Happy New Year

During the Christmas Holiday we did our first update in our new home. We had one closet to share between the two of us in our master bedroom and then there were things under the bed in another chest of drawers and shoes hanging and banging behind the door that drove Dave crazy. So after a lot of thinking and reasearch I came up with a new design for our closet to maximize the space. We now get like 3x the amount of stuff in our shared closet. We are loving it.

 First Christmas

2011 has been a busy year for us.  We have been blessed beyond measure and are so very grateful for all the love and support we have received from our family and friends.

Here are some of the highlights from this past year.

February 2011:

We adopted a beautiful little girl.  Brielle Mira Karlsven was born on February 14^th.  We were so excited for her to come into our family. Tawni (Brielle’s birth mom) wanted us to be at the hospital with her and it was an amazing experience for us to be there for the birth.

May 2011:

Our son, Keiton Isaac Karlsven, was born on May 26^th. Brigette almost had to give birth in the car as we were stuck in a traffic jam on the way to the hospital. Dave ran into the hospital with Brielle in his arms and asked the security guard to hold the baby while he went out to get his wife who was having another baby.  The security guard looked pretty confused by the whole situation, but there was no time to explain things as Keiton was born in less than a half hour from the time we reached the hospital. 

July 2011:

Dave got a new job in Salt Lake City.  He works for RUMOR, an advertising agency that does lots of website design work.  Dave is a website developer and specializes in building eCommerce websites for RUMOR’s clients.   He really enjoys his work and is learning so much every day. 

Dave was also able to give his first baby blessing to Keiton this month. It was great to have so many family members in town that could be a part of the blessing.

August 2011:

We had been looking forward to this month since Brielle was born.  The State of Utah has a 6 month waiting period before we could legally adopt Brielle and therefore we had to wait 6 months to bless her and be sealed to her. 

Finally the day came that we were able to go to the courts to finalize the adoption and then we were off to the Temple for the sealing.  Both babies were pretty hungry by the time everyone was in the sealing room, but even though there was some crying going on, it was a wonderful experience for us to have Brielle sealed to us for eternity. 

Keiton also wanted some attention at the temple so he decided to spit up all over the sealing room carpet. 

October 2011:

The only bad thing about Dave’s new job was that it took over an hour, sometimes up to 2 hours in bad traffic, for Dave to get to work in the morning and then another 2 hours to get home at night.  Dave was leaving for work early in the morning before Brielle and Keiton woke up and then coming home in the late evening just as they were being put to bed.  That was tough for everyone.  So we decided to start looking for places to live closer to Salt Lake.

We have always liked the Bountiful / Centerville / Farmington areas just north of Salt Lake. 

We looked at a lot of homes, but were frustrated when some of the ones we really liked were sold to other buyers.  Finally we found a home in Bountiful that had the layout we had really hoped to find.  It even had a nice deck with a view and a partial view of the Bountiful Temple out the master bedroom window if you stood in the right place to look past the neighbor’s big tree.

We put an offer on the home and hoped everything would work out.

Nov. 2011

We bought our first home.  We were so excited to finally be moving into our first home.  It was a huge chore to pack all of our stuff, (We have way too much junk, some of which was still in boxes from our last move.)

We spent a lot of our Thanksgiving holiday packing up a huge trailer with the much appreciated help of family and friends.

We will miss our ward in Woodland Hills.  We met so many amazing people there and developed a lot of good friendships.  We hope our new ward is even half as good as this one we left.

Brigette is excited about all the projects she can now do on the home.  She wants to update the kitchen and Dave wants to make the deck nice for some spring BBQ’s.

Dec. 2011

We had a huge wind storm hit Bountiful and Centerville the week after we moved in.  Hundreds of big pine trees were blown down all throughout the city.  We were very lucky that the big pine tree in our front yard did not blow over onto our house.  Brigette watched out the window as the roots of the tree kept lifting up the concrete slabs of our sidewalk and driveway. 

We were without power for a couple days because our neighbor’s tree fell onto a power line along with many other trees around the city.  Overall the city estimates that over 1000 trees were knocked down in the storm. 

It was sad to drive around the city and parks and see all the massive trees, which had been growing for so many years, now blown over.  All the wards in our area cancelled Church so that the members could help with the cleanup.   Even President Eyring, who lives just a few blocks from us, was out helping clean up the mess.  

Though we were lucky and didn’t lose our tree, we did lose our back fence.  The wood posts were snapped right off at the base by wind gusts clocked at over 100 mph.

Our garbage cans blew through our neighbor’s fence. It was not a pretty sight because our 2 babies tend to fill up the garbage can with dirty diapers, so I spent some time going around the neighborhood picking up the scattered diapers.

However, there was a good thing that came out of the wind storm that we are really excited about.  Later that night when we were going to bed, Dave looked out of our Master Bedroom window and was taken away by a magnificent sight.  That big tree that was blocking our view is now gone and we have a fantastic full window view of the Mountains and Temple.

We feel so blessed.  It has been a busy, but wonderful year for our family.

We hope you all have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Love,

Dave, Brigette, Brielle and Keiton