Friday, September 12, 2008

Recent Pictures of the Kids

This is Cory and Hailey just being cute a week or so before we moved from our apartment.

Trent's sister, Stacey took some pictures for us of Hailey. Cory got in some of them, too.

Whoa, mama! We told Cory to give Hailey a kiss and this is what we got! Let's hope he's not quite so aggressive when he's a teenager.


Our Move

A lot has changed with us, but then again not everything has changed that we would have liked!! We had to leave our Married Student Apartments the end of August since Trent was no longer a student. We still did not have a job, though, so that made our decision on where to go and what to do a rather difficult one. See, most people when they graduate from college, they expect everything to be rosy and perfect and within a few weeks, they will have their dream job, buy a house, and their lives will be perfect. While that has happened to a few people we know (not mentioning any names!!) it certainly does not happen to everyone. We are learning some very important lessons in patience, that's for sure. We're not quite sure if we wasted the last 3 years getting a Masters Degree or not, but right now, it sure feels that way.

So my sister Stephanie, who lives in Layton, Utah and has 5 kids of her own, offered us to come live in her empty 2 bedrooms in her basement while we continued the job search. At the time (end of August), we thought we were quite close to securing a job in Cinicinnati, OH. They had already once offered Trent a job a few months ago and we knew they were still hiring, so we thought we would have the job for sure. Well, shortly after moving up here, they let us know that they decided to change their minimum qualifications for that job and wanted at least one year of experience as a clinical researcher instead of little or no experience. How lucky for us.

So now we are completely back to square one with the job search. It has helped to move into a ward with working professionals because everyone seems to be networking for us and trying to get Trent a job. Not to get our hopes up or anything (heaven forbid!) but the hiring manager for Myriad Genetics lives in this ward and promised Trent a phone interview after Trent sent him his resume. Trent has applied to jobs over the last few months at Myriad, but they never came to anything. But supposedly, as long as someone there KNOWS you, then everything suddenly changes. He also had a pretty good phone interview a couple of days ago with ARUP, a medical services laboratory company in Salt Lake City. And that job would not be doing clinical research. It would be more laboratory science work. But we are quickly realizing it is pretty much near impossible to get a job doing clinical research with no experience. So now we are going about ways to get his foot slowly in the door. It may take 2-3 years before he can do that yet.

We are hoping and praying that since we really wanted a time limit on the number of weeks we would invade someone's home, that we will at least have a job offer by the end of October. We told my sister we didn't want to invade them for more than 2 months. At least if we have a job offer by then, though, we can start house hunting and at least feeling a bit more optimistic. If we have absolutely nothing still, then we will start apartment hunting and have Trent continue to work as a pharmacy technician and just go live in an apartment for a while. I guess on the positive side, he does already have a job that at least makes enough for us to be independent on--just not enough to buy a house.

We're still trying to get Cory into preschool--he cries almost every morning when his 3 cousins, ages 9, 7, and 5 head off to school and he has to stay home with the "babies", his sister Hailey, and his other two cousins, ages 3 and 8 months. It's especially difficult for him because all last year we had him in Headstart for 4 days a week and 2 years ago, I had him involved in a preschool 2 days a week with a few moms in our court. So for him to be almost 5 years old, and doing absolutely no preschool, is so hard for him!

Hailey is adjusting very well to living here--she loves her cousin, Rebecca, who is 3 years old. She also adores baby Jacob and screams for job anytime he wakes up from his naps. I swear, my kids needed to be born into a family with 4 children already. Too bad that's not going to happen!

My pregnancy continues to go well. I'm almost 18 weeks along now. We'll find out the sex of the baby in 2 weeks. Yeah! We'll be sure to let everyone know.

We'll also be sure to let everyone know how the job search goes--trust me, if you haven't heard anything, that means absolutely nothing has happened.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Extreme Broadway

So, Karen may have mentioned that her family did an extreme broadway production for the last family reunion. Karen's brother had recorded the whole thing, but his kids recorded over parts of the production, so I told him I would burn the copy I have and send it to him. To make a long story short, all of my blank DVDs are in storage from our big move into Stephanie and Zach's house in Layton so I am going to post them on our blog and hope that he can download them onto his computer. Anyway, you are welcome to watch, but it is a little lengthy. I would particularly suggest finding Karen in her Hairspray debut. She is so "HOT." I think it is the 7th video (after the cute little dance number). FYI: This is not the whole show. My camera ran out of juice during the last 15ish minutes so this is all I have. If you watch the whole thing, you must be really bored, but I hope you enjoyed it. (Karen will be mad if I don't mention that she IS wearing a lot of extra padding. Not that it isn't totally obvious since she is normally stick skinny.)