We have a New baby nephew

I'm so excited to have a new nephew! His name is Xandric Paul Connors! He came a few weeks earlier than what his due date was, but everything gratefully was okay, and both mommy and baby are doing great! I'm just a bit sad I wasn't able to be there when he was born! :( I hate living soo far away from my family that I miss all the important stuff! Same thing happened when Nyliam was born I was stuck in Utah! oh well that's life, hopefully we will be able to come down and see him sometime in the near future! I really hope!!! We can't wait to meet you Xandric!

Work Work Work and more Work

I got my EMT certification done back in december hoping to be able to get clinical experience in that but unfortunately most schools now require you to have paid hours of experience no longer just volunteering experience. Here in Utah most of the fire departments just hire firefighters for the EMT positions and just rotate them, I guess is more cost efficient for them to have them cross-trained to be both EMT and firefighters. So it would be really hard for me to find a full time position being an EMT. So I had to come up with plan "b" to get my clinical experience...So I finally took my CNA test after putting it off for a whole year it sucked because I had to re-read the entire book and walk through all the skills tests on my own versus just going to do it right after I took the class last summer! Oh well I guess I was super busy working off hours to pay off for our wedding photographer and getting everything else ready for the wedding! I finally studied for it right after we got back from California and went and took the written and practical test and passed both thus enabling me a job as a CNA and hopefully get 2,000 hours of clinical experience over the course of the next 10 months in order to apply for PA programs  I was a bit scared of having to find a full time CNA job I would have loved to work at a hospital nearby but here in Utah is so hard to get a CNA position without experience or without knowing anyone at the particular hospital to get you in the door. I was fortunate to find 1 full time job at Alpine Valley Care Center is in (Pleasent grove), not too far from Orem and starting the middle of October I will be working morning shifts 6am-2pm. This is a nursing as well as a little bit of rehabilitation center. I was also very blessed that Stonehenge of Orem called me for a PRN (as needed) position, so I will be able to take on extra shifts! This one is just short term rehab patients who come and stay at the facility anywhere from a week to 3 months. This will be interesting to see how it works out a year from now, CNA job is not a job that I see myself doing more than a year, it's quite tiring being on your feet for 8-12 hour shifts, the only good thing is that time seems to fly by and then it's time to go home! The only super sucky thing that was not fun is that I think Jon got me partially sick (cold) and at work they gave me a flu shot which just shot down my immune system and I had to work/train this past week while being super sick. I'm still not at 100% but at least I feel a lot better! Jon is now in his last and final year of school, hopefully he will be graduating next summer... The plan is to work hard and get my hours and apply to grad school and hopefully be able to pay off a large sum or Jon's school loans.

Jon gets his aquarium... that must mean my puppy is coming soon!

So Jon had been bugging non-stop that he wanted an aquarium so we finally found a good deal on this aquarium that came with over 25 fish and a small nursery as well. we paid $15 for it and it came with a ton of extras such as food, toys, filters, and everything else to upkeep the aquarium! Jon was super excited! I told him we would get it with the condition that he will feed them and of course clean the fish tank out whenever it got dirty! I keep bugging Jon that he needs to get me a tiny little puppy to keep me company when he is gone but the chances of that are far from slim right now!

We have 7 new kids!

So we where called to the primary and for the first few weeks we got placed in the Nursery, and shortly after we where called to be the Sumbeam teachers (ages 3-4). It has been quite the experience, specially with 2 of the most wild boys I have seen! It takes  A LOT of patience to be able to teach at this such young age! I think Jon will be getting a lot of more gray hairs in this new calling! It has been a little bit better now that the kids don't cry and they know us but we still have one or two each week that require a lot of attention and it has been interesting to find ways in which to calm them down and not get frustrated or mad at them. I think our little class in the primary is the hardest to teach because of their age and because they don't listen and they have very short attention span! Jon says this is the worst calling ever, but I think deep down he does love it specially as he has gotten to know each one of the seven different kids that we have! They have learned to love Jon specially when he brings them goldfish crackers, fruit, and the infamous green light red light game!

California Trip....

This was a much needed vacation from everything! I'm thankful we got to go spend time with my side of the family I hadn't seen them for about 8 months, I really wish I lived much closer to my family as I do miss them and get to miss out on a lot of family gatherings and such! :( Hopefully grad school will take me back to California or at least closer to home... We went to the beach, the Long Beach Aquarium, Disneyland and California Adventure, My sister's Baby Shower party and Celebrated our first anniversary with Jon! I can't believe how fast an entire year went by! I had a blast spending almost everyday with my baby Niece, I can't believe how much she has grown, she is super tall and she listens and behaves a lot better when we take her out compared to previous years! It was our first time as a couple going to Disneyland we had never gone together before, we were both excited, I usually don't get too excited to go to Disneyland because I had season passes growing up and used to go there all the time, but we were excited to go this time around. We took our five year old niece and she was great throughout the day, she even got to ride Indiana Jones for the first time ever, she is such a brave soul, at age 5 I know I wasn't nearly as brave as she is.. We got to ride the new Star Tours it was pretty sweet and even got to see the new show World of Colors at California Adventure Park it was such a neat show I really want to go back and see it again and hopefully get better seats. We got to ride most of the rides because surprisingly the lines where super short throughout the day and fast passes also helped out a lot with the lines..

Zion's National Park

This was Aly's and my very first time going to Zion's National Park in all the years that I had been here in Utah I had never gone... I was super excited to go camping and finally be able to enjoy the last week and half of August. This was planned by our friend and it was a big group was supposed to go but at the last minute almost everyone ended canceling but we still went and had a great time! We ended up doing all of the three Emeral Pool hikes, it was really pretty! I wanted to do Angel's Landing hike but Jon had asked one of the rangers there and they said it would take about 6 hours and we figured we didn't have that much time  to get it done so we decided to not do it, later to find out that it doesn't take that long maybe half of that so three hours... Matt and Jon went to hike the Narrow's they had both been wanting to do this hike for a while, I decided to not go on it and rather stay with aly back in the campground since they had mentioned that we had to swim through parts of it and I had just gotten over a cold I decided to sit out for this one... It was great sleeping under the such starry nights, the first night it was super windy so I had a little trouble going to sleep since I'm not a deep sleeper and wake up to just about any noise, the second night was so much better! I hope we get to go back and do more hikes in such a beautiful national park!

Summer Adventures....

At the end of May Jon decides that he would love to spend every waking moment for the next few months remodeling the basement.... Here is a list of everything we took out and had replaced... Ceiling, Paneling from the walls, the second bedroom added a new entrance from the hallway and expanded the room, new carpet, new windows, tile in the back bathroom and entry way, some plumbing in the bathroom, and painting. In writing it doesn't sound like much right but when you are doing it without or little professional help it is a lot of work. Jon had set up an initial 3 weeks to get everything done.... It ended up being more like 2 months to get everything done. A million thanks to our friends who came out to help us and specially to Aly for helping us while spending her summer here, I'm sad that we didn't take her out as much as we had hoped for because we where pressed to finish the basement. :( The basement looks a lot better and hopefully we won't be doing any more work on the basement and hopefully we can finish upstairs in the next months to come.. but for now I think we are both sick and tired of doing house work/projects... I think we are crazy for wanting to do so much in such a little time on top of that taking a full load of summer classes and working at the same time. We didn't get much of a summer to enjoy and it flew by and now fall is almost here