Month of Thanks Day 3

Today I would like to express how grateful I am for the amazing family I grew up in...

My mom is the most amazing person in the world! I really admire all that she has been through and the strength that she has to endure all her trials. I talk with my mom on a daily basis and she always knows what advice to give when I am having a hard day.

Cori is one of my best friends in all the world! She is the sweetest girl in all the world. I know that I can always count on her to be there for me. We grew up doing almost everything together and I am so thankful that I had a friend like her in my life!

Ammon always keeps life interesting. He has some of the most adorable kids!

Whitney is another one of my best friends. While she lives clear across the world I know I can always count on her as well. I love being able to facetime with her and her son.

Month of Thanks Day 2

Today I want to express how thankful I am for my growing family.

Bostyn Tea joined our family in March of 2011. On the day that Eric proposed to me we decided we wanted to add a puppy to our family. She is definitely a "daddy's girl" and loves Eric more than anything. Her current hobbies include people watching out the kitchen window and sun bathing. She also loves being an aunt.

Salem Devlyn joined our family in November of 2011. We enjoyed having Bostyn so much that we decided we wanted another American Bulldog puppy. We found a breeder and fell in love with Salem. We adopted her when she was 3 months old. Salem is full of life and loves being around people. While she may look like a small horse and be a bit scary looking, she is the most loving dog in the world! On October 17th she became a momma of 10 puppies and is attempting to adjust to her new role...

 

Eric and I have decided that we are wanting to keep a couple of Salem's puppies... So now introducing the newest members of our family...

Ate' (pronounced Aw-Tay) Nemesis is Salem's second born puppy. When he was born he came out fighting. We fell in love with him from the moment we saw him and just knew we had to keep him. Out of all the puppies he looks the most like his mom. He loves to play with his siblings and wrestle around. When he wants something he goes for it, even if it means pushing the others out of his way.

Phalanx (Fay-links) Alcibiades is my little baby. He had an interesting birth. He is the fifth puppy born to Salem. After the first 4 were born there was a decent time that went by and Salem decided she needed to walk around. She came back into the bedroom and sat on the floor by the bed. I looked down and noticed a puppy was coming out breach. She realized something was going on and took off running down the hall with him attached and hanging out of her. He ended up being born in the hallway. He is the runt of the group. He loves to jump on his siblings and bite at their ears.

Month of Thanks Day 1

With it being the month of November I have been doing a lot of thinking about what I am thankful for... While I think about this topic a lot, this month always really brings it out. I figured I would write a post each day about something I am thankful for.

Today I am going to write about how thankful I am for my amazing husband Eric. Eric and I are complete opposites and he challenges me every day. While some days these challenges aren't always the best, I love him more than anything.

Eric has been extremely supportive of my decision to go back to school and he does his best to keep me from going crazy while getting my papers done. He is always there to discuss my work and give me pointers to help me do better.

Eric recently dropped out of this semester of school so that he could work full time to help us out financially. I am extremely grateful for this sacrifice.

One of his biggest passions is shooting. This is something that I do struggle with since I am terrified of guns, however he has been amazing with me. He takes me shooting with him all the time hoping to get me use to being around guns, and I am sure hoping that one day I will actually participate with him.

I love you Eric!

Dang! Where has the time gone? I can't believe how long it has been since I last wrote!  So much has happened in the last year. My goal is to now stay up to date on our family however here is a semi brief overview of what has gone on since last May....

At the end of May I was given the amazing opportunity of working as the Office Manager on the pipeline that was going through Maine. I ended up working from 6am to around 6 pm Monday through Saturday and a few hours on every other Sunday. The pipeline became my life and I loved the guys that I worked with! Growing up I had my reservations about construction guys because they seemed rough around the edges, however there was never a dull moment with the guys I got to know. While I was working in the office, Eric also got in on the pipeline as a laborer. Thankfully he had to be to work around the same time I did so we were able to work our schedules out to be about the same...

As the work started winding down (with the change of weather) Eric and I made a HUGE decision to make another cross country move. We purchased a small trailer, built a wooden box over it, packed all of our stuff inside it and traveled back to Utah. Bostyn and Salem did an amazing job traveling across the country and seemed to enjoy every moment of it...

It was so nice to see my family after not being home for 2 years! We ended up staying at my mom's house for a few months while trying to get everything figured out... We searched for places to live and for jobs and nothing really panned out. I was able to work a temp job for about a month and a half. While working this job I realized how unhappy I was with the line of work I was in and how I really wanted to make a change... Once realizing this and talking things over with Eric we decided to make another move (smaller this time) and both of us decided to go back to school. Once the decision was made everything fell into place. We were able to find a place to live, which for once had a yard for the girls to run around in. It is a fixer upper, however it is our fixer upper for now!

At the beginning of April we made our move and started school in May. Eric is going into Construction Management and plans on starting his own company doing all kinds of different types of construction. I started out in History Education, planning on teaching either junior high or high school until I got my master's degree then hoping to make the move up to teaching at a college. However, over the summer while taking my Western Civilization class I found my love for Ancient Greece. I have since decided I want to major in Classical Studies and emerge myself in all things Greece and Rome.

Over the summer we spent a lot of our spare time outside with the girls and also going and spending some time with my family in Provo.... At the end of May my little man Rykert was baptized. I was such a proud Aunt that day. He did such an amazing job! Here are a few pictures from our summer of fun...

My handsome Ry boy...

Ry, Lilly and Asher before Ry's baptism

Baby Ladd...

Ash chilling...

Ry loves snakes and was so excited when Uncle Eric found a snake and let him hold it!

Salem loved her pool... She was often found in it all throughout the summer...

Bostyn became our outdoors dog... She loved chilling out in the yard...

Lilly giving attitude...

Cori and baby Ladd at the carnival...

Going down the slide with a scared Asher...

Salem getting ready to send her balloon up to Pa... it has her paw print on it. She was very into the whole thing.

Bostyn up in the mountains...

Bostyn loves people watching from our kitchen window...

Salem...

At the end of August Eric decided to breed Salem. We are expecting to have puppies by the end of October and are super excited! That is our last year in a nutshell :)

Life Recap....

I can't believe that a year has gone by without me updating our blog... so much has gone on this past year. Some of it amazing, other parts of it were full of major drama that was endured but will hopefully stay in the past where it belongs.

Last May Eric and I moved to Nashua, New Hampshire and found ourselves in an amazing ward that was very welcoming and we enjoyed getting to know people and attending ward activities (which happened a couple times a month)... While living there Eric was ordained as a Priest in the Aaronic Priesthood. It was such an amazing experience to see him go from being a new convert to getting the priesthood. Around the end of July we got a phone call from Eric's mom in Pennsylvania. She informed us that his grandma's health wasn't the best and also that she was bleeding internally and that things were looking good for her as well. After hearing the news we made the decision to once again pack up all our stuff and make another move.

Right from the start of being there we encountered trial after trial. Everyone at his grandma's house smoked and I had a very hard time being there around it. I struggled to breathe through out most of the house... A few days after arriving in Pittsburgh we attended a funeral of a family cousin. While there, one of his mom's cousins pulled me aside to talk to me about some things. He is a minister in some faith that I can't remember... anyway, he said something that really struck me. He told me that no matter what happened while Eric and I were staying with his Grandma that we needed to stick together as a team and not let anyone in the family divide us, because they would be trying. At first I brushed it off but the longer I lived there the more and more I thought of it.

Eric and I love to joke around that Jerry Springer has nothing on his family. They could do a whole dramatic series about them and make a ton of money. His oldest uncle was constantly beyond drunk and always causing drama of one kind or another... unfortunately though the biggest problem ended up being his mother... who by the way was only bleeding internally because she drinks too much and was in no real danger of dying, she just wanted to get Eric back down to Pennsylvania to live and decided to lie to get him there. She also can't accept the fact that Eric has another woman in his life and would constantly demand she be put first. There were many times she got in my face over nothing at all but to let me know this. There were many times during this period of time that I wanted to just let it all go and walk away... however I found ways to keep my head on my shoulders and move on from each and every dramatic day.

In January I was talking to my mom on the phone about how fed up I was with everything that was going on in my life and how I didn't know if I could take much more. She was always good to talk to and was a very good listener. I am thankful I have her in my life. I guess she had just had home teachers over that day and was given a lesson about writing in your journal. They talked about how sometimes it seems like you have nothing good to write about but later on your children are going to love reading about your life. She challenged me to record the stuff I was going through so that my children could later look back at my life and see how I dealt with the challenges I was faced with. While months have now gone by since I was challenged to do this... I am now doing it.

When it comes to the 7 months I spent in hell (aka with Eric's Pennsylvania family) some of the things I have learned or re-learned is how grateful I am to have the gospel of Jesus Christ in my life. Through this I have become the woman I am today. I am thankful that I grew up in a family that is super close and always there for each other and where abuse was never acceptable. Without my family behind me I don't know where I would be today. I am grateful that I know that I am a choice daughter of God and that he is always there for me. I also learned that I don't deserve to be treated the way I was and while running away from trials isn't a good thing, sometimes leaving and moving on from them is the only thing you can do....

While there was a lot of drama going on... Eric and I also took some time to go out and do a few things while we were there... here are a few pictures of things we did...

Exploring Downtown Pittsburgh

At the Hookstown Fair...

Fun in the Snow...

At the beginning of February Eric had to go back up to Maine for court about his car accident last year. We took a week and came up to Maine, did his court stuff and spent time with his family here along with look for a place to live. Thankfully we were able to secure ourselves a cute place to live... While up in Maine we had some fun with the huge snow storm that came.

We headed back to Pennsylvania and packed all our stuff up and within a week made the move back to Maine. I told Eric that all I wanted for my 31st birthday was to have moved to Maine and I wanted clams... we ended up leaving Pennsylvania on the 15th of Feb and being back at his dad's place around 5 pm on my birthday and having clams for dinner so I got my birthday wish. Now here we are living the slow life once again...