the story...

when i was trying to come up with the new blog name, i threw around many different ideas, but nothing seemed quite right.  i thought about something crafty, since i love everything crafty.  i thought about something photography related.  i thought about doing something crafty with our names, but that beats the point of taking our name off of the blog.  i was stumped.

nick and i were talking a while back about living in colorado and that's when it hit me... yosemite drive.  the name of the street that our first family home was on.  perfect.

when we were planning to get married, we decided that we would buy a house instead of renting or living on post (ft carson).  he was there in colorado, i was not and that posed a bit of a problem when it came to house hunting together.  with an almost one year old, a full time job and wedding planning, it was impossible for me to make a trip to colorado after january.  he looked at a houses for a couple of weeks but didn't find anything that matched what we wanted.  when he called to tell me that he had found "the" house, he talked me through the layout and explained the house with the most detail that he could and right there, on a phone call with 800 miles between us, we decided to buy the house.  everyone thought it was crazy that he bought our first house without me even seeing a picture of what the outside looked like.  he spent weeks getting the house ready before em and i moved up there. doing things like pulling out the carpet and refinishing the original 30+ year old hardwood and taking useless features out of the back yard (whick was huge, by the way).

the first time i saw the house, our first house, was a week after we were married.  nick flew down to drive em and i and our belongings up to colorado.  he, of course, being the perfect gentleman that he is, carried me and em over the threshold and into the house.  it was even better than i had pictured, it was perfect.

we got right to work, turning our house into a home.  we ate our first family dinner of lentil soup sitting on the floor around a trunk (we didn't have a table yet).  we fell into routines in that house and we fell more in love with each other, with being a family.  we learned to work through anything that came our way.  we learned how to be a team and to always have each others back.  we learned how to live within our means.  we hosted countless get togethers with his fellow army officers and their families.  we celebrated birthdays and positive pregnancy tests.  we became the trivial pursuit champions (that's right, andersons), carved pumpkins, dyed eggs, planned camping trips, planned our move back home, and devoured tri tip and fajitas around our dining room table.  none of our family lived nearby (we did have a cousin in the area, which was nice), so we hosted visitors as often as we could.  there wasn't a month that went by that we didn't have out of town guests and we loved it.  we didn't have cable (gasp) and we would spend our hours talking or playing cards. we could look out our front window and see pikes peak.  we had a sweet neighbor, chester, and i would take him dinner at least twice a week so that he didn't have raisin bran every day.  it's where i spent my 23rd birthday laying the tile floor in our kitchen (he cut, i placed), and wouldn't change a minute of it.  we put our family to work when they would visit... nick's dad helped us re-plumb our master bath after we gutted it.  it was gross, let me tell you.  the only thing we did in there was brush our teeth, we never even turned the water on in the shower.  we tore it out after nick returned from iraq and remodeled the entire thing on our own.  it's where we learned that it's easier to paint base boards before you put them in... thankfully we didn't have carpet!  it's the same home that the three of us walking back into together, exactly nine months to the day after we walked out when nick deployed to iraq.  it's where we jumped in the fallen autumn leaves.  it's where we made snow angels and built snowmen and snow bunnies.  the house that we sold after two days on the market, much to our surprise.  the house that we drove away from on a beautiful april morning with a four year old em in the back seat and ethan on the way, moving on to the next chapter of our lives.  the house that i will always miss.  there are days that i long to be back there, life was so simple back then.  i'm so thankful for that home.  it is where we became a family.

happy friday!
a

i have pictures, but i have to stamp them before i post.