Welcome Back... to Texas?

Sorry for the hiatus, but we've been busy, busy, busy! In the past month we've moved into our new home in Austin, sprouted our first two molars (well, W did), spent a week or so visiting family in Utah, gotten lost on the Austin freeway about 46 times, met W's future best bud, and so much more! And, of course, I have taken maybe one photo this whole time. I promise to run downstairs and at least take a quick picture of our house before I actually post this :)

 Bam! There it is: Home Sweet Home. Everyone welcome :)

Anyway, here are a few more details from the past month:

• W and I spent 10 days in Springville, UT with my parents who recently relocated from the aina :( Good news is they are living in a super-cute, little bungalow with a basement (yay!) and a creek running behind their home and an awesome back yard. Ben is a junior at my dad's alma mater and may or may not be dating now... what? We helped move Jay into her new apartment in Provo and she is now a BYU student and attending all the BYU football games, so I'm kind of jealous. We also spent an afternoon in Midway at Tyler's mom's cabin and I wish I had known a couple of years ago about how adorable Midway is.We visited with a couple of old friends from L.A. too, and watching W with the other littles is the best!
• W has two new molars, one that broke through in Utah and another the first week we got to Texas. He is 15 mos now and he is loving all the space here. We've gone the the pool and the park just down the street several times and I guess we have a little more space in our home too. His favorite game to play right now is throwing every ball he can find down the stairs :)
• We are loving Austin so far! The people are nice, the market is HUGE and awesome, there is fun stuff to do around every corner, the weather is not as bad as I imagined and we've even had a few thunderstorms roll through which I love. There are also a million kids in our neighborhood and a little boy just a few months older than W right across the street! Our ward is great and we both have new callings already- Tyler is the ward Family History Consultant and I am the Mia Maid Adviser.
• We are definitely diving into this whole home-owners thing, maybe a little too fast actually. There are lots of little fixes we would like to do/are doing and Tyler is loving sowing off his manhood by fixing things up himself (he praises his works every time he walks by it...), but we do want to live in this house a bit before we do anything major. We've also discovered that sometimes our style isn't always in sync with each other, so we're learning to compromise, again :)
• My best friend, Monica, who just happens to live in Austin had her first baby boy three days after we arrived! His name is Nathan and W loves to hold him, probably because he's a cutie little thing. We plan on spending lots of time with him :)

These last couple of weeks have really been awesome, but also a lot harder than I thought. I was much more attached to L.A. and especially our friends/ward there than I realized, but we've realized how crazy blessed we are right now, so I'm sucking it up and moving on. W's been much more shnuggly since we got here as well, which I think is part "What is this place?" and part "My gums are killing me!", but he's just so sweet all the time and I'm trying to relish it before he goes full-blown toddler on me.

I promise we'll be better at keeping people posted on life in Austin when things calm down a little bit more, and I think we're due for a W post so I'll try to get that done too.

 Our home (FYI, the yard was green when I came to see it in July, but now it is all dirt so that's a project we'll have to tackle in the spring). 

 BONUS PHOTO:

What dinnertime looks like when you're trying to grow some teeth. The poor guy set his fork on the bowl without taking a bite, then slid the bowl away from him and just laid his head down :(