That Blessed Creature...the Cockroach

I've been thinking about our adventures in 2012. There were plenty of events and challenges last year, but the biggest events of them all had to do with the blessed creature...cockroaches.
Well to start off. In January we found out we were going to have a baby. Yeah exciting! We couldn't wait, but of course there was some fear that comes alongside that decision to start our family.  We wondered how we would afford anything and where would we be living? These were our two biggest questions. But over time we learned to just keep moving forward.

I was still in school studying at Snow College and let me tell you that, that semester was the hardest semester of my life.  I waited, of course to take all of my science classes till the last semester, I now was learning a violin concerto that was extremely difficult and being a music major there is always something to do. Being pregnant and in school with all these responsibilities and things to do, I did not want to do anything! I felt sick and tired all the time and to make a long story short I'm just grateful I passed Chemistry.
In May, Travis and I graduated with our Associates degrees.  That was a huge blessing!  Then we packed our things and moved from our little apartment in Ephraim to the city.

We had been looking for a place in Salt Lake for awhile and being so far away it was hard to find one. We found a place in Midvale that we thought would be nice. It was a 2 bedroom apartment and off to the side of the complex there was a playground.  We thought this would be nice to have when our baby comes.  Little did we know there was a surprise in our new apartment.  Cockroaches were EVERYWHERE!!  It was not a little infestation it was big! We moved our things in and tried to make it work.  But everyday we were there I would take Travis to work at 5:00 am and end up spending time elsewhere until I needed to pick him up around 6pm. At this time I was 6 months pregnant.

We dreaded going home! We would visit our families and have a great time and then on our way home a feeling of sadness, frustration, fear, etc. would come over us. Sleeping there was a nightmare.  We lasted 3 weeks in that infested apartment. On top of which, diseased looking birds would get in and poop all over the place. I don't know how we lived there, but one night we were over at Travis's parents house and decided then and there we were going to move out...that night!

We got out of our contract and moved in with Travis's parents for 3 weeks and then found an apartment in downtown Salt Lake. We knew there were cockroaches in this apartment as well, but according to the landlord it was not nearly as bad as our last place. It was a small studio apartment, but wanting to find a home we took the risk with the bugs and moved on in.  It took us a while to get all of our things there. We didn't want to bring more cockroaches with us so we left most of our things in a storage shed for about a month.  We slept on an air mattress.  And at this time I was 8 months pregnant.  Travis had a construction job and so I had to drive him every morning Mon-Sat. at 4:30 am.  Sleep was minimal at this time, which is really hard being pregnant. I climbed 4 flights of stairs everyday with a basketball inside of me.  Boy, was that a workout!  

Eventually, Travis's job ended and in September our little girl Emree was born. The cockroaches at this time began to appear more and more.  But I felt better about bringing a new baby home to that place than the one in Midvale. Not only did they appear more and more, but we also started to find bedbugs.  On top of that we had problems with our neighbors below us.  There were several occasions where we were not able to sleep in our apartment because when we came home it was filled with smoke.  Apparently they had been a lot of trouble anyway and they ended up getting evicted.

We thought things would get better with the bugs and such once they left, but they got worse.  It was our nightmare of Midvale all over again. There came a point where we couldn't live that way any more and we worked things out with our landlord and moved out once again.  This time across the street. We were very cautious this time in deciding where to move. We wanted to be sure there were no bugs, preferably no cockroaches.

It took us 2 weeks to move all our things.  We went through every little item in our apartment to make sure we weren't going to bring them over with us and even then we found three we had brought with us. We threw out all of our furniture and anything that could possibly hide bedbugs or cockroaches. We slept, once again, on an an air mattress for a few weeks.  It was rough, especially with a new baby.  There were a lot of challenges that we had to face, but by the end of November we were settled in our new home and new it was bug free!

We learned our lesson. Moving from a completely infested apartment to a possible infestation was not the smartest decision, but we learned not to settle for less.  This scenario is kind of how Satan works.  You might get caught up in a bad situation and know that it is wrong and work your way out. But when you see there is a possibility for evil to abide somewhere else and it's not that bad yet, he catches you and you get stuck.

During these though times our Heavenly Father pulls us through and we remember all that our Savior has done for us. Although we had a tough year, we learned a lot and have grown from these experiences.  Our home is a sacred place where no evil and no bugs are allowed.  What blessings we have received after the storm has passed.  Even with all the worries of taking care of finances and a child we have found that money means nothing. We found peace in our hearts in knowing that as long as we are doing what the lord asks of us he will provide us with our needs.