Family

His

My parents taught me to play. Every July my family (including extended family) would go to Lake Powell in Arizona and stay for the week on a houseboat.  During that week we went water skiing, jet skiing, cliff jumping, fishing, and played games.  This was always my favorite week of the year. This has allowed not only my immediate family to come together but for all of us to come closer together as an extended family as well.

My parents taught me to love people from all different walks of life. As a little boy my dad was in medical school, so we moved around a lot. Most little kids get scared to move, but I actually liked getting to meet different people and see different places. One of the greatest periods in my life was while serving a mission in Argentina. Just like in my childhood, I got to travel around, meeting people and seeing a different way of life. My parents instilled in me a love for learning about different languages and cultures, and I hope to do the same for my children. 

My parents taught me to enjoy life. My family likes spending time together. My parents used to make Friday nights a special family night. While they were in medical school, funds were tight, so they’d save money and set it aside to occasionally buy us McDonald’s ice cream cones. But we didn’t realize we didn’t have much money. We had everything we needed. We played sports together and hiked together and took road trips across the country together to see family. 

Hers

My parents taught me where I came from. My parents are good storytellers. They’d read to us and tell us funny Dudley Do-Right stories when we were little, but the best was our birth story. Every year on our birthdays, my Mom would tell us our birth story, and we’d all get excited to hear the same details we heard the year before. My story involved a stormy Saturday night and the doctor not recognizing I was breech until my mom was in labor. Brad and I look forward to telling our little ones their birth story every year. It will be a story about a hero who loved them and a husband and wife who couldn’t wait to become parents. I think they’ll wait for the details every year, just like my siblings and I did. 


My parents taught me how to love. I'm the middle child of five kids. I love being part of a big family because growing up, it always meant I had someone to play with. And now that I'm grown up, it always gives me someone to talk to. I don’t know when it started and frankly who started it, but my family has a tradition that whenever we leave each other, we say, “See ya, love ya, bye!” Better than the tradition of saying it though is that we really mean it. My family members are my best friends, second only to my husband, Brad.

My parents taught me the importance of hard work. I grew up on a farm, so there was always work to be done. As little kids, we’d put on irrigating boots and hoe the weeds from the sugar beet fields. We thought we were such hard workers. I realize now that really, we accomplished very little in those beet fields. Many days I’d get “sick” and end up sitting on the four wheeler eating Twinkies. (Somehow that always made me feel better.) My Dad and Mom let us work in the fields to learn how to work. If they wanted the best quality work, they probably would have kept us out of the fields altogether. I’m glad they sent us out there—we learned to work, and we learned to love being together regardless what we were doing.