We're Home (What Now?)

Today we got home from our honeymoon road trip!  It was so much fun!  It is strange to be back though.  Driving through our old hometown to pick up my car was strangely unfamiliar in some way.  I've been away from home longer than a week before, but because my life has changed so much now, it didn't seem like home at all!  That's kind of sad to me, but at the same time I'm pretty cool with the idea of moving on.

These past few months have been all focused around getting through the semester and then getting through the wedding without any problems.  The wedding went off without a hitch, the honeymoon was perfect and.... well, what do we do now?  Haha, I had kind of forgotten that life continues after the hubbub is over!

So we moved in with Seiji and Kylie, who are kindly letting us stay for free.  We are so grateful for them, because otherwise we'd have to move into a place and pay for the place, only to move out again in February when we leave for China.  It's super convenient this way, and also we absolutely love hanging out with Seiji and Kylie and are looking forward to being their "roommates!"

Bailey and I will both go back to work tomorrow.  Bailey is the head sweeper at an elementary school, and he also is working hard building a business with his dad and his brother.  I still work for my mom's cousin Julie, who is an amazing single mom with 4 sweet kids who I nanny when I'm not helping Julie with her business or other errands.  Bailey and I are both so blessed to have jobs that we enjoy!

We are taking the summer off school, but in the fall we will continue earning our art education degrees.  Once again, all of my classes will be art classes, which will be super fun but very time consuming.  I'm excited about my Ceramics 2 class, which I'm hoping will help me decide whether or not ceramics is really what I want to emphasize in.  Bailey is still trying to decide what his emphasis is, but that is okay because he is still working mostly on generals.  Though he will be taking an art 2D class this fall, which is specific to the art program!

As I mentioned, in February Bailey and I will be moving to China for a few months to teach English.  We will be stationed in Changzhou, teaching from about 9-12 on weekdays.  The rest of the time, as well as a few weeks of vacation time, will be ours to explore the beautiful country!  We are so excited about the opportunity we have to teach and travel together.  Though it is stressful to take a semester off of school and work, we figure that now is a better time than any - especially because there's no kids in the picture yet!

We will get back to Utah next summer and continue with school.  Things are pretty tentative from there out.  We've considered doing a teaching program in Ukraine the summer after China, but that's definitely still up in the air.  Once Bailey finishes his art history classes, we'd love to pay a visit to our sweet Danish friend Simone and then travel across Europe.  Kids are definitely on the list somewhere, but we aren't feeling rushed.  We feel like we will know when the time is right to expand our little family.

As for long term, we don't really know where we will be!  We will both have our art education degrees, so we may just be art teachers somewhere, which sounds like a perfectly happy life.  Or, if we really put our minds to our dreams, we will live in a unique house that we built ourselves on a nice chunk of land, with my own little pottery studio in the backyard.  Bailey will be a member of congress and I'll stay at home making pots and playing with our cute little kids.

But as for now, living the poor married student life, we are pretty happy!  Being married is an amazing adventure already, and my favorite part about it is waking up to my cute husband's face every morning.  I'm so extremely grateful to be promised an eternity with him, and we are so excited to build our future together!

Since I hate posts without a single picture, here is one from the last day of our honeymoon, which we spent in (after driving to) Idaho.  Again, we went to Fork Restaurant because we dreamed the whole trip about their amazing food, and again we visited the state capitol.  Bailey has a serious thing for politics, so we got him a future campaign picture.

Though he may just be being silly in this picture, he has serious political plans starting with running for city council next year.  And perhaps someday making me the first Asian American First Lady, which I'm pretty sure I would rock at.