A little about us....

Well, Jason and I have finally decided to get our blog up and going. We hope to use it as a way to communicate with friends/family as well as an excuse for us to record what's going on in our lives.

To start off with, here's a little bit about each of us:

Jason grew up in Goldendale, Washington
(in case you don't know where that is, see here:


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Jason is the middle child in his family, with an older brother, Sean, and a younger sister, Jayde. He was homeschooled and has always loved learning about science and how things work. Jason served a 2 year mission in the Chile, Viña del Mar mission. Currently, he's studying Biology at BYU with the goal to go to med school after graduating from BYU in about 2 years.

This semester, he's taking a pretty heavy course load of mostly science classes including: Plant Diversity Bio 220B, Microbiology 241, Human Devlopement SFL 210, Physics 106 and 108, Book of Mormon, and Intro to Medicine. Jason is also working part time at the Global Service Desk through BYU. The GSD basically provides all kinds of tech support for the LDS church. Jason likes his job a lot because he gets to work with computers and they've been great to work around his class schedule.

Ilarene is from Centerville, Utah (see below)

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Ilarene is the oldest of five kids (Delia, Alex, Nick and Sam) and is lucky to have her family so close. She and Jason have lots of chances to visit and spend time with them.

Ilarene is studying Biology Education at BYU and graduating in April (crazy!). She is currently student teaching at Lakeridge Jr. High in Orem, (which is conveniently located only about 15 minutes away from where we're living). Student teaching has been an awesome experience because of her placement with a great co-teacher and cooperating teacher. While it definitely is very demanding, it has been so fulfilling as well.(Posts will surely follow later with some funny stories...) Ilarene is hoping to get a job in the fall teaching in a Junior High somewhere near Provo while Jason finishes up school.


We met in January 2010 through two of our best friends, Jamie Williams and Trent Despain. After only a week of knowing each other, we started dating and have pretty much seen each other every day since (except for a few weeks during the spring when Jason was living in Washington). We got engaged in June under the stars at a park in Provo. We were originally planning on getting married in December of 2010, but thank heavens we decided we didn't want to wait that long! Instead, we got married in the Salt Lake temple on August 13th (friday the 13th!!). It was such an amazing day to be sealed in the temple and know that we get to be together forever. Also, we loved sharing the day with so many people that we love. We had a fantastic photographer, Julie Cannon, and we would highly recommend her!! See her blog here for more information and awesome photos: www.juliedphotography.blogspot.com.