Things we love about Mt Vernon!

We are loving our new town, it's so drastically different than Everett. There were good things about Everett too, but those had mostly to do with our friends there, not so much the city.

1. People garden up here! And they take care of their yards! Most everybody has mowed lawns, usually even trimmed and with flower beds. So now we're trying to keep up and not be the ugly house in the neighborhood. So far Josh is doing great at it, but I"m having a harder time reaching the ground to pull weeds and stuff. That day will come later for me.

2. No hoity toity people up here, everybody is very down to earth. Everywhere we've lived previously has had a lot of people who worked for either Microsoft, Boeing, or other large corporations that have made some people around us very rich. So there were always large economical desparities. Up here it seems everybody is on the same playing field. Everybody is working class up here. We like that, since that's where we fit in too. There's nobody in our ward that stands out as the "rich family" and things like that. It's great! We fit right in!

3. Tulips! Need I say more? Well... it would be nice if they were all year long, but I'm happy to have them in the spring at least. The tulip festival is a blast and we've gone every year. So now it's even easier to go! We can go in the morning, come home for lunch, and then go back out if we want to! Who can resist a view like this???

4. We could afford a house up here, or more importantly, we could afford a YARD up here. We got almost a quarter acre for our money, which is so much more than we could have gotten anywhere else. We're loving the yard, and the kids are especially. It's so nice to be able to just send them outside when I need a break. And once our fruit trees are mature, we'll be living large with all the fruit. But for the next few years, we'll be happy with just the apples and raspberries :)

5. On occasion, our sunday school lessons will involve stories about cows! OK, so that NEVER happened in Everett. Made me want to laugh during class, though. It's fun to be around farmers again, haven't had that since I was a little kid.

6. Mount Vernon is in the GORGEOUS Skagit valley. It's absolutely beautiful up here. We have a park that's on a little "mountain" (maybe more of a very large hill, unless you live back east, then it counts as a mountain) and it's full of trails and amazing views. You can see Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands, the whole valley (which much look amazing during tulip season) the cascade mountains and a great view of Mt. Baker.
And here's the sunset on the Skagit River that we sat and watched on the 4th waiting for fireworks
We live in a beautiful place!


7. We live less than a mile from the hospital! yay! Now that we'll have two boys, we might get some good use out of it.

8. Fireworks are LEGAL up here for the 4th! OK, so it's supposed to be just the regular stuff, not the things that fly up in the air and then explode... but we lit up our little things without feeling bad at all! And we enjoyed the fantastic shows that our neighbors put on with all their illegal fireworks. They were the BIG ones. If it hadn't been so late, I would have just laid out in the back yard on a lawn chair and watched the sky. There were blasts of color coming from every direction. It was illegal, but pretty.

9. We're a lot closer to the mountains than we are to big cities! We're about a 2 minute drive to rolling countryside and forest. And quite close to Mt. Baker. so if it blows, we're in trouble, but we're counting on it not blowing it's top anytime soon.

10. The schools! In Everett they were still working on letters and struggling through them. We moved up here and they expected Isabel to be already reading. Instead of learning letters, she was having spelling tests. She is way less bored now, since she could read before she started kindergarten. Now she's on par with the rest of the kids and she has an actual challenge. She maybe doesn't think of that as a plus, but I do!

11. And did we mention it's far away from seattle? There's never any traffic (except for a couple weeks in April when the festival is going, lol)

So if you ever want to come see our beautiful valley, come visit! We'll BBQ in our big back yard! :)