Marriage Rocks!

I am a part of my favorite couple in all of history! My own!! Here's a little bit about us! What are your names?  Eric and CJ Carter When did you meet? Sept 2003 In 8 words or less, describe where or how you met.  FHE group at BYU What was your first date?  BYU Homecoming Oct. 11, 2003 When were you married?  MM / DD / YYYY Where were you married?  Seattle temple How many children do you share?  5 Getting to Know You! When and/or how did you know you wanted to marry each other? CJ-I was in the shower! And I needed a job that was better for couples, so that's how I started that conversation! Eric-Christmas break when I went hoe and I was compltelty miserable and I didn't konw why, then I was drviing somewhere with my mom and she asked if I wanted to go ...

When I was in 6th grade, the world of organized sports was about to blow wide open. My friend loved basketball and her dad was putting together a traveling team. She asked me if I wanted to be a part of it. At that time, I was unable to participate, but it lit this fire in my mind that I was worth the recruiting. We moved that summer to New Mexico, and when my junior high announced try-outs for the school basketball team, I knew I had to share my recruitable gift! My mom, on the other hand, knew that I had zero basketball experience and that everyone had been invited to the traveling team. So she prepared me for tryouts. "IF you don't make the team, maybe you could be the manager. Tell the coach you are in honors math and are good with numbers. It would be fun to keep score and stats." As life goes, mothers always know best, and I didn't even make it past the first cut. But I raced right up to the coach and asked to be the manager. So my journey with organized sports ...

Eric and I have both been around the world of stage plays and musicals most of our lives. Whether it was performing in them (he was Ephraim in 7 brides for 7 brothers , I was an Irish settler in Paint your Wagon ), singing in the shower to show tunes (his favorite is Little Shop of Horrors , my favorite is Guys and Dolls ), or watching it on the stage (he fell asleep during Phantom   of the Opera when he was 17, I stayed awake during Forever Plaid when I was 19), we love all of it. In the summer of 2017, our family was in the stage production of Mary Poppins. It was an incredible experience--some would even say it was supercalifragilisticexpialidocious! He was cast as The Policeman. He had a few lines in a couple of scenes. And then he had two words in the song "Jolly Holiday." They were spoken, but since he said them during the song--it felt like a vocal solo. We worked tirelessly to perfect those two words: Morning, Mary. I would name an emotion and then he would respond ...

My dad was an F-4 pilot in the Air Force. Being the daughter of a fighter pilot, I grew up dreaming of being a Thunderbird pilot. I would practice on my roller skates in the drive way, skating around in different formations, imagining myself pulling G's in a cockpit one day. When I was 14 my dad transitioned to reserves in the Air Force, and started working in the commercial airlines. That didn't lead me to the stick shift in a cockpit, but it did lead me to some tomato juice in seat 22B.  As an employee, family members could travel for (basically) free with standby flying. Our family took full advantage of that benefit! My senior year I traveled somewhere once a month. Sometimes I traveled by myself, and sometimes we made a spectacle of it and had 5 girls, ages 7-17, dressed in Sunday best, each pulling our own little travel suitcase behind us following our parents through terminals and down gangplanks. Because it was standby, our family of 7 was usually spread out in middle s...

Before 1987, the names Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello and Leonardo would cause goosies to run up and down the arms of the world's finest art historians and humanities enthusiasts. After 1987 every costume maker from here to China and back could bank on a nice spike in profits during halloween. All they had to do was manufacture enough Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costumes to clothe every aspiring Mikey, Raph, Donatello and Leo out there. I know my husband was Leonardo for Halloween in 2nd grade. I may have never dressed up as a turtle, but I did go to the theater on opening day in 1990 to watch my generations beloved action figures come to life on the big screen. My friend had invited me to go with her to the matinee and had asked if I could walk home with her after school. I wasn't a mutant ninja die hard (I only had sisters, so Barbie was more our thing) but I had never gone to this friend's house--so I could feign Turtle fandom for a day. It was a big deal for me to wal...

Living in a small community is an experience I wish everyone could have at least once in life. It affords a bond and sense of community and helps to create individual awareness and an increased sense of self confidence and worth. When I was in 7 th grade my family moved to Alamogordo, New Mexico. It was a small town in my parents’ mind (both being from Southern California), and so it was a small town in my mind. Ironically enough, I now live in a town of 2,000; whereas, Alamo’s population was upwards of 30,000. Even so, it did have that home town feel with unique traditions that seem to only live in storybooks and Hallmark movies. And the community was strong. In fact, I was running track for the junior high and had just won the 800m by a hefty distance. Coach Burns, the High School cross country coach approached me and invited me to run cross country when I entered high school. A personal invitation was all it took for me to commit to a sport I had basically never heard of. And tha...

During my first three years of college I lived in on-campus housing typically inhabited by freshman. My freshman year it was a perfect fit. My sophmore and junior year I worked as a resident assistant and absolutely loved being surrounded by freshman year after year. My junior year I lived on the 1100 floor of Chipman Hall. We had an awesome floor community and I developed life long friendships on that floor. Some of those friendships were so enduring that we dared live off-campus as roommates my senior year. There were 8 of us who were so tightly bonded that we referred to ourselves as "The US". We felt that everything we did together was so original and ingenious as to indicate our true bosom friendship. One of our clever marks in friend-lore was a quote board. I know, I know...as it turns out every college apartment has a quote board; but ours was like, way cooler, and way funnier, and we all contributed daily. Sometimes even bi-daily. One of our more staple quotes was, ...

For Christmas I got my children a present that was so fun, I also gifted one to myself! It is an LCD writing tablet that is basically a dry-erase board meets magna-doodle. It feels like an electronic device, in functionality it's just a blank piece of paper (powered by batteries). There is something highly satisfying about doodling away, and then pushing a little button and seeing it all disappear. Having lived long enough to see the exponential explosion of technology still makes me giddy. It's come so far that in my childrens' classrooms they have whiteboards that are hooked up to the teachers computer. I remember the transformation from chalkboard to whiteboard and getting excited when I would walk into a classroom that had upgraded to the next generation of learning. Education between the chalkboard era and whiteboard era led to more tech. It must have been a math teacher tired of writing and erasing equations and choking on chalk dust who invented the overhead projecto...