Nicole & Lane

We can’t wait for when we get the honor of creating new traditions with our future children. Until then, we’ve started out with some sweet family traditions and activities with our foster children that we want to continue forever. Every year we host a Halloween party, a Christmas party and an Easter egg hunt at our house. It has been a lot of fun to have family and friends come over and celebrate the holidays with us! For Christmas Eve, we go see the local lights show, decorate cookies and have our kiddos leave food out for Santa and his reindeer. It has been so rewarding to watch the excitement on the children’s faces during these activities. For Thanksgiving Day we always run a Turkey Trot and then head over to Lane’s parents house for a big Thanksgiving dinner, followed by decorating our first gingerbread houses of the season. For all of the holidays, we give the kids an area of the house that is all theirs to decorate. We have a fall tree, a Christmas tree, and an Easter tree that they get to make all their own!

In the Summer of 2021 we moved from Salt Lake City, Utah to a diverse college town in Texas. We bought a 3.000 sq/ft house on close to 3.5 acres of land with the goal of creating a little homestead to raise our future children on. We got chickens, adopted a 2nd dog, discovered a kitten (who, of course, we kept!), and started making our house into our home. Our house is unique, with the living room covered wall-to-wall in windows with views of deer every evening. We have a large deck that is wonderful for evening get-togethers with neighbors and we are in the process of building a large deck in the front of our house. The amount of windows throughout the house have been fantastic for allowing us to watch our children whom we’ve had through foster care play in the yard. We have 3 bedrooms upstairs, which includes a nursery and 2 guest bedrooms. Downstairs we have the master bedroom and an office (Lane works from home). Our neighborhood consists of only 5 houses and we are friends with all of our neighbors. Nicole is the secretary of the HOA and we often have neighborhood play dates in our yard. We live in the kind of neighborhood where everyone watches out for each other and chicken/duck eggs plus vegetables from the garden are regularly shared. While we are enjoying country-living, we are also only 10 minutes from a very lively college town with all of the opportunities of a big city!

We’re not sure what number constitutes zoo-status....but here is our personal zoo! -Simon is about 12 years old and is a jack russel/poodle mix. Nicole adopted him from a shelter 11 years ago and he has traveled across the country with her many times over -Jake is our orange cat who Nicole found at a mechanics shop as a starving kitten. She is about 4 years old. -Beckett is a 3-ish year old lab and we adopted him from a shelter 2 years ago -Barley is about 2 years old and she showed up on our beck deck in August of 2021. She is our HAM and often referred to as an emotional support cat, as she is so sweet to everyone. -Louie is a blue heeler and about 1.5 years old. She showed up in our front yard earlier this year and our 3 year old foster daughter named her.

If it weren’t for our hobbies, we would probably have never met! Because we both wanted to live in the mountains and enjoy the best hiking and skiing around, we each moved to Utah and would end up meeting each other there. We both enjoy hiking, travelling, skiing, cooking, time with friends and family and game nights. We have a vast collection of games that we enjoy playing with friends and this combines perfectly with Nicole’s love of throwing get-togethers and parties. We have both discovered a curiosity for gardening and have successfully grown large gardens full of various fruits and vegetables for a few years now. Lane has a few bee hives that he cares for and we have greatly enjoyed giving honey to our friends and family. We have also tried our hands at growing fruit trees! Lane is coaching soccer for our former foster son and we are both greatly involved in the local foster care community. We try to live life with a purpose and be proud of ourselves each and every day.