7.31.2012

two years ago i wore this dress. 

and the most expensive shoes i have ever bought, including running shoes.

posed, preened, and wore flowers in my hair.

and enjoyed feeling the beauty a bride enjoys on her day.

most importantly, i married travis randy bodtcher. 

as i have written many a time, the first year of marriage was tough on us. we were thankful to hit that year mark and move on. now that we have hit the two year mark, it's amazing how great things have become between us. i'm sure if we hadn't gone through that refiner's fire, we wouldn't be as solid as we are today. 

year two definitely threw some curve balls, like house selling, ptsd, and paying for my education. but we did it! 

i've noticed a lot of changes in us in the past year. it seems that we aren't as quick to get angry with each other, even me, and that's a big deal because it turns out i have a slight temper. we have gotten pretty legit at reading each others' minds, even over the phone. we have become better cheerleaders for each other's accomplishments. we seem to have a lot more fun together. something as simple as cooking dinner turns into a party when we are together. watching the olympics together this week has reduced me to tears of laughter, between travis's insanely loud patriotism and our terrible asian and russian accents we use to narrate the events to each other. he is the first person i want to talk to when i get good news. knowing each other so well has turned into not only a safehouse for both of us, but a huge amount of laughter and joking. we are just so happy! the only issue is that we aren't able to spend enough time together between our jobs. it's always a good thing when you wish for more time together, right? 

yesterday was a great celebration of our anniversary. we slept in, had a couple's massage, saw the new batman movie, (because last year on our anniversary we were crazy and watched the first two.) had dinner at teppanyaki, (where we had our wedding luncheon) and went mini golfing. we have a (sometimes) friendly rivalry going, and i'm sad to report travis beat me last night. whomp, whomp, whomp. 

the best part of the day was at dinner. travis looked at me and said, "you know, we really have it together." i asked him if he meant financially, as we are doing better now that we're both working. he told me he meant the two of us, being a married couple. we have it together. it was a battle at first, but we are both so incredibly happy now. love you travis! can't wait to see what next year brings! 

photo credit, liana bodtcher.

keeping secrets from husbands and other tales of epic failures

i'm a bad liar.

ok, that's not entirely true.

once, during my first year of college, i convinced some guys who lived in my apartment building that i had a twin sister. see, there was this incident in the parking lot where i almost backed into their car and of course i was thoroughly embarrassed. probably because of the shortness of the shorts i was wearing (i had just come from the gym) the guys were quick to forgive me and invite me to hang out sometime. they walked to their apartment on the first floor and i took the elevator up to the third, mortified, thinking, phew, close one!

then a few weeks later, i ran into (not literally) the guys again.
"oh hey! it's that girl who almost hit us!" they said. "hey!"
i pretended not to recognize them. "sorry? have we met?"
"uh, don't you remember that time you almost hit us in the parking lot?" they looked confused.
i twisted my face into an expression of recognition. "ohhhh! my sister told me about you! yeah, she was so embarrassed!"

and so began the tale of my twin sister, the terrible driver. they ate it up. and the rest of the semester, whenever i saw the group of guys, i alternated between the twins' identities.

so yeah, i can tell a tall tale, but for the most part, i'm a bad liar, especially with travis. he just knows me too well for me to get away with anything. so when it came to planning his surprise party, i vowed to be a blank wall. he would never know what hit him. turns out he knew i had been acting funny from the moment i started planning. travis's dad helped me distract him and get him out of the house, and i literally texted him "we should be actors! we are amazing!" then later travis told me that he had been on to us the entire time. oh well.

i had a lot of fun planning, decorating, and hosting his party. here are a few pictures, pretty terrible pictures, but hey i was busy being a hostess right?

i promise they were having fun. that's just how travis's dad smiles. 

 soup bar, my dad's famous clam chowder and julie's broccoli cheese. 

my parents and brother zane

newly married derrick and grandma jackson

the luscious cake i whipped up. 

all lit up

blowing out his candles 

the decor. along with the rest of the pinterest world, 

i am obsessed with making banners. 

here is the recipe for the whip cream frosting:

cream cheese 

powdered sugar

vanilla extract 

heavy whipping cream

add the first three ingredients together and mix until moistened

then while the mixer is running, slowly add the cream 

mix until thick and fluffy

 also, i added some raspberry jam to the filling for tartness. 

it was fun to throw a party in our new house, even if the birthday boy wasn't surprised. i'll keep working on my deceptive abilities for next year's party. 

xo

what it looks like when travis and i try to take a familly easter picture together

"no i'm not taking a picture!!! i'm hungry!!!!

"fine, but will you please figure out where to put that camera! 

it's been twenty minutes and i know you want a tripod 

but we don't have one right now." 

me, "uhhh no this one is awkward!" 

"oh look we got a cute one of you! now me!"

"no this looks cheesy." 

nice, trav. 

and then a bunch of racy cleavage shots 

which i will not share here. 

and then thirty minutes later....

this was the best we got.

note the moving boxes on the left. 

yeah we need to get a tripod. 

easter was fab. 

checked our new lds congregation, which was awesome. 

didn't eat traditional easter dinner of ham and cheesy potatoes, but instead cooked 

STROGANOFF

which i feel warrants caplocks and a strong german accent. 

took a nap. took a walk. kissed a bit. 

yeah, i love being married to this man. 

happy easter from the charles bodtchers! 

xo

dishwashers, vacuums, new homes, graduating from college, i guess i could just say this is what's been goin' on lately...

remember that time i fell off the social media scene?
we don't have internet at home until monday... so i have to make do with my phone and i just HATE touch screens. bleh. so if it seemed like i never answered you or cared about anything you blogged about, i promise it was because we are waiting for internet. (i am currently using the school library to write this post.)

as for the new house, it's heaven! travis and i feel like we are staying at a really nice hotel, having some kind of strange vacation. we walk around the house in awe, asking each other if this is real life.  pictures to come on monday when we get our intarwebs hooked up. but the house is everything i've ever wanted. you know, within reason.

plus, we have a dishwasher. you mean you just put the dishes inside and push a button and it washes them. for you. ????
also, we bought our very first vacuum. brand new, still in the box, off KSL classifieds. 70 bucks. DAMN. you know you're getting old and boring when you're stoked on using the new vacuum.
in one month from now, i will have a bachelor's degree.
which is awesome.

as previously stated, i am not pregnant. i had a lovely full blown, although late, period. and can i just share something i love so much about travis? so i try not to take drugs for pain, because i get terrible migraines all the time and if i took drugs for pain every time i wanted them, i would probably overdose. and due to the shiny copper iud in my uterus, my periods are filled with extreme cramping. i have had doctors tell me it's fine to take 800 ibuprofens left and right, but i just don't feel super comfortable with doing that. so i use a rice bag heated to extreme temperatures to calm down the cramps. usually works like a charm. yeah, yeah, boring person information, get to the point. sweet travis takes such good care of me that week i'm on my period. if i wake up in the middle of the night in extreme pain, he heats up the rice bag, brings me a yogurt, (so i'm not popping pills on an empty stomach) and encourages me to take a pill. (there are perks to being married to a paramedic fireman; he basically does that for his job.) even if he's just settled into bed and i start to get up to heat that rice bag, he always jumps up to do it for me. he also encourages me to eat junk food, takes me for fro yo, and brings me chocolates. and he never mocks me for my granny panties i wear that week. seriously, true love guys.

welp, this was a short, mostly boring post. time to get back to doing homework. i just took a major test and i have a paper to write and a quiz to take. oh crap, and another paper to write. so over this whole "college thing."

rigor mortis senioritis sets in. and if you're not a fan of The Who's john entwistle, that joke's not going to be funny at all.

xo

searching for home: part 1

our house. is a mess.

and we haven't even packed our bedrooms yet.
it is AWESOME!

this is what it sounds like when we pack:
travis, taking down the kitchen table, says, "wow, i remember putting this table up with nate and us eating eating our first meal in this house." pause. "and you were so mad at me."
i laugh, "yeah i was! and you were so scared of me!"

travis and nate, eating the first meal in our house

we laugh now, but when we were first married, it was a pretty tough adjustment. sex was painful and scary, which made travis feel guilty and withdraw, making me wonder why travis was acting so different, leading to me getting really defensive and angry, leading travis to think i regretted marrying him.... etc.

then there was the house. it's a long story, but the reasons we bought this house weren't really great reasons. we were trying to find something in a certain amount of time so we could get that $8,000 tax credit. (that we didn't end up getting, but ended up being a huge blessing because if we had gotten it, we would have had to pay it back before selling our house.)  we didn't really know anything about buying a house. i'll just leave it at that. but the house was a disaster. filthy, crawling with spiders, covered in construction mess. etc.

then came the adjustment of living alone 2-3 days a week while travis went to work. i really resented his job for a while- and i know, i should have been thankful he had such a great job, but i wasn't.

then there was the fact that we were living in the neighborhood he grew up in. a great neighborhood, but i just never felt like it was mine. it was like i was visiting his, you know?

sorry, this is becoming a list of negative things. but to understand why i'm so thankful we are moving, you have to know the reasons it was really hard living in this house. every room in our house is full of memories of sadness. the other day my mom was over, helping me when i hurt my back. she was sitting in our t.v. room, saying how nice it looked. i told her what i though about every time i see that room, our first night spent in the house.

 our first night back from our honeymoon. we had barely spoken to each other on the plane ride home. my parents picked us up from the airport with a cute sign, "welcome home bodtchers!" i saw the name "bodtcher" and panicked, because i didn't understand how travis and i had had such a good thing before getting married and now all the sudden we weren't speaking. and now i was supposed to just be a bodtcher? when my parents asked us how our trip was, both of us were probably thinking the same thing: i feel like a failure because sex is impossible, and i think my spouse hates my guts. and i can't believe i have a spouse. when we walked into our house, it was a mess, the floor covered in brown paper to protect it from all the sanding and mudding we would have to do. florescent lights cast shadows on the dingy walls. my dad looked at us, perhaps reading the panic in our eyes, and said, "this place is going to be great, you know. once you get it all painted and decorated and remodeled." i wasn't sure i believed him.

then my parents left us alone. our first night in our house. a bed was set up in the only room that didn't have paper covering the floor. it wasn't our bedspread, just someone's extra we were borrowing. there was an ikea catalog someone had left us. i got into bed and started leafing through it, trying to start conversation with travis about decorating our house. he disagreed with every suggestion i made, probably feeling stressed out about money just looking at how expensive everything was. we had a fight, then turned to face opposite walls, and i fell asleep with tears on my cheeks, wondering what had happened to us.

that is what i think of every time i see that t.v. room.

there are so many other memories similar to that one. our first year of marriage was hard. between all the normal newly married adjusting, remodeling our house, travis's job, paying for my schooling, travis's mentor committing suicide, my PTSD and sex being so scary, fighting about our families- "make your family stop telling me to have a baby"- travis's damn dog roxy and her nine puppies, travis having to live paycheck to paycheck for the first time in his life...  we both agree that it's a miracle we came out of that and stayed married. but we did. we stuck it out, started figuring it out,  and we are so happy now.

travis started talking to me about wanting to move last january. neither of us have ever felt at home in our house. i have always had a weird way of thinking about inanimate objects as alive, (like when i used to put band-aids on the kitchen table because it had an owie...) and i have just always felt that our house didn't really want us there. maybe it was sick of all the disagreements and anger. i know, it sounds crazy. but it was never home.

so when we say we are excited to move, it's more than just being excited for a new house with a dishwasher and more space. although those things will be a huge upgrade from what we have now, we are so excited for a fresh start in a place that feels like home. and i'll always be thankful for the lessons we learned in our red brick house, as painful as they were. because through all of the fights and doubt, i always knew travis was the one. that even though we were making each other miserable, we could be great together. we could be happy. i thought i knew that when we were dating and happy. but if you're completely miserable with a person, and still want to be with that person, that is when you really know.

i'm so thankful for travis and for that first awful year of marriage we struggled through.
probably more thankful it's over and things are good now.

guys, it's really happening! we are moving!

and if you need to talk about how hard marriage can be, feel free to email me. i won't judge you. :)

happy weekend! -xo
 

valentine's.

today was probably the best valentine's day i have ever had.
i woke up early and it felt like christmas, because i had a surprise for travis sitting out on the table, just waiting for him to wake up and be surprised.

yeah, travis was nominated for the husband of the year award by the american committee of husbandry. sorry ladies, maybe yours will take next year! just a basket full of treats, a cd, a candy mustache (because travis keeps sneakily trying to grow out his 'stache and i'm trying my damndest to discourage it.)  and something red and lacy.

it's a handkerchief, guys. jeeze, pervs.
jk.

so after i dragged him out of bed woke him up nicely to see his present, we headed out to breakfast.
please, please if you live in murray and want to go out to breakfast, don't go to IHOP. instead, head over to the tea rose diner for either american or thai breakfast. or lunch or dinner for that matter. could go on and on about the curries. best thai food (in utah) i have ever had.

yeah, it's a dive. the owner is from thailand and she is quite the character. they also have a challenge that if you can eat a dish with their #10 spice level, you get your picture on the wall. but beware, you have to sign a waver and take antacids before and after you eat. anyway, this is why you should come here to eat:

don't worry, travis's french toast came with sausage, eggs, and hash browns, too. but seriously, those pancakes...

after breakfast, we watched some storage wars, decided i should skip my first class, and then headed to the gym to play some basketball. not sure if i have ever revealed this, but travis is quite a ball player (like last week when he was playing with some random guys and they called him lebron james, yeah he was pretty proud) and he's also a great coach. he always beats me, but he's pretty gracious about it. then we came home and celebrated our love... in a very loving, adult, and delightful way.

then i had my research methods class i can't miss, so i headed up to the U for three hours. the worst part about a night class is the 45 minute train ride home, but i'm sure you can guess who was waiting outside my class with flowers and a big kiss. (and the car, obvi.)

travis was shivering when he handed them to me. he hadn't wanted to turn on the heater because he was afraid it would wilt my flowers, so he drove all the way in the cold. pretty adorable. oh and as we were driving back, he popped the in new ingrid michaelson cd for me. seriously, travis is the husband of the year.

love them.

"i asked for peonies, but they aren't in season."

-travis r. bodtcher, HOTY. 

(husband of the year.)

so then when we got home from class at 10pm, naturally, i wanted to take a few pictures with the two of us. travis was a pretty good sport about it. also, he was wearing a hat. so enjoy that hair of his. it was the best we could do with low lighting and 10pm smiles.

wining and dining

travis came home early from wyoming. and we partied like rockstars.

 we hit the good stuff hard on friday nights. 

in the wine glasses i found at the DI for a buck. 

and then ish gets a little crazy

trav cooked his signature meal for me

chicken fettuccine alfredo

but this time i experimented with the sauce 

and then he described to me his mustache plans for next week. 

also, our kitchen is pretty dark, like the lighting is terrible, so the pictures of our food, look pretty disgusting. i promise in real life, it was delicious. and no, i didn't take pictures of each step of each dish to walk you through making it. but i will leave you with the recipe for the sauce, which is gluten/butter/heavy cream free and also delicious. and easy.

• roughly a cup of low fat cream cheese 
• some milk... we used skim 
• a butt ton of fresh parmesan and mozzarella cheese
• a few cloves of finely sliced garlic
• salt, pepper, onion, parsley

i think that was it for ingredients. you add everything together in a bowl and mix and then throw it on the stove with the chicken. it seemed to thicken just fine after cooling.
enjoy!