Chapter Closed

I feel like a whole chapter in my life has been closed, the BYU Provo chapter. This past week, Ben and I both graduated from BYU and have officially moved out of Provo. Moving itself was quite the adventure. We have loved the apartment we've lived in the last 2 1/2 years, and really we like the landlord (and luckily have stayed on her good side the whole time). However, we started hearing a few months after we moved in how AWFUL and TEDIOUS the checkout was when you move out. She has very high standards of what "clean" entails. We scrubbed our apartment from top to bottom for a day and a half (and it's only 500 square feet, thank goodness it wasn't bigger). After about 8 hours of cleaning, I started to feel really overwhelmed.

Being full-term + scrubbing floors on my hands and knees = lots of pain.

Thank goodness, a few angels came to help us on Wednesday. My ever faithful visiting teacher came to help (who is also pregnant, due about 5 weeks after me) and brought us the most delicious dinner (which was a total life saver since our entire kitchen was packed at this point). She also called the relief society president (who I had never met before Wednesday due to us being in the singles ward this past year) who came to help along with another girl in the ward who I had never met. Those two cleaned our whole bedroom- what a blessing! A few other friends stopped by throughout the day; I literally put Meghan and Caitlyn to work scrubbing our floor with a toothbrush (that's what the landlord specifically instructed). By 9:30 Wednesday night we had finally finished the cleaning. It couldn't have happened without all this help and I am so grateful for every person who came!

Thursday morning my dad and Will came down to help us move. We had a few guys from the ward there too and in about 40 minutes they had our entire apartment loaded into the trailer my dad borrowed for us. I'm sorry we chose to move on the coldest morning of the year. I think it was 10 degrees outside when we started. I gave the apartment a quick once over with the vacuum and waited for our landlord to come for the dreaded checkout. Luckily, she took a glance around, told us everything looked good, we gave her our keys and were on our way! Apparently all that anxiety over the checkout was worth it, she kept telling us how good everything looked. The process took about 15 minutes. She warns you that if you haven't cleaned well you could be there for 5+ hours checking out.

I know this is kind of long and boring to most of you, but I wanted to publicly say THANK YOU!!!!!!!!! to all the wonderful people who helped us clean and move! We couldn't have done it otherwise (and I've vowed to never move being 37 weeks pregnant again). Ben and I are both so grateful for such supportive friends and family!

Now we are mostly moved in and settled in my parents basement in Kaysville. We are living here until April when we move away to med school. The set up works out pretty well: we needed a cheap (as in free) place to live, and they want to hold their grandbaby as much as possible before we move away. Win-win. Well, I guess right now my parents don't have their "win" because the grandbaby isn't here to hold yet, but I think we can all be patient for a few more weeks for that one.

Now that we have the stress of finals and moving behind us, let the Christmas celebrating begin!