Thought for today

This is from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I think it is a good way to look at life, to try and make it more fun!!!
Tom convinced the boys of the town that white washing a fence was something to be coveted, just to get out of doing it himself and this is what Mark Twain has to say about it,

"Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action--without knowing it--namely that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artifical flowers or performing on a treadmill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mount Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerably money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign."

We do this with so many things in our lives. For example I love to go to school, I love to learn and study. I don't so much like to do other things. Other people don't like to go to school they would rather have a job... Funny how that is, isn't it?

- Natalie

It's kind of fun to get all these comments from friends and family who have found our blog. We'll try extra hard to keep up with updating our lives for all y'all.

The big news of late is that I had to start another class at ASU. I got an email from my academic advisor saying that a class I have to take in order to graduate is only being offered in the spring of next year, so if I want to graduate in December, I have to take this class this semester. So I started a new class 5 weeks into the semester. The conditions are that I have to start turning in all the homework, take the midterm, and pass the final. If I do all that, plus pass an "oral exam" on the material I missed the first 5 weeks, then I get credit for the class. Problem is, this is supposed to be one of the harder classes of my degree. "Transport Phenomena." How exciting.

I am going on a business trip this weekend to Boston, I'm pretty excited about it, but that means that Natalie is going to need some company Friday and Saturday nights!

Grandma Lillywhite's funeral

This is a picture of my great grandmother Alta Brinkerhoff Lillywhite. She passed away about 2 weeks ago at 4 months shy of her 98th birthday. We went up to Taylor for a funeral/memorial this weekend. It was really nice; she was an amazing lady. I Googled her looking for a picture to show Natalie and I got thousands and thousands of pages, mostly obituaries saying what a wonderful woman she was. She is survived by 465 descendants, who have served a total of 270 years of missionary service for the Church among other ridiculously amazing statistics.

There can't be a family event without my grandma doing something silly. I love her to death, but she is a very funny lady. At the viewing, everybody kept saying how much Grandma didn't look like herself (being embalmed can have that effect, I hear, but I digress). It was decided that Grandma just didn't look right without her glasses, but no one knew where they were. Off went the uncles to look for Grandma Lillywhite's glasses, but my grandma came up with a better idea. She took her glasses out of her purse, and lovingly placed them on her mother's head. "Much better," she said. "Now she looks like herself." Well, the uncle found the correct pair of glasses not even 10 minutes later, and you should have seen the look on his face when he got back to the casket. "Who's glasses are these? I've got Grandma Lillywhite's right here, who's are these?!" Needless to say he was more than a little confused. Who says you can't have fun at a funeral?!

All the levity aside, it was a really spiritual memorial. No one could say enough about how great a person she was. My uncle Grant told the best story. In close to 50 years, the closest he ever heard Grandma Lillywhite complain was the week before she died. "The one regret I have is that I can't make it through 3 hours of church anymore." She definitely knew what was important in life, and tried very hard to teach all of her descendants to follow in her footsteps.

Two whole years

On January 6 Dallas and I celebrated our second anniversary. The picture above is the little bed and breakfast that we stayed at for our anniversary. Isn't it so cute?! It is weird to think that we have been married for that long... It's been a blast. So much has happened. In that time Dallas and I have had to move 3 times and been in 3 different wards. We've both been through 5 different jobs and we each have two right now. We both work as EMT's at PMT Ambulance driving ambulances around the valley. I also work at Scottsdale Shea in the Emergency Room as a Patient Care Tech. Dallas works for a company called Science Care that travels all over the States holding Cadaver labs for various companies and doctors. (YUCK!!) I love my job in the hospital it is fun(for the most part) and good medical experience which I needed to get into PA school.
I finally decided last week for sure that I will be attending Midwestern University in Glendale. It has been really hard for me to make the decision. I got accepted to both schools here in Arizona (Arizona School of Health Sciences and Midwestern University.) Dallas will still be in school until December so I only applied to the Arizona schools cus I can't very well just leave my husband for 8 months or so. I love being around my husband too much for that kind of long distance relationship.
And as Lincoln always says, anyway...
At Christmas I made the decision to decide where I was going to go to school by January. So I decided to go to ATSU because it was close to where we live right now, and I am really tired of moving. It is also a shorter program, by two whole months, and is a little bit cheaper. But after making the decision I still wasn't one hundred percent sure about it. A couple weeks ago I started taking an EKG class from a lady who also teaches at Midwestern. While talking to her I discovered that I still really liked the program that Midwestern offers and reopened the idea of going there. Dallas (I guess, although he never told me) thought I should go to Midwestern the whole time even though it is an hour commute. Well, we went to the temple and felt really good about Midwestern. It's not that ATSU is a bad decision we just felt that Midwestern was the better school for me.
So I am so so so excited to be starting school in June. I wish it would have started in like January. I haven't been going to school since last May when I graduated from ASU and I really miss it. Or I just miss not working anywhere from forty to ninety hours a week. I don't like my jobs that much. I have been working a lot but it is a good thing since if I work a lot Dallas is able to concentrate on his school and hopefully do really well.
Dallas is hopefully going to graduate this December, if everything works out okay. He's currently taking his senior design capstone class which is supposed to be a really hard class. We did just find out on Thursday that one of his classes that was supposed to be offered this Fall will only be offered in the spring now. So the counselor is going to let Dallas try and start the class now... only a month into the school year!!! Hopefully it works out and he doesn't have to go another semester. That would stink so so bad:=(

Needless to say life is great!!

Before and After the Haircut

Before:

After:

The hair is a little shorter, but she's just as beautiful (maybe a little more silly, from the looks of it)!

Our family decided to take pictures together after Ambers baptism a couple of weeks ago!! It was a lot of fun and a little funny :-)

*The first picture is of all the kids that were there, we're just missing Jared and Caleb!

*The second one is of just the parents and kids! No husband and boyfriends (Someone had to take the picture!)

*The last picture is of all the girls in our family (Six girls and Mom)

Dallas and Natalie

HEY!!!!

We did it, we made ourselves a blog!! Hopefully we'll be able to keep it updated!