Steve & Amy

Steve served a mission for the LDS church in Independence, Missouri (although most of the mission covered Kansas). Amy also served a mission in Campinas, Brazil. Here’s a few pictures from our missions!

One of my favorite places to visit was Adam-Ondi-Ahman!! It was incredibly peaceful and a fun place to relax on our preparation days.

Many of the cities in Kansas had murals on the buildings. This was one I thought was amusing being that I was in Kansas. (There’s no place like home!)

Although Brazil is known for its warm temperatures, during their winters we would often get cold, because there was no indoor heating. This is how I liked to study in the cold mornings.

As everyone knows, I’m not usually a really tan person, but my feet sure got some crazy tans lines on my mission.

On Friday night, we continued our tradition of doing something fun with our nieces and nephews. We had plans to take our nieces Rebecca and Maddy to an outdoor movie. Unfortunately there was a huge downpour, so we had to adjust our plans. We made homemade pizza at our house. Then we played a couple of games, Trouble, UNO, and of course, Duck Duck Goose. (Steve and I have determined that we are too old to play that with only a few people, because we can’t run in small circles without getting dizzy!!) After that we watched a movie, Bedtime Stories. Maddy and I fell asleep, but Steve and Rebecca made it through the whole movie. The girls slept over and we were able to wake up and have pancakes for breakfast! We had a great time with our nieces!

Here’s a few pics of our homemade pizzas!

By Steve:
It was April 15, 2005. My best friend helped to plan a singles dance, so I decided it would be good to go and support him in that. While at the dance I talked to a lot of cute girls, but didn’t really hit it off with any of them. Then I saw this beautiful girl walk through the doors. My first thought was, “there’s no way I can talk to this girl, she’s way out of my league.” My next thought was “well, out of my league or not, I’m going to talk to her.” My way of talking to her, was to talk to her friend and then hopefully talk to Amy as part of that. Long story short, we hit it off immediately. We both felt completely comfortable being ourselves. Although we were not an “official” couple for about a month after we met, neither of us had the desire to date anyone else. We were engaged five months (to the day) after meeting, and married about three months later. We have now been married for a little over three years, and it has been the best three years of my life. I love her to pieces.

By Amy:
Steve and I met when we were both at a singles dance. My friend had wanted me to come, so I decided to go, even though I didn’t really want to. When I got there, I kind of wanted to leave, but then I saw Steve! I thought he was so cute! He started to talk to my friend, so I made sure to be part of the conversation. He was so easy to talk to, that we kept talking and dancing the whole night. As part of the dance, everyone was going to see a movie at the theater. Steve offered to drive me and my friend. On the way home from the theater, he asked for my number. I was so excited that he had asked, so of course I gave it to him. We had a great time dating for the next five months. After a very romantic proposal, we were engaged to be married. We have a great time together. I love being married to my best friend!

My family has quite a few traditions. One of the traditions is that we always went on a vacation every year. We didn’t always go far away, or spend a lot of money, but we always did something. When my family gets together and talks about our memories, some of our favorite memories are of our summer vacations.

Here’s a few pictures of our summer vacation fun!

A family water fight on our river rafting trip.

Hiking to Delicate Arch in Moab, UT

California Trip

I think that these vacations really helped my family to grow closer together. Steve and I plan to continue this tradition with our family. So far, we’ve been able to go on a vacation each year together, and we plan to continue this when we have kids.

When Steve and I were first married we took a trip with my family to Nauvoo. We went with my parents and my two sisters. One night while we were in the hotel, we got a little bored and created a game called Hotel Flyers! My sister created a really fun movie to show the game!

You’re never too old to have fun!!

This weekend we had our annual campout with Steve’s family. This year we all went to Yuba Lake. With all the rain that we’ve been getting, we were wondering if we should cancel, but we decided to brave the weather. It didn’t turn out too bad…we had a few rainstorms, but we still had a fabulous time!

The nieces and nephews loved Steve because he would be their “parental guardian” (that’s the term they came up with), so they could play in the lake. He was the one they would come to when their parents weren’t ready to take them to the lake.

We love having such a fun annual tradition with Steve’s family. The kids and adults all love it. In fact my niece told me that we should have adopted a baby before the campout, “because the baby would have so much fun!”

Each year a different family plans the campout and next year it’s our turn, so if you have a favorite camping spot, let us know!

Going back to my elementary days (okay, and sometimes junior high), my best friend Brian and I invented a game. The game was usually played at a playground, or on another friend’s trampoline. We called the game “ebalebs” (pronounced eh-bu-lebs), which was our code word for “babes”. We gave it a code word because we didn’t want to refer to it as “babes” every time we wanted to play the game.

To play the game, each of us would think about the girl we had a crush on at the moment, then we would pretend that the “bad guys” took them away. That was always how the game began, then we’d run around pretending we were on ships, motorcycles, or something else and save our babes from the bad guys. Sometimes we would play for hours at a time before we were able to finally “save” them. As we shared our newly invented game with some of our other friends, they joined in on the fun and swore to secrecy that they wouldn’t reveal what the code word “ebalebs” really meant.

I think Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was our inspiration as it was all the rave back in those days. Except they fought for only one girl (April), and we each decided it would be much funner for each of us to have our own girl to fight for. Oh, and we weren’t turtles haha . Still aren’t thank goodness. Anyway, we enjoyed playing that game many times. We were always heroes of course, although it was always last minute rescues and very suspenseful moments .

Don’t make too much fun .

In honor of Steve’s birthday, here are the some of the things I love about him:

*He is so smart! He has a way of solving all kinds of problems.

*He is very unselfish!! One of his favorite things is to just have time to himself, to relax, but he’s always willing to give up that time to help others. When I need help with something, he’s always willing to drop what he is doing and help me.

*He always know what needs to be done and he always has a plan to do it. (This helps things get done that I put off!)

*He is great with kids. I have so much fun watching him with our nieces and nephews. I’m looking forward to seeing him with our kids.

*He is very clean and organized! He files all our papers and keeps track of all the important stuff like paying our bills and taking care of the budget.

*He is a great husband! He is always supportive when I’m stressed, upset, or needing help with anything. He’s always willing to listen to anything that I want to talk about. He always looks for ways to make me happy.

I’m so lucky to be married to him! HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

I have one of those lists that has everything I want to do in my life. One of those items is run a marathon. I don’t know why that one is on the list, because I am not a runner. I briefly ran in college. I trained for a 5K. I was able to run that, but it nearly killed me. Since a marathon is a HUGE difference from a 5K, I’m still not sure about my reasoning. So anyway….that’s my crazy desire to run a marathon.

Last week my sister told me about the Top of the Utah Half Marathon in Logan. She told me that she wanted to do it and asked me if I would do it with her. I decided that I should just do it! So I came home and told Steve about it. I told him I was going to have a hard time training, because my sister lives in Provo and I’d have to train alone. Well, he decided that he would run the marathon with me.

So Tuesday, we decided to have our first “training.” We went to the track at the local high school. Since it started raining, we only did 3 laps. We thought that the laps were 1/2 mile, so when we finished we went on and on about how great we did, and how we thought we could do this marathon. Unfortunately we came home, found out that the laps are only 1/4 mile. We had only done 3/4 of a mile…..

The next day, we decided to do our actual training. We had to run 2 miles. We thought it might be a little tougher, but we thought we could do it. So we ran one mile, walked a lap, then ran another mile….and we nearly died! Only 2 miles!!! So you may want to ask, how are we ever going to run 13.1 miles??? Well, we are going to continue training, do our best, and then if all else fails walk some of it. At least when we’re done I can say that I’ve done a marathon, and maybe I’ll just add the word “half” to my marathon goal!

What’s on your list of things to do????

I thought it would be fun to start blogging about some of our favorite memories. Some will be of Steve and I together and others will be from before we got married. Check back every Monday for a new memory!

When I was just about to graduate, I heard about this amazing opportunity. I found out that I could do my student teaching in an inner-city school in Washington DC. When I heard about it, I decided that it was something I really wanted to do. Everyone thought I was a little crazy, but it turned out to be an incredible experience. I learned a lot and I had the best time exploring Washington DC and some of the surrounding areas.

Teaching in an inner-city school was a lot different than I had ever imagined. All the doors are always locked and there is security in the front of the building. Also, during this time, there was a sniper in DC, so the kids couldn’t even go out for recess. (Indoor recess for a month is never a good idea!)

My cooperating teacher didn’t really like teaching. My first day, she told me that I needed to learn to yell, before I could be an effective teacher! I wouldn’t say that I learned to yell, but I did learn a lot at that school. The kids were great, definitely not an easy class, but they were very loving and responded well to us! By the end of the four months it was difficult to leave them.

Here’s a few of my favorite comments from some of the students.

“Teacher, can you tell Joshua to move his bush, I can’t see the board” (speaking about one of the student’s afro)

“Teacher, my momma needs to do your hair for you.” (one student speaking about my flyaway hair, she thought it needed to be in braids).