I'm going through a pretty bad insomnia phase and last night was the worst one yet (couldn't fall asleep until 4:30 a.m., despite going to bed at a reasonable hour). So I'll really try to keep this one short and sweet so I can squeeze in a nap before Jack wakes up from his nap. It's a crime how little time you get to yourself to recharge with young kids (and I just have the one--terrified to find out how that recharge time dwindles even more when we add another). 

So . . . forget my last year's worth of posts about preparations to move to Utah. It's looking like Washington state is the forerunner now. In fact, we were going to sign a Washington job contract last night, but we had a couple questions about the contract that we shot them instead, and we're waiting to hear back about those first. It's an amazing contract. Checks absolutely every box for Jared's dream job, plus perks, except that it's not in Utah. But it is just a half hour from Jared's parents, so honestly it's basically a best-case scenario as far as not signing in Utah goes. I'll go into more details if/when we sign the contract and it's official. 

Jared's a wreck, and I feel sort of responsible since I'm the one who vetoed signing the contract last night. Hence the not sleeping. I suggested we shouldn't sign the contract until we hear back about certain items. One of which is that the contract included a start date in mid-September, but they said they could be flexible on that. We're done here at the end of June so a start date in August would make more sense. But since we're pretty late in the game for signing a done-with-training contract, Jared is suuuuper paranoid that some other sneaky applicant is somehow going to swipe this dream job out from under us before they get back to us about start date and we can officially sign. It's probably not a big deal at all (the job posting sat on the physician job board for two months, so I highly doubt there's competition), but Jared's anxiety levels have me feeling like it's an enormous deal that we delayed the process to ask a few questions. I know in my rational mind that it's going to be absolutely fine, but in my sleep-deprived mind there are riots and burning buildings. If the contract somehow does fall through then that's on me and I'd probably never forgive myself. So, melatonin it is tonight! Maybe even a fat dose of benadryl. Prayers for a speedy and successful contract signing process appreciated! 

No relevant pictures this week, but enjoy these of Jack playing with his marble run. I think I like playing with this toy even more than he does. Give me alllll the engineering toys (my other favorite is his wooden train track). When I first started college I wanted to pursue mechanical engineering, and honestly sometimes I still think that would've been a great fit. This is the first marble run Jack successfully built almost entirely on his own. I'm so proud. *wipes away a single tear*



We're moving to . . . Washington?

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Hello! Happy Monday! I'm feeling refreshed. I can't remember if I put this in last week's post, but because my birthday and Mother's Day are so close together, I decided to try something I've heard of other moms doing--a weekend by myself in a hotel. I've heard of this going both ways for people; some moms absolutely love and swear by this solo break. Others try it out and find themselves bored and end up going home early. I had a hunch which camp I'd fall into and now it's official: first camp. This is going to be my new Mother's Day tradition. I don't want to spend actual Mother's Day away from my family, but doing this the weekend after Mother's Day was perfect. It's a good solution to the Mother's-Day-Next-To-My-Birthday thing. Jared doesn't have to stress about gifts for both occasions, since the weekend away IS the Mother's Day gift, and I set it up on my own. I get exactly what I want, and Jared can focus on my birthday instead of stressing about gifts for both days. This is the first year we've been in a financial position for me to be able to do this and not feel guilty. I stayed at a Day's Inn, so nothing fancy, but I was so grateful for the opportunity. I'm sure I wasn't the only one grateful for this weekend. I have been uptiiiight lately. This weekend helped me a lot. 

I only spent one full day away (sandwiched by two nights so I could have an actual, full day to myself). Jack and Jared had an awesome time together doing a father-son day. They went to the arcade and watched airplanes take off at the airport. Lots of cute stuff. I slept in and went thrifting for hours and made a big dent in my favorite-recipes-compilation project while I watched chick flicks. When I got home it occurred to me that this was the longest I have EVER been away from Jack. One full day. Cool. I'd never done two nights away before this. Jared and I have tried, but we always feel guilty after the first night and go home early. Our St. George getaway did feel longer than this staycation, but it was technically only one night. Homegirl's gotta get out more.

I also got my favorite meal in town for lunch: A beef+lamb gyro from Sweet Zoey's. I took it up to Casper Mountain and found a picnic bench by a stream. It was the highlight of my staycation. Enjoy this highly glamorous selfie of the moment. You can even kinda see the stream behind me. Cute!

We have 9:00 church, so I checked out early from my hotel Sunday morning and met Jack and Jared there. Jack was so happy. Especially when we found out I get to be assigned to nursery for my new calling the next two months! I have to say I appreciate the Jack charm a whole lot more now that I've filled that self-care cup with some overdue Laura time. I told Jack beforehand that I was going to be gone on a date with myself. He didn't even seem confused haha. Dates with urself 4ever. 
^^Jack and Savvy at our favorite Casper "hike." Basically just a short nature walk to a stream in the foothills. I think it's called Squaw Creek Loop. Wildflowers and blossoms are starting to pop up!


And now for a job-hunt update. This is me eating allll my words on my last post about feeling a bit overwhelmed to move back to Utah. I take it all back! Give me Utah and its crazy housing market and all the family! Parents and grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews--I want them all, and I want them now. The move back to Utah isn't looking quite as certain as I thought it was. We're not giving up hope--it's just taking the Utah doctor longer to get us a contract than we thought. In the meantime Jared has a few Zoom interviews set up for Washington jobs. We figure we'd better have some backup options in place, just in case. It'll probably be a few more weeks before I have any concrete updates to share. I'll keep you posted. 


Staycation and More Job-Hunt Whiplash :)

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(Before you get worried, I'm feeling great! Just going to do a mental health tangent at the end of this post.)

Over the weekend we celebrated my birthday, and then Mother's Day. I now feel greater sympathy for all the people who have their birthday right next to Christmas. The Mother's Day/Birthday crossover isn't nearly as big of a deal, but I did have myself a little pity party about Mother's Day getting swallowed up a little by my birthday the day before, and feeling a little sad that I don't get to be celebrated on two separate occasions each year!! (For sure some snarkiness in there, but I absolutely had a pouty little indulgent moment on Mother's Day that I'll be sure to check at the door next year, because Jared really tried to make me feel special both days.) In fairness to my pity party, Jared has had to work 24-hour shifts over my birthday for the past 3 years, so I think a little sadness around my birthday is absolutely warranted. As a silver lining, this was Jared's last 24-hour shift ever! (supposedly)

I forgot to get any pictures of birthday or Mother's Day festivities, but I got some cute pics of everyone else throughout the week so I'll put those here: 

(not pictured: me and Jared went out on an actual birthday date to an actual restaurant, and for Mother's Day we went for a scenic Casper Mountain drive and roasted marshmallows--all Jack's idea. And we video called our wonderful Moms! Dear Mom, thanks for listening to me whine about my own mothering journey when I should've been pumping you up about how great a mother YOU are on Mother's Day. You're the real MVP.)

^^Savvy being a metaphor of me and my bad attitude while everyone else was just celebrating me and/or being a toddler and throwing normal toddler tantrums. 
^^Jack "driving" the stationary car while we were visiting the "poo poo cows." There's a quiet road right by our house where several enormous white cows live. Jack calls them the poo poo cows. 
^^Patio weather at last! Jack did this all by himself, except for the "k" that I made.  
^^Last weekend we visited Ayres Natural Bridge. It felt like spring at last and we're so excited to wave our last Wyoming winter goodbye!


Back to some birthday talk, and then I'll touch on mental health. I'm surprisingly not feeling sad about this being my last year in my 20s, for three reasons: (1) I've heard great things about the 30s, (2) my 20s were filled with some tremendously difficult times, and (3) maybe I'll be done being pregnant forever once I hit my 30s?? We're planning to try for baby #2 after Jared's done with residency, and honestly if next pregnancy is as rough as the last one, there's a good chance we'll be done after that. For a long time I felt sad about that, but I'm starting to get excited about it if it continues to feel right. We'll shoot for a baby #3 if things go much smoother next time around. TBD.  

And now for some mental health chat! I love that in my generation this topic isn't really taboo anymore. There are two people in my life who are huge proponents of therapy for all. First is my friend Emily who finished her degree and started her own therapy practice in Seattle. And just had the cutest bb girl ever. You go girl. Second is a close cousin who benefited a lot from doing a year of therapy recently and is so open about how it can be easily accessible and a positive experience for literally anyone. You don't have to have any major "issues" to work out to be able to benefit from therapy. 

Anyway, this cousin of mine told me that it was so easy to get started--she just made an appointment to talk to her bishop and asked him if he could make her an appointment through LDS family services for counseling. He made the appointment for her, and it was all paid for through the ward's fast offerings (not always the case that it's completely covered by fast offerings, but I think it's generally pretty affordable if you use LDS family services). The most intimidating part of thinking about therapy for me was definitely the thought of finding a therapist and setting up a first appointment, so when she told me how easy that was I started to think about maybe looking into it. We're about to be faced with some major life changes, and I think talking through them and getting some tools from a trained third-party source could be helpful. 

So anyway, last week when my bishop asked me to come meet with him to give me a calling for our last two months here (they're desperate for additional hands in primary), I didn't even really plan this, but when he closed with, "Do you have any other questions?" I was like, well ya, could you get me set up with an appointment for LDS counseling services? He's a brand new bishop so he hasn't done that for anyone yet, but he said he'd look into whether it's available in Casper and get back to me. I'm really excited! If it doesn't work out here in Casper then I'll probably look into it when we get back to Utah. Three must be my magic number this week, because there are three things I can think of right now that I'd love to get help with: 

(1) Navigating the big life transition from 7 years of a very intense work schedule for Jared, to what will hopefully be a much more normal schedule and less of a solo-parenting lifestyle. I'm not necessarily worried about this, mostly just excited, but with any big life change there are sure to be bumps. 

(2) Setting boundaries around family. We've lived away from family for almost a decade now. At first that was really hard for me, but now it's the norm to spend weekends and holidays by ourselves and I worry I'm going to be overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of family members we'll be living near when we move back to Utah Valley. All of my siblings and their spouses and kids live there, and my parents and grandparents and many aunts and uncles and cousins do too. And everyone all still gets together, pretty frequently! It's wonderful, but the last couple of times we've gone to visit, my little introverted self has felt a little overwhelmed by how many lovely people there are to keep up with. I just think it'll be helpful for me to learn how to recognize what my boundaries are and how to hold them so I don't let myself get overwhelmed or burned out.

(3) Getting past some anxiety/trauma about getting pregnant again. I know the word trauma gets thrown around a lot, but I think my pregnancy with Jack for sure falls under that umbrella, since I felt a full 10 times sicker when I was pregnant with him than I did the time I had the flu and food poisoning at the same time. And it lasted every minute of every day and every night for 250 days and nights. I could probably use therapy to work through my oddly terrible childbirth/extended postpartum pain/colicky newborn phases too, but the pregnancy thing is what I'm most scared of at this time. 

So with all that TMI published on my blog now, yay therapy! Therapy for all! If you have any relationships or hard times or self-confidence things you find yourself thinking about often or wanting to talk through or get tools for . . . therapy! Let's do it together. Go team. 


29 and Feelin Like Therapy!

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 (Sorry I missed posting on Monday. It took me several days to take and brighten up these pictures.)

This is the official house tour post where I put all the pictures of our first home in its "finished" glory. 
^^These pictures were taken last fall. We had already trimmed the karl foerster plants to prepare for winter, but everything else was looking pretty good. I'm so proud of all the work Jared did to get our yard looking nice! He insisted on doing all the landscaping himself. He even mowed the lawn with a push mower (the only kind we could afford when we moved in) and planted and watered the back lawn BY HAND for 3 years. Slow clap. 
^^And here she is at the end of winter, sold.
^^When you first walk through our front door, this entryway setup is on the left.
^^And the living area is on the right. Jared made the coffee table out of a free pallet and some cheap hairpin legs when we were 100% broke before moving in. The couches are probably 30 years old and hand-me-downs from my Uncle Delwyn and Aunt Becky. They've stayed in pretty good shape, but are old enough that the support is disintegrating and our backs hurt after sitting on them. We've never had to buy a couch in our 8 years of marriage, but we're excited to leave these couches behind when we move and buy something new for our next place, wherever that will be. The tv table is an old record table I scored for $20 at our local thrift store. 
Our place definitely isn't usually this clean. We packed away a lot of clutter into our crawl space and garage before staging our home to sell. Anything that we knew we wouldn't need during the next two months got packed away. That said, our place feels so nice now that it's more minimal! We spent our first two years here feeling like our space wasn't complete and we needed to get more decor. Then without even realizing it, sometime in our 3rd year we crossed that line and reached the point of too much. So now we're paring down and can hopefully maintain the balance more quickly next time. I think the key is to get stuff up on your walls quickly, and then have lots of pretty baskets (I got most of mine at the thrift store) for holding necessary clutter. And then frequently editing down and getting rid of things you don't need. The chest in the above picture holds our board games. Usually some of these picture frames hold family pictures, but our realtor recommended we replace them with artsy prints for the showing.  
^^I love these barstools so much! They have big seats, a nice thick gray cushion (hides stains), and I love that the wood wraps around the back so I don't worry much about Jack falling out. I love to sit at the bar to get work done on my computer or have a snack. I really hope I can find a place for the stools in our next space, but I have a feeling we won't be living anywhere with a a bar this high. I'll let you know if they end up on KSL at some point so you can snag them if you want. They're so good. They might still be available on Wayfair but I don't remember what they're called. 
^^Our kitchen! It has been a luxury to cook in this spacious, new kitchen. The counters are formica, not stone, but I don't even care. We're probably going to have to take a kitchen downgrade wherever we live next (whyyyyyy Utah housing market, why?) so I'm really trying to make the most of having ample cabinet space and counter space for preparing food. I've enjoyed learning to cook lots of new things here (german food, cast-iron skillet meals, fancy lemonades...). Full disclosure, there's usually a big basket containing mail and miscellaneous odds and ends in that back right corner. 
^^The dining space. This is our $40 table and chairs set we scored at a yard sale in Utah the month after we got married. I'm looking forward to a table upgrade at some point in the future, but a couch upgrade is more urgent and this still does the job fine. Jared's mom and my mom both helped me reupholster the thrifted midcentury chairs on the ends. Jared thought they were hideous at first, but now Studio Mcgee is selling a very similar chair for over $1,000 a piece and suddenly they don't seem quite so bad. 

Changing out the lighting in our dining room and kitchen made a world of difference in modernizing the space, as did adding those VERY cheap oversized prints on the dining wall. I got the frames from walmart (in the posters section). They're super plastic but they were only like $5 a piece. Then I learned how to cut the photo mats myself (add that to my resume) and printed out some pictures that I've taken from various places we've lived/visited. I think a low-pile rug would look great under the table, but we're still in a low-budget stage of life and a rug probably would've gotten gross during Jack's highchair/baby-food-hurling stage anyway. 
^^Take a left after you walk into the house and you find Jack's room. We've loved having these acrylic book ledges on the wall, but next time I'll do wider/deeper ledges to hold more books. Most of his books are in his closet. 
^^Thrifted everything! Man I love our thrift store. We really didn't have any budget at all for new furniture during our first two years here, so that place saved us. The dresser was a yard sale find that was painted all gray, and I just sanded down the top and spraypainted the hardware. 
^^And this amazing little table and chairs were I believe a facebook marketplace find by my mother-in-law? Might've even been free, and I think they're actually Pottery Barn! Definitely the best quality piece of furniture in our house haha. She drove them down to us when they came to visit last summer. Hopefully we'll have a playroom type space in our next house and this will be the centerpiece. It's been a great place for crafts and playing. 
^^Between Jack's room and the office is this cute lil' bathroom. 
(and now we know why home photographers use ultra-wide-angle lenses)
^^And across from Jack's room is an identical room we use as an office/guest room.
^^Jared helped me make this cool black shelf to hang my weavings from, and it doubles as a ledge to put pictures/Jared's paintings on top. We r artsy. 
^^On the other side of the house you walk in from the garage to this little catch-all area next to the laundry room and our master bedroom. You won't find any built-ins or upgrades in our little builder-grade house, but for a first home it's been juuust fine. 
^^These laundry room shelves looked like a dumpster fire of random cleaning products until I staged them up to show our home. It wasn't even that hard. Just had to grab a few baskets around the house to hide stuff in. I probably should've done that ages ago.
^^My favorite room in the house!! Our master bedroom gets lots of natural light and is the last room we consciously finished up, just this last Christmas. Because it was our last room finished, it wasn't filled with quite as many random thrift finds (though the rattan photo baskets and hanging planter are some of my favorite thrift finds ever). My favorite plants are in here because this room gets the most sunshine, and I splurged on new bedding as a Christmas gift to Jared (our old bedspread was a truly horrifying thrifted yellow coverlet from the 70s). Also this is the only room I finished after taking my online interior design class from Casper College last spring. Not that I'm any type of expert, but I know more now and have a wee little bit bigger budget than I did when we first moved in. 
^^These now-cute bathroom shelves also looked like a dumpster fire of random hotel samples and toiletry kits until the night before the photographer came to do our home listing. If we were living here longer, I'd wrap the shelves in natural wood to make them look fancier, but they're good enough as-is. I also read that it's a good idea to buy all new fluffy white bath towels before showing your home. That way you can throw out your old towels and have nice new towels when you move into your next place. I wanted potential homebuyers to feel like they were walking into a spa-like setting in the master bath. Also, I mentioned there were no "upgrades" in this new build, but our builder chose to do a stone shower in the master bathroom and we've loved it! Looks real nice. 
^^I know this just looks like a standard walk-in closet, but I clocked many, mannny hours hiding in this safe haven when Jack was a colicky newborn. It was the only place in the house I could go to not hear the heartbreaking screams when Jared was taking a turn or when we were sleep-training. I'd turn on the bathroom fan and lay on Savvy's bed under the clothes and cry/do my pelvic floor exercises to try and make the childbirth-recovery pain go away until it finally disappeared completely about a year postpartum. That was a rough year. Thank you closet safe haven. Usually it's stuffed with clothes, but we've packed most of them away already. 

(*note: If you haven't had kids yet and want to at some point, don't be discouraged when I mention my awful pregnancy or recovery period. A full 99% of women have a much easier time with pregnancy than I did [darn hyperemesis gravidarum] and I don't know anyone else who took an entire year to recover from the pain of childbirth. Colicky newborns are pretty rare too. It won't be as awful as I make it sound from my weirdly distressing childbearing experience, I can practically guarantee it! And of course, I'm grateful we're able to have kids of our own.)
^^And finally, our backyard! A hundred thousand thanks to Jared and my dad for making my patio/pergola/bistro-light dreams come true. I love this space so, so much. Please bless we can have another fenced yard with cafe lights at our next home, even if it's only half this size. I'm doing my best to soak in these last two months in our little house on the prairie!
Our First House (Bar Nunn, Wyoming)

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