Easter

I love Easter! (Sorry I don't have pictures yet) Our Easter started Saturday. We dyed eggs at my parents. Darin dyed an irregularly long egg like a football; Curtis was feeling patriotic and dyed one red, white and blue. I love dying eggs, but that's not enough. So Saturday night around 11:30, my mom and Curtis played the Easter Bunny for Darin, Alicia, and I. Even my Uncle Curt search for eggs with us. Then Curtis and I had our own Easter egg hunt, thanks to Darin and Alicia. It must have been a sight watching us running around the house, tearing everything up. It was such a blast!
Sunday, we had a wonderful day at church hearing about the Resurrection of our Savior. Then we had a delicious ham dinner with my parents and Darin's parents. It was nice to be all together.
And, of course, the whole time eating jelly beans, robin eggs, and our See's chocolate eggs! We hope you had a good Easter too!

The New Plan for the Rest of our Lives!

As many of you may know, Darin was planning on going into the Church Educational System (CES). He decided to take this semester off of teaching early morning seminary and focus on school and decide if it was something he really wanted to pursue. Well as soon as he decided to take the semester off, we both felt that CES was not right for us. Daring started looking into the FBI and ICE(Immigrations and Customs Enforcement). He talked to a guy in our ward (Mark) who we thought worked for the FBI, and it turns out that he works for ICE. :) Well, that week, in a meeting Mark's boss asked if anyone knew someone who might want to apply for ICE because they had some extra pin numbers that you need to apply to take the test. So, Darin went in and met with the head person in Reno (who told him he came highly recommended) and got a pin number! He had to be one of the first 1000 people to register online. As we were almost done registering, the computer started acting up and wouldn't let us finish, I said a prayer and it started working again. The power of prayer is amazing. So Darin takes the test on April 3rd in San Francisco. We are going to make a long weekend trip out of it and spend a couple days in San Fran and a couple days in Monterey.
We have been getting so many questions about the whole process, so here it is what we understand it to be:
~ Take the 4-5 hour test in San Fran April 3rd
~ 6-8 weeks later find out if he passed
~ Go through a process of 4 (?) interviews probably in San Francisco
~ Wait probably 6-8 months while ICE does a 10 year background check
~ If he turns up clean, we are offered 3 places/jobs across the US. We choose where we want to go from our options.
~ Darin goes to a training base for 4 months in Georgia. We haven't decide if I will go with him. (We are hoping that is is around May or June 2009 - When Darin graduates from UNR.)
~ Darin graduates from the Academy and is officially a Special Agent!
~ We move ... somewhere. :) (hopefully around September 2009)

We are really excited about ICE! The Lord has really blessed us in this process thus far. It seems like everything is falling into place for this to work out. So, we will keep you updated!

Rexburg Temple

My friend Kendall and I had a girls weekend. We drove to our old stoppin' grounds- Rexburg, for the temple open house. As we drove into Rexburg in the dark, we could see the temple glowing on the hill. It was beautiful. These pictures don't do it justice. I wish I had some at night. We only stayed in Rexburg for a day, then we drove down to Provo and spent some time with our friend Sara. Although I did miss Darin, it was nice to have some quality girl time!

Do you see all that snow! It was freezing!



The view of BYU-Idaho from the temple.

Christmas

Sorry I am a little behind on our blog. We had a great Christmas - Here are a couple pictures.
Opening our P.J.s Christmas Eve!




We also got a Video Camera! Look forward to videos from us. (As soon as I have time to sit down and figure out how to post videos!)



We slept over at my parents house on Christmas Eve with my brother and sister-in-law. We woke up at the crack of dawn opened presents, just like when we were kids. I guess we haven't really grown up yet.

The two of us in front of my parent's tree. Look at all those presents! Don't worry, they weren't all ours!

Alicia, my mom, and I got scrapbooking kits! It's my new hobby. I just finished my 2nd spread. It is lots of fun!


Darin and I got remote control cars. They are sweet! They can power slide like nothing I've seen before!







In front of our tree! This is the first year we have a Christmas tree! It smelled sooo good. I will always have a real tree. :)

Models

A friend of ours asked us to be models for her so she could learn how to use her new camera. We went to Rancho San Rafael Park. It was lots of fun.
I wish you could see how big this tree was. I climbed it and survived. Ok so it wasn't that big.

Thanksgiving

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving in Utah with Darin's Family. It was great food, shopping and football games! We loved watching football and movies on Jason's projector. Darin was so excited to throw the football around with his nephews.

Finally- Pictures of our house!

Here are some pictures of our house. We have been in 5 months and we love it. We feel so blessed to be in a home already.

That is the front door on the left. This is the dining room and kitchen.

A closer picture of the kitchen and our granite countertop. (We love it!)

Our family room.

This is between our family room and dining room.

This is our office- You can finally see the floor after only 5 months! Yippee!

This is our spare room/exercise room/storage room/someday in the future-baby's room.

Here is our bedroom. This is my favorite room to decorate and you can probably notice. I love Bed Bath and Beyond and Linens and Things. :)

This is the master bathroom. I didn't get a picture of our guest bathroom/ palm tree bathroom.