Matt and I married on March 13, 2008. It rained and snowed, but it was perfect and beautiful. Besides, it's good luck for it to rain on your wedding day.
Matt and I had only knew each other for just over 6 months. Barely half a year, and here we were, promising the rest of our lives and eternity to each other. I'd say we were young and impulsive and naive, but really, we knew what we were doing. At least enough to know we would be happy with our choices in the long run. At least I did. And I am.
The school year started with me newly single, my boyfriend of a year having just left on his mission. I had to do some last minute juggling with my schedule and ended up in a 12 o'clock math class 4 days a week. Little did I know that someone else in my class had gotten in at the last minute too. A few weeks into the semester, the cute boy who usually sat in the row next to me, one chair up, showed up with a sign up list for the blood drive at the Institute for the next Monday. I signed up.
A few days later, on a Sunday night, Matt called to remind me that I had signed up for 1:00 the next day. I missed his call, but saved the number to my address list on my phone. If nothing else, I might need Math homework help.
The following weekend, my friend Sara needed a double date. She wanted to make a dinner for her boyfriend at her apartment and since he was waiting for his mission call, being alone together wasn't an option. So I did what any girl does, called the cute boy in Math class. Luckily for me, he said yes. That night was so much fun! We got to know each other a little and had some good laughs. At the end of the night, while he was walking me to my car, Matt asked me if I had any plans for the next night. I didn't, so we went out again. We went out every weekend for the next few weeks and were soon talking marriage.
We had a notebook where one of us would write a question and give it to the other. Then they would write their answer and ask a question of their own. It was a unique way to get to know each other. All of Matt's questions seemed to come back to the Church somehow and I knew it was the most important thing in his life, and that his wife needed to have the same commitment. Luckily, I felt the same way.
Our wedding was beautiful and all of our family was able to be there. Our reception was wonderful thanks to the hard work of my mother and her close friends.
We had a very small, short, modest honeymoon at my Aunt and Uncle's cabin in Little Cottonwood Canyon. 4 days and then we were back to real life. That is how it has to be when you choose to get married during spring break and you are both full time students.
I moved in to the apartment Matt had been living in since the start of March. It was a small, outdated, less than ideal space. However, it had two things going for it. The price, $435 a month, including all utilities, and the location. It was on 36th street right behind the institute at Weber State. 2 minute walk and you were on campus.
This is a picture of Matt wearing the ridiculous pajamas I bought him for our first Christmas together, but you can get a little bit of an idea about the apartment. Dark, lots of wood panelling, and low ceilings.
This is our first kitchen. No dishwasher and a sink that seemed to be made out of concrete because I broke about a plate a week in it. And believe it or not, out entire bathroom was in a space smaller than this kitchen. We could not both be in it at the same time unless one of us was at least partway standing in the shower.
We were pretty happy in our tiny basement apartment. We had regular newlywed bliss. We didn't have much in the way of responsibility and we enjoyed every minute together we could get.
We took a major step in our lives just three months after we said "I do!" We (intentionally) got pregnant.
Funny side-story: Matt and I went to Lagoon at the end of June on my work's Lagoon day. We had a great time, but something happened to me that I had never had happen before. I kept getting motion sickness. Now I knew that one of the first signs of morning sickness is nausea, but I was just too slow to put 2 and 2 together. Not until the next morning when I had some more "motion-sickness" did it occur to me that it might actually be "morning-sickness" instead.
It would be a few days before I got a home pregnancy test to confirm what I already suspected. I was pregnant.
By this time, we had known each other 10 months, and Matt had been home from his mission for 11 months. Yeah.
The next 9 months somehow dragged and flew by at the same time. We both kept going to school, although I did have to lighten my school load, and we both kept at work.
This is a really terrible picture of me "modeling" the pajamas Matt got me for our first Christmas married. It is a terrible picture, but the only one I have of me with a belly.
My due date was 2 days before our anniversary. I hoped I would go early so I didn't have to host a child's birthday party a few days within my anniversary. Well, I didn't deliver early. But there is also 6 days between our anniversary and Keldrie's birthday because instead I went 8 days over. I have to say Matt was a saint with me while I endured the last few weeks of pregnancy. I was not a nice person and I'm sure it was hard to stay calm and compassionate with someone who can do nothing but complain.
I was induced on the 18th of March. Keldrie just really liked it in there. It took until 1:29 AM to have her, so her birthday is the 19th.
She has been "high-drama" since the moment she was born.
Baby makes 3 and we were so in love!
Next came the realization that we were in a very small apartment and although our child is tiny, all her stuff is not! So we decided we needed to find a bigger apartment.
The place we found was in a less than ideal location. It was another basement apartment, but one that was terrible when it came to heat-- there was none. Since we moved in in April, we decided we would stick it out for the summer and then move in the fall, when the heating problem would become more serious.
Matt was now working for Myers Mortuary selling burial plots. Yes, you read that right. And frankly, he was pretty good at it. I went back to work at America First when Kel was not quite two months old. Luckily, she was watched by both my and Matt's mothers. Nice to have someone who you know loves her watching her.
During this time, Keldrie grew up while we watched and everyday I resented having to go to work. Luckily, I was working 30 hours, not 40. This meant I had 10 more hours a week with my daughter. Matt was working hard and going to school too.
Soon, very soon, it became time to move. It was September. Not only did we move back to Layton from Ogden, but we had enough in our saving that we felt confident enough for me to put in my two weeks notice. The day I came home and cried to Matt about missing my child growing up, he just looked at me and said well, why don't you quit? We made it work and I happily turned in my two week notice!
The last day of work for me was the same day we signed the lease for our new apartment. It was very close to our parents and had a second bedroom. We liked it well enough.
Matt's job was starting to bother him. Some of the guys he worked with were pressuring him to do some things he felt were less than honest. He very quickly found a new/old job. The guys at Jiffy Lube were happy to hire him back and even wanted to start him as a manager-in-training. He started that job and was soon managing his own store in North Ogden.
During this time, our daughter continued to grow and she had her first Christmas.
Around March, I had my annual doctor's check-up. She noticed that my thyroid gland in my throat felt swollen. She had my blood drawn and then sent me to see a specialist because my sample came back unusually high.
After having my blood drawn lots more times and feeling myself have 2 days full of manic energy and then a week of feeling so down and low only to wake up the next morning with more manic energy we discovered that I had a "nodule" growing on my thyroid. This nodule was putting out way too much of the thyroid hormone and throwing my metabolism off, which is why my energy levels were all over the place. The answer to this problem was to have my thyroid, or rather just the nodule, "ablated" with iodine radiation. This radiation is much safer than what people with cancer have to deal with because it is attached to the iodine (salt) and only your thyroid uses large amounts of it and therefore gets affected by it. It worked very effectively. There were only two draw-backs. First, I had to be separated from my family for 3 days because I was actually "radioactive" enough to affect Matt or Keldrie.
The second draw back from this procedure is that we needed to wait at least 6 months before becoming pregnant again. Trace amounts of the radiation could be floating around until up to a year and so the chance of miscarriage or birth defects was high. I was very disappointed. I had been hoping to get pregnant that fall, around Kel's 18 month mark. But wait, WE DID! During that time, we also bought and moved into our new house! That sure did help the time go faster.
The town house was such a mess when we moved in. Not super gross, but super out-dated. We spent about 6 weeks working on it before we actually moved in.
We have since been so happy with our house. It is the perfect size for us, we love the ward we are living in and it is close to Weber State where Matt is going to school. Around the 9 month mark in our house, Matt and I were asked to be the leaders for the ward Youth Conference. It was so much fun! And by that time, I was pregnant. We were so happy to be having our family grow again.
Russell joined our family in late January!
Since then, Russell has been born perfectly healthy, Keldrie has almost finished potty training, Matt has only a year left of school, and I am the happy play-at-home mommy of two!
So all in all this is what we have done in the 4 years since we have been married:
Moved 4 times
Had 2 babies
Matt has had 7 jobs (Many of them overlapping)
Spent a total of 10 days away from each other (Radiation, vacation and work conference)
Had thousands of laughs
Hundreds of date nights
and 1460 days of married happiness!
Tommorrow is our four year anniversary! We might not be able to give each other elaborate gifts or even celebrate on the day of because of Matt's work schedule, but I know it will be a wonderful day and we have given each other a happy marriage. And what could be better than that?
