2013 in review!

Hello, blogosphere! I have been MIA for a while, mostly due to family events, work and catching up on sleep whenever I can! But here I am, and 2013 is already over. I can't believe it!

New Year's has never been a favorite holiday of mine, mostly because I have a hard time staying awake past 10:30 on most nights. I like setting goals on a normal basis, so new year's resolutions don't have too much weight with me. But I love the fact that the new year prompts me to reflect on my past year in gratitude and to identify lessons along the way. Also, Matt proposed to me on New Year's Eve two years ago, so that makes it a lot more special :)

Matt and I have been so blessed this year. 

Here is our 2013 in review... mostly in pictures because those are the best! 

Matt thrived and I survived in the brutal SLC winter! It is so beautiful, but makes me grateful again for my rainy Seattle winters.

We sent off our favorite sister missionary to Toronto, CA.

Matt and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary with some snowboarding and a weekend away. 

I got into UW, the grad school of my dreams! Matt graduated from BYU with his Bachelor's in Exercise Science. Woo hoo!!

We "partied hard" with friends and did lots of camping during our last month living in Utah. I graduated with my Bachelor's in Nursing from the U of U. 

We camped some more at Matt's family property and left the first place we called home together for good. We moved to Seattle to begin our job and house hunt!

We made a quick trip back to Utah for my grandfather's funeral. We were lucky enough to also spend a lot of time with Matt's family! We miss them!!

Our little Lizzie got baptized, marking the end of an era in the Hutchings family! She's getting so old! *tear*

September was a busy month... we moved into an old, dilapidated farm house. We fixed it up and called it home, enchanted by the beauty of the fields and coyotes that came with it. I started my first quarter at the UW and we got to go to Coeur D'Alene and watch Andy play football. 

We both (finally) had jobs in October! Matt started working as a Personal Trainer at the Pro Sports Club and I started working as an RN at Pediatric Associates. We both love our jobs and are so blessed to have work. My best friend Lauren also got married (back in September) but I got to finally see her at her open house here in Seattle!!!

We spent a fantastic Thanksgiving with my family and counted our blessings many times. Also, kept up the tradition of the Turkey Trot! (we also moved out of aforementioned farmhouse, into a townhome in Bothell. We love our new place!)

We went to Matt's swanky work Christmas party where we both won some prizes - yay for Roulette! We got to spend more time with my fam for Christmas and my sister Mallory got ENGAGED! We are so excited for Tyler and Mall and can't wait to welcome him into our family officially!

Have a happy new year and a fun, safe night! Bring on 2014!!

Movin' with my Fitbit

Okay so I've not been very active on social media lately, what with moving and school and work and all that stuff...

But we're all moved now! Thank heavens that whole process is over and done with for a while. We really like our new place, even though it's added about 15-20 minutes on to our commutes. It's a little sad to not live on a cool farm anymore. But to be honest, once it started getting cold outside the novelty of the farmhouse wore out pretty quick with no heat inside! And now we've got some landlords to fix stuff for us! It's great. I like the area of Kenmore a lot. There are many shops, libraries and Starbucks' around so that I am a happy little camper. The King County Metro bus system from Kenmore also got me to school on time, and I didn't have to do any transfers. Great.
Side note: it was a big deal for me to start taking the bus to school about 6 weeks ago. I'm kind of afraid of public transportation because I've had bad experiences of bus schedule incompetence and weirdo guys talking to me. But practice and an exasperation with traffic/parking prices at UW has made me an adopted public busing expert. Kind of. 

So anyways, some REALLY big news is that my sister is here in Seattle!! It's a happy and a sad thing. Great because we are so excited to see her, but she is here to try and figure out some really bad headaches she's been having. So I really hope she and her doctors can figure out how to help her feel better! Please keep her in your prayers. Love you, Mall. (Even if everyone else writes your name like Mal, I've been writing it Mall for your whole life so that's what I'm going to keep doing.)

Now onto the FITBIT FORCE!!

Matt bought this beauty for me about a month ago, and it finally got here! I got mine a week before he got his (yesterday). I started using it last Thursday and I would definitely say I love it. 

My job has me sitting on my butt every day, all day. I think that's a problem for a lot of people with full time jobs or in full time school (or both). Watching my step count on my fitbit has helped me focus on moving more and has motivated me to get in my daily morning workout before I go to work. When I work out, I average between 7,000-9,000 steps a day. The day I didn't? 3,500. That's a huge difference. So sedentary.

My fitbit measures steps, "calories" burned (not sure how accurate this actually is), elevation in staircases climbed, active minutes. It tracks my sleep and lets me know how restless I was during the night. It has silent, vibrating alarms - one of my favorite features. It syncs almost immediately when I open the app I downloaded to my phone. It also has a clock on the unit (like the picture above) which I like, so it's functions as a watch as well.

This is the app on my iPhone.

You can add in a food diary (which I haven't tried yet), and track amount of water drank. You self-enter weight to track that. Oh yeah, and link up with friends. Right now, Matt is my only friend on Fitbit! I need some more :)

Here's the graph of steps that pops up when I turn my phone sideways. Obviously this was a day I went to the gym. (I told you I sit on my butt all day at work!)

This is what the daily sleep graph looks like. So cool. This is one of my more restless nights.... almost every night is just plain blue. The website told me I have 99% sleep efficiency. I just wish I got MORE of it!!!

And here is a peek at the website dashboard:

I really think it is a great tool to stay aware of activity. It's very comfortable - I don't even feel like I'm wearing anything on my wrist. I got the "slate blue" color and Matt got the black. Those are the only two colors available for the force but I wish there were more! 

All in all, a really cool thing. I highly recommend it!!

Hope you all have a great week/weekend and Thanksgiving!

Jobs

This handsome guy just got a job. --->

an AWESOME job!!!

He will be starting in two weeks as a personal trainer at the most "posh" gym I've ever seen, The Pro Sports Club. 

Matt loves to exercise. He cares a lot about people. This is the perfect job for him. Let me tell you how cool he is for getting to this point...

Back in May, Matt decided to get his personal training certification through a company called the National Council for Certified Personal Trainers, or NCCPT. He took the test in June, and passed with flying colors. As soon as he applied for this job at the Pro Sports Club, however, he found out that his certification wasn't valid. He needed to take another test - American College of Sports Medicine - and get certified though them before he could accept the job offer. PSC wanted him alright, but he'd have to retest first.

Oh yeah, and you have 10 days to take it. Because it takes a month to get the results back and we want you to start by then. 

So Matt ordered his study materials and waited and waited, and they finally arrived with 5 days to spare. Then he studied his little heart out. He was nervous. 

The night before his test, I was researching stuff online about the exam to see if I could find any info that would encourage him. Or give him helpful hints. All I found were forums discussing how impossibly hard this test is. How they studied for 6-8 months and didn't pass. How you need to literally memorize the book to pass. How one person even took it five times and still didn't pass (that would cost over $1000 dollars!!). Granted, most of the people that couldn't pass this test didn't have college degrees and not much anatomy/physiology education experience. Matt would be fine... after all, his Bachelor's is in this field! That has to count for something, right?!?! Hopefully.

So since I got all psyched out, all I could do was leave him alone to study, pray for him and let him know that I was proud of him. He took it and felt confident about it and we waited for 3 weeks to finally hear that he passed!!

Now that we have officially heard that he did great, he's all geared to start working in two weeks!!! This is such a blessing, since it's been SOOOO hard for me to find a job. 

Wait but you're a nurse?! You'll always have a job wherever you go!! Don't you know people at Seattle Children's?! I know a doctor that could probably get you a job! 

Yes, people. That would be true if I wasn't a new graduate nurse. That would be true if I was able to take the job that was handed to me from the pediatric oncology unit at Primary Children's Medical Center in Salt Lake City when I graduated because I had work and clinical experience there. But I didn't. And nobody trusts a new grad nurse around here, apparently. 

Except University of Washington's Nurse Practitioner program. I've definitely gotta hand them that one. Thanks guys!!

Probably one of the top 5 happiest days of my life.

In the meantime, I wait and apply, apply, apply. I attempt to network with people who have never worked with me. I try to talk people into name dropping for me everywhere I can think of. And I wait some more. My dad has always told me, "For every ten applications, you get one interview. For every ten interviews, you might get one job offer." I totally believe him now, except I think it's 1/100.  

Like I said, it's a GREAT thing I've now got a husband with a paycheck! I love him :)