Tidying Up the Desktop

Does that bring back memories????
I've been saving a lot of pictures here for a long time intending to pass them along with, perhaps, little stories about them. Tonight my desktop reached Capacity, and even though a lot of the little icons had already served their purposes and could be gently dropped into Trash (which makes a most satisfying sound), there's still all these old pictures. So ... tada! ... here they are, in no particular order. If you want 'em, they're yours.

This is a view of the apartment I lived in when I was a student at BYU. Actually, this isn't the one, or any of the ones -- I lived in three different units in this building but this was as close as we could get when I gave David the quick tour of Provo the day after Jenna's wedding.

The first house we lived in when we came back to Provo so your dad could finish school. We didn't live in the house you can see here, but in the basement. It was divided into two apartments and we spent a year in each. The smaller one was the first year, with just Jenna. The living room was approximately the size of a decent closet and the kitchen was huge. One bedroom, cold. One bathroom, semi-primitive. But it was home. The next year we got the other half of the basement, with a larger living room and yet another huge kitchen and another cold bedroom and small interesting bathroom. Ethan was born shortly after we moved in. We kept one crib in the bedroom with us and one in the kitchen.
Next came a place up in Orem at the top of the hill, but we didn't quite make it to Orem that day, so ... no picture. That one was a step up because we had two bedrooms, and a washing machine of our own, hooked up to the kitchen sink. Josiah was born while we lived there, but only by a few days. When he was fresh home from the hospital we moved here:

I did a lot of that move by myself, loading the car over and over and over, pausing whenever Josiah needed to be fed, because Harvey was at National Guard Summer Camp, which is probably not the correct name for it. He got home a couple of times here and there to help but mostly it was me and the babies and our Home Teachers with a pick-up truck to move the washer. We may have had a dryer by then, too, I can't remember. But fortunately we didn't have much big or heavy stuff.

I LOVED the new place. It was a duplex, as you can see, and we had some actual yard around us, where we put the swings my parents gave the kids. Two bedrooms, a bathroom upstairs and a half-bath in the utility room downstairs. Nice big living room, little dining area, small but functional kitchen. There were several units like ours there, nearly all of them student families, and we had a lot of friends. The kids had a lot of friends, too, and everyone just sort of roamed in and out of one another's houses.

I remember a few times (okay, at least twice) the women planned picnics for the whole neighborhood while the men were off at school and when they came home, we'd have a badminton net set up and grills going and tables of side dishes and desserts and kids running around everywhere. Usually someone brought a guitar. Lots of fun, folks. Amanda was born while we lived there, and just after she turned 1 we had to move because our landlord decided he wanted to put his married son into our place.

We moved here:

Looks the same, doesn't it?

It was across the street and sort of around the corner. I thought it would be an easy move because it was so close, and I started by piling things in the kids' Radio Flyer wagon and toting them over there while Harvey was at school. Thought I'd be done in no time! Surprise! I moved us!

Before long my friend Louise Dunn brought her little station wagon in on the job, so now we've got two pregnant women and six or seven assorted preschoolers and a mini station wagon and a Radio Flyer wagon. And a cat. I think it took about a week, and of course eventually we had to have the men do a lot of it. Micah was born the following summer, and when he was 9 days old (I think it was) we moved to NJ.

That's where the pictorial tour ends.

But we still have some old family pictures:
















Maybe we could give a prize to the first to correctly identify everyone?