a thousand words

They say a picture is worth a thousand words...so here are a few thousand with some commentary to chronicle the last couple of weeks.

This is Mose, the Potter family pet for the last 15 years.  He is still the best dog ever.

 



Morgan Belcher, definitely the most energetic Belcher family member

 



I was recovering from pneumonia and JD had started getting sick, but we still carved out pumpkins!

 



Heading to my cousin's missionary homecoming (Also, we saw Catching Fire the night before...SO MANY FEELS! AH! IT WAS AMAZEBALLS!)

 



My lovely cousin Anne

 



He's home! Welcome back Elder William Pittam! Peru lost an amazing missionary. 

Also, HE WAS SO TAN I ALMOST DIDN'T RECOGNIZE HIM! AH! 

 



Finn and Kent, I just love watching the cousin's babies play

 

Thanksgiving dinner in Kemmerer, WY

 



Yeah, I'm not wearing makeup and didn't make any attempt to get ready for the dinner.  JD also looks tired.  I cooked all day with my mom, JD was at work all day.  Yeah, I show you pictures where we're clearly not all put together or looking our best.  It is because this is our real life.  We're not put together all the time, and that's just fine by me. 

 

Family is great, friends are fantastic and life is good.  On non-put together days and otherwise.   

sunday enlightenment

"I want everyone to know, you don't have to find out you're dying to start living."  -Zach Sobiech



Happy Sunday everyone.

If you have 20 minutes, the amazingly BEAUTIFUL full documentary can be found here.

universal truths

So, I recently started re-reading one of my absolute ALL TIME FAVORITE books, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (P.S. Thanks to my BFF Cody for letting me borrow it and read it for the first time when we were teenagers...I'll be honest, I am not positive if I ever returned it...Probably didn't...moving on).  Anyways, the first line and probably one of the most quoted lines from literature ever goes a little something like this:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.  -Jane Austen

And it got me thinking, what universal truths have evolved since Jane Austen published Pride and Prejudice in 1813.  I mean, certainly there must be a lot of them...here's a few I've come up with.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that...:

No matter who you are, you have at least one top 40's song that you love.  Yeah, I'm looking at you music snobs who only listen to people I've "probably never heard of."  I've seen One Direction on your Spotify playlist.

Yes...I am ashamed...

You can tell yourself just five more minutes on pinterest....then suddenly it has been an hour...

The aforementioned truth also goes for tumblr...I just can't quit you tumblr...

John Green can't quit tumblr either...

Nobody loves being dressed up.  No one, if someone says that they'd rather be wearing a dress and heels instead of sweatpants and t-shirt, they are LIARS.

Even the wig wearing and fake nails having real housewives love their sweatpants

Either you sing to yourself while doing almost anything, or you're not living life correctly.   

Also, everyone loves puns....even if you don't like puns, you sort of like puns.  

It's really important to be nice to everyone.  Because, everyone is dealing with difficult things in their lives.  

 Also, just for your own safety.  

So, another exciting thing happening in my life, I am starting the Beachbody Challenge program!  I purchased the Turbo Fire pack with the Chocolate Shakeology powder.  To be honest, I'm actually super about this!  My neighbor is a beach body coach and she's been awesome in helping me get started.  She helped me join a Beachbody Challenge Group (which I never even knew was a thing) and I'm honestly excited to start this.  I might not be as excited come Monday after the first workout, but right now I'm stoked.  

the golden birthday

Disclaimer: So, I'm late night blogging at work because I'm on the graveyard shift.  All of the pictures from my Birthday extravaganza are on the hubs phone...which is at home with him.  So, this will not feature many pictures from the Birthday trip (hashtag disappointment).

Before the whole pneumonia saga began, I celebrated my Golden Birthday.

October 21st was a good day for me.  By some miracle, neither of us were working that day.  So, JD took me to Salt Lake City and basically let me have a field day.  Seriously, the man let me pick EVERYTHING.  And he didn't complain or ask to go somewhere else even once.  I'm almost 100% positive it took a lot of self restraint on his part, but I'm grateful for it.  We went shopping, I bought lots of makeup and clothes.  We ate at the Cheesecake Factory and JD told the wait staff it was my birthday, so they sang to me.  Which, while embarrassing at the time, I'm grateful he went behind my back and did it.  It made me feel special although it also made me feel painfully awkward.

I've always been a person who absolutely LOVES birthdays.  I love my birthday, I love other people's birthdays, I love it all.  I just think it is amazing to be able to have one day a year where you can feel be the center of attention without having any kind of guilt attached to it.  It's an absolutely amazing thing to have one solitary day a year where you can make things just about you.

20 was a great year, but it also came with some challenges.  I experienced my first year of marriage, which was amazing.  I changed jobs.  We almost bought a house.  We experienced a lot of heartache and tragedy with the deaths of three amazing people.  We dealt with the defeat of another house falling through.  We celebrated birthdays and anniversaries and new family babies being born.  We had lots of date nights.  We spent many an hour playing with our dog.  It was honestly a complete and total rollercoaster all year long.

However, it has been the best ride of my life.  I'm really lucky!  I have an amazing husband (who is pretty handsome on top of it), I have a great job, we have a place to live (even if it's not our dream place) and we're happy.  Not just happy, but joyful.  20 was a great year, but 21 is already even better.  I am so excited for the ride that is in store for us this year, I know so many things are going to keep changing!  However, I'm ready.

At least, I think I am.  

The one picture on my phone from the birthday dinner....because the Belcher's cannot go to dinner without constructing some kind of sculpture with whatever is available.  We're adults, I swear.  

the silent "p"

Yeah, Pneumonia. 

It all started out as a little flu, or so I thought.  I started feeling under the weather, coughing and congestion and some nausea.  I kept getting this weird feeling that I should try to get a doctors appointment.  But I wasn't thinking I was too sick and that point so I brushed off any sort of thought of getting an appointment lined up.  On Thursday (October 24th) I was starting to get really, really sickly.  I went into work and was promptly sent home by my boss.  So I rested up on Thursday night, expecting to be able to get back to work by the weekend.  Not so.  Friday I started getting unbearably ill.  Honestly, I was pretty much positive on Friday afternoon I was going to give up the ghost.  I was calling my poor husband, who was at work, telling him all of my symptoms.  He called his dad feeling really helpless trying to find something to help me because he couldn't leave work.  His dad suggested a few things I could do at home to try and make my life a bit more bearable.  It was helpful, but I still felt incredibly ill. 

By 6:00 p.m. JD was finally able to escape the cage that was work that day (obviously I'm exaggerating by using a metaphor for my own selfish purposes, we love JD's job generally) and get home to his sick wife.  He took a look at me, felt my burning forehead and said "Yeah...we're going to the Emergency Room." 

Alas, we made a trip to the emergency room.  I had a fever, my blood pressure was slightly heightened and I could not breathe.  At all.  I had two doctors and one nurse attending to me.  After listening to my lungs on the of the doctor's said "Eww..." (yeah, that was encouraging).  So, a chest x-ray was ordered, lots of blood was drawn (which my husband almost passed out during...heaven help him when the children come) and medication was prescribed after I was diagnosed with PNEUMONIA. 

So, I spent the next better part of the week in bed on anti-biotics and decongestants and cough syrups and Tylenol and using a humidifier.  Then JD started getting sick.  The second he gave a sneeze I got him a doctor's appointment.  He got checked out and was given an antibiotic.  He didn't yet have pneumonia but he was starting a pretty good cold that could begin pneumonia.  So, he then spent a couple of days in bed and then was all back to normal.  It took me MUCH longer to recover, but that's because I didn't go to the doctor right away.

Side note: if you are feeling sick and think you should see a doctor, GO SEE A DOCTOR.  DO NOT LET IT PROGRESS AND THEN FEEL LIKE YOU ARE ABOUT TO DIE BEFORE GETTING PROFESSIONAL HELP. 

Things I am grateful for during the pneumonia saga:

• JD, even when he almost passed out when I was in the hospital
• Antibiotics, Cough Syrup, Pretty much all modern medicine
• Essential Oils, while I am a huge proponent for modern medicine and the amazing powers it wields, I also believe in supplemental care with pure essential oils (i.e. the Breathe doTERRA oil blend works about 1000x better than Vick's Vapo Rub) 
• Prayer
• Cozy quilts and blankets
• Disinfectant Cleaners
• My mommy's chicken soup
• The close proximity in which we live to my parents (ya know, their basement...)
• My dog

I spent most of my recovery among pillows, quilts and remote controls.

And this is my I hate the hospital face

f is for friends who do stuff together

About a month ago, I got a surprise facebook message from my amazing friend, Jordan.  Her husband and she were going to be in Idaho for a wedding and were thinking about dropping down into Wyoming to visit on their way back to Nevada.  She asked if that would be okay and my response was along the lines of ummm...HECK YES!!!

Two of our mutual favorite things include:

These dudes



and these dudes

Fun fact: The picture of JD is about 2 1/2 years old and from like our second date.  It is literally the only current-ish picture I could find on his Facebook of him alone.  And that isn't even his fedora...

Jordan and Jay got married the year before JD and I did.  After I got married we joked that we married the same guy in different sizes.  Both of our husbands love them some video games, sci fi, reading, all of the good stuff.  Jordan and I married total nerds, and we love them all the more for it.  

Jordan and I have been friends since....probably elementary school-ish?  We've been really good friends for about 7 years and our friendship just continues and continues.  You know how people say that you'll never see the people from high school again?  This is true for about 90% of the people I grew up with.  However, I still have some amazing friends from high school that are still my absolute best friends on the planet, even though we're all spread across the country now.  

 

It was pretty much an amazingly fun two days.  JD and Jay both had someone to obsess over the new Pokemon Games with, Jordan and I had a mutual married friend to be around and talk to.  We played an enormous amount of Nintendo games (P.S. Jordan and I hate Waluigi, and we're fairly positive both JD and Jay somehow cheated at The Game of Life), ate delicious food, watched General Conference and just had an overall amazingly fun time.

The overall visit was just a glorious escape from our everyday lives and got me thinking about how amazing it is to have friends.  Friends are the family that we pick for ourselves.  We're able to connect and build relationships with the people around us.  In my opinion, it is one of the greatest blessings we're given.  Society is built on people creating relationships and working together to create a better world.  And I'm really grateful to have friend and be apart of that. 

 

oh hai

So it has been awhile...I'm basically going to be spending this week catching up on the blog so here are the basics of what has been going on:

• We had our amazing friends, Jordan and Jay, come to visit us a couple weeks ago and it was glorious.
• I celebrated my golden birthday by turning 21 years old on October 21st.  
• I had pneumonia.
• JD then started getting sick.
• We spent a lot of time at our local clinic and hospital.
• Halloween was nice, even though we're both still on antibiotics.
• Not being able to work out is really difficult, never thought I'd ever say that in my life.
• My birthday camera finally arrived a week after my birthday.  And it is amazing.  

And that is an incredibly oversimplified version of what has happened over the last like, month.

Blog posts are coming updating you on all of these individual events.  Thanks for sticking with me.

Also, I am having withdrawals from not seeing my BFF and former roommate.  Come visit me Mandy!  JD will build a ramp for you!