Really?!?!? The Vala Pants Blog: The Love and the Hate of Two Thousand Eight (longest blog ever)

2008 was a pretty good year. There was, however, a lot to love and to hate about it. Major events of 2008 for the Becca and the Dave include (in chronological order, of course:)

Feb 2008 - Visited Oregon for the first time (well, my first time) Lincoln City. We went to see Dave's parents and had a great time.

Feb 2008 - My dear (great) Aunt Katherine died. We miss her and hope she is enjoying her coffee the way she enjoys men - hot and black. :)

May 2008 - Dave graduates from the U of U with a Biology degree - GO DAVE!

May 2008 - We almost get our asses capped by our gangster neighbors. Bullet found in our porch. Neighbors threatening to kick Dave's ass. This happened the night before Dave's graduation party, his parents were at our house at the time, it was a very dramatic and scary little course of events. I even bought some pepper spray.

May 2008- We decide we should get the hell away from those psycho neighbors because we can't live with 'em BUT we CAN live without 'em. So we start looking for a new home.

Day-Z and Lady sunning themselves one last time on the deck of the house in the old hood - goodbye 1995 S. 500 E. We will miss your yearly infestation of boxelder bugs, drug dealing gangster neighbors perched outside of our bedroom window, getting monthly ambulance and cop visits in front of the house, birds nesting in our attic,and of course all of the 7-11 trash thrown in our yard from passers-by. No, but seriously, we did love that house - it had a lot of character and the neighborhood was great (albeit our crack slinging neighbors to the South.)

June 2008 - I finished my first year of teaching the third grade despite some sticky situations at the end there. I should not publicly blog about said sticky situation in case someone named C.A.L. happens upon my blog one day. I could get stalked and run over by a horse in that case.

Some of my cute students from last year. No worries, I totally got permission last year from their parents to post their cute lil' mugs.

June 2008 - While looking for a new home, we took a nice vacation to Atlanta to visit Jiri and Jen, at the same time waiting to see if everything was legit for a house we really liked in Holladay. Turns out they accepted our offer on the Holladay house and we were in for a shitload of work when we got home from Atlanta. We were going to be closing on our new house in 20 days, not to mention needing to sell our current house! YIKES!

Jiri, Jen, Dave and me in Georgia after a relaxing little picnic.

June 2008 - Came home and worked nonstop (seriously) for the next 2 weeks getting our house ready to sell. You would not believe how much crap we had in that house. We got rid of TONS of stuff. Dave repainted the entire exterior of the house. I cleaned top to bottom and we both worked on a billion miscellaneous projects. It was one of the most tiring things EVER!

June 2008- Dave got a teaching job at City Academy teaching high school biology. Set to start in August.

June 2008 - Oh yeah, and we decided to try to bring a baby Vala into the world amidst all this moving chaos.

July 2008 - 3 gangster neighbors are arrested on the 4th of July and taken down our driveway in handcuffs to jail. Sweeeeeeeeet! Same morning the "for sale" sign goes up in front of our house. 1 day later our house is sold to the first lookers! We had quite a few people interested in looking but we were pretty confident that the first people were serious buyers so we accepted their offer.

July 2008 - moved to our new Holladay home with the help of many generous friends and family members. Again, SOOOO much hard work ahead. The house was/is definitely livable, but there is a ton we want to do with it.

There is our "new" cute little house in Holladay. Lots of work to be done with a higher mortgage? Yes. Not having to carry around pepperspray to spray in case our neighbors attack (not to mention, not having to see Gilbert's giant tumor/goiter hanging from his shirtless belly next door) - PRICELESS!

Also, the new house had a little something something built in for Day-Z. We like to call it her "summer vacation kennel." Good Times!

mid-July 2008 - amidst all the moving business and chaos, I take my first pregnancy test, then another and another and another and another and another and maybe even another (all within the same day, of course) and finally decide that it must be right. Um yeah, pregnant. Dave's wearing a spacesuit when I show one of them to him. Well, okay it wasn't a spacesuit, but that's how I choose to remember it. He was insulating the roof of the garage and to keep the itchy stuff off, he had this disposable white head to toe thing on that looks like a spacesuit. It was awesome.

July 2008 - my mom had a visitor from Poland (Matthew, the son of her good friend in Poland.) He'd never really been outside of Eastern Europe so this was big for him. We decided to take him to Zion and hike the Narrows. It was fabulous.

Yep, pretty sure he was stunned by the sheer beauty of Zion. I think the Narrows are maybe the most beautiful and amazing place on earth, and I have been to a lot of breathtaking places. If you have never hiked the narrows, please do yourself a favor and GO!!!!!

August 2008 - Big trip to Europe. Despite feeling more fatigue than ever before in my entire life, I was feeling pretty good at 4 weeks pregnant. Well, that was July 31st. Now fast forward a day to August 1st when we arrive in Europe. Thus begins my adventures in nausea-land. We spent a couple weeks in the Czech Republic visiting Dave's family and enjoying Czech. We then took a monumental train-ride to Ibbenburen, Germany where we spent time with and attended our dear friends Melanie and Andres' wedding. This was all very good, but like I said, I was SICK-E-MCGEE!

Dave and his cute grandma in her home in Vojnice, Czech. We spent a lot of time there visiting.

You can never be too sick to visit the Monkey Zoo in Rheine, Germany. This place is so cool. there are hardly anybody there and the monkeys just run free. They come visit your shoulder and they have little baby monkeys running all over acres of wooded paths. It's pretty damn awesome. I am 8 weeks pregnant here.

Melanie and Andres on their wedding day. Their wedding was so much fun. It went until dawn the next morning. We love these Germans. Incidentally, Melanie got pregnant shortly after we left and now Melanie and I are due to have babies within 2 months of each other. Awesome-O!

August 2008 - Baby Vala gets it's womb name - Buckley Schumpert (refer to previous blogs for full explanation.)

August 2008 - Dave starts his new job teaching - like, high school kids can be like, so totally annoying -OMG!

August 2008 - I start my second year of teaching third grade. I'm not gonna lie, I was a little worried that I would puke my guts out in front of the kids every couple of hours due to the pregnancy sickness, but I managed to get to the bathroom when need be and made it through that tumultuous time.

Aug-Oct 2008 - I am seriously wondering what I have gotten myself into. I hated this period of being pregnant. I thought the feeling shitty all the time was NEVER going to end.

Oct 2008 - One of the first days I started feeling normal again was at Jessi and Dalan's wedding. They are super duper wonderfully fantastic friends of ours and their wedding was a blast.

Cute Jessi and Dalan at their wedding.

VaRonica, me, Julie, Leigh and Misty at Jessi's wedding

November 2008- We discover that Buckley Schumpert is a boy (again, refer to previous blog for my feelings on that.)

November 2008 - I start a blog! I figure this is a good way to document the goings on of the Vala's. I save my posts so that years from now I can ridicule myself and maybe let Buckley Schumpert ridicule us, also.

December 2008 - I reach my 3rd trimester at the very end of December. I am feeling okay but I'm just waiting for a couple weeks when I can no longer zip up my coat and I can't see my toes.