Our newest adventure!

It’s done!!! It’s finally done! We are all moved in and loving our new home. Moving here was the biggest headache ever! ( we may have been a little spoiled since buying our first home was a piece of cake, but still!) We put in an offer on the house in August and didnt get moved in until the very end of December. Sheesh! We just had a very poor experience with our lending officer and the realtor selling this house. (lots of dishonesty, and miscommunication) So if you’re moving to Idaho, I can tell you who NOT to use!! But if you want to sell your house in Utah, (or buy one) I can sure as heck tell you who TO use! Our realtor was literally our life saver! (it helped that she was my friends mom, so we already knew each other which made it nice) But this lady seriously helped us out sooo much and went above and beyond! She was the bomb.com I could go on and on but I wont, if you need a realtor ASK ME, I’ll give you her info.
ANYWAY
So much has happened since we moved in!! First off let me just say small towns are THE BEST. Our ward has like 50 people in it and everyone is awesome. I already got a calling into the YW presidency and I am thrilled!!! (I was crossing my fingers that it wouldnt be primary again.. woops) I may or may not be like 30 years younger than all the other leaders but that’s okay. Haha There are only 7 YW in my ward and they’re all so different and wonderful in their own ways. I’ve always wanted to be in the YW and I think it’ll be a blast  We had YW in Excellence, or New Beginnings at my house this week and it was a hoot. It was SuperHero themed, and since there are 8 values, and only 7 YW guess who was voted to participate. Say hello to SUPER VIRTUE. (way creative, I know) anyway it was fun.

There are so many perks to living out in the middle of nowhere. We only hear about 3 cars a day drive past our house, every direction you look is beautiful-whether it be mountains, pasture, rolling hills-I love it all! There is wildlife EVERYWHERE a bald eagle has a nest IN OUR YARD. We see huge hawks flying around ( sometimes i get nervous one is going to snatch up Penny) there are huge herds of deer that graze across the street, It’s just awesome. I used to not care too much about nature and the outdoors but moving to Utah helped quite a bit, and moving to Idaho made it even better! I love where we live!

Because we live so far from everything I decided it would be smart to start meal planning, and trying out freezer meals, and I’ll tell you what! What a good idea!! If you’ve ever considered freezer meals TRY IT! It’s so easy and they are all so good! I just found a few recipies on Pinterest that I thought sounded good and easy so I made a shopping list of all the ingredients and went out and bought them (it’s just a 45 min drive, NBD) and came home and got to work! Here’s a tip- if you want to do freezer meals, they make life during the week wayy easier because you don’t have to cook, but you do need to set aside a good chunk of time ONE day to make everything. It took me about 3 hours but I had made 12 meals. (7bags, most with enough for left overs for lunch) and I did the math and it came out to about each meal being under $4. Like, you can’t beat that. Some of our favorites so far have been-


BBQ CHICKEN-The first time I made this I shredded up the meat and we put it on salads, WOW YUM! The second time i shredded up the meat and we had bbq chicken sandwhiches. Both excellent options.

TERIYAKI CHICKEN- I cooked some rice and poured this over it. The juices soaked right up and the chicken was delish!



These two weren’t technically freezer meals, although I’m sure you could make them that way, they were just from one of my crockpot cookbooks but wow were they delish!!

POTATOES AND HAM- I work for the school district here and for Christmas they gave each person a Ham roast, So one day I cooked mine and then just cut it up and portioned it out into bags and froze some. It has lasted forever! So I used cut up ham chunks from this and wowowowo! Delish!! But if you don’t want to buy a whole Ham, I’m sure those little pre packaged ham chunks are good too.


STEAK FAJITAS- This was actually out of the “kids in the kitchen section” haha I didn’t realize that till after, but they were sooo good! And obvioulsy easy. I used elk steak and it was incredible! Sooo tender and lean. But of course if you dont have any elk meat lying around, i’m sure beef is wonderful too 

Moving on!

Penny has been loving all the open space to run around. She is the tiniest little cuddly sweetheart but when she wants to play, she plays!! She’s kind of a psycho but we love her. (even Jon! It’s a miracle!) She also likes to bring me dead cats.

she likes mud.

I haven’t had tons of time to teach her any tricks except sit. But she is a quick learner.
Story time!!
Let me give a back story quick- Jon hates poop. All poop. (he claims he isn’t changing diapers, we’ll see about that) I don’t really understand because he lived on a farm growing up, but anyway- when penny pooped in the house for the first little while being potty trained it infuriated him, and I always cleaned it up because she’s “my dog” anyway one morning he got up for work and I was still in bed and I hear from the hallway “what the heck.. you’re going to die!” my immediate thought was that somehow Penny got out of her kennel and pooped on the floor because then I heard “Lauren.. come here” So of course duty called and I was summoned from my place of rest to go pick up some poop. Well when I got up I saw Jon standing in the doorway of the bathroom. He goes “there’s a mouse in here! (time out-when we bought this house I was delighted by the idea that we wouldnt have mice anymore because this house was much newer, and in our old house OLD, mice were the bane of my existance, but turns out when you live in the country it doesnt matter how new your house is. There aremice EVERYWHERE outside and some find their way in-Time in!) Go get me something to trap it with, I don’t want to make a mess in the bathroom.” I laughed and was like let’s get penny!! So I grabbed her from her kennel and we put her in the bathroom and started egging her on to “go get him!!” she pretty much had no idea what we were saying but we kept egging her on and she started to get excited, especially when the mouse started to run! This little guy was so fat that he didnt even scamper, it was more like a slow speed walk. Poor little guy haha he reminded me of Gus Gus from cinderella. Anyway she started pawing at him and barking but wasnt attacking, Jon and I were just cracking up because it was so entertaining I tried to get my camera to record it But somehow the mouse got away and crawled under the cabinet or something. Darn. Penny did grab him a couple times so there was a little blood on the floor so we figured he would go crawl away and die somewhere in the walls.. (greaaattt) oh well. So Jon and I both left for work. WELL! When i got home I walk in thehouse and the first thing I see is little Gus Gus sitting in penny’s food bowl chowin down! No wonder he was so fat, he’d been dining on high calorie puppy food! Ha! So i trapped him under a bowl and got penny. (we need to pause right here and take note that this is quite impressive for me. I don’t handle the rodents or pests of the house, that is Jon’s job) but since he was gone, i had to be tough. Anyway. I got penny and we tried again! This time she was much more excited and chased that little guy all around the kitchen she grabbed him and shook him up real good and I shooed her outside and she fisnished the job! I was so proud!! Unfortunately I still had to dispose of the dead mouse but our little baby is now a mouser! Who needs cats when you have a little sweater wearing dog?! The end.

In other news you all remember from the my last post that Jon’s dog Jasper died. Well long story short the owner of the pit bull was apparently ordered to pay restitution (not by us, we didn’t press charges or anything) we were asked what we thought Jasper was worth and blah blah blah anyway, Pitbull owner didn’t want to pay cash so he gave us a horse instead! Ha! So we got a free horse. Her name is Jessie. Jon tried to surprise my with it..but he’s not so good with secrets and I figured it out. We have been talking about getting a horse for a while but our “farm fund” was being saved up for equiptment for the fields so we didn’t want to spend awhole bunch on a horse. But we didn’t have to because Jessie was free! What a blessing! She’s a great horse too! Comes from excellent papered lines (owner is a horse breeder) I’m not sure why he didn’t just pay us because what we asked was less than half what the horse is worth, but we aren’t complaining! I’m so excited to have a horse! Every little girls dream right? She’s beautiful, super sweet and friendly and young so we have plenty of time to train her how we want and bond with her before she can even be ridden. What an adventure!

Jon's glamour shot^^

I’m totally digging this country life!

 

Oh yeah, and I turned 23, so that was pretty cool. I had a little shindig at my house with lots of family and some of my friends were even able to make the trek! It's crazy some of them already have kids!! (who are all totally adorable!!!)

Quotes from Jon:
“Sometimes I wish I was a raindrop..”
“Remind me to thank your parents for teaching you that your jokes never get old”
“My body hates me, but pepto loves me”

 

Oh, and then there was this gem at the DMV

Lady behind counter: Name?
Me: Lauren LaRue
Lady behind counter: Lauren LaRue? Sounds like a stripper name.

okayyyy bye.