MOVING!!!!!

Big things are happening at our house!  We have put our house on the market to sell.  It is way too much house, not enough yard, not enough shop and the neighbors are way too close for comfort.  I know we sound like hicks from the sticks, but when you grew up out in the middle of nowhere, to have someone that is right outside your kitchen window every time you go to do dishes it is a little much.  It is not that our neighbors are bad people, but we just aren’t very social in our neighborhood for very specific reasons.  We like our privacy and don’t need someone there all the time asking what we are doing and wanting to have conversations as you are trying to get work done. 

We will miss a few things about this house as we prepare for our next house buying adventure.  We will miss our neighbor across the street Mark.  Mark is an associate pastor at a non denominational church here in town.  He truly embodies what it is to live a Christ like life. He is always doing things to help others and is always watching out for every one in our neighborhood.  We never had to shovel the walk in front of our house.  Mark always had it done with his snow blower before we could even think about getting the shovel out.  He has helped Ian with trimming trees and how to get rid of obnoxious weeds from our front yard.  That will e something we will miss very much. 

We are getting excited to have the possibility of a shop for Ian and a little bit smaller house for me.  I just get tired of always having to clean our very large house that we don’t even use half of.  This has been an experience of finding out what doesn’t work for us as a couple and what we want in the long run for our home.  Since we can’t have children we have decided to downsize from a 5 bedroom house to a 3 bedroom house.  That gives us plenty of space for both of us and we will also have a guest room for when people come to visit. 

So if you know any one who is looking for a house to buy in American Falls, send them our way!

Puppy Love

So this week is the birthday of my brother’s two youngest children.  They are one week and one day apart.  I know it is crazy that they are this fertile and we are unable to have children.  It has been an uphill battle for us to explain why we are not creating little crib midgets (Ian’s favorite reference to babies).  At 16 my mom dragged me to the doctor to have blood work done because I could not loose weight even though I was dieting like crazy.  Come to find out I was insulin resistant.  Who could have guessed that people can actually gain weight on Slim Fast!  Along with this diagnosis it was also discovered that I have severe Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome.  What this means is that instead of ovulating my ovaries make cysts.  I do ovulate occasionally, but right now the only treatment that I have found that actually does anything for this condition is birth control.  I am on the stuff they put teenage girls on to control their acne.  So on top of the PCOS I am also on birth control so I can function during my period. 

This was not an issue while I was going to school, as I was not dating much and I was not married.  I just figured that eventually I would find someone who would love me no matter what, even if I could not produce little humans.  I dated a few odd balls along the way, one of which said that he was going to take me to Salt Lake and get a blessing from President Hinckley.  For my non LDS friends President Hinckley was the leader of our church while I was dating this buffoon.  I then told him that this was my trial in life and that I was finally getting use to the idea of not having children and having to watch what I eat the rest of my life.  It is not as big of a deal as he made it out to be.  Needless to say that one didn’t last long.

It wasn’t until after I had survived BYU-Idaho without getting hitched that I found my eternal companion.  I had been bouncing around doing seasonal work after I graduated.  I landed in Pocatello, ID working for a small cell phone company.  I had been there about a month when I was set up on a blind date by my roommate’s boyfriend.  The only request I had about this was that they could not set me up with another jerk.  I was tired of dating the momma’s boys and the boys who didn’t know how to have fun.   This is where I met Ian.  Not to long after this date we were dating steady.  I never wanted to hide my condition from those around me so just a few weeks into our relationship I let him know that if he wanted to have biological children it probably wasn’t going to happen with me.  Luckily he was very understanding and even knew what PCOS was because his sister also suffers from the condition. I felt like I had hit the jackpot!  And I did, he has turned out to be the best thing that has ever happened to me. 

After we got married the questions started popping up.  We were not old when we got married, but according to Mormon standards we were ancient.  I was 25 and he was 31 when we tied the knot.  So of course in our first meeting in our new family ward (can I just interject that I really miss the quietness of a singles ward) the questions started rolling in.  I was completely comfortable explaining where I worked and where I grew up, but then the infamous question that plagues all infertile couples in the LDS culture started to work its way in.  “When are you going to have babies?” became a very common question most Sundays.  At first we played it off as we didn’t want children, we were very happy just the two of us.  That didn’t fly with the Relief Society ladies.  After a while I developed an anxiety about going to Relief Society.  For those who don’t know already, I have an anxiety disorder that I am on medication for, but there are some things that I just can’t do.  One of those is Christmas shopping in December, luckily Ian follows lists well and amazon.com ships right to my door.  It got bad enough that we just stopped going altogether for a while. 

My mom didn’t help this a bit.  It also didn’t help that my brother and his wife got immediately pregnant right after they got married.  Getting it through my mom’s head was the hardest because I kept getting the lectures of don’t wait too long and you won’t be the young parents.  News flash to everyone.  We weren’t going to be the young parents anyway.  By time my mom was my age when I got married she was done having kids!  I way missed the boat on that one.  It took her friend Chris helping me to convince her after Katie was born that we were not going to be able to have children without fertility drugs, and even at that it was a long shot.  We had friends who did the fertility thing and it almost destroyed their relationship.  We decided that after watching that we were not going to put each other through this. 

Our next option was adoption.  Do you know that you have to go through more hoops to adopt than it takes to get a concealed weapons permit, not that I am for gun control, but still.  Also that financial thing came up again.  You have to have an obscene amount of money in a bank account that you cannot touch as well as have home inspections, background checks, and regular interviews.  We looked for just a moment at LDS Family Services, but they have a policy of only doing open adoptions.  If I am going to adopt I don’t want an open adoption because once that baby is placed in my arms it is mine and I don’t want to open up the hurt that another mom brings into the mix.  Then they closed the adoptions from Russia, which is where we were looking at adopting from next.  After that we decided to hold off on the adoption of human babies and just adopt dogs.

Ian already had two rescue dogs before we got married and I was excited that I would be getting instant canine babies when we got married.  We had Tana who is a Boxer/Brittany Spaniel mix who was a humane society rescue and Copper who is pure bread Bassett Hound, and every bit a Bassett as he can be.  Just about a year after we got married I was working at a small cell phone store in American Falls and a lady came in to pay her bill.  In her car was a beautiful Boxer.  I told her that she had a beautiful dog and she broke down in tears.  She told me that she was on her way to the shelter with her because her granddaughter who lives with her was severely allergic to dogs and she could not keep her.  I called Ian, who worked a bloc away and begged him to come see this dog.  This is when we met Gidget.  She was malnourished because the lady’s son wasn’t good at remembering to feed the dogs and was dirty because she had been chained up under a pine tree.  Ian came and looked at her and said that if I wanted her to take her home, and I did.  We had Miss Gidge for a year and a half before she passed away.  I still miss my little dog everyday. 

About a month after we lost our Gidget we were told about a Boxer Rescue out of California.  I needed another dog and we got in contact with the organization.  For those who want to know it is West Coast Boxer Rescue and you can find them on Facebook.  This is where I first saw the picture of Rambo.  He had huge jowls and a lanky body and I fell in love, enough that Ian drove me to Meridian, ID and we went and got him.  We have renamed him Bo and he is our 84 lb lap dog.  So for now we have kids of the canine variety.  

The Beggining

I know that no one will probably ever read these crazy ramblings that I post.  But I need to be able to get some of these thoughts out of my head so that I do not completely drive my husband nuts!  If you would have told me 10 years ago that not only was I not a teacher, but never did do my education classes because of a law passed called No Child Left Behind, I would have laughed at you.  That was the only thing I wanted to do, ever...  
It all started when I left St. Anthony for Helena, MT and Carroll College.  Yes, a Mormon kid went to a Catholic school, and loved it.  I was in my first education class and had to do 40 hours of classroom observation.  I did my classroom observations in a middle school English class and fell in love with the "slow" kids.  These were the ones I understood the most.  They were not handicapped, they just didn't grasp things the way other students did.  Most of them were very bright, but they had been shuffled into a group that was treated like they were so different they could never learn.  My first lesson here is do not just lump all of the different kids together, it doesn't work very well.  My second lesson was that I enjoy the screwed up kids, the normal ones are the scary ones.  
Towards the end of my first semester there was a new piece of legislation that came out.  It was supposed to revolutionize education as we knew it.  Raise everyone to the same level they said.  The problem with this is that no one was on the same level to begin with.  In essence this meant that the more advanced students were left in the wind because the average student was holding the entire class up and the mediocre student made the class's progress skid to a screaming halt.  This was not fair to any of the students or to their teachers, who now must teach to the test instead of teach to the child.  I personally believe that standardized testing is dumbing down America and the next generation.  Multiple guess does not work, it promotes laziness on the part of administrators and makes teaching even more difficult than it already is.
After I transferred away from Carroll for a more economical option of BYU-Idaho I had to completely rethink my goals for life.  Here I was at another private school and I was a Special Education Major.  At BYU-Idaho this equates to early child hood education.  NO I DO NOT WANT TO TEACH PRESCHOOL!  I wanted to work with learning disabled kids, preferable in the Jr. High to High School level.  I did not want to run a daycare out of my house, or have to change the diapers of other people's children.  So with all of this in mind I dropped the education part of my major.  
Now with my history degree in hand I realize that I have a useless degree.  There are no jobs in Idaho for someone who has a history degree, and after a break away from school I have also come to the realization that I don't want to go back for grad school.  I took the GRE and the LSATs and want nothing to do with grad school, it is not worth my sanity to have another piece of paper saying I am smart.  Because of this decision I am working at random jobs and in fields that I never would have considered.  I have worked in everything from food service to administrative positions.  Currently I manage two, yes two, low income housing complexes.  So much for going to school and spending all of that money to get me to my dream job as I had been promised all of these years.  I can say that I was in the top 10 for a Library Director position, but alas I was not old enough to really be considered.  Go figure, I have a degree in one of the areas they wanted and because I was only 26 at the time I was too young.  Frustrating really if you look at it.  But then again I have decided that everything I learned in my pre-college education was fairly useless as well.  I don't use my algebra, geometry, physics, mad sentence diagramming skills, or my band skills at all in my everyday life.  But that is all for now, check back often for more ramblings on all sorts of topics.