Ady was so excited, she didn't even seem nervous today with her First Day of School. She is doing the Spanish Immersion Program and the teacher I met wouldn't even speak English in the classroom, she walked me out and said they have a really strict policy, they don't even speak anything other than Spanish in the classroom. Good Luck Ady!!
Sunday: What a fun party we had for the August birthdays! I made a Barbie Cake for Ady's birthday and, I might as well say it- I was pretty darn proud!! It turned out really cute!
Monday: This was my first day back to school! Yes, after 6 years I am teaching again, if you haven't heard. I will be doing a third grade job share and my team teacher is so great! So our babysitter started today also. Her name is Mindy and the kids love her. I got home and Clayson said, "I don't want you to be home!" Everything a mom wants to hear after my first day back to school!
Tuesday: Happy 6th Birthday Ady!! It was six sweet years ago that she joined our little family! She wanted to go out for her birthday to, get this- WENDY'S! That's an easy one!
Wednesday: More school stuff for me, the kids just partied with Mindy.
Thursday: The kids have had a lot of fun watching the Olympics. Tonight we watched diving and Ady and Clayson thought it was great.
Friday: Today Dale's mom stayed with the kids while I went to work. Tonight Dale and I are going out to Batman for our anniversary. Pretty simple. Tomorrow we will be married 8 years!!! Super fun!
Glad to be back in the groove of things!!! Sure have missed seeing the great blogs and can't wait to be updated again!
Mon we had family home evening and went and pulled some weeds.
Tues we celebrated Braydens monthly birthday by being extra nice to him that day.
Wed we watched the Olympics
Thurs we got ready for the weekend
Fri Leo and Mel came up for dinner, they rode the frontrunner up and we had fun at our house with them. Steff and Roger had their baby and I went and visited them at Primary Childrens and the U of U hospital. He had his surgery that same day and it went really well. Good News.
Sat Sharon and Tad Timothy came up and we had a BBQ at the Gortons house. We watched a wasp come and take bites out of Jeff's left over chicken and then carry huge chunks (huge for a wasp) of meat off to it's home. Did you know wasps ate meat? I didn't. Janae said we should put a video of it on Youtube.
Sun we went to Stake Conference at the Bountiful Regional Center. We came home and watched more Olympics. We had a big Birthday party for Steff, Janae, Ady, Brandon and new baby Jacob.
I decided I liked what Jeff Gorton did, in fact I liked it so much that I'm going to copy him and give a recap over our last 8 years.
2000
Janae and I were at Ricks College and in April we went and looked at rings. We decided that we were pretty serious and Janae decided it was time to look at engagement rings. I had a competition for my SIFE group in Kansas City, MO. So I invited Janae and my Mom to come along (my mom was the chaperone as we were two very, well.....you know how it is with mormon pre-married folks and all their hormones) I pulled a surprise on Janae and proposed to her in Nauvoo, IL. After she laughed, she said yes. She said she saw the ring box in my pocket so she knew what was coming.
We were married in the Bountiful LDS temple and had the reception in Janae's backyard and then went to the Grand Canyon on our honeymoon and then had another reception in Provo at my best friend Nate Robert's house in his backyard until the microburst came and knocked everything down and we moved inside. In Dec, I surprised Janae with a trip to Florida and we went in January. Janae got to meet some of the folks I baptized and we toured my mission.
Janae and I went to BYU and lived in a crappy basement apartment, were thankful to move into Wymount.
2001
BYU for both of us. Dale had about 10 different majors this year until finally settling down in Broadcast Communications (because it was the easiest to get into). Janae finished her last semester of school work. The highlight for us this year was when we went to Florida with my family in July and swam on the beach and see Janae's best friend Heidi who was serving in the same mission!!! We went to Islands of Adventure, Universal Studios and my Dad's vendor had rented out the entire park for it's customers. We got on all the rides we wanted to and all the food in the park was free for 4 hours!!!
July was cool to be able to do that and we never would have suspected how the world would have changed in September. Janae was teaching first grade during her internship when 9/11 happened. What an awful day for us and for the world!
I was working at BYU Housing as a mediator and Janae as a first grade teacher. This is when I started to hate BYU and should have realized that I have ADD and can't keep doing the same thing for more than 5 minutes, including my major at school. Ironically on 9/11, I found out I was accepted into the flight program at UVSC. So we decided to move out of Wymount as it was only for BYU students and I would be going to UVSC.
2002
I forgot to mention in 2001, we found out we were pregnant with Ady.
In 2002 I did the Salt Lake City Olympics as a volunteer at Soldier Hollow, the cross country skiing. Janae finished her first year of teaching.
That summer we moved to Apollo 13, yes the Apollo Apartments number 13... how cool is that.
I finished working on my private pilot certificate. I can't get over how dumb I was that Janae was 9 months pregnant and I was in a plane flying around with no cell phone communication or ability for Janae to contact me if she needed to....Psycho Dale, oh well, you're only young once. Janae was done working, so all she did was stay home in the crappy apartment that was not insulated and she would turn the air to 60 degrees and the a/c ran non stop, oh well, 9 months and pregnant in July on the top floor in an uninsulated apartment is not fun. At least she was happy watching free cable in a nice a/c apartment.
We also had a car that would smoke everytime you would stop at a stop light and we got so tired of people telling us our car was on fire. Kayla lent us her car so we could bring Ady home from the hospital without the car catching on fire with a brand new baby.
I decided after my Private Pilot Certificate that the program was too expensive and I needed to go back to BYU. Good thing I had only taken a semester off and I could just register for the classes and didn't need to reapply to get into my program or anything.
2003
Was kind of a blur. We moved to Candlelight apartments, we hated the Apollo 13 apartment, plus candlelight was around the block, plus Janae's cousins lived in the apartment below us. All I remember from 2003 was this.... Go to school, come home, play with Ady and Janae and Mark and Jared and Luke (nephews that lived in the apartment below). That was literally our life for 2003, very simple and very uncomplicated.
Janae went back to teaching the before and after school program which helped us survive the living expenses of being in school.
Probably the most exciting thing is that I helped with the biggest crime theft bust in BYU history that year...that's a story for another day.
2004
Went like this...
Internship with KUTV 2 News
Job as a TV News reporter in Pocatello ID...
Hated the job as a TV News reporter and qualifying for Food Stamps...
The one good thing in Pocatello, and we've said this to them, the only reason we moved there was to meet the Bobos. They lived right across the hall from us in our ghetto apartments and they pointed out the spit stains from the tenant before us who would spit his chew on the patio...yuk!
Job with Volt in Salt Lake City (moved in with Mom and Dad in Provo)
Moved to apartment in Pleasant Grove....
Clayson was born in December.
2005
We moved into our house in West Jordan, hooray!!
We loved our neighborhood and made lots of good friends in the 1o different wards we were in (because of so much growth in the area).
This was a rough year in the employment front as things became contentious at Volt Services group because of the immaturity of employees that I worked with and yes because of my own immaturity. This is where I really grew up professionally.
Pretty much our life in 2005 was living at the Gortons either every day or every weekend. Janae and I took a really fun trip to NYC in October, it was the awesome'st trip to NYC ever!!
2006
Finally things came to a head at Volt and I started actively interviewing at a lot of places. I got a really good job at Grant Thornton which I've decided has got to be the most insane group of psycho accountants on the face of the planet. They were weird and fired me after only a few months there. I still have no idea why. Anyways, that too, is another story for another day.
The good things about 2006 are our jetblue vacation to Disneyland in April!!! We went with the Eyrings. Sean is convinced that Brayden was conceived in Disneyland (we were in the same hotel room as our kids, yeah right Sean!!!) So he still calls Brayden lil Walt to this day.
I luckily got a job at Twinlab right after getting fired from GT, but the company had very low morale due to cash problems. I made the best of it through 2007.
2007
Is kind of a blur too.
Brayden was born in February.
Janae was working at Jetblue.
I was working in the Bishopric. It just seemed like the busiest we'd ever been.
Life was stressful, but we had fun and made really good friends with the Egberts and the Gomez's.
One of the funnest trips ever was with the Gortons to Mesquite to Janae's family's condo. Poor Jeff got sick on the Shrimp buffet and can't eat shrimp to this day. While he was sick, Janae and the kids and I and Brigitte and her kids all went to the Casa Blanca Resort and we walked around catching a lot of stares, I think people thought I was a polygamist, hee hee.
In 2007 we started to realize that our house 1300 sq feet, wasn't getting any bigger but our kids were. We started to plan our move.
2008
I think about how quickly it seems 2008 has flown by. The moving stuff all happened at the beginning of this year and it seems like that process has been in the works that it seems like the year just barely started. Does time move faster when you're older, can anyone tell me that?
We started to get to know the Micklesens a little better during this time, right before we moved.
So February, I went with my Bro in Laws to West Yellowstone for a snowmobile trip. I had decided after that trip that either it was going to be graduate school or find a new job. I had worked so hard to get into the MPA program at BYU and the Monday I came back from my trip I got a phone call from the place I'm working at right now. Actually, I had 2 messages and interviewed at both places and decided on ConnectPoint. The day I got the rejection letter from the MPA program at BYU, I got a job offer from ConnectPoint. I think I've permanently put school on the backburner. I just don't have the attention to go to school and....oh well.
Anyways, with the new job, we felt like Janae had finally had enough of Jetblue and we needed to move and we wanted to be closer to Janae's family anyways. Our house sold in a couple of weeks.
Before I get to the house, we had a really fun trip with the Egberts in San Fran Psycho. It wasn't like we did anything exciting, but we just enjoyed each other's company so much that it was one of the best trips in memory. Just don't ask us about the bedbugs, the rental car or Rob's driving through red lights, LOL.
Anyways, the house sold really fast and so we lived with the Burtons in North Ogden. Now we're finally in Layton and Janae is teaching and things seem to be settling back to normal......Oh and we live by the Gortons again, so now we see them on a daily basis. Except for the fact that Jeff works closer to home than I do, so that's become a very sore topic of our friendship....j/k Jeff.
We have not fallen off the face of the earth, and we still love each and every one of you more than ever. However, I have lived without internet for over 2 weeks and would not recommend it. I am at my parents' house to borrow theirs, and we will soon be back in the game. Please check back in a couple of day! And to my dear friend named Brandie: I still love you and can't wait to hear how much money you have saved. I am so excited!! See you in a few days!
Janae wants me to remind you about the Grocery Coupon class at our house on Thursday at 7:00 pm. If you're interested in coming, can you please call Janae at 860-5610 for directions. ;) Disclaimer, this is not an MLM, we already tried prepaid legal when we were first married and got tired of hounding all our friends and dialing the ward list for new recruits, we don't do MLM's anymore....this is a no cost, free class on how you can save $$ on groceries.
I would recommend taking the Frontrunner if you're coming from Salt Lake County and Dale would be happy to ferry you from the Clearfield station to our house.
