We have a ton to update on this post since it has been a while from our last post.

Things have been well in the Anderson household. Samson is a year and a half old and has been part of our family for a year now! He continues to be well behaved and no longer chews on any furniture. He doesn’t even need a leash when we let him out into our unfenced yard (most of the time). He tries to make as many friends as possible with the neighbor kids, but sometimes he can be intimidating because of his size.  Over 80 lbs!

The house is really coming together. It has been over a year since we moved in and time has really flown by. We got a dining room table for our front room and all of our rooms are furnished and functional… all except 1 that we have been using as storage. With summer approaching we’ve even done a little bit of flower planting and mulching. Ah the joys of home ownership.

We’ve been very blessed to have found a church that we very much enjoy. It is less than 5 minutes away from where we live and fits our personalities and worship style very well. We’ve been checking out a few different Sunday school groups and bible study classes, and in general just enjoying getting to meet new people.

Speaking of new people, we’ve enjoyed getting to build new friendships with some of our neighbors. Tim’s softball team has started back up and we’ve found a new board game that we enjoy playing whenever we get together with friends or family. It’s called ‘Ticket to Ride’ and if you are ever looking for a new game to purchase, we highly recommend it. It’s our new favorite.

We have some fun trips planned this year and had a couple of them already. We went to Washington DC to visit Tim’s sister and our brother-in-law, Kim and Luke. It was great because we were able to plan the trip when Tim’s brother, Ryan could come out too. The five of us explored the capitol city. We went on walking tours of  the national mall and Arlington National Cemetary.  We went to the Newseum and went to the Earth Day celebration on the National Lawn. One day we spent a day going around to different places and did a photo shoot with our brother-in-law, Luke, who is a wedding photographer and did some of the pictures from our wedding. (check out his stuff here )

We also took a brief trip down to Daytona and Cape Canaveral Florida with our Anderson parents to see the final launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis. It was a very cool experience and the weather couldn’t have been nicer. We spent 3 days and had a BLAST :)

When we got back from DC we discovered a wonderful surprise…. WE’RE PREGNANT! We are 13 weeks, just out of the first trimester, and due December 30th. We have had two doctors appointments and everything is looking good.  We could not be more excited. Our room we have been using for storage is getting emptied and will soon be the baby’s room.

We hope this post finds everyone well and enjoying the summer. We are looking forward to spending the summer with family and friends and preparing for the arrival of the new member to our family.  Hopefully we will be better at posting this summer as we update on how things are going with the baby.

DC Trip Quickpost29 pictures

Tim & Kate Portraits69 pictures

We had a wonderful holiday season. Kate was very excited about decorating the house for Christmas and it made the house feel very homey. We did a lot of traveling to see family and really enjoyed getting to spend time with everyone. For New Years we had friends over and played games all night and followed that up by watching Ohio State win the Rose Bowl on New Years day!

After all the Christmas decorations went away the house felt a little empty so we have been hard at work at decorating. Our family room now has end tables, lamps, curtains, and decor. While we were at it, we got bedroom furniture! So we have been busy fixing up our bedroom and in the process helping the guest room look like a guest room.

We’ve finally gotten around to posting the majority of our wedding pictures online for your viewing pleasure. You can go check them out at our picasa site here or go to our wedding page here where we were also able to post a preview version of our wedding album. Sorry for the delay. Hopefully by our next post we’ll have pictures up from our summer trip to California.

Kate got her wisdom teeth removed during July, which hindered her enjoying all the wonderful July 4th foods, but she recovered quickly with no complications.

We were able to enjoy a lot of summer festivities such as: the Dayton Air Show that Tim went to with his Dad and brother, the Jazz and Ribs Festival  that we went to with Jenny and Gabe, and we started playing in a weekly sand volleyball league with our friends Mark and Michelle.

August  has already been an eventful month as we enjoyed our first Dublin Irish Festival this past weekend and Kate assisted in throwing a bridal shower for Jenny.  After celebrating another friend’s wedding this weekend, we will be heading out to spend our one year anniversary in beautiful San Francisco.  We’ll spend the rest of that week enjoying some relaxing time with family at Discovery Bay and Yosemite National Park.  The rest of August should fly by with a few more birthday celebrations, a bachelor party to throw, Tim taking high school football officiating classes, and just enjoying what’s left of the long summer nights.  We’re very much looking forward to the beginning of football season while being back in ol’ Columbus town and getting to spend time with visiting friends.

Also exciting news is that after much tedious searching in a very rough economy, Kate has received a job offer for a position that promises some very exciting career opportunities and flexibility.  More info on that at later once things are a little more solidified, but God has been good to us and continues to bless us as we grow.

While Mom, Dad, and Mamaw explored Nashville, we packed up our little town house. We packed and packed and packed and packed some more. Then on Sunday, we finished throwing the last little bit in our truck and then made the drive to Ohio. We got into Columbus around 6 PM and then all of our amazing friends and Tim’s parents showed up to help unload. It was an amazing weekend. Between our parents and our friends we had so much help cleaning, packing, and unpacking. We can’t forget about the delicious food people brought too! We are so grateful for everyone’s time and energy.

So now we are mostly unpacked and have been making little additions here and there. (We’ve  been to home improvement stores more times in the last few weeks than ever before.) Our major additions thus far have been blinds, a storm door, and a king sized bed. Lately we have been looking for living and bedroom furniture and boy have we seen a lot of it. It’s been a lot of work but a lot of fun picking out what our home will look like.  Here’s a video tour of our house before we moved our stuff in.

We look forward to being able to seeing friends and family more now that we are back in Ohio.

As we spent weekends in Ohio looking at different homes, a few times we changed or adjusted our priorities in what we were looking for, but never saw anything that really grabbed us and made is think “this is home”.  We were starting to get a little worried and wondered if it doesn’t happen for some people and if we would eventually settle on something that just worked.  That changed when we walked through the last house after a long day of searching.  We are truly happy with the home we found and when we went back through a list we had drawn up at the beginning of our search process of all the desires for our “dream home” it had nearly all of them.

We’ll provide more pictures and even video once we get closer to moving in, but for now here is some brief info to give you an idea:

4 bedroom, 2.5 bath.  2200 sqft.  Built in 2008 (We’re the first owners!) Great up and coming “americana” neighborhood that is close to our friends and less than 10 minutes to Tim’s work.  All the bedrooms are upstairs, crawl-space no basement, and the main floor has a sitting-office-living room and an open great room that flows right into the dining area and kitchen .  Not a super huge backyard, but big enough for a dog and room to throw a football around.

We close on April 28th and will move in the weekend of May 10th (right after Kate’s graduation)!  We are very excited and very much looking forward to our move.

Our first stop into the city was the Atlanta History Museum.  They had a lot of info on Atlanta’s past and growth as well as significant events that were important to Atlanta including the Civil War, Martin Luther King Jr, and the 1996 Olympics.  After checking into our hotel, we got a nice Valentine’s Day dinner at a great Thai restaurant.  For the evening’s activies we had heard about a fun event going on at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art.  We decided to check it out and were glad we did.  Not only was the Art Museum impressive itself, they also had a special exhibit on the Terracotta Army that was very cool to see.  There was also had some fun music, dancing and desserts to keep us entertained.

The following morning we laid out our path to see three of the more popular tourist attractions that were all centrally located to our hotel and Centennial Olympic Park.  Our first stop was the CNN World Headquarters studio tour.  After our tour we moved on to visit the World of Coke and the Georgia Aquarium.  By the end of the day we realized we had seen quite a lot for such a short period and were ready to head home.  We had a great time and Atlanta is a really neat city.

Tim will be on here later to talk about our wonderful weekend in Atlanta.

We have been back and forth between Columbus and Nashville looking for houses so keep checking back for an update on that.

A quick fly through the site.  At the top you’ll find all the links to send you along your merry way.  The wedding link will take you to the old wedding site which we’ll keep somewhat as a keepsake so we can look back 25 years from now and go “awwww, Tim was so much cuter when he had hair”.  The rest should be fairly self explanatory.  I opted to keep the format of our “blog” section in a single column to keep things as simple and clean as possible.  I think the the template of the site might be a little too clean and neat, but it will change and adjust as our life does.  If you have any suggestions or thoughts, feel free to leave a comment.

Finally at the bottom of the main page you should see a form where you can enter your email to receive updates whenever we post something new here on the small chance that you aren’t checking back here everyday.

Look forward to more!

– Tim & Kate