aRiZoNa

 Tracer and I had such a blast in AZ! 

We missed Chris like crazy.. but the time flew!

We got to spend 2 weeks instead of 1, and its a good thing cause so much went on! 

Lacey & Ty's WEDDING

( What a beautiful wedding on the Farm! I was lucky to be the one to take their pictures! They are the Dream Couple!)

Grandma Jessi's 86th Birthday

( We took our sweet Grandma to breakfast and to get her hair done! She loved every minute.)

 HALLOWEEN

( I had so much fun helping Sunde's Fam get all dressed up as the Kung Fu Pandas! Tracer was a tiger thanks to Summer:)

Kacey & Belle had Baby Kessia

( What an awesome thing to see Belle have her baby with a midwife in Summers house! It definitely brought me back to a lot of amazing and terrible memories ha ha! It was priceless to sit and wait on the stairs right by the room with my family. The little girls would run and put their ear to the door listening intently for that lil' cry.  Belle was a champ and the baby was a lil' 5 lb. doll! What a blessing to be there!)

Other highlights;

Being on the Farm at my favorite time of year,

 Eating Mom's Pumpkin Pie all week,

Watching Asher& Elena's Soccer Games,

Randomly seeing Amy Johnson on her way home from Havasupai,

Dad and Kolt both got their Deer,

Hearing the Song Summer Wrote for the Primary kids to sing in the Church Program, &

Took lots of pictures..Lisa & David, AZ Dream Gymnastics, Baby Kessia, & The Andrew Fam.

 It took being a way from Da Da for 2 weeks, but finally... Trace learned to say MA MA!!!

10 things we like about Ruby

There are many reasons why we love living in Ruby, the 5th wheel beauty… here are the top ten

1. We get to be close all the time
1. Ruby has a total of 275 square feet… not too big and not too small. .. Well the shower's too small, but it just means more encouragement to take shorter showers.

2. Cleaning up is easy
1. If the place is a total mess, and Trace has every toy and every can out, it probably takes one person 5 minutes to make the place look picked up; however, if Trace is helping it probably takes more like 10 minutes.

3. Traces Bed
1. We made a bed for Trace next to ours. It’s a few inches lower than ours and sinks down in the middle. He likes to roll around a lot in his sleep so the sunken middle makes it so that he has to really get a good start to roll up to us in the night… He makes it up to us every night, but I like to think it buys us a few extra minutes before he starts unconsciously steam rolling us.

4. We have everything we need, and nothing we don’t need
1. We had to send a lot of stuff home when we ventured into RV living. We haven't missed any of it. Hopefully we can keep that going when we move into a home.

5. Our windows have screens and we have a screen door
1. Our last place didn’t have these… You don’t really know what you’ve got till its gone in this instance

6. We get to be "home-ish" owners.
1. Although there's not much to living in an RV, we do get to do some maintenance. We also can modify it in any way we want without trying to figure out if our landlord would approve or not 

7. Our Jack-knife sofa
1. We like to fold out the little (thin and short) thing and watch movies together on it. It’s a good thing that the three of us like to cuddle or else one of us would enevitably fall off

8. Mobility
1. We are looking into the future with this one. Clinical year (starting in January) has the potential to be one of lots of moving. We may have one clinical that is 5 minutes from home and then another that is 2 and a half hours away… So we should be able to always be within 20min of some kind of trailer parking space the entire year

9. Its not creepy
1. Because every single foot of the 275 can be seen from anywhere in the RV, It takes almost no time to reassure yourself that no one or thing is hiding anywhere… I don’t know why this would be a thought that someone would have, but just in case someone did, it would be quickly set at ease… (I've practiced it a few times this past week just in case someone would need to know… I didn’t need to know, but just in case someone else did… because I don’t worry about those things…)
2. Our last apartment took quite a few minutes of heart-pounding hide and seek before you knew there was no one planning on spending the night without you knowing… the street we used to live on was a little creepy, okay. I think it’s a pretty logical thought to have. And I just know that someone had died up in our attic (the smell was awful- and although we made ourselves feel better by saying it was probably just a dead bird… I'm still not convinced). I never got up the nerve to climb up in the attic and check.  SO THANKFULLY, our new home has no attic and no hiding places, unless you are a midget.

10. Laundry Shoot
1. One might think that an RV has no luxury features… This is not true. We have a laundry shoot that sends our dirty laundry into our lower storage area… one foot below. I don’t know how we dealt with the dirty laundry before, but now we don’t have to. 

We found out today that we will be relocating to Tupelo MS for our clinical year. It's 3+hrs south of where we are now. We have no clue what's down there... except of course Elvis' birthplace. 

The Smokies

All BOY!!

Trace got his 1st big shinner..

He was playing on the top trailer stair when he reached for the tomato plant and face planted

into the corner of the bottom stair. It was scary and so sad. This one will take a while to heal I'm afraid.

Married 2 yrs!

Been married 2 years..how fun is that!!
--I meant to post this back on the Sept. 24th but better late then never.

We'v done quite a bit in 2 years I'd say!

Got Married
Went to Scotland
Got Pregnant
Moved to Provo
Chris finished his bachelors
Moved to Wallsburg
Had a baby
Chris got into PA School
Moved to Tennessee
Got Pregnant
Bought a Truck
Moved into a 5th Wheel

Petty exciting stuff!

Confessions of a Tennessee'an Transplant

 We uses the bed of our truck for Traces playpen, complete with a fifth wheel hitch. He said "tractor" and "deer" before he said mama, and he has a deer instead of a dog for a pet.  Trace has watched the baby einsteins "old macdonald" video on you tube 500 times, because we are too cheap to buy him the dvd's.

As a family we have watched all 9 seasons of Little House on the Prairie in 9 months… to put it into perspective, that's 10,032 minutes of Walnut Grove Pioneer drama, in less than a years time. Although we loved it, it was somewhat like running a marathon, we didn’t enjoy every minute of it, but now we can boast. If there was a jeopardy episode that dealt entirely of Little House on the Prairie facts… we would be rich!

Many already know this, but just for the record, we are the Amish paparazzi. Shayna tells me to slow the car down when we are passing their homesteads so she can skillfully sneak some pictures. I'm sure the word has spread amongst them to be ware the silver SUV with the brown haired, crazy-bun woman in the back.

The other night while I was supposed to be studying for a test, I got into a heated debate with some classmates about politics. Feeling like a lunatic, I went home and told Shayna all about it. We agreed that we have become those contancorus sort of people our fathers seemed to be when we were children ... we think of ourselves as amateur constitutionalists.

Shayna hasn't followed a recipe in… well, she's never followed one. 90%* of the time it works out great… but occasionally it feels like we are pioneers just eating what crawls across our plates. It keeps us grounded. She also confesses that she is somewhat of a health food hypocrite. She makes sure we use only fresh ground wheat, agave, and lots of fresh produce; however, she also makes sure that we ingest at least 1/2 a pound of caramel or chocolate daily.

Of course our families wont think twice about this shocking  information, but we may loose some friends over it. We just had to show our true colors at some point in time.

*Shayna suggested 82% and I suggested 97%… she doesn’t give herself enough credit. We settled on 90%.

Lake Powell 2012

The long awaited Lake Powell trip, came and went like a high school relationship... but it was more significant. In general the travel day (whether to Utah or Arizona) is always more hectic than we expect, although it is always worth it. We woke up early, got to the airport at a perfect time (combining my over active planning and Shayna's fashionably "5" minutes late is a good middle ground), navigated through the sea of incompetent airport "professionals" and the even larger sea of novices who try to bring too many liquids and sharp objects through the security station, and made our way to the back-most seats on the plane. Downside: these are the only seats that don't recline; Upside: they provided a few empty seats across the isle from us. The 3.5hrs were alright until Trace decided to be "that child" that everyone glares back at...he was screaming so loud...anyways... we landed and were met by mom and katherine, and made it to the lake safely after a pleasant 6 hour drive.
We left the marina by ski boat later than expected because of multiple set backs (not enough life jackets on the boat, a jet ski that wouldn't start, tracking down a spotlight, etc). It was dark by the time that we set out. Cory and I used a spotlight to go from buoy to buoy, while Sarah and Mom followed close behind on jets skis (and sometimes too close beside- we found out after the trip that Sarah has no depth perception and that she was probably the one with the worst night vision- kudos Sarah for making it alive!). Cory and I didn't know that some of the buoys were not lit up, and upon passing one very close beside, we slowed down a bit. The whole experience was the topic of many parables for the rest of the trip. The temperature was perfect and the water was a nice 80 F. Shayna didn't ski or wake board because she has a bun in the oven and I didn't because... I have no excuses. I spent all the time in the water with Trace. He LOVED it. If we believed in reincarnation, he would come back as a fish. Drayke (Traces older cousin), would probably come back as a clam... he ate a few cups of sand each day... that kid is rugged. He'll never be called a sissy, that's for sure. We got to sleep out on the front (I think its called the bow) of the houseboat- we feel very special to have gotten that coved spot (probably the coolest and least bat/mosquito ridden area on the boat). Thanks guys. The trip was was complete only because all the women dressed up in bathing suits from the 80's (Shayna found them at a store, stuck in the past, in our current hometown McKenzie). Some of these women never even got to experience the 80s in their lifetime, but from the pictures you would never know it. Thankfully the 80's were a time of great fashion sense, so there is nothing they should feel embarrassed about. The trip was perfect great food, time to catch up with everyone (especially Joe who we hadn't seen or really even talked to in over 2 years- he has only changed for the better and thankfully has not changed too much), almost no sunburns (Shayna got fried on the last few hours on the water), and the one day we spent in St George broke up the drive home nicely.
[Insert Paragraph 1 here for the trip home... basically it was all the same, except no back seats, no empty seats, and we didn't have to wake up early].
We are so blessed to have a families that we both love and keep in touch with. Can't wait to live closer to them someday!

Trailer Treasures...Not Trash

We've begun a new life... in a trailer. What it lacks in glamor is made up for in sheer insanity.

In the middle of a hectic second semester Chris began to feel uneasy about our living situation and wanted to consider another option. What was it that brought on this uneasiness? It could have been the countless men roaming the street in front of our apartment toting rottweilers on chains in the middle of the day. Or it could have been the Slatterys down the road that shot off fireworks during the night (well after the 4th of July). Whatever it was, we may never know. Somewhere in the beginning of the uneasiness Chris started researching RV's and RV living. Shayna was sure this was a passing stage... Chris was hooked after reading just a few geriatric RV blogs. The romance and adventure they promised on the open road seemed like the life we needed.

Shayna got on board with the decision to move after she discovered that Chris had been sleeping with a .40 by the bedside. She thought that maybe what Chris meant by trailer was actually a new apartment in a safer part of town (one that wasn't on the wrong side of the tracks...literally, we used to live across 2 sets of railroad tracks). At some point she realized that this may be the only dream that Chris would ever have in his life... and she let him run with it. Shayna eventually thought it would be fun to live in a trailer, probably partially from the peer pressure of having had half of her siblings (Sunde, Kody, and Kasey and their families) begin their marriages in trailers... and they turned out great!

So during some of Chris' "free time" (mainly during 2 very boring classes that shall forever remain a secret) he looked on Craigslist, marketplace, and many other online listings, for our dream RV and truck. Ironically, at the end of our search, it was Shayna that found both the truck and the RV.

The truck was mislisted for the Nashville area (2 hrs from McKenzie), but was actually down in Mobile Alabama (7 hrs away). We thought that was the end of it, but the people had family up near Nashville and were willing to meet us there the next day. After a few test drives, Black Beauty was ours, it was definitely meant to be. We had to neuter the poor thing (his 3 inch Body Lift scared Chris when it came to towing... and we couldn't find anyone that was willing to do a custom 5th wheel installation).

Our RV is a diamond in the rough. An older couple in Kentucky had babied it for 9 years and felt that their RVing days were over. Alan, the previous owner,  thought Chris was a scammer at first because his cell number is from Utah, but soon he learned that we were quality RV wannabes. The correspondence over email was like having a pen pal while in middle school ( I think we totaled over 70 emails in the month before we picked up the RV). On the day when we brought our baby home, Chris drove 3 hours north to Kentucky, had breakfast with our new RV pals, and headed home... Papa Mike would have been proud. Chris took a wrong turn 5 miles down the road (y'all out west have no idea the maze of country roads we live by) and made a 16 point turn in a little clearing. No other mishaps occurred, and the long awaited Ruby (short for Starcraft Aruba... we thought the nickname made it sound like a granny with flair... basically what she is) was home at last... er... she is the home now... so I guess we we're home at last.

Chris' buddy Chris (from school) hooked us up with a place to park our home. He rents from the most amazing landlord EVER, the 100% southern grandpa, Jimmy. He is a member of the Church of God of Prophecy (and proud of it... we love him!).  We're parked up on his acreage a ways out of town. Call us crazy, but we love our new home on wheels.

 The MOve

 

 Our NEw Home