our story

(visiting amy & jordan yesterday in washington)

i feel a little behind on everything. i have more pictures from this summer than i know what to do with (all edited now... woo!) which means we've been having some serious fun. too much fun to sit and blog about it all. it's been so fun having two kids to do everything with. as in... two running, talking, eating, sleeping in big girl beds, (almost pottying) on their own kids. and we do have a little saga to go along with all the fun. time to write it down.
(this is mostly for my sake... i don't really expect anyone to read this)

rewind to april. landen was working his butt off to finish school on time. which meant he still needed 6 crowns to graduate. he had completed 2. yikes. may rolled around and it looked like he was probably going to finish a few days late... then a few weeks... then possibly a couple months. it just got worse and worse the harder he tried. i guess you can't really do anything if your patients cancel on you or can't pay for their dental work. he wasn't too worried though because he had been told by BU that oregon would accept a "certificate of completion" whenever he did finish and he could use that to get his oregon license instead of his diploma. a couple weeks before graduation he found out this wasn't true. he did need his diploma to get a license in oregon, and they wouldn't issue him one if he finished even a day after may 21st. he would have to wait until the next round of diplomas could be printed in september (as well as 90 other students at the school who finished late). meaning he couldn't work as a dentist until october. uh-oh.

meanwhile, i packed up our apartment, loaded the truck, shipped it off, and flew to oregon with my mom. we moved into my parents house. and when i say "we" i mean my dad and i unloaded the moving truck into a uhaul, unloaded that at a storage facility and loaded it into the storage space. oh- in the rain. i was so done with wet smashed boxes it wasn't even funny.



the girls and i were hanging out with my family until we heard he finally had finished only 2 weeks after graduation. he had to go through starting 16 crowns to actually get 8 finished. thank you to good friends who let him stay at their place, and to an extremely long book-on-tape that kept him awake for the 4 day drive. needless to say, we were a little excited to see him after 18 days.

the girls followed him around the rest of the day.





luckily, the company that hired him said they would keep him on, even though he probably wouldn't be receiving his diploma until september, and license in october. it was going to be a loooong summer.

it just wasn't good enough though, wasting away precious months he could be getting paid just because the school would not issue his diploma. he fought the system. he called oregon. he called BU. he left messages. he wrote emails. faculty wrote letters for him (to which we owe a huge thank you). FINALLY, two weeks ago, he found out they would do it for him. and last week he received his license. he starts tomorrow, august 1st, with a full schedule, in an office to himself!

i can't begin to tell you how ecstatic we are, and how blessed we feel right now. i remember feeling like we were totally stuck back in april. he couldn't get patients, he couldn't get a diploma, he couldn't even really be a dentist. and now all the pieces are finally coming together.

we also thought he'd be moving between the portland and salem offices but now he's just in portland, so we have a bigger range to choose where to live. we are so grateful to my parents for letting us live with them until we figure this whole thing out. it's been a little crazy, but right now i've really never felt more blessed. and i'm so thankful to landen for working so hard for our family.

we are loving green, cool, portland and all the busy fun we've been having this summer. now it's time for a real update!