Thanksgiving week

This year we were lucky enough to have 2 Thanksgivings. While shopping for our little Thanksgiving dinner at the great and abominable grocery store, a friend called and invited us to join his family. We were already emotionally committed to have our own little Thanksgiving so we left walmart with lots of groceries, but no turkey. I don't think that we could have fit any kind of full grown turkey in our camper oven anyways. We had a fun time cooking and eating our pre-Thanksgiving meal, and enjoyed spending Thanksgiving day with lots of good people and crazy kids. We got to spend the day outside because it was so warm, and got to skeet shoot right before it got dark. The food was great! We only had to pay the small price of me being dressed up by the kids. I consider this my contribution to Thanksgiving dinner.

We've become quite flexible since September. Although there is no way to really express the battles of practical flexibility we face daily, here are a few examples:
- We use an old wash tub as a fire pit and when we run out of marshmallows we roast mushrooms (this was my idea... Shayna and Trace didn't quite appreciate it)
- Previous to our discovery, that our hot water tank can use both electric and gas heating at the same time, the hot water would run continuously for 4 minutes. Since the discovery a shower can now last for 8 minutes with continuous hot water... we're so cheap though we just use the electric heater and turn the water off when soaping up.
-Trace takes baths in our kitchen sink... he loves it. Maybe we'll start encorporating washing the dishes with his bath time... gross.
-Our furnace is in the process of being fixed (it needed a little work so we have been using electric space heaters this whole winter so far), and the past few nights have dipped down into the mid 20's. We are able to keep the trailer about 40 degrees warmer than the outside, with the heaters, so this morning it felt a little bit like we were camping... good thing we like to cuddle... and good thing Trace's basal metabolic temperature is that of an obese bear cub.
- Arranging food in our fridge after grocery shopping is like doing a 3D puzzle. Most of the time we can get everything to fit, but there is never any spare room.

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%.