Moving Time

So the latest update is that Scott and I are moving to Vancouver, WA near his family. We will start our twenty-hour drive on Tuesday, stop by a hotel in Boise, and finish our drive on Wednesday this next week. We will be staying with his parents during March and part of April while we snag a job and get an apartment. Our stuff is still in Rexburg, so Scott and his Dad will be driving there and back once we get settled into an apartment. Before we head out, we are going to celebrate my Mom's birthday early while we are here. We are also celebrating with our friends, the Robinsons, for Aaron's birthday.

Things that Scott has been doing:

-applying for jobs in Vancouver, WA

-enjoying his enormous new monitor

-enjoying his expensive/free mouse and keyboard that he got from reviewing on Gamesplash

-working for Jon

-chasing after our little sunbeam, Eli, who we suspect might have adhd

(and yes, Scott's list is a lot more succinct than mine, lol)

Things that I've been doing:

-Every Sunday, I work with Brielle, a little three-year-old girl in our sunbeam class who has autism. I've really enjoyed working with her, and I feel like I've learned a lot. It's almost made me consider going into special ed. Working with her came naturally for me, and it feels good to help her cope with the outside world. I will be sad to leave her.

-I went to a late Valentine luncheon and learned how to make gourmet Cuban flan. It's a very delicate process. The caramel is made by cooking sugar in a pan, but the sugar can not be stirred until the bottom of the sugar has reached a perfect golden brown. The pans must be warmed in the oven before coating them with home-made sugar caramel because the caramel will harden too quickly otherwise. Instead of putting the flan straight in the oven in the bread pans, you have to fill a cookie sheet with water and then put the bread pans filled with flan on that. This creates a sort of double boiler effect. Anyway, that was fun.

-I've become addicted to shutterfly, which my friend Janae introduced me to. I'm making a book covering the British Literary Tour I went on for a month before I was married. It's really hard to cram it all into one book. There are so many random pictures I want to put on there like candy bars and signs etc. I'm ending up having a lot of collages as I slap pages together. I figure I can go back, delete, and refine later.

-I'm pregnant again. Oh yeah. I'm about six weeks along (I think). Lol. Feel shocked? I just figured it would be easier to tell everybody this way. We're going to get a kick out of who finds this little tidbit first. Rick visited Colorado for the past few days. Scott was having such a hard time not telling him. We did get pregnant again quickly after our miscarriage in December. I initially wanted to wait longer, but it just felt right. And who can argue with the spirit? I have to admit that there is a certain disillusionment that you feel after having had a miscarriage. We no longer feel invincible. There's sort of a scary excitement to trying again. I wonder if we will struggle with more miscarriages, or if our first will be our only time. I'm attempting to not think too much about how far along I am so that we can get past the first trimester without too much worry, but we are happy and hopeful.

Crocheting for the Girls Continued

Here are the girls wearing the hats. So cute!

Crocheting for the Girls

The roses above are from a pattern I just found on pinterest, which Jess invited me to (thank you!). I love it because of the twist it makes. My Mom said they look more like real roses.

I promised my nieces a while ago that I would make them hats, and I finally kept that promise and sent these off Monday. It was so fun to make them, and I hope they like them. The babies get one each, and the girls get two. Crocheting is such a fun way to relax and take the stress away.

A note about Scott:

Yesterday, he got a $100 keyboard and a $90 mouse from this blog he writes for, Gamesplash. He doesn't get paid, but he gets a ton of perks like free games etc. for reviewing them. He was like a little boy in a candy shop when the keyboard and mouse came for him to review. There's a good chance they will let him keep them. For his sake, I hope he can keep them. He's already getting attached, lol.

Graduation and Life

The day finally came when Scott and I graduated. Sweet! It seemed almost anti-climatic though for me. When you first start college, graduation seems so far away that your head sort of goes into this stick-to-the-grindstone mindset. So when graduation finally came, I was kind of like, well here we go. Let's move on now. We have been so blessed to get to this point. It was a really special moment to be able to walk together during graduation while holding hands. It was somewhat symbolic of our passing through all walks of life together.

Although I am somewhat remiss to bring the topic up, there is also the sadness of our recent miscarriage. This may be a bit private to write about, but it would be hard to explain our lives without mentioning such an integral part of it. Graduation was a strange juxtaposition to this grief, combining joy and tragedy. The experience has brought Scott and I closer; we definitely have a different, special perspective concerning life now. One of my struggles has been the physical aspect of healing. My hormones are a little out-of-whack, and it's been interesting waiting for my body to get back to normal. For the most part, we have healed and moved on, but there are always the unexpected reminders of our grief. When I e-mailed my supervisor and cooperating teacher for permission to use them as references for my resume, they both asked me how the baby was doing. When I went to church, an old Young Women's leader asked me in a teasing manner why I was behind some other girls in having babies, ignorant of our recent hardship. These are the things that I'm looking forward to dying down. The unintentional pricks to the pain that is still healing.

Whew, I'm sorry about dwelling on that. It is nice though to get it out. Currently, Scott and I are living at my parent's house down in the basement. Scott has his own lovely little corner in the alcove of our room, which used to be my beauty parlor. A fact that I enjoy reminding him about. Mom painted the room lavender with a pretty, butter yellow. the lavender matches the color of the flowers in one of our engagement pictures, which she is going to blow up and put in the room. Scott is working a few writing jobs while accumulating more, and I am in the process of applying for some online, teaching jobs. We are both looking forward to hearing back about the master's degree programs that he has applied for. And that's pretty much what's been going on for us.

Love to all,

Clarissa

Summer Dyer Reunion

Hey all,

I didn't get a chance to talk about the fun we had in Sunriver for the Dyer reunion during the summer. It's a very family friendly place to vacation. The highlight for me was floating down the river and squirting each other with water guns. Fun! Here's a picture of Scott and me in our reunion shirts.

Updated Layout

I was informed by Clarissa that she didn't like the design of our blog and since I'm the site maintenance I had to take care of that. I'll leave the rest of the posting to the lead content writer. She'll give an update on our lives soon.

-Scott

Almost There!!!

Well, Scott and I are getting a little tired, but we are so close. I only have three weeks until I'm done with student teaching. Sweet! I was grading the kids patriotic essays yesterday, and some pretty funny lines came up. I wrote a few of them below. Lol, some of these kids are pretty literal.

-But I will not be a hippy! (said randomly without any connection to the essay)

-We all know that nature has been here since we all can remember.

-If we had no soldiers, we'd all be slaves. And that's dumb.