With his own two hands

So Russell made a bed. All by himself. Cut, sanded, stained, and assembled it. After almost five years of marriage we finally had the room to get a bigger bed (upgraded to a queen!), so we went mattress shopping this weekend, and after several weeks of work Russell finished the bed today. Pretty spiffy, huh.

From Spring 2010

From Spring 2010

Snowmageddon

So this weekend we got a whole bunch of snow (even the president referred to it as Snowmaggedon, so that's what I'm going with). As in record-breaking snowfalls, on track to being the snowiest winter the DC region has ever seen. And lucky us, we're trying to move in the middle of all of it. I had already planned on taking Friday off so that we could go over to the house and start painting, but after seeing the forecasts we decided to go ahead and plan to stay there overnight. Good thing we did, 'cause we didn't make it out of there until Sunday. (Luckily we packed enough food and clothes to last us several days). Also, we were really lucky in that we didn't lose power, either. Anyway, we got about two feet of snow, and two rooms painted. Tomorrow we plan on going over and cleaning the carpets and will hopefully finish in time to make it back to our apartment before Round 2 hits.


The view from our porch


A blue jay hanging out outside our bathroom window


Our freshly painted bedroom (I mixed the color myself from a couple cans of green paint we got at a construction thrift store and some white paint from wal-mart, not too shabby, I'd say)

From house

The boy's bedroom

Oh, and in other, totally unrelated news, Simon laughed today. His first honest-to-goodness laugh. What a cute little boy!

Russell P. Knighton, Ph.D. (candidate)

So, it is official: I got my acceptance letter today. For those who don't know, I applied to the Ph.D program at the University of Maryland, so that is the letter I'm talking about. Ok, technically I got the financial aid portion of my acceptance letter, which wasn't really supposed to get to me until after the official acceptance letter, but it still let me know that I have been accepted. I'll be starting up in August and will be teaching while I go to school, so I'm pretty excited about that. I feel a pretty strong draw to the academic environment, so this should be a pretty good experience for me. Plus, the money that I get from that will be enough to pay for the child care that we'll be needing. We really have been blessed.

On a somewhat related note, we have now closed on the house, which means that the whole point of buying were we did in order to be closer to school was not in vain. We spent most of the day today over there cleaning up and getting the feeling that the place was actually ours. We also painted the boy's room a nice shade of blue, and Iain only leaned against a painted wall two or three times, so all in all we will consider it a success. Especially since we got the paint really cheap ($1 for the gallon). It was fun being able to paint our own place. We still have a lot of painting to do, but we feel good getting the one room pretty much done.

Oh, one more thing. I got my diploma today. It feels kind of funny to have the actual piece of paper, but I'm sure I'll get over it. I graduated suma cum laude, which makes me feel pretty good too. Of course, if you listen to Alisha, I'm not smart enough to have the 4.0, so there must be some mistake. :)

We got the house!

Some of you may have heard this already, but we're buying a house. It's just over in Maryland (which sadly means we'll be moving out of our ward - church just won't be the same), fairly close to the University of Maryland where Russ will *fingers crossed* be going to school starting this fall. It's got lots of little things that will need worked on, but it's super-cute and sooo much bigger than we could have afforded in DC. Plus, it has a yard! We took a few pictures during our home inspection the other day, and while they aren't the greatest and there aren't ones of every room, you can kind of see what it's like - or at least what it's like with someone else's furniture.