Our Place (and some other things...)

This post is going to be mostly pictures. We're all settled into our apartment and I finally got around to taking these! It's really quite a lovely place :).

This is the view from near the front door. See those doors on the left? Behind them is the "kitchen"...so if I don't feel like doing dishes, I can just hide the mess ;). Brilliant. Oh and there's the hospital bag on the right, all ready to go at a moment's notice :).

Behind door number one we have the kitchen! See the two burners? I couldn't be happier about that (our apartment in Shanghai just had one...and about half the cupboard space)!

Across the hall from the kitchen is the bathroom, I love the tiled walls.

That's our washer to the right of the shower. No dryer of course, but I've gotten used to hanging our clothes up to dry.  It's not so bad...in fact, I kind of like it! It feels like I'm living in a simpler time ;).

Our purple bed :). The mattress was absolutely horrible (like bruise-your-hips hard) but we bought a foam pad to put on top and now it's super comfortable. And the biggest bed we've ever had! We don't have a couch, so we spend a lot of our time chillin' on the bed. It's a little strange...

Red fridge, nice TV, and Oliver's little corner. And notice the toaster oven next to the TV? No ovens in China, and our apartment didn't have a microwave either. So we decided to buy this toaster oven and I've already used it like 5 times in the past week, I think we'll definitely get our money's worth. And we certainly couldn't spare any counter space in the kitchen, so next to the TV it sits :).

Sitting area and dining table. There's our Mesa temple fan sitting on the little table :).  And we bought that white shelf thing from Ikea (yes, they have one here!) cause there just wasn't enough room in the closet. I hang our clothes to dry on that railing thing by the window...I don't know if that's its purpose but it works nicely.

Made some brownies :).

I've discovered that a rice cooker can be used for many things. It can function a bit like a crock pot and can even be used for baking brownies :). I put about half the batter in and it took like an hour and a half to bake them.

They don't look very good, but they tasted okay! We just kept telling ourselves that any brownies is better than no brownies at all (not always true, but true in this case).

While the brownies were slowly baking in the rice cooker we went out and bought our toaster oven. So I baked the second half of the batter in the toaster oven and they turned out very different than the rice cooker brownies, but also good :).

And...I look awful in this picture, but here I am at 37 weeks! Technically full term! Someone needs to tell Oliver that it's okay for him to come now if he wants...he's not listening to me :).

The view from our apartment window. We live on the 42nd floor! My ears pop whenever I ride the elevator up to our apartment ;). The picture doesn't quite capture it but the last several days the setting sun has been bright red! It's beautiful.