She’s doing really well so far. Potty training is going better than we’d anticipated; she has only had a few accidents in the house. She’s getting much more used to “telling us” when she needs to go (and we’re getting better at seeing the signs); she’s also getting better about going right away when she gets outside.  She is sleeping well too; she gets up lately around 3:00 and 6:00 needing to go out. Unfortunately, she’s not really interested in going back to sleep at 6… so Daddy and Mommy are going to have to get up a little earlier now (which we needed to get in the habit of doing anyway!).

She met Tiki (Kirsten’s mom’s dog) and Tootsie (Kirsten’s sister-in-law’s Mom’s dog) yesterday, and there was soooo much playing. It was exhausting but wonderful! When Mattie runs, she kind of bounces. I’d say there’s as much vertical movement as horizontal.

She’s with Daddy at her first Vet appointment as I type, so I hope she’s doing okay.  More info to come!

Here are some pictures on Flickr, and here are some more. :)  We’ll post lots more pictures in the future, I’m sure!

I want to post pictures of the move in and the house, but that would require me to get my desktop computer hooked up at home.  Once I do that, pictures will follow!

By now my mother-in-law’s house is stuffed to the brim with boxed furniture from IKEA, a leather chair we purchased, and various other things that belong to us. I’m guessing that she’s excited to get her space back when we move everything out on Friday!

Tomorrow, Thursday, I have to run down to Des Moines in the morning to pick up some furniture that we ordered from Homemakers. Then, Thursday evening, we have a walk-through of the house with the builder and we have to get our U-Haul truck and load up our storage unit.

Our actual closing is on Friday morning in Waterloo at the attorney’s office. We’re very fortunate to have a family member there who will be performing our closing for us! We sign a lot of documents at the closing, get the keys, then bust out of there to start the move in!

Friday we have furniture being delivered from a place in Waterloo, the utilities guys coming to drop off garbage and yard waste receptacles, and workers coming to install cable and internet service. We have to pick up a bed that we bought, and move our storage unit AND mother-in-law’s house worth of stuff in all on that day.

We’ve got a lot going on, but we’re pretty excited for it all.

This past weekend, Ben and I went and picked out the newest member of our family!  She is a soft coated wheaten terrier we’ve named Matilda (”Mattie”).  Early last Saturday morning, Ben and I went to Starbucks and got our decaf americanos, and then we were off to Mediapolis, Iowa.  We went to see Connie at Eagles Roost kennel.

We were so impressed with the kennel where Mattie was born and has lived these first few weeks of her life!  It’s a beautiful, open area, with lots of room to run around and a big pond. Connie clearly handles the puppies often and is so good to them. They had a nice-sized fenced in area where Mattie and her 4 brothers and sisters hung out.

We knew we wanted a female dog, and we had three to choose from.  We decided to go with the one who was the middle temperment of the three–not too wild, but some spunk. :)  Connie microchipped her right then so that we were sure we’d get the right puppy when we come to pick up Mattie and take her home!

Mattie just turned 5 weeks old on Monday, so we have to wait several more weeks to bring her home with us. We move into our house on October 17, and we potentially could have gotten Mattie as early as the following weekend (October 25). But my grandparents will be visiting then, and we probably won’t be very settled into the house at that point. So we’ve decided that we’ll plan to pick her up and bring her home with us on November 1. We can hardly wait!!

Well, I finally couldn’t stand it any longer.  It was time for a new camera.  With several big life changes coming our way over the past few months, it seemed like a good time to upgrade and take better photos of all the happenings.  Therefore, Tuesday, September 30th, 2008, I traded in my previous Canon PowerShot point and shoot digital camera for a brand new Canon Digital Rebel XSi DSLR.

Man does this thing sing!  I’m still learning how to manipulate all the controls and how to fully use the machine, but I’m catching on quick and the difference between photos from the old camera and the new is unbelievable.  12.2 mega pixels vs. 4.  Quite an upgrade if you ask me.

I bought the camera as a kit with one lens.  I figure if I get really into photography, perhaps some day I’ll upgrade.  Rounding out the accessories for now were an 8GB SD card and a fancy Mountainsmith camera bag from eBags.com.  The latter will allow me to bike with the camera to George Wyth State Park and Hartman Nature Reserve, both here in Cedar Falls, and take lovely pictures of the fall scenery.

Hopefully I’ll be able to showcase some of my new photographic work on Flickr, or here on this blog from time to time.  However, I still have a good deal of learning to do about how it operates, so I’ll sign off for now and go read the instruction manual!

I can’t begin to name everyone who has helped me. Most of all, I wouldn’t have the ability to do anything without God giving me ability and giving me the strength to use it. And honestly, this bar exam (and the studying for it) was much harder than anything I could have done alone–I know that it was Him helping me!

Ben deserves to have his name on the list as much as I do, with all he did for me and all the help he gave me. He shall be rewarded with a large television.

Please see my previous post regarding how wonderful my family was to me during studying and the bar exam. All of you have been and still are so wonderful to me.  What a relief!!

We’ve just had our offer on this lovely, 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom ranch-style house accepted! We couldn’t be more excited!

It’s really a long tale, and we’ll love to tell it all at some point, but just the high-level view for now. We’ve been doing the open house circuit on Sundays this summer, and hadn’t really found anything that we loved that was in our price range. Plus, we wanted to wait for Kirsten to finish the bar exam before really diving into a house hunt. It wasn’t until the beginning of August we started actually taking steps to be proactive.

We found a realtor (more to come on this process later), and saw about eight houses with him last Friday (8/29). We really liked one, and it was in our price range. We immediately scheduled another visit that Sunday, when my parents were going to be visiting from Illinois. We took them through the house, and they liked it too.

Then, we made an offer on Tuesday, the builders (it’s a brand new construction) counter offered, we counter-offered back, and they accepted! We have our financing in place through our bank and we’re all set. We really can’t believe that we’ve come this far and actually will be in the house in mid-October.

More to come on the whole process soon, as well as some life updates, but as it stands now, I’m packing up from work to head home soon!

So, we are now proudly running WordPress 2.6. My next tasks will be converting to using tags for posting instead of categories, and also designing a theme or settling on a new theme for the site.

So…please have patience over the next month as I work on the site and tweak various aspects of it. Both Kirsten and I will continue to post updates as often as we can.

Ben and I went with my family to Minneapolis this past weekend for a little getaway after the bar exam.  We had a blast!  Amy, Ben, Mom, and I went up on Friday morning, and Andrew and Brooke (my brother and sister-in-law) came up in the afternoon after they finished with work.  Amy, Ben, Mom, and I went to Potbelly for lunch when we got there aroun 12:30 or 1:00 on  Friday.  We then drove around to some of the places we frequented when I worked in Minneapolis last summer.  Then, we went to IKEA after checking into our hotel.  That took forever and exhausted us, so we went back to our hotel to chill until Andrew and Brooke arrived and the fun could begin!!  Once A&B got there, we ate at TGI Friday’s and then went to the Minnesota Science Center to see the Star Wars exhibit and learn about special effects in the movies on the IMAX screen.

 On Saturday, we went to the Mall of America.  It rocked.  I got a lot of new clothes for work from Banana Republic, J. Crew, Ann Taylor, and other fine establishments, so I will (hopefully) look something like a lawyer come Monday morning!  We ate at Buca di Beppo for dinner with my friend, Christina, and my aunt and her family, which was a blast.

 Sunday morning, we did church together as a family and then went out for lunch at one of Ben’s and my favorites: Brit’s Pub downtown Minneapolis, on Nicollet Mall.  It was too chilly for lawn bowling on the roof, but we made due with a few delicious beers and Sir Winston’s cheese toasty with tomato soup.  We went to the Twins game after that–Amy got us tickets for $1 each, since she’s a certified nurse aid and it was “first responders’ day” at the Metrodome!  The game was fun, the Twins won, and we headed out for a quick bite to eat before coming home.

 Sounds like a busy weekend, doesn’t it?  “What did you do today, then, Kirsten, to follow up from such a wild weekend?”  Well, I’m glad you asked.  I had a to-do list, of course, but I also did a little relaxin. :)  I’ve started reading a book (for fun) called Three Cups of Tea, which I will review on here once I’m finished with it.  This Wednesday, I will be spending an entire day at Jiva, the Aveda spa in Cedar Falls.  Other than that, I will sleep in, have coffee with friends, and play with the puppy, all while basking in the post-bar glow.

 Suffice it to say: it feels goooood to be done.