Sleepover

This weekend Whit and Chris came up to Provo/SLC so that they could go skiing and hang out with some of their friends. They brought Drake with them and I spent Friday and Saturday watching him while they skied. It was really fun! They all stayed at our apartment on Thursday and Big was pretty excited to be having a sleepover with B. We set his bed up in the family room and I slept on the couch by him. On Friday I took him swimming at a cool indoor pool up in Lehi. That kid could seriously spend hours and hours swimming. Luckily we went during the day when it wasn't so busy and he pretty much had free reign of all the toys and slides. We watched Puss in Boots later that night and crashed early. On Saturday he got in his fill of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and Mario Kart in the morning and then I took him to the Nickelcade (a five cent arcade for those of you who are unfortunate enough to have never experienced the awesomeness of a Nickelcade!). He went straight to the race car and motorcycle games and we spent the majority of the time playing those. Later when Whit and Chris got back from skiing we met up with some of their friends to get dinner and then let all the kids play at the Provo River Beach Resort. That place is pretty sweet, check it out if you haven't been there! It was nice to have those three around this weekend.

Haha I had some hilarious conversations with the Little Man, he seriously says some pretty funny crap. Here are some highlights

"When I get bigger I'm gonna drive B's car!"

"I'm gonna come visit B and Bah in Wisconsin when I am two fives old. . . " (and from his mouth it sounded like "Winsconsin" haha)

He was telling me how one of his friends he plays with who is a year younger than him is a little baby, I asked him what he was and he said, "I'm a man!"

I was singing and dancing in the car and he kept saying "B, stop that singing! B, stop that dancing!" I didn't and finally he shook his head and said, "B, you're makin me crazy!" haha

Jared started his job at Trek and so far he's really been liking it. He'll be working on stuff related to the mountain biking aspect of the company. This past week he redesigned a website for one of Trek's mountain biking teams. He's been able to meet some nice people out there and I think that he really likes the guys that he works with so that is good. Obviously it's not that fun living apart, but the fact that he has a job that he loves makes it a little more bearable for now!

Haha

Dating Memories

I was hanging out with my friend Emily this weekend and we got talking about all the fun times we both had with our husbands when we first met them and then started dating. I've never been much of a journal writer and my blog is pretty much the only journal I have, so I wanted to write down some of the details I remember from those times with Jared (and if you can't tell from the last few posts, I've been feeling all sentimental about stuff lately, I blame it on the move!).


Warning: Unless you really want to know the details of our dating life, I suggest you stop reading now, it will probably bore you to death! Now that you have been fairly warned. . .

- We met through his sister Mikell back in August 2008. Kell and I had become good friends the school year before and decided to move in together. I met Jared the weekend before school started when he was helping Kell move her stuff in. I thought he was really cute and nice but kind of shy. He totally thought I was hot! ;)

- I remember developing a crush on him one afternoon when he came over to talk to Mikell about something. I was in the living room playing guitar hero and he was sitting there waiting for Kell to come home. I wanted to start a conversation with him, but I was too nervous so instead, I asked him if he wanted to play guitar hero with me. Awesome story to tell our kids, "Your dad and I bonded for the first time over a video game!" Lol real romantic eh??  (What's pathetic about this is I even remember the shirt he was wearing haha. A long sleeve button down shirt with pearl snaps, he still has it!)

- After that I decided he was too shy and I was too nervous around him for anything to come of it, so when his roommate started showing interest in me, I decided to try that route instead. I went over to his apartment to see his roommate a few days later and Jared answered the door. His roommate was still on his way home from school so Jared and I ended up having a good conversation while I waited, which made me realize I was really more interested in him than his roommate.

- I got his number first, and invited him to come over to our apartment and watch a football game and eat pizza. . . He was out on a bike ride but said he would come after he got done. He showed up decked out in all of his biking gear and I thought he looked kinda weird haha

- One night we all watched I Am Legend at our apartment and I sat next to him on the couch. I am the worst person to watch scary movies with because I get freaked out really easily. During the movie I jumped pretty bad and grabbed his arm a few times . . . he argues that I did it on purpose, I argue that I was honestly just scared, which was the truth, I promise! :)

- A group of us went to the kite festival down in Spanish Fork one night.  I strategically positioned myself to ride in the same car with him on the way to the festival and snagged the seat next to him on the way home. We watched a movie after that and this time I purposely pretended to fall asleep so I could lean my head on his shoulder. . . smooth is my middle name people lol!

- I knew he liked me when I got a random text from him saying that he had gotten a job he had applied for. I figured you don't just randomly tell people stuff you're excited about unless you like them.

- It took him the better part of 2 hours to get up enough guts to put his arm around me. He did the whole, "let me rest my arm on the top of the couch above you," move. His arm slowly started sliding down the couch closer to me until I finally leaned into him to force it the whole way down haha.

- We didn't go on our first date until after he had put his arm around me and held my hand. We went out to lunch at Tucanos, best restaurant ever, the end!

- We kissed for the first time after coming back from a play up in SLC. We parked the car in the parking garage underneath my apartment complex and then walked up the stairs and onto the grass in front. He gave me a hug and his heart was beating really fast. I thought it was kind of cute so I asked him if he was nervous. He said, and I quote, "No, I'm not nervous, it's because I just walked up those stairs!" I laughed and then we kissed, it was a good one. He texted me a few minutes after he left and said "Muy Bien!!" haha that's Jared for ya!

- I first realized I loved him at my friend's apartment. We were doing some math homework and I remember sitting on her bed and just randomly blurting out, "I'm in love with Jared, what the crap?!" Haha the look she gave me was priceless, who the heck realizes they love their boyfriend when doing math homework??

- We dropped the L-Bomb in Park City a few weeks after that. My family had come up to visit and they were staying in a sweet hotel room that had it's own hot tub, so we all decided to make good use of the thing. After everybody else got out, Jared and I stayed and kept talking. I can't remember what the conversation was about, but he eventually said, "I'm falling in love with you," and I said, "Good, cause I'm in love with you too." That's right, we said "I love you" for the first time in a hot tub, at a hotel in Park City. . . kind of a random circumstance but whatever works right?!

- We first brought up the idea of getting married a little while after that, thanks to my crazy sister. We were planning to go to STG for Thanksgiving and I was talking to Whit a few days before we left to go down and she was asking me if we had talked about marriage. I told her we hadn't yet and she said that I had better bring it up with him before we came down to STG or she would ask him about it at the dinner table on Thanksgiving. Yep, my sister is a little manipulator! :)  Later that day Jared and I were driving to the grocery store and I brought up the conversation I had had with Whit and said something like:

Stace: My sister is kinda crazy, she threatened to ask you if we were going to get married at the dinner table on Thanksgiving! Haha isn't she ridiculous?!
Jared: Well that sounds like a good idea to me.
Stace: Us getting married??
Jared: Yeah
Stace: Okay sounds good

And that was that, haha, I still find it pretty dang hilarious that we decided we were going to get married on such a whim!

- He proposed inside of a cool gazeboo that is on campus at BYU. I had always wanted to get kissed in a gazeboo and had told him so when we were dating. He did a whole scavanger hunt/geo-caching thing that led us to the box the ring was in by the gazeboo. He said he promised he would always take care of me and asked me if I wanted to be his wife forever. I said yes and fulfilled my goal of getting kissed in a gazeboo! :)

We got married on May 30, 2009 and now almost three years later, here we are! If anybody made it through this post I am very impressed, you now probably know way more about Jared and I than you had ever wished to know haha!

Our Apartment

The reality of moving has been setting in this past week. It's kind of funny, but I think something I will miss the most is our apartment, weird I know. You always hear old people reminisce about the good ol' days of being dirt poor and living in a crappy little apartment, and I honestly think I'll turn into one of those people down the road haha! We both love our place and are really going to miss it when we move! So for my own sake, I'm making a list of things I want to remember from the three years we'll have lived in this apartment

Year 1

- I learned how to cook

- We went on our Caribbean Cruise. . . best vacation ever

- We learned that neither of us is as easy to live with as we expected before we got married

- Jared met my little brother for the first time

- I did my student teaching

- I got accepted to grad school and Jared got accepted into the BFA program

- Jared learned how to be a graphic designer (many long nights spent on the computer in the family room)

- I graduated from college

Year 2

- I finished my first year in the grad program

- We bought a bike for me

- Jared did an internship in SLC

- We went on the family beach trip up to the Oregon Coast

- We learned how to fight and then how to compromise and get over it

- We started watching white trash reality TV, thanks to my bro-in-law's influence!

- Spent many nights hanging out with our siblings at Whit and Chris's house

Year 3

- I learned how to plunge the toilet lol

- Jared learned how to make potato soup

- Jared graduated from college
- I've taught up on campus and have LOVED it, best job I've ever had!

- We bought our first big purchase together. . . the Subi

- I learned how to take care of newborn babies by helping my friend Dana with her twins

- Jared got his dream job

- I bought a sweet Patagonia down coat in preparation of the nasty Wisconsin winter's

- I'll finish my thesis and master's program

The list could go on and on, but I don't want to bore people. It really will be sad to leave this place though, it's been our first home and we've made alot of great memories here.  We've also made a bunch of really great friends who we are sad to leave!

I was looking through my camera and came across some random pictures

Candid!

This was our New Year's Eve dinner, we definitely ate the whole thing!

. . . in one sitting. . .  

Amazing margarita pizza from Nicolitalia!

Jared taught Big how to play games on his iphone

he created a gamin' monster!

Valentine's dinner. . . that's salmon, not tofu or

some other weird looking substance on our plates! haha

I came across these pictures of Wisconsin in the winter

this is the doom we have to look forward to next year. . . 

On the left is downtown Madison

Some random stretch of farmland

We're moving to Wisconsin. . . What the?!

Back in January I posted about the all of the things that Jared and I want to do in 2012. I can only shake my head at the irony of that list now haha. So I mentioned that Jared wanted to get his dream job at REI Headquarters and I wanted to try and teach at BYU. Well I did get scheduled to teach some classes on campus at BYU next year, but unfortunately, I won't be doing that. You see, even though Jared has had no leads on a job at REI, he's taken a job offer with Trek Bikes, which is his other dream job. This is great news right? Yes it is great news, only problem is that this job happens to be located in Madison Wisconsin, which is not so great.

Here's the story. . . A about a month ago I was randomly looking a design blog and saw a posting for a graphic designer at Trek. I can't tell you why I was looking at that blog, I have no clue, honestly no idea. I mentioned the job posting to Jared because anybody who knows my husband well knows that he's obsessed with all things biking. It wasn't like I told him because I wanted him to apply for it though, it was something along the lines of

Stace: Looks like Trek is trying to hire a new designer
Jared: Hmm

And we went on to other things that night. The next morning Jared casually mentions that he "might have applied for that job at Trek" but he was mostly doing it to see if they'd even email him back about it. You see, he had applied for a design job out there over the summer after he graduated and he never even got an email back from them saying they had decided to go in a different direction. So this time around he wanted to see if he'd get any feedback from them since he now has a little bit of professional experience on his resume. After he told me he applied for it, I told him that they were going to want to interview him. He didn't think so, but sure enough not three days later they emailed back saying the wanted to do a Skype interview.

Jared: I'm going to do the interview with them
Stace: Uh huh and they are going to want to hire you, you know that right
Jared: I don't know, but even if they do, we had already decided that we were going to stay in SLC
Stace: True, but you are going to start talking to them, you are going to like what they have to say and you are going to want to take the job
Jared: No that won't happen

As you can imagine, my gift of predicting the future is spot on when it comes to stuff like this. He does the interview. They tell him that out of hundreds of applicants, he's the guy they want for the job. He likes what they have to say. They say want to fly us out there so Jared can do an interview in person with them. They say that unless something crazy happens, they are going to offer him the job, so he needs to decide if he's really serious about taking it or not. After we talked about it and weighed the pros and cons of the job and of moving, we decided that we would move forward with the interview process and have them fly us out there.

We went over the last weekend of January and it went really well. The area itself is pretty nice, to us it kind of felt like a mix between the suburbs of Cleveland where I grew up and then Yakima where Jared grew up. The actual town that Trek is located, Waterloo, is about a half hour outside of Madison and in the middle of a bunch of farmland. . . kind of random but for us its better than working and living in a big city.

It's taken a couple of weeks to finally get the offer and then do some negotiating, but now Jared has accepted it so we'll be moving to Wisconsin. Jared will head out there within the next few weeks, but I'll be staying in Provo till May or June so I can finish my thesis. Obviously the long distance thing isn't ideal, but that's just what is going to have to happen for a few months.

When it comes down to it, the job itself is an amazing opportunity for Jared. In fact, I probably couldn't even hand pick a better job for him. Trek is one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, biking company in the world. Jared loves the company and the particular market that they target. He'll get to work on projects that he's alot more interested in compared to what he is doing now, the salary is significantly higher, and there's potential for him to move up in the company in the future. Why am I not super stoked and jumping for joy you ask? Well people, it just kind of a bummer that the job is 2000 miles away in the freezing cold of Wisconsin doom! :)  It's hard to think of moving that far away from our families.

I will say this though. . . After having a few weeks to process everything, I wouldn't say I'm necessarily excited about the idea of moving out there, but I'm not completely dreading it like I was at first. I know that it's the right thing to do for Jared's career, and I'm sure that when we get out there, we will meet new people who we will eventually come to think of as family.

So there you have it. . . not even 6 weeks into the new year and our whole lives have turned completely upside down. It will be interesting to see what the rest of the year brings.

Here are a few pics from our trip, not the best quality given Jared's iphone, but what do ya do?! Our hotel was right in downtown Madison, which actually kind of reminded us of Seattle a little bit.

This is the view out one window of our hotel room

this is the State Capitol, its a really pretty building

This was the view out the other windows in our room

The whole downtown area was really pretty

Haha, we saw this farm as we were driving out to Trek for his interview

Underneath the cow it says "We Stand Behind Our Business" Bahaha

I hope everybody had a great Valentines Day! We stayed at home and had dinner and then watched a movie, nothing too special but it sure beats trying to battle with the crazy crouds in all of the restaurants in Provo on Valentines!

The Big Two Nine

Today is kind of a big deal. . . it's my sister's birthday, can't believe you're almost 30 you oldie! Whit is the best sister and friend, and I only hope that in 5 years, I can be as cool as her :)  I was going to post a bunch of pictures of her and I, but it turns out I am pretty lame and only have one recent picture of just us, good thing we were matching, ha! (Don't worry, we don't wear the exact same outfits all the time, only on special occasions like family weddings)

Meh. . . decided to throw in a some other random ones

Our mom is pretty cool too!

The sibs

Bahaha, my sis and sis-in-law. . . white trash queens!! ;) 

Lol, we definitely have the best dance parties with the most amazing 

moves in the world!! (this was at my wedding, almost 3 years ago, crazy!)

I love you Whit, hope your 29th year is the best one yet!

In other news, for those of you who know what I'm talking about. . . Jared hasn't heard anything, but should find out by the beginning of next week, I promise we are not trying to purposely keep you in the dark!   

The Weekend

This weekend was actually somewhat eventful for us, considering the fact that we don't usually do anything extravagant. . . some married couples are cool and plan fun dates and all that kind of stuff. . . we are not one of those couples! But this weekend was fun. On Friday we stayed home and watched a movie, Law Abiding Citizen was on TV, that show is crazy! Saturday we slept in a little and we both had school/work stuff to do in the morning, but later in the afternoon we decided to take a drive up to Sundance because it finally snowed and we wanted to test out the skills of the Subi! He ran like a champ until we tried to turn around in a parking lot that had about a foot and a half (that might be a slight exaggeration!) of dense snow on the ground. Luckily some nice people were there and helped pull us out.

Jared got a little wet from trying

to get the car free!

Later that evening we went to dinner at PF Changs, thanks to my parents for the gift card from Christmas! We opened up our fortune cookies and got some pretty good advice

Ironically, we are going out of town this weekend (more on that later), but I wouldn't necessarily call our destination exotic. . . especially in the winter time. Also, we are hoping to get some good news as a result of this trip, so the fortune cookies happened to be spot on this time!

After dinner I got together with some of my friends for a girls night. My friend Emily threatened me until I agreed to let her paint my fingernails. . . which lasted approximately 20 hours or so as I just took the nail polish remover to them about an hour ago, hehe sorry Em! It was good to catch up with the girls, and Jared had a fun time watching some weird zombie movie (28 days or something, it sounded creepy!) while I was gone.

Today our friends Chase and Dana blessed their baby boys, so Jared and I went up to SLC for that. Chase and Dana are some of our closest friends up here, so it was great to be able to share the special day with them and it was fun to meet some of their family! After church we watched football and after getting in our fill of "Axe Men" (my bro-in-law will appreciate that!) we are off to bed. . . a pretty successful weekend by our standards! :)

With Chase and Dana

(observe the nail polish. . . ha)

I'm holding Tate and Dana is holding Porter,

cutest twins in the whole world!

2012

I was going to post about our holiday activities, but I can't find the camera cord so since I can't post any pics or videos, all I will say is that Christmas with Jared's family was super fun and we were lame and didn't do a whole lot worth reporting for New Years Eve ha! Maybe when I can find the camera cord I'll post about the holidays, but until then I'll post about 2012.  I'm not a huge fan of setting "New Year's Resolutions," in fact, I can't even think of a time when I actually sat down at the beginning of a new year and made goals, yep I'm that cool :)  This year will be no different, so instead, I'm going to write down a list of things that we "will do" and things that we "want to do" during 2012.


Things we will do. . . 

1. We will pay off our student loans, only 4 more months to go baby!
2. I will finish writing my thesis-of-doom and graduate with a Master's Degree!
3. Jared will get a roof rack for the Subi. . . already has half of it now
4. We will pay off my car loan
5. I will continue to make dinner most nights
6. Jared will continue to go on lots of bike rides
7. We will be moving up toward the SLC area, not sure where exactly, but somewhere north of Provo!
8. I will turn 25, the big quarter century year!
9. Jared will turn 28 this year. . . nothing special about 28, other than it sounds old ;)
10. We will watch the rest of the second season of The Walking Dead
11. I will exercise only when I feel like it, which is not often haha!
12. Jared will continue to curse the crappy Utah drivers on his commute to work.
13. We will be watching alot of basketball in the next four months and then alot of summer Olympics after that!
14. I will continue to watch our budget like a hawk because I'm a little OCD when it comes to finances
15. Jared will design some sweet stuff at work and will likely pick up some free lance projects on the side
16. We will spend alot of evenings hanging out and relaxing together, we just aren't the most social people on the planet!

Things we want to do. . .

1. We want to get some new couches, we are thinking a sectional
2. I want to fly back to Cleveland sometime over the summer so that Jared can meet the rest of my extended family back there
3. Jared wants to get fog lights for the Subi
4. We want to see the Hunger Games movie
5. I want to find a new apartment that is big enough to fit my piano
6. Jared wants to find a new apartment that is big enough for all of our biking and camping junk!
7. We want to go on a fun road trip somewhere with friends
8. I want to get a job as an adjunct professor at BYU teaching math (this is a freakin long shot but it would be cool!)
9. Jared wants to get a job at REI Headquarters (another long shot, but this is a list of "wants" people!)
10. We want to go to see a Jazz game when they play Jimmer's team
11. I want to learn how to cook some good German food like schnitzel and spaetzle
12. Jared wants to design a christmas card for us this year (I don't know if he really wants to, but I'm going to make him!)
13. We want to do something cool for our anniversary this year as we've always been too busy with school and family stuff the past couple of years

And last but not least

14. I want to get pregnant. . . totally depends on where we are at toward the end of the year and what I feel like I should be doing with my career at that point in time, but we aren't gettin any younger folks and we want to start having kids sometime in the next couple of years.

So there you have it. . . not a list of resolutions, but a more realistic list of things we will do and a somewhat far fetched list of wants :)

Oh yeah, and I want to get a massage, that sounds pretty amazing to me right now. . .