Chris & Naomi Hathaway Home

We've decided to make a pretty significant change in our lives this year. Since last summer, I've been able to work full time from home on AggData, which has been amazing. The added benefit is that we are no longer tied down to any location, and as much as I love Texas, we've decided to move up to Washington state, closer to Naomi's family. I told Naomi that the two things keeping me from going up there were house prices and traffic. Well, working from home solved both of those things, since I don't have to commute and we can get a home farther away from the outrageous Seattle market.

We knew we wanted to make the move sometime this year, and we were fairly certain we wanted to build a new house in Dupont, where Naomi's parents live, but we didn't plan out anything more detailed than that. Well, in February we were visiting Washington and looking around at houses and lots like we always do when we're up there, and we found out a lot had just opened up in a neighborhood we liked, so we took a look, and this is what we saw:

That's a nature preserve in the backyard, and you can actually see the Puget Sound through the trees. Naomi and I heard angel choirs and dove in right away, probably a bit sooner than we expected. And, after some finagling with the loan (considering the market and my self-employment), we got approved and started building in the last week or two. They already have the first floor framing up:

We've also been working like dogs to get our current house ready for market, and we're pretty proud of the results. We had the outside painted, added new countertops, shoved about 80% of our stuff in the garage or sold it at a garage sale, a new back fence, and a lot more little things to spruce it up. Here's the listing with our realtor , but click here for better quality pictures. And if you know anyone looking for a really nice house in Texas, let us know!

Finally, my somewhat excited mother-in-law has been keeping us updated with pictures of our new house as it's being built. She created a blog out of it in fact: http://lincolnsnewhome.blogspot.com/. It's really exciting to see the progress; thanks Mom!

We are planning to move this July, and the house should be finished the first week of August. Oh, and here's a map of where we're building:

View Larger Map

I know we're behind on news, and hopefully I'll catch up soon, but we had to post this as soon as it happened.

Go Fiona!!

Lincoln started preschool last week. We've been really wanting him to have more social interaction (he doesn't need the education part; he's already doing addition :) ), so we asked around, and found a really nice school called "Bible Bears" that he goes to Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9 to 2. It's at a local baptist church, so he gets a bit of "chapel time" as well, where he learns Bible stories and songs. He asked us if his school was at the church with the big "t" (the cross). He was a bit nervous at first, but did just fine and is very excited to go back. And we're excited he gets some time out of the house with kids his age.

Here are some pictures of his first day:

Oh, and he started primary this year. He's a sunbeam, and on his very first day he gave the scripture and a talk (there weren't many there from his class). He had no fear and has been doing wonderfully every week.

I've been working on a project recently related to AggData, where I'm parsing out unstructured Store Hours data into standardized open and close times. It's fairly complicated, so I decided to draw out a chart of some of my logic so I would have a plan going into the complex programming involved. Tonight, though, when I looked at my notes, here's what I found:

I couldn't be prouder.

Since it's the holidays and Fiona's been acting so cute lately, I'm throwing in another couple of videos for good measure. Enjoy:

Yes, we've been pretty lax recently about posting, but instead of trying to catch up, I wanted to throw up a couple of recent cute videos of Fiona. (If you want to follow more recent developments, follow our twitter feeds, here and here).

Anyway, Fiona has been acting rather cute lately, and she's decided to do some fake coughing and sneezing. It seems she just loves to entertain... enjoy.

A couple of weeks ago we ventured to Star Valley, Wyoming for a family reunion and extended vacation. We had a lot of fun spending time with family and participating in all sorts of fun adventures. Lincoln did a lot of things for the first time ever, including picking huckleberries, looking at stars through a telescope, and riding a tractor, a horse, a surry (horse-drawn carriage), a four-wheeler, and a canoe. His favorite thing, though, was just playing in big piles of dirt with his second cousin, Pierce. He spent most of his time outside and came back with a pretty nice tan (thanks to Mom's genes). Fiona had some firsts, too, including her first laughs and the first time she's played with toys. We also took a road trip to Utah to see some old friends and to Idaho to see Summer and Justin's new house. I wish we lived closer to them, because Lincoln and Sydney got along really well. Anyway, we took lots of pictures and video, but here are a few of my favorites:

And a few funny videos:

The full galleries can be found here.

We blessed Fiona at church in July. She wore a beautiful dress her Grandma Hathaway gave her for Christmas last year. We had several friends attend as well as Grandma and Grandpa Hathaway. After church we went to the grandparents' house for dinner and had a photo shoot later that evening.

So we haven't been so good about posting to our blog recently. I'm going to try to at least document a few things and then Chris can come back and improve upon it when he gets the chance.

On a Sunday night in June we were looking at the flights to WA and the next morning we had hopped a plane standby and were on our way. We very much wanted to show Fiona her family there. I think Grandma was happiest of all that we came. She was not so pleased with us leaving again, but we'll try to solve that problem one day. We spent our days in WA looking at model homes and dreaming of a life there. It's still a bit out of reach, but maybe it won't be forever.