It Takes Two

Two years of marriage, that is.

In the past year we have:

 

Figured out how funny we are not,

Embarrassingly ALMOST gotten lost,

Said goodbye to a couple missionary friends including Sister Ripplinger, Sister Richey, and Elder Hansen,

Graduated from college!

Jumped out of an airplane,

Became parents for a few months,

Did a LOT of playing,

Went back to school,

and just basically had a grand ole time.

 

We also learned that:

 

Two years of marriage > one year of marriage,

Kolton has an unhealthy fascination with Craigslist,

Jayci has an unhealthy addiction to books,

We both LOVE living in Monteview,

Kolton has zero sense of smell,

Jayci has a supersonic sense of smell,

Kolton makes a pretty good farmer (and looks oh so handsome when he comes home all greasy grimy)

Jayci makes an okay teacher (and is a complete spaz in front of the class)

Kolton can grill up one heck of a steak,

Jayci can mix up a pretty delicious white sauce,

Boating and playing cards are our favorite pasttimes,

Watching Seinfeld at night is also pretty alright too.

Insanity really is insane,

and living in between both sets of parents really has a lot of benefits.

Life is good!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Classy Couples Christmas Party

This year we got a bit crazy and I got together with my friend Andra to plan our very own couples Christmas party. We didn't know if anybody would even come, but thought we'd plan it anyway. I don't have the best track record when it comes to party planning, but I think it was a success. We had quite a few people show up and our house was bursting with food and friends and fun and ugly sweaters. We had a white elephant gift exchange and got such a kick out of all the funny gifts.



Two balloons make a nice redneck boob job!

Hot Flash relief kit

Beans, Gas Relief pills, and an air freshner

An autographed picture of Marsh wakeboarding

A lovely hat

A Shakeweight!

"Home: Where the Ho and Me get together!"
Classy.

It's a...

Christmas Man-Thong!
Also classy.

More men's underwear for the Tomlinsons

The Victoria's Secret bag held nothing more exciting than hand soaps.

Marshall got the fanny-pack!

A magazine full of insider Twilight pictures

Andra scored with a stand up bathroom scale

Lindsey got a useful toiletry kit

 

We had so much fun visiting and laughing and I was so sad when everyone had to leave. I just wanted to party to last all night. But we made sure to get a picture of everyone and their ugly sweaters.

Matt and Breezie

 

Mitch and Lindsey

 

Kaden and Raechel

Jake and Baylee

 



Presli and Brady



Marshall, Andra, and Dawson



Tanner and Alli



Austin and Krystal



Us!

The D.I. sure made a bundle off of us party-goers between the sweaters and the gifts. Thanks to everyone who came! We had such a nice time and hope it will become an annual thing.





O Christmas Tree!

 We got our very first Christmas tree this year. With school last year and just barely being married the year before, other things took priority over a  tree during our previous Christmases as a married couple.

But this year we decided to change all that. School and stuff still kept us pretty busy so we didn't get a tree until midway through the month.

We decided that this year we would chop one down and then maybe buy a fake tree after Christmas and try to get one for sale. I didn't love this plan because when I was younger my family used to chop down trees. We would drive clear up into the mountains and drive and drive and drive until we got stuck in the snow. Then we would chop down the first tree we saw and spend the rest of the day getting unstuck. Wasn't such a fun experience.

 

So I was a little wary when Kolton brought up this idea but thought that it would probably work this year. So we headed off. We jumped in the pickup, grabbed a little jerky (to prove we were really living off the land) and drove into the mountains/hills behind our house. We were surprised by how dry it was up there (no possible chance of us getting stuck in the snow) and even more surprised by how many good trees we saw. There were actually quite a few options that weren't so bad...for a mountain tree, anyway.

 

We walked around for a bit, hiked up and down a couple hills and were pretty indecisive. We actually ended up chopping down two trees before we got back to the pickup. And by we I of course mean Kolton. He chopped down the two trees and then packed them down the hill to the pickup while I had the much more tasking task of carrying the dangerous weapon (the saw) down the hill.

 

When we finally got to the pickup we were pretty happy with our day's work. Then on our way down the mountain we saw THE tree. It was just sitting there on the side of the road beckoning for us to chop her down. So we did. Which brought us up to a total of three trees in the back of our pickup (we ended up giving the other two away). We continued our drive down the mountain even more content with our accomplishments.

 

When we got home we put the tree up right away (twas the middle of December, we had no time to waste!). With a few lights, a couple popcorn strings, and a few thousand strands of tinsel we had our very own Charlie Brown tree. And we love it!

It's quite homemade and cheap (I like to refer to it as "vintage"- that sounds a little fancier, I think.) but it actually looks pretty good when the lights are off. The tinsel really sparkles and looks neat. I think that we are going to nix the fake tree plan and start our own tradition of chopping down our trees because it was quite fun (sans getting stuck). 

Summer of Love I

At this stage in the looove story I get a bit fuzzy because I stopped writing in my journal faithfully among other reasons. But here goes...

 

 

Kolton and I continued to see each other (almost) every night. We went to a wedding reception together and got bombarded with awkward questions-which was not fun.

 

My Grandma Mickelsen passed away in May which was so hard for me and my family and I was glad I had Kolton to lean on a little.

 

When my family was headed down to Lake Powell with the Holdaways I could think of nothing better than to have Kolton tag along. I think we were both secretly nervous about it because week-long vacations with someone's family is serious stuff! But we had such a good time and really got to know each other a lot better I think. He got to see me at my very worst, my lake hair, no shower for a week self.



Kolton still teases me about sliding down on my bum. He claims it wasn't really that steep, but it was!

My family also still teases me about how often we felt the need to reapply each other's sunscreen throughout the week. It was our only physical affection for the whole week-can you blame us!

We really had a nice time enjoying the sun and the water and I was so glad Kolton came with us. I was especially shocked that we weren't sick of each other after spending over waking moment together. That was definitely a turning point that got things rolling a bit faster for both of us.

 

The Sunday after we got home I spent at Kolton's house. We went for a quick ride in the bumpy, bouncy sprayer because I had never been in one before. I'm sure we looked silly spinning cookies in the yard for no good reason, but it was a good experience for me. I couldn't claim to be a true farmgirl until I'd taken a ride in the sprayer. We spent the rest of the afternoon looking through all of his mission stuff and visiting. It was an idyllic little afternoon and again I couldn't believe that we could spend a week with each other and still come back for more.  

 

And that's about all we did at the beginning of the summer. We spent a little time getting used to seeing each other on a regular basis and it was quite nice, if I do say so myself.

ketchup

So I've been feeling like a major slacker lately because I've been neglecting writing. We've been super busy though, so I've got an okay excuse....kind of. But now it's time for a catch-up.

School has kept me hopping and plenty busy. The semester is almost over though! A couple weeks ago I found out the best news ever...

My student teaching placement is at good ole Terreton Elementary in the 5th grade! I was so excited and so relieved about this! I've been stressing since April about my placement and worried about driving hours every day in the snow, so this worked out  so marvelously and I just cannot wait!

 

My sixth graders have been doing well too. I get a bit teary every time I think about never seeing them again. We've had so much fun (or maybe just I have) and I am really going to miss them. We dissected a pig heart a couple weeks ago after we had learned all about the heart and it was so awesome! The kids loved it and I really loved it-besides smelling like formaldehyde for the next two days.

 

Kolton has been mildly busy. He's really slowed down and is liking not running a hundred miles an hour all the time. In fact, he's spent quite a bit of his now free time on craigslist (don't love this hobby). He's bought a dartboard, the Insanity workout dvds, and all nine seasons of Seinfeld. I'm thinking he needs to find a new hobby. We have used all of our recent purchases however. Insanity kills us about every morning, Seinfeld entertains us at night, and I've beat Kolton at darts quite frequently, so I guess all of these haven't been such bad purchases.

And that's about all we've been up to! I need to be better at keeping up so the catching up isn't quite so overwhelming. I'll be better...after the semester is over. :) We'll see I guess!



Halloween

We had a lovely little Halloween party at the Bitter's this year. It was the first time Kolton and I have dressed up for Halloween in a while and it was quite fun. Maybe that's why we were so out of practice and our costumes were super lame. 

We played a few games, mostly sat around and visited, and enjoyed seeing everyone's costumes. 

Chad and Kristy.

Superman, Lois Lane and Baby Superman

We still have yet to decide what we were. 80's couple or white trash or something else entirely..."

Simmons' football players

Bitter Batman family

Superman, Captain America, Batman and Snow White were all at the party!

Austin and Krystal

The oreo on your face game. Too funny!

Me and cute Baby D's pumpkin bum

10 kinds of crazy

So last month, something super weird happened to me.

 (I'm NOT pregnant...just so you know.)

 

 I've never been the super emotional type. I can probably count the number of movies I've cried in on one hand (And that list does not include "Charly"). But I do have a bit of a heart. When I do cry in movies it is always over strange things. In You've Got Mail when Kathleen Kelly is in her shop for the last time reminiscing about her mother I always get choked up. And let's not even talk about the time I went to the drive-in movie of Toy Story 3 and had tears streaming (Streaming!) down my face when the final credits rolled.

 

Anyway, my past behavior in no way prepared me for what happened this last month.

 I now present to you the non-comprehensive list of all the reasons I cried in the last month. (this will be brutal)

 

1. During one of my classes (on campus) a girl in my class was talking about a 6th grader she works with that her teacher doesn't like very much. She talked about how she's tried to make the kid feel special and loved every day she's in the classroom because she can just tell that they need a little extra special attention. As she's talking, I have wetness pooling in my eyes. And it was serious business because I was about to cry in lecture over someone else's story that included people I knew nothing about. I had to duck my head real low to avoid anyone noticing and try not to blink. It was embarrassing.

 

2. My little niece was out playing with some big kids and trying to be bossy (because that's what 3 year olds do). I was standing back a ways observing the situation. The kids had climbed up in a tree and she was standing at the base of the tree telling them to come down. One of the boys in the tree started yelling rude things down at her telling her to go away and that they didn't want her to play with them.

I sat back and watched all this happen and didn't step in at all. I don't know why I didn't just do something about it but I think it's because it was kind of a defining moment for me. As I stood back watching and seeing the look of surprise on her face as she faced rejection for the first time it just broke my heart in two. I realized that no matter how much I love that little girl and think she's about the most adorable thing on the planet, not everyone thinks so, or at least treats her as such. And I realized that I was there then and could step in but she won't always have someone there to fight her battles for her. And I wondered why the heck we don't just treat each other right all the time because everybody has somebody who thinks they are great and maybe we should all just try to see everybody through that somebody's eyes.  

Anyway...I put a lot of thought into that and it makes sense in my head, but not so much in type form.

Eventually I did step in and grab her hand and tried to wipe that sad look off her face by pointing out some pretty flowers and feeding her some yummy dessert (the cure to end all woes). But this just really broke my heart and has made me think a lot over the last month.

(The crying didn't come until I tried to recount the story for Kolton a few days later. Just so you know.)

 

3. And again...in lecture. It was a different class but still on campus and I still got a little weepy. My teacher was talking about how instead of punishing the whole class for a student's misbehavior, you should reward the entire class when the student sticks to a good behavior plan you have set out with them. Instead of everyone getting angry with the kid when a class privilege gets taken away because of one kid's mistake, they are cheering them on and encouraging them when the entire class gets ten minutes of extra recess on Fridays because the kid turned in all of his homework that week. As my teacher was giving us this counsel I got a little teary-eyed because I just thought that this was the best strategy I had ever heard of and that kid would feel so special and well-liked and I just really loved it a lot.

4. One morning I woke up in the middle of a horrible awful dream. Instead of being relieved, I started crying. The dream was that horrible awful and scary. Kolton couldn't understand why I was crying and I couldn't understand why I was crying and it was just kind of a weird way to start the day. Eventually I was able to get it out of my head and move on, but it was a rough couple of minutes.

Now this is probably waaay too much information for anyone about my spastic emotional state, but it was just such a crazy funny-ish time because I'm really not a cry-er and I think I'm getting more soft-hearted all the time. Which is good/bad. 

The Kidlings and Us

I have been trying hard lately to be better at taking pictures. There's still definitely room for improvement, but I was looking through my camera the other day and was happy to see there were pictures from the last couple months on there that I had forgotten about. Many of these pictures were of of Kolton and I and other people's kids. Of course I had to share!

We went to the homecoming football game and I had a lovely time visiting with old friends and trying to not watch what was going on in the actual game as they were losing quite badly. Renlee was decked to the hilt to cheer on her uncles and I just had to get a picture. This little girl is so fun. She has basically no facial expressions and puts your arm to sleep if you hold her for too long. :) I love her!

 Lily Mae also had a birthday. 3 years old!

The party was at the Godfrey's and Lil was SO excited. She was jumping up and down and wouldn't hold still for a second. She had to show everyone her "birthday" (cake) and was so much fun.

And lastly, my favorite newest addition:
Dawson Chad Bitter

He arrived on September 30th and is just the sweetest little guy. I've found any excuse to visit just so I can snuggle him. His parents are about my favorite people in the world and we just really love the entire Bitter family.

Kolton and the proud Daddy