we are happier here.

y'all, we bought a house! and strangely, that means i have so much more time for things i love-like writing on my blog!! i wish i would have written a blog on our normal day-to-day while living at my in-laws butttt i didn't have time! we lived on the third floor and with two kids, that meant a lot of running up and down the stairs and figuring out when i could feed them and feed myself. going to the grocery store was a huge chore because it was 25 minutes away and finding 50 minutes, let alone an hour and a half where both girls were awake and happy was a rare thing. now we have our own house with a kitchen on the same floor as us, laundry room on the same floor as us, garage on the same floor as us. i can get to the grocery store in 2 minutes (the nice HEB in 15) and when i get back i can unload the groceries with the door open while both girls are in their high chairs or playing and i can hear or see them both. it sounds simple, but trust me-it isn't. i can even do laundry while they are in their room together or one is asleep and one is awake. before i would have to do laundry while both children were asleep because carting our clothes down three flights of stairs and leaving one (or two) babies awake upstairs for the 5 minutes it would take to take the clothes down and start the laundry was not possible. it was extremely challenging. but here we are, in our own little house in san antonio, texas. life is good. 

 this is me as a baby. funny picture, but i think lucia looks like i do in this!

lucia grace  

 wearing shoes i wore as a baby 

(it took me 15 minutes to get them on her)

 primrose as the enormous bear at costco

 little babies

 this was this morning. i can't believe her hair is long enough to do pig tails and she is this tall and skinny. she is supposed to still be a chubby infant with no hair, i don't get it. she wears an eye patch 3-4 hours a day to help strengthen the muscles in her left eye. she wears glasses all the time because she is far sighted. she got them at about 16 months.

i found this picture of my gran while unpacking some boxes. i assume Don took it and i just think she looks so beautiful. 

goodbye first house: bedroom

the last room in the house is our bedroom:

 we have a tiny bed and we constantly fought over how much space the other person was taking up. during the olympics we took our mattress downstairs into the front room for two weeks and pushed it up against the couch. while we were down there, i slept up against the couch and that meant jon got most of the bed! we decided that maybe it'd be better if we pushed our bed into the corner of the room so that i could sleep up against the wall and we'd both be more comfortable. (i don't like sleeping close to the edge of the bed when its in the middle of the room, scary!!) it looks funny having our bed like this, especially since that means the rest of the furniture is lined up on the opposing wall, but it's actually helped a lot! the only thing i don't like is reaching over jon to turn on and off the lamp, and not having a place to plug in my phone.

(mouse!)

i think i posted about this before. jon used to go to work before i woke up and sometimes i was so sleepy i couldn't even say i love you! so i used push pins to spell ILY right by the door so that he knew i loved him every time he left the room, even if i didn't say it. the light switch cover is the one that was in my granny's bedroom forever.

i must say that our room never looks like this. maybe on the first day that we have guests. the floor is usually covered in clothes and shoes! but that's what makes it homey, right?!
i am writing this while i should be studying for my midterm tomorrow. it's been awhile since i've just sat down and written my thoughts like i used to.
it is our last night here in this house. i don't think it has hit me yet, it seems surreal. i did get a dose of reality when we were packing today. in the winter marines wear green cammies. they change to their desert (tan) cammies in the spring and wear them until fall. they just switched from green to tan when the time changed. that means jon won't be wearing his green cammies anymore...who knows if he will ever wear them again. we took out all the drawers from his dresser and he and his dad took the dresser out to the u-haul. i saw his drawer sitting in the middle of the floor filled with his green cammies that he is sending to storage for an indefinite amount of time. it made my heart hurt...a lot. it's enough to have to say goodbye to our first little house and move in with someone else. it's really sad to leave san diego, the place where we've spent our entire marriage, our friends, my school. but to think about leaving the military...that is more heart wrenching than the others. we can come back to san diego, we can come see our friends, i'll be back next year to graduate from my school. but come May 3rd, jon will no longer be wearing his uniform everyday. he won't be able to say "I'm a Marine." i will no longer be a Marine Wife. I mean, i will...but it just won't be the same. it is quite difficult to explain. it's just been amazing to have my spouse do something we are both so proud of. i'm proud that my husband went to afghanistan. i'm proud that he enlisted on his own free will. i'm proud that he has known since he was a child that he wanted to do this and proud that he chose the marine corps because it is the toughest branch(wink). i know we need to move on from this. jon has so much to give the world, so much more than the marine corps will allow him to do. he's starting school in june and i know he will do awesome!  he's had an internship this spring and met a lot of prevalent people who were impressed by him. i know he's going to do great in whatever he decides to do. i am sad to leave california, but i'm ready to be in a state where i can (hopefully) find a job that doesn't require me to mop before i go home, is that too much to ask?
i could ramble on and on, but i really must get to studying. we are packing up the trailer tomorrow and checking out of our house. tomorrow night we are going to sleep at the isaac's (that's who we will be living with when we come back to san diego on april 7th) and then saturday morning the three of us are road-tripping from san diego to san antonio! jon and my FIL tried to warn me about how tiny the middle seat was in the u-haul, but i told them to stop. i wanted to be surprised. i don't deserve to dread the roadtrip three days before we leave. i'll deal it with saturday morning.
wish us (me) luck!

goodbye first house: kitchen

we got our little yellow butter dish from our dear friend from elementary/jr high/high school jenni hens (from anthro). she lives in san diego and goes to SDSU with me! we love her so much. she got that for us for our wedding almost three years ago! we just recently bought the two ceramic jars from the PX because they were ridiculously inexpensive. i like how they look with the painting, but who knows where they will all be in our new place.

the mirror is an heirloom i got from my granny's house after she died. she got it years ago at ZCMI!

there isn't much going on in our kitchen. i always had big plans for it, but they were never carried out. i will miss how big and spacious it is, hopefully our next house will have a kitchen like this. maybe with different cabinets and lighting though...

goodbye first house: living room.

our living room is the most 'finished' room in the house. it has come along way since summer 2011 and even more so since summer 2010. i can't believe how empty our house was and how small that little plant is on my desk! it is the same plant that is sitting next to the tv now.

our original brown sofa was the first piece of furniture we bought as a married couple. jon bought it for us actually and i never really liked it. looking back at it though, i kind of miss it....

i think we bought it for $350 from his friend who was getting out of the military. two years later, we sold it for $250, and bought this vintage blue sofa for $150. haha, a day in the life of the hagerman's. 

the painting above the sofa is one that my uncle don did. he said that he, my mom, and my grandma were sitting on their porch in sugar house in 1976 when a little girl went by. don had intentions to paint a picture of their house, but when he saw the little girl he asked her if she'd like a portrait done of her. she said yes and he said she sat still for a solid 45 minutes while he worked. when he was finished, he showed her the finished product. she liked it, but didn't look long. she said that her mother was waiting for her! it's a quirky little painting, but i love having it and remembering that cute story. 

see how good my plants are doing! i recently repotted them and am praying they make it through the move alright....

i got those knobs from anthropology. the red clock is the clock that used to hang in my grandma's bedroom right across from her when she sat in bed. the eagle globe and anchor is the marine symbol that my dad carved and painted for jon while he was deployed and gave it to him on the fourth of july in 2011. 

my instagram pictures made it to coffee table books. it's fun because sometimes my visitors find pictures of themselves in there!

our nate berkus tortoise shell is one of our favorite household items. for a long time after we moved in, we could not figure out what to hang on our walls besides pictures and my eyes were so bored when i'd look around the room. we love this funny little thing. 

we got that little Dalarna horse when we were in Solvang in November for Veteran's day. jon found that little shot glass that he bought from sweden while he lived there with the same little horse on it. he gave me the canvas print for our two year anniversary (cotton)! and we proudly have his associates degree displayed that he obtained in october.

here is one last photo for your viewing pleasure:

jon and alex in sweden with the dalarna horse in october 2008 after jon had finished his two year mission.

goodbye first house: entryway/half bath

we are getting ready to say goodbye to our first home together. we are so sad! it is surprising to me that we have spent all of our time married in the marine corps in one house. it is pretty typical for young marine couples to move around in the first few years. we are happy to have stayed in one place, it's made the house feel really homey. 

this mirror was a gift from john and kat. it was black, but i painted it maroon to match the rug.

we are lucky and have a really big laundry room. i will spare you the detailed photos; it is basically just a storage room for items we don't know what to do with! 

my in laws came to visit just a month after we'd moved into our house. they were taking me to a job interview when we saw a washer and dryer on the side of the road just a street over from us on base. i told them that i wanted them! the first month we were here, jon would get up really early on saturday or sunday mornings and take our laundry to the barracks and do them there for free. we had to get to my interview, so we didn't stop and look at the washer and dryer. when they picked me up, they told me they had a surprise for me. after they dropped me off for my interview, they came back to check out the items on the side of the road, but only the dryer was left! they brought it to our place immediately and hooked it all up. it totally worked!! that afternoon, they took us to the appliance store on base and bought us a washer to go with it. it was a really nice surprise and just one little example of how nice my FIL is. 

across from the bathroom (the door on the right) is the door to the one car garage (on the left, not pictured). 

the american flag hook was a DI find and is where jon hangs his cover almost every day. 

the rug is from homegoods. 

this is one of my favorite things in the house. it is a canvas print of the draper temple, where we got married. my dad gave it to me (jon and i) for christmas in 2010. it was our first married christmas, but jon was deployed to afghanistan at the time. it was a sweet reminder that although my spouse was thousands of miles away and sometimes it didn't feel like it, i was indeed a married woman and that no matter was happened, we were sealed for time and all eternity.

the picture of Christ was a wedding gift to Jon and I from his mom and the first thing we hung up when we moved in.

another DIY.

i don't know about you, but i have so many pictures lying around the house just waiting to be framed. unfortunately, matting is so. freaking. expensive. so i came up with this clever idea of making your own matting, very inexpensively! 

i bought jon a couple andy warhol's from a street vender (they're so obviously original.. ;) ) and wasn't sure what to do with them. we bought this huge frame from ikea for the print i bought before we got married and hung it above our bed. i hated the way i looked, so we took it down and it was just sitting in our laundry room. i thought i could hang both prints in the huge frame for jon's downstairs bathroom. 

 i went to blick and bought a nice sheet of 20x30 poster board. they had different colors, but jon requested black. 

 the first thing i did was cut it down to fit in the frame.

 here i am, modeling how it fit the frame just marvelously. 

 then i measured where both of the prints would go. i drew a line halfway down the poster board, and halfway down both pictures. then i just decided where i wanted the bottom picture to go. when matting stuff like this, you should have more space between the bottom of the picture and bottom of the frame than the top of the top picture and top of the frame. that made it easy because i didn't need to have the exact same measurements above and below the pictures. i figured out exactly where the pictures would be, and i started to cut!

 i had to cut each line a few times to make sure it went all the way through the board, and was very careful with the corners so i wouldn't cut too far and have an exposed rip. 

 here it is! so it turned out to just be a frame for both pictures to sit behind. 

 unfortunately, one of the pictures was smaller than the other. i thought i accounted for that, but not enough. you can barely see the white edge though, so it's alright.

 i taped the pictures to the back of the poster board on all four sides, to ensure that they won't slip. 

 while i was putting the frame together-THE GLASS BROKE!!!! i was so furious. all that work, and in one of the last steps, the glass breaks. 

i hung it up anyway, and you can't even see the break in the glass! it's like an optical illusion. the frame looks really big in the bathroom, but i think the size is pretty cool. i've second guessed it, but for now it's nice. i hate everything else about the bathroom. the towel racks. why? why are there towel racks in a half bath? just put a small one near the sink, that's all you need. also, the fact that the toilet is hugging the vanity instead of being centered on that wall. the metal toothbrush and cup holder. i could go on and on. 

but, this is an improvement since we've been here for almost two years and i've just done nothing with this bathroom. now i want to find an interesting boy rug to put in here that isn't plain black and boring. i'm glad that i now know how easy it is to put matting around things you want to frame for cheap!