Wow! I can't believe its been over a year since we have updated this blog. Time flies when you have kids to keep you busy. Well in the last year many things have happened. We moved into our home on our 2nd wedding anniversary a few weeks later Bella started 4th grade at a new school, we had our first trunk or treat with our new ward, Ryan turned 1 and we visited Grandma and Grandpa Mann and Uncle Movell in Nevada for Christmas. Now that it is a new year I- Marjorie turned the 32 and about 1 1/2 months later(the first part of April) we found out we were expecting a little one. In May we had our first doctors appointment and found out we are have an early Christmas present coming to our home. On July 20th we found out that Isabella and Ryan get a little sister to join them. We are super excited. I had asked Ryan a few weeks or so before we had the ultrasound if we were having a brother or a sister, his reply SISTER and he was correct. I know Bella is thrilled to get a little sister, Ryan on the other hand I think is still a bit confused as to what is going on. He loves to say hi and hug my belly and talk to his sister. He is always sharing his toys and telling baby sister it is her turn to play with his ducks or phone, motorcycle or whatever he may be playing with at the moment. I feel bad for our kids this summer since I was so sick for the first 3 months or so of this pregnancy we didn't do much for the summer. It was not as exciting for them as it could have been. Sorry kiddos. Well it is now October 14th and we are getting ready for our second Halloween in Pleasant Grove. We are so excited. This year Bella is going to be a Jester, but it may change at any given time. Ryan on the other hand will be one of his favorite characters and that is Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. We were hoping to find costumes for all of us along the Winnie the Pooh theme but we haven't had much luck and I am not one for spending tons of money on costumes that we will only wear a few hours.

WOW!!!!!!!!!!! Home Sweet Home!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I will be posting pictures of the house once we get it all organized so all can see what the inside looks like.

Well, it has been one month and some change since we last posted. At that point we had just sat down with the Kelly, our broker, she is amazing, thank you so much Kelly. I want to send much thanks and gratitude to Robert Arnold our realtor with Everest Realty Group, you are awesome and amazing.
Well, now back to the house. We got the apprasal and the house was in great condition and appraised for the selling price. So we got ready to finalize the loan, but we ran into some issues with past credit and other verification items, FHA loans are very strict, wow. After all that we got the thumbs up from the Mortgage and Title company to ready ourselves for closing and signing of the final papers. We thought that orginally we were going to close on August 15th, but we were able to close one week early which was awesome. Let just pause here for moment and explain how worried I was for this closing, for about the first 10 minutes I forgot how to make a cursive J, meaning that I had to initial my mistakes. Crazy. Marjorie was cool as ice about the whole thing. She is amazing and I love her so much, thanks, beautiful. I got settled down and the closing went very well and the loan, funding and reporting got finished. Once this is done, THE HOUSE IS NOW OURS, WOOOOOHOOOOO!!!!!!! We got the keys to the house on Thursday, August 11th, the greatest day of this whole process. Such a relief to be able to have a real house we can call our home. Awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We had everything lined up to move on August 13th, which yes is our Anniversary. Not the best way to spend our 2 year anniversary, sorry beautiful. I look at the positive side of this, our anniversary present to each other is a new home to live in and raise our beautiful family with a new beginning and new adventures. I LOVE YOU SO MUCH BEAUTIFUL, YOU ARE AMAZING, PATIENT AND THE GREATEST PART OF OUR FAMILY, THANK YOU AND I LOVE YOU FOR ALL ETERNITY. So we are home sweet home in Pleasant Grove. I am so greatful for everyone involved with this process.

To all of our friends and family, our AWESOME Realtor will be throwing a house warming BBQ for us and we want to personally invite all to attend. I will be posting the date here once we are final on it. The idea is to have the BBQ about the middle of September, but I will post the exact date here, so keep looking for this. Please attend and enjoy some great food and fun.

Good News

As you all know life has been stressful trying to find a home. I know that Marjorie has posted on facebook, that we have been accepted for the house in Pleasant Grove we put an offer in on. We are extremely excited and this is the furthest we have been in 4 months looking for homes. We have a lot of things to do before we can actually move into the house. One thing is the home inspection and let me tell you, that is no easy thing to look forward to. To our good faith and hope that house was satisfactory on almost everything. We have a few things that are of concern, so since our sellers are not going to pay closing cost our realitor is going to work to make the sellers pay for all the repairs of concerns on the house. Our realitor is awesome and will do everything he can to leverage all things to make that happen. Thanks Everest Reality for all the hard work you all have done. Well, the next step after the home inspection was to sign all the loan papers. What is the best way to describe this, ummm, OH MY GOODNESS,yeah that is the best phrase to describe that. Well, now we have the waiting game for about 10 to 15 business days, then what is next, not sure. In the meantime we have to get the house appraised and fight to get the seller to repair the issues. We are hoping that the rest of this process is smooth, but that is up to the Lord, we did what we can do at this point, so it is in his hands.

July 4th and other good times

Things have been good and continue to get better. We just celebrated our countries birthday and it was an awesome celebration. Danny, played some golf. We did some swimming and then went and watched the parade in Sandy. We spent the afternoon and evening with Spencer and his family. The firework show was amazing, Sandy city had a radio station put their firework show to music. Talk about enhancing a firework show, it was amazing. All had a good time.

Just to let everyone know that we are still looking for houses, but it seems like it takes forever to find one that is worth putting an offer in on. But as of this post date we have put offers in on several but have got the news that the house already is under contract meaning that no more offers are being accepted. We put an offer in on house tonight in Pleasant Grove, so hopefully we do not get the same result as the other houses "Under Contract"

Here are some pictures of some happenings in the "Our Story" life.

Life's Good

Just posting to let everyone know that we still are posting on our blog. I know that the last post was for New Year's and I apologize for having such sparatic posts. I will keep doing my best to keep this updated on the happenings of "Our Story". Please forgive me for being a slacker.

Since new years, things have been good for our family. We have had our down times with illnesses and other such issues. But I am happy to let all know that our new addition, Ryan is sitting up on his own and is learning more about how his vocal cords work. Isabella is doing awesome in school. She had her dance festival on Tuesday May 31st and that was extremely cute. Marjorie, Ryan and I had a great time watching her class dance. Great Job!!, Bella. We love you. Great Job!!, Ryan. We love you.


Marjorie and I are also looking for a house to settle our family into. I have never looked at homes or been involved in the buying process. I am excited but also very nervous as there is a lot involved with this and I had no idea. It is very intense in all aspects.

Well, that is all for now. I plan to add pics of events that have transpired in the last few months. So plan to see some really great pics of our little family to enhance "Our Story"

Happy New Year!!!

Planning the wedding

Well its been a couple months since we updated our blog. Quite a bit has happened since then.

On June 13th 2009 Danny proposed to me at Bridal Veil Falls with Isabella. It was a great day. It started off in the early afternoon and went to the wee hours of the night.

Danny and Isabella picked me up at my Mom's on Saturday June 13, 2009 and we headed up to Bountiful. He knows that one of my favorite places to eat is up there so we started the day off at Joy Luck a Chinese place I love eating there.While there I am thinking that something big will happen while eating but nothing really happened till we were about to leave and had our fortune cookies. Danny had made a special fortune cookie for me that read "A fairy tale wedding will happen in 3 months". I thought that was very sweet that he would begin the day with my favorite restaurant and who we had talked about using for our reception decorator.

After that we headed down to Orem to his house for more excitment to the day. I was thinking that he had roses set aside for me with a cute letter or something but he had something better waiting for me to see. He had started this blog a few months ago but hadn't done anything on it. Well we came into his house and he had me stay in the kitchen for a few minutes while he set up things in the computer room. A few minutes later he directed me into his computer and had our blog on the screen and wanted me to read it. I don't think I was reading 5 minutes before I was in tears because of the sweet words he had waiting for me. By the time I was done reading we were both in tears and Isabella was wondering what was wrong. Of couse nothing was wrong and we were overwhelmed by tears and just wanted to hug each other and be together.

After shedding a few tears and sharing hugs we headed down to where things all began 11 months prior on our first date. Since we had already had lunch he didn't replay the first date all the way which was fun. We headed to Bridal Veil Falls and walked around for a bit and then he motioned me to the falls. While there the three of us were basically the only ones there and Danny was able to say more things to me as to what he thought of me and bring back memories that we had made 11 months prior. He asked me one thing that brought back the tears again but it was once again good tears. He said "do you remember me asking you if your Dad would approve of me"? For those who don't know my Father passed away 6 years ago this December from Rapid Onset Alzheimers. It has been very hard to not have him physically here with me through the good times and the bad times and this was one of those days I was really wanting to share with him. I am sure he had better seats in the house watching the proposal play out then anyone did and was right there with us. Well after more words and tears Danny asked me to marry him. I honestly don't remember most of what Danny said because I was so overwhelmed and excited but have told Danny he is in charge of writting those words down for our journals. I sure hopes he does.

Well after he proposed and I of course said yes he brought out the ring that I was dying to wear since we had picked it out about 10 months prior and I loved from day one. We stood and watched the falls for awhile and had someone that was enjoying the falls take a picture of us. After that we headed to my Mom's house to tell her the great news and while doing that we were calling and texting family and friends the great news.

I can't quite remember what we did after showing my Mom and Quinn my ring and telling them about the proposal but I am sure we just started planning our wedding.

Well Danny always wanted a short engagement and if my Mom had here way we would have been married in a month. I don't think I could have done that and am glad we had 3 months to the day to plan and prepare and give family notice for time off with their jobs.

Well the planning came and that was a big chore. I won't lie there was a lot of stress that came with planning it. We enjoyed planning and preparing things from where we were going on our honeymoon (which in the end we really didn't have planned untill the week of our wedding but that made it a lot of fun to just plan as we thought of it), what kind of cake, reception food,wedding brunch, colors,decorations etc.

We decided to go with the colors lavendar, baby blue, pastel green and pink. You would think that being early Summer it would be a litle easy finding dresses, tux etc in those colors but it was not easy. We looked for weeks for colors for the Mom's and then I finally decided I was going to have my sisters and Danny's sisters skirts made. That started out going fairly well and we had a few hiccups along the way but I have two AWESOME co workers that stepped in and were able to do 4 skirts in about a 2 week time frame. Thanks Jeannine and Denise you are LIFESAVERS!!!

Well the tux and ties for the guys were quite easy and not as stressful. Thanks Tom, Spencer, Glade, Rick, Rory, Quinn for being so supportive with the pastel colors.

Well since my 2 married sisters Becky and Maria had hired Fairy Tale Weddings to do theirs and the packages they offered where outstanding Danny and I met with them and started planning what we were going to have as decorations. We decided on heart shaped cages and fountains under a canopy with our colors through out the cultural hall. Our cake we had done from a lady I met at Michaels that teaches cake decorating classes. Our photographer was recommended to us by my manager. I had always wanted to be sealed in the Salt Lake Temple for many reasons one that stands out the most is because my parents were sealed there 30 + years prior and I have always liked the Temple grounds and so we chose Salt Lake Temple. The food was done by my sister in law Cheryl and her boyfriend Frank. We decided on chicken salad sandwiches, pasta salad,and mixed veggies and a slush drink. They also did the wedding brunch which was cheeze blitzs with apple and cherry topping,ham, sausage and steak, eggs, and orange juice and fruit punch. My good friend Coleen Ellsworth did our engagement pictures and invites.

As time went on we made lists of people to invite to the sealing, wedding breakfast and reception. That was a big chore to get address' as lots of people had moved or we didn't know last names etc. It kept all of us busy in preparing for the wedding.

I found my dress on line and with altering and cleaning was a steal of a deal for under $200.00.

Well after 3 months of planning August finally came and we had a few last minute preparations and then the big day came that Danny and I were waiting for. After 13 months of dating and a lot of ups and downs in our relationship that made it stronger our lives began when we were sealed for time and all eternity in the Salt Lake City Temple. To be continued in another post.