June

To speak my truth: I don’t really love the GBOMB approach to monthly reviews.

There. I said it.

I love posting a monthly review. I love remembering the stuff I did that month. I love looking through the pictures.

But I hate having to think up stuff that fits in the “Bad” category. Life can totally suck sometimes. There are ups and downs. Most of the time, though, I forget the downs. Or I learn from them (or hope to someday learn from them). But with social media too often portraying the sparkly life we want people to see, I always think, “No, I need to be real and post genuine stuff, good and bad.” So I sit down at the computer and rack my brain for all the crappy stuff that’s happened in the last month aaaaaaand I hate it. And now I’m thinking it’s not very genuine at all because that’s not how my mind works most of the time.

So. For now, I’m hanging the old GBOMB up. Retiring it, if you will. Maybe not permanently. We’ll see if I can come up with something to replace it with (any ideas are more than welcome!).

But, for now, here are a few highlights from June:

Oh, they say when you marry in June…: (Ten points to anyone who knows what that’s from;). Ben and I celebrated our 6 year wedding anniversary! I know there are billions of people who’ve been married longer than six years but I still feel very accomplished every time we hit another year. We drove up to Utah for that weekend and, while we didn’t do anything extravagant to celebrate, we did eat at the Happy Sumo as well as Leatherby’s so I’d definitely call that a success. The day after our anniversary we went to the Living Planet Aquarium and had to reminisce a bit because we did the very same the day after our wedding. Ha! It was fun.

I feel incredibly lucky to be married to Ben. I think I hardly knew what I was getting when I married him. But, lucky for me, he’s an infinitely better man than I had originally thought. I’m certainly grateful that he’s mine, that I get eternity with him. Being married to my best friend brings a happiness that can’t be found elsewhere. Our life’s not perfect but I love it.

We left Flagstaff: Let me just say that moving has been on our minds for months now. We’ve weighed our options time and time again after every shift in our possible future. And honestly, we didn’t ever feel like we got any sort of strong answer about moving. But we did come to a point where we realized paying rent was draining our limited money faster than anything else, so why stay when Ben was done with school and, subsequently finished working at NAU? We decided to “move” (meaning store our stuff and live with Ben’s mom) and things moved incredibly quickly after that. Within a week we had our stuff in boxes, my mom and dad came down with a trailer, we loaded up, cleaned and pulled out of town. Leaving Flagstaff was difficult. Just looking at the above picture makes me teary eyed. We really love it there and will always have fond memories; that was where our two babies were born after all. But onward and upward, right?

Job search update: So…I don’t feel quite ready to share everything about Ben’s job search just because things are still shifting and up in the air. But know that it’s going well and there are things in the works. All good things, all good things; )

Summertime: This summer hasn’t gone at all as we had planned but I’m super grateful for the extra time we’ve had to spend with family. I got some bonus sister time when we went to Utah at the beginning of June. And in the few weeks we’ve been living with Ben’s mom we’ve been totally spoiled with good company. Things have been crazy and busy but we’ve been surrounded by loved ones and that has made the uncertainty so much more bearable.