A bit about Jeremy

I grew up in Orem, UT, which is a town about 40 miles south of Salt Lake City.   Some of my favorite things growing up were video games, books and our tree house.

In a large way video games shaped how I am today. Not because of the actual games, but how we got into them. When I was 8 or 9, before we got a Nintendo . My dad got us an atari, with a book full of games. The problem was we had to actually write the code for the games ourselves.

The issue with this is he didn’t get us a disk drive to save them on. So we only had a game until the power went out, then we had to start over. This seemed like torture at the time, but has been a skill that I have used throughout my life, and into my professional career as a software developer. I always look back fondly at the things my parents did for us as kids to entertain us.

Another thing that has always remained with me in life is my need to always have a book to read. Growing up my grandma had a room that has Sci-Fi and Fantasy books on every wall. I would spend hours down there just trying to find the book that I wanted to read. Reading Lord of the Rings and Dune in elementary school didn’t really help out my social standing, but it has for sure helped me out in life. I can’t count how many times I have read Dune, and read it at least once a year… usually more.

Another fun thing my parents did for us as a child was give us a bucket of nails and some wood. My older brother and I of course did the logical thing with this and build a treehouse. We spent countless hours in the tree house making it higher, and most likely more dangerous. From the treehouse we could easily get on top of the roof of our home. We had to be sneaky about that because my parents would yell at us if they could hear us walking on the roof. One summer my dad gave us some semi-thick electrical wire and a pulley so we could make a zip line out of the tree house. This was a fantastic idea! We would zip down from the top of our tree house to the edge of the yard where it was connected to the fence. The only drawback is the wire would stretch over time, so we did the natural thing and would wrap it around a branch. We would wrap this multiple times until the inevitable would happen and the wire would snap. Surprisingly no broken bones happened during this fun. That didn't happen until we had a water bed mattress filled with air by a vacuum, that we would launch each other across the yard on, similar to this... Water Bed Launch

Growing up as a kid was always a fun adventure for me, my parents always tried hard to make sure we had the best time ever, all while using our imagination to do it. Imagination is something I already love to pass along to my nephews, and I am looking forward to passing that along to whatever kiddo we are lucky enough to adopt.

Getting to know Kara-musicals, popcorn, & couch forts

Every time I hear the phrase "getting to know you" this song pops into my head https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MNANgFCYpk. Yep, I grew up watching musicals and The King and I is one of my favorites. Some of my other favorites include:

• My Fair Lady (https://youtu.be/pwNKyTktDIE?t=10 "just you wait Henry Higgins, just you wait" my sister and I have this tattooed on our shoulders because we love it so much and watched it so often as kids)
• 7 Brides for 7 Brothers
• Hello Dolly
• The Sound of Music
• Oklahoma (yes, I think of singing it every time I hear someone say they are from here)
• https://youtu.be/ZbrnXl2gO_k?t=51
• Disney ones including Beauty & The Beast, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Mary Poppins, Summer Magic, and Babes in Toyland

As the second of four children, I grew up spending a lot of time with my siblings watching these movies. They are nostalgic for all of us, each has their own favorite of course, but I always remember snuggling up on the couch or floor with our blankets and watching movies with homemade popcorn and orange julius'.

A must try recipe!

My mom used to make extra good popcorn with lots of salt and butter (not exactly super healthy, but it was so good!) My younger sister, Callie (she's a year and a half younger than I am) and I used to sneak the air popper into the bathroom on the other end of the house and make ourselves popcorn at night. It cracks me up every time I think of us making popcorn in a tiny bathroom in the pedestal sink thinking that our dad couldn't hear us giggling and hearing it pop (it was SO loud!). 

This particular air popper is so nostalgic to me that I stole it from my dad's house when I got married and still make popcorn in it. Not in the bathroom anymore, but it always reminds me of when I was a little girl.You can always find me with a blanket as well, I love snuggling with a soft blanket even when it's summer time. I actually like to keep the house cool enough that you need one so it's perfect.

Callie and I as adults, who knew we were
two crazy kids popping popcorn in a bathroom once

Other things I love from my childhood are the memories from building blanket forts with the cushions from our ugly bright orange couch. We used to bring in all of the kitchen chairs to the front room to help hold up our dozen or so blankets and crawl through the legs. Of course, eventually, one of us kids would get mad at something and jump on the blankets bringing the whole castle down into the molten lava that somehow soft pillowy couch cushions were always safe from.

Not our original, but this color of
orange is close to our old fort cushions

I imagine my dad seeing it like this

One of my other favorite memories was getting to share a room with my sister until we were teenagers. We may have not always gotten along 100% of the time, but we had a lot of fun times. We used to have bunk beds that could separate into opposite ends of our bedroom. Well we decided that it would be fun to play a little game where you hid things under your pillow or on top of your headboard and then when the lights went out you'd throw said things to try and hit the other sister with it. These things usually did not consist of soft things like teddy bears or fluffy pillows....no....they were more like hard plastic dolls, small wooden boxes that once held treasures, hair brushes, and such. You never knew when the other would throw it, if you'd get it, and with what. We used to stay up giggling like well, small little girls to be exact. We once got in so much trouble that we had to go knock down corn stalks in our garden because "we had so much energy to burn off". During this punishment time, where we still continued to giggle in our pajamas under the bright moon in the middle of our garden- Callie cut her finger on a stalk of corn so bad that she should have gotten stitches, she now sports my favorite thing about her....a scar on her pinky from our shenanigans.

The stories could go on and on, but my hope in sharing these stories is that you'll get a better understanding of how important family is and having a childhood that you can look back on with fondness. A childhood that is full of silly stories that can one day bring a smile to their face as they write them down to tell others. As a parent, I want to make sure that my child has these experiences and can remember the fun times that we have together as a family. I know there will be some unfun ones in there along the way, I'm not perfect and nobody is, but a good healthy dose of the good nostalgic memories is what I'm aiming for.