June 2023- Brent's graduation and moving from Eugene

                                     

June was a month of transition. In a nutshell, Brent graduated with his PhD and we ended a 9-year phase of our life where he was in school. The kids finished the school year (always emotional for me- why do they have to grow up so fast?). And we packed up our house and moved from Oregon (we all know moving is the worst, but moving without actually taking your stuff is THE WORST). Because of all of that, it was really emotional to look through our pictures for this post and I found myself missing our old life, house, and friends. I'm grateful that life was so good that I miss it! 

Brent and the kids joined me on my annual trip to Coos Bay to do an audit. The wildflowers on the side of the road were gorgeous!

We went out to yummy Mexican food the first night.

Swimming at the hotel was so fun!

The hotel sits right on the bay.

"Just doin' my job"- as Audrey says.

Brent is the best dad and took the kids all over town and to sites while I worked.

After I audited all day, we went to the coast  (so windy and chilly!)

and then we went to Shore Acres, which is one of my favorite places ever. Just look at these pictures!

After Coos Bay I was home for two days (attended a ward Luau and did the Hula with my activity girls)

and then I flew to Chicago for a work conference. It was hard timing since we were about to move and needed to start organizing our stuff, and this was work trip #3 in two weeks. Chicago is not close to Eugene- that was like 5 hours of flying! I got there on a Sunday night and left on a Wednesday morning. 

I was not feeling adventurous and only walked around near the hotel with some coworkers both nights. Some people took the train deep into the city, but at night after I socialized I watched The Office in my hotel room. I needed some downtime in my life!

I got my pictures taken for work when I was in Utah a few weeks prior and got raw photos to choose which one for them to edit. These two were mine and Brent's favorites. 

While I was out of town, Brent attended Audrey's preschool Father's Day program. 

Singing songs with her class for the dads:

Coen's class learned about butterflies and they watched them go through the cycle from caterpillar on. Here's Coen's!

The kids' school had an end of year festival with bounce houses and games, and the kids were thrilled to go. Audrey has the hugest smile in this picture:

Brent's wearing a mask because his allergies get SO bad this time of year. 

The kids each got to choose a color to do temporary dye in their hair at the festival. This is the first time I let them do anything like this, but it felt very "Eugene" to have colored hair, so I figured why not before we leave!?

Audrey's cutest little drawing from preschool. It's a picture of her and daddy. She also celebrated her summer birthday at preschool and got a crown. 

We went to Olivia's birthday party, and Audrey had tons of fun, 

especially on the slip n' slide:

While I had Audrey at one birthday party, Brent took the older two to another birthday party at Get Air:

That evening we went to a senior celebration BBQ at friends' house. So many end of year parties!

I asked my friend Nicole to take a few pictures of our family since Brent received his graduation gown. We just went in the field across the street from mine and Nicole's house for the pictures. Thanks Nicole!

After I had posted our house for rent for about 3 days, I had several people apply. The best ones were 4 first year law students- girls in their early 20s. We facetimed with them and showed them the house (since they're all from different states). We were so grateful to find someone we trusted to leave our house with! I took pictures of all our furniture and let them choose what to use. 

They chose almost all of the furniture except for the bunk beds and green couches. This made it so that we didn't have to sell all of our nice furniture or get a storage unit. 

Ava made this basket in class. Since we weren't saving it forever, we took a picture.

Same with Coen's penguin:

The kids each had a music presentation at their school. Ava was so animated and cute.

We went to a surprise birthday party for Nicole. Brent and I jumped on the trampoline- I don't think I had jumped for years!

We had dentist appointments early in the morning and none of the kids had cavities, yes!

Preparing to move to Hawaii took a lot of work. There were lots of things to figure out and arrange, like scheduling our car to be shipped to Hawaii. Another thing was all of the paperwork to get the kids into the school in Hawaii- luckily our doctor's office was really nice and helped fill out all the forms and do the TB clearances.

We went to the Freeman's house for one last dinner. I love going over to their house- they make it so comfortable.

The EQ had planned a surprise going away party for Brent at the church- they watched a movie and popcorn. Sweet! I was in charge of getting Brent to the church at 7. As we were driving home from the Freemans, I waited until we were almost to the church and then I told Brent, "Oh! Can you swing by the church? I need to get table cloths from the RS closet for Nicole." Luckily there was only about 1 minute for Brent to ask questions about why she needed table cloths. I asked Brent to come in and help me carry them, and I have to say- he was surprised when there was a party set up for him!

Audrey's last day of preschool with teacher Alexa. We loved this preschool SO much. I held it together and didn't cry, but it was close. 

I found this that Ava had written in her conference notes and wanted to take a picture to remember her sweet and honest thoughts. "Even though it's hard for me to feel the spirit Jesus, Heavenly Father, and the Holy Ghost is real."

Coen's teacher Ms. Meng was the BEST! She did so many fun activities with the kids and would send home letters to the parents about how much she loved each of the kids. 

Ava's teacher, Ms. Leontine. I never got any parent teacher communication from her (despite having a meeting with her and asking for some) so it was hard to know what was going on in Ava's class this year.

Last day of school- all the kids got to sign their names on Ms. Meng's shoes.

My parents drove into town to help us start packing up our house. Parents to the rescue! They watched Audrey so that I could go to Brent's dissertation defense.

He first presented about his dissertation to his committee (there's one member that joined via zoom) and then they each asked him questions/gave him suggestions. Brent and I left the room while they deliberated if he passed.

They opened the door for us to come back in and then said "Congratulations Dr. Cowley, you passed! You are now officially a doctor."

They told him that he didn't just pass, but that it was one of the best dissertations they had seen in a really, really long time. They wanted him to submit it to conferences to win awards. Go Brent! 

Here's a little info about his dissertation that I wrote on FB: 

For his dissertation, Brent spent 1,643 days researching and piecing together over 60 years of Utah County’s film regulation history. He took over 3,000 photographs of documents and articles and spent 35 full-day visits to 6 physical archives. Brent tracked down and interviewed over 50 people for his research. His dissertation totaled 309 pages with 544 citations.

We started sorting a few closets and then went strawberry picking with my parents:

And then we went out to dinner to BJs, which is where we go every time they come visit. It was my dad's birthday! Thanks Dad, for spending your birthday helping us.

We went to the arcade to spend the last of our money there:

Saturday- Brent took the kids to a birthday party (we never went to birthday parties all year- just the end of the school year!). I stayed home and worked on packing with my parents.

We went to church and said goodbye to friends. Sister Harris gives us all hugs each Sunday and tells us how amazing we are. We like to take Sister Harris treats or extra dinner, and sing Primary songs to her. 

We went for a drive to show my parents where temple will be built in Eugene.

Our give/sell pile started accumulating at the bottom of the stairs as we went through each closet and room.

Lunch at TrackTown:

Pictures on campus:

Brent's SOJC building:

Ava had one last play date with Esther. Then she drove with my parents (and two of our suitcases for Hawaii) back to Utah.

Luckily, Tammy flew had flown in the day before my parents left, boy did we need help with overwhelming task of sorting our things and preparing our house for renters.

Tammy, Coen, and Audrey and I went to Brent's graduation. There were probably over a thousand graduates in his department, and Brent was the very first to have his name called, since they did the 5 PhDs first. They put the wrong person's name on the screen since they were still figuring it out! Brent's chair of his committee, Peter, hooded Brent. Here they are on the jumbotron.

The graduation was in the basketball arena and it lasted like 3 hours because it took so long to read the names of each of the graduates. Luckily I had a few activities and treats for Audrey and Coen and they were really good!  Coen kept clapping and cheering for the graduates over the hours.

Here we are with Peter after the ceremony:

Lots of pictures... proud day!

Our piles for sorting our house were as follows: 1. Garbage 2. Pack to take-Hawaii 3. Pack to take- Utah, then Hawaii 4. Give /sell in yard sale 5. Store in Brent's bedroom. 6. Sell on FB Marketplace. This picture is of our give/sell pile a few days into our sorting projects. 

Our upstairs- most of this was store in Brent's bedroom.

Tammy took the kids to a Dairy Queen outing.

Since we only need one car in Hawaii, we decided to sell our gray Mazda. Because we were so busy and I was out of town etc, we only had time to clean it and take pictures to post it for sale about 4 or 5 days before we were scheduled to leave Eugene. Ack!

I posted the car for sale on Facebook marketplace and we got a few people the first day that were interested to come see it, and we got one offer for $1,000 lower than we were asking. We decided to wait it out and see if we got better offers. On Saturday of that week, I had the last two people scheduled to come see the car. The first shady guy offered a personal check for a lower amount (uhhh no thanks) and then the last family came- parents with a sweet teenage boy. We were trying to leave Eugene the next day but I didn't want to seem like I was desperate to sell the car :) 

The family walked around the car and looked it all over. I could tell they were really debating. I was praying, please buy our car! The dad came up to me and said, "we're thinking about it, but you can keep showing it to other people because we're on the fence." I asked him, "do you want to test drive it, in case you want to come back for it?" He said OK, and they test drove it, while the wife and I chatted and Brent went in the house to get the kids lunch. When they came back from the test drive, they told me they just couldn't decide because of the couple cosmetic issues. I offered to lower the price and the husband said, "Oh no, you don't need to do that. We'll go ahead and buy it." They had cash, and the dad even had the paperwork printed out that we'd need to send into the state for the sale. What a blessing! 

Brent told me that when he had gone in the house while they were test driving the car, he had said a prayer with Audrey and Coen that we could sell our car. We knew that this sweet family was the answer to our prayers.

In the mean time, Ava was having tons of fun with Grandma and Grandpa in Utah. Here she is at a dealership while my parents were buying a new car:

We ended up putting the heavy storage items like books and our kitchen dishes in the large closet under our stairs. Here's progress on our house:

The upstairs- seeing these pictures exhausts me, remembering.

Audrey and her special friend- she went to their house once a week to be babysat and these two girls got to be such good friends.

Some friends in our ward hosted a little goodbye party for us at the park. We lived in Eugene for 6 years, which is the longest I've ever lived in a place in my life (although we did move houses 4 years in). But we stayed in the same ward for the 6 years, and a lot of these people became like family to us.

Our garage sale day. Nicole had been helping me by posting a lot of our bigger things to sell on Facebook, and it was such a huge help to have her take care of that for me! She had the idea that we should have a garage sale for all the rest of our stuff that we were getting rid of. Nicole and her husband helped us so much that last week- she basically lived at our house that weekend, setting up our garage sale, manning our garage sale, and helping in our house to clear out the food in our kitchen. Nicole took food that was open, and then she donated our pantry food to needy families in our ward.

Nicole brought Otter pops that Coen could sell at the garage sale:

In Uta, Ava got to have her very first friend sleepover, and I think you can tell by her smile how she felt about that:

Brent's office is our storage room- he put his movies around the edges of the room and we filled in the rest of the room with the stuff we want to save. It got a lot more full than this...

It was tiring work!! These two stuck together in the time of transition.

I kept out a couple toys that the kids could play with the last weekend, but it got tricky at the very end with none of our stuff, dishes, food, etc!

The back porch became our garbage center. Our ward helped haul off the garbage after we left.

We lined up our suitcases that were going in the car for Utah/Hawaii. Another exhausting day- the kids fell asleep here in our living room!

The last meal I cooked in our house, sniff sniff!

We worked hard on cleaning our house, but our saving grace came through a lady in another ward who cleans houses and charges $25/hour. She was still cleaning our kitchen as we drove out for Utah (and Nicole and her husband then came and locked up the house). Here's how the living room looks- ready for our renters! 

This was all such a whirlwind- we had only found our renters 2 1/2 weeks before, and we had only decided to move to Hawaii about 7 weeks before. 

We were only able to do it because of all the help we had! My parents and Brent's mom sacrificed some of their summer break to come help us. And Nicole and her husband also kept helping us so that we could get on the road for Utah. Coen snapped this picture of us as we were about to drive away.  

We drove through Boise and stayed with our friends like usual (so sad knowing it would be our last time making our trip from Oregon!). Luckily once we got to Utah, we could breathe for a bit. We enjoyed a fire in my parent's backyard.

In case you're wondering, we asked, and Audrey and Coen did not miss Ava, and vice versa. Uhhh. 

The kids were super excited to see their cousins:

Utah in the summer was the break we needed- so good to be back!