baths we wanted, and a great size backyard. So far we've had the home inspection and have given financial documents to the bank and are on track to close and officially own the house on September 13th.

Blueberry Picking & Archery Games

Instead of flying straight into Virginia, Brian and I decided to fly into Maryland to visit his family and then buy the "green" truck and drive south to Christiansburg.

Blueberry Picking 

Not far from where Brian's family lives, is a wonderful place called Butler's Orchard, where you can go out on their property and harvest your produce at a greatly reduced cost. Since Brian's favorite fruit is blueberries we decided to go out and pick those.

Everyone's got their own style of picking blueberries.

We picked a ton of blueberries

 And good times were had by all

After you pick the blueberries you bring them into the store where they are weighed and paid for. In the store they also had a slushy machine that had two flavors of slushy lemonade. Both flavors were delicious

Archery Games

Besides picking blueberries until our fingers turned purple, we also played a few rounds of milk jug archery.

For those of you unfamiliar with milk jug archery here's how you play.

•  Fill two empty milk jugs with equal amounts of water.
• Tie these full milk jugs on either side of a rope on a pulley
• Shot arrows into your milk jug and hope that you jug drains faster than your opponent's jug
• Whomever's jug hits the ground looses

Everyone taking a few warm up shots before the game.

Brian and Michael setting up for the first round

This is a video of Brian vs Michael and Gina

Here's a video of Brian vs Dad

Dad examining his milk jug after the game

It's always fun to visit the Maryland house!

PS sorry for the poor quality of the videos that was the best I could upload under our current internet conditions.

Goodbye Provo

July 19th-21st was our last weekend in Provo, and since it was our last weekend in the college student phase of our lives we partied it up pretty good:

We went to in-n-out

We went to the American Fork Carnival and rode the Spider ride

We played Spades with tiny cards

and Star Wars Monopoly

and Canasta

and BANG!

The following Monday July 22nd was my last official day of work, and the day the movers came and packed our whole lives up in boxes.

Work was great because lets be honest, I didn't really spend that day working. I spent my morning making up a quiz about myself and the people who scored the highest got the remainder of my meal tickets. Shout out to Cisco, Danny, Gabe, and Megan for getting 1st-4th place respectively and winning meal tickets. That afternoon at work, Megan and I put together a BBQ appreciation party/Gabe's Birthday Party for our department which was awesome!

Brian spent that morning with the movers.

The came at 10am and were able to box everything up and put in on a truck and drive away at 3pm.

They even took the Taurus with them.

All that was left were the bags we packed for the airplane and the furniture that came with the apartment.

Tuesday July 23rd we clean, clean, cleaned our apartment which was a lot easier to do with out all our stuff in the way, and my manager Carmen, invited me to come in to work for an hour. When I got there, she thanked me in front of all the managers of our department and our VP for all my hard work and presented me with a gift card to home depot and magazines to help get me started on turning a house into a home.

Wednesday morning July 24th, Becca and Nate drove us to the airport and we set off to visit Brian's parents in Maryland before heading down to Virginia. The funny thing about flying out of the Salt Lake City International Airport on a Wednesday morning is you see a ton of missionaries. All of the payphones were crowded with guys in suits and girls in dresses. There were at least 20 Elders and 10 Sisters boarding one flight to Oregon in the gate next to us. I guess that was a pretty fitting last hour in Utah.

Things I Will Miss About Provo

• All of the wonderful friends we've made through out the years
• Having a temple super close and another one on the way
• A dessert place on every corner instead of a bar
• Two awesome Libraries
• Our Married Student Ward
• Google Fiber (seriously they have to wait until we leave to put it in?)
• Awesome cheap date activities 
• The ability to have everything you need in walking distance
• Free access to a 3D printer and power tools (this ones is Brian's)