Short Life Update

Hi blog readers! I recognize that this blog is nearly solely for our personal journaling and the very few people read it, but we thought it was about time to post a short update on what has been going on in our lives and what our plans are for the near future that don't directly concern Eloise.

Dustan is still attending BYU, working on his master's degree in Robotics. As of this last winter semester though, he has officially finished all his classes! Yay, done with college classes forever! He finished with an impressive cumulative GPA of 3.9 for his undergrad and graduate classes. Now, he is just working every day to finish his maser's research and writing his thesis, which he hopes to finish and defend by late August.

Dustan is officially an employee of Raytheon Missile Systems, but it on an educational leave of absence until he finishes his master's degree. Once he is finished, we will be moving to Tucson, Arizona! We are very excited and ready to start the next phase. We are hoping to be settled in Tucson by Labor Day, though the date is very flexible and depends on Dustan's master's degree.

Dustan is very passionate about mountain biking. And by passionate, I mean obsessed, haha. He goes mountain biking every chance he can, usually at least four days a week but ideally more. He signed up to do a few downhill mountain biking enduro races this summer, that he'll hopefully get to do still even with a recent bad crash that caused some injuries (5 stictches on his chin and a rotator cuff tear that we'll find out more about at an upcoming doctor appointment).

I (Ellen) quit working as soon as I had Eloise, and now have the happy and full-time job as a stay at home mom! It is wonderful, hard, and very rewarding, in many ways I didn't expect. I am ready to get down to Tucson and start building a life down there--ideally before the heat kills us ;) I recently finished a watercolor art class through the city of Provo and really enjoyed that, and hope to get into painting more. Dustan also has purchased me a mountain bike in the hopes that I can join him for some rides as I get better. That is a work in progress!

Since we possibly only have a few months left in August, we have a few things we are looking forward to and hope to do. We are looking forward to lots of friends and family visiting throughout the summer, and the upcoming Nielson family reunion in Oregon. We want to take Lou camping and get her a little more out of her comfort zone (and us, for that matter, haha). We also plan to revamp and kind of restart our photography business. It got put on hold while I was so sick being pregnant then after Eloise was born. But we want to get back into and get some great shoots this summer! Let us know if you need some pictures taken ;) There are some great places in Utah that somehow we have never visited that we want to get to for some weekend getaways. Those include Bear Lake, Goblin Valley, Grand Escalante, and more. We were hoping to do more last summer (our first ever summer in Utah), but I ended up being so sick while pregnant that we didn't do a whole lot. Hopefully a baby won't slow us down this summer!

Basically, life is good and we have a lot to look forward to in the coming months :)