Our First Christmas!

Dave and I had a really fun Christmas together. Dave's mom is staying with us and it was fun to be able to have her here. We went with our friends, the Reesors, to my parent's house for the afternoon. Being with friends and family was really a special experience. After opening presents and eating yummy soup, we went and played in the snow! It was the first time our friend Dani had ever played in the snow because she is from L.A. I hadn't played in the snow for a long time so it was fun to sled, have snowball fights and make snow angels. Christmas was perfect this year. Dave and I got way too spoiled! He suprised me with a laptop! I was so excited! I also got a new ipod from my parents. Dave got tons of Scrabble stuff. He was thrilled! I hope you all had a very merry Christmas too!

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

Dave and I decorated for Christmas during the long Thanksgiving weekend and I have loved feeling so seasonal! I am so excited for Christmas! Dave and I have been doing the 12 days of Christmas for each other by getting little gifts and putting them in our stockings everyday. It has been a lot of fun!



This is our Christmas tree! It is quite colorful, but really gets us excited and in the Christmas spirit!



Our stockings! Dave's is the Christmas Story one and mine is the extra large stocking! Looks like Dave has a lot of stocking stuffers to get!



This is the nativity that my mom made us! Isn't it so cute?



Our Christmas card collection so far. I also attempted to make a garland. I think it turned out pretty well.



Our Gingerbread house! It was really fun to make together.

We have been so blessed this Christmas season and we are both so excited to spend the rest of the Christmas season with our friends and families and to share the Christmas spirit with everyone!

Dave is a professional Scrabble teacher!!!

I have something of an intimate relationship with the game of Scrabble. In the world of Scrabble game players, I would be considered a "Letterati". I study the game through internet play, reading books about Scrabble, and clicking through Scrabble website after Scrabble website. A skeleton in my closet is the time that my wife went to Utah with her mother for a girls-weekend. They were gone for less than 40 hours and I managed to play 35 online games of Scrabble. That accomplishment is one of my proudest moments, while it remains one of my wife's darkest. As with any other hobby, I continue to seek more opportunities to enjoy mine. I've recently piloted the establishment of the Idaho Falls Scrabble Club of which I am the director. We meet at the Barnes and Noble bookstore located in the Teton Mall in Idaho Falls every Thursday evening to socialize and enjoy a battle of vocabularies. However, as those of you that know me already know, I tend to take any given interest and devote ample time and energy to developing my skill and opportunities in that hobby. Thus it has happened with Scrabble. I recently interviewed with the Madison School District for an after-school teaching position in a local elementary school. After mentioning Scrabble as one of my extracurricular activities I was not only offered a teaching position at the school that I had applied with, but was offered the opportunity to teach Scrabble . . . at two schools. I begin my job January 6th and I am so thankful for the opportunity. I recently constructed a magnetized Scrabble set with which I will be able to demonstrate and execute lesson plans with the board standing vertical. White and nerdy? I know. But me? Of course.

A Christmas Letter to Dad

Dear Dad,
It has been two months since you entered the gates of Heaven; two months since I last saw you. In those two months I have grown tremendously into the man that you had always hoped that I would become. I owe little gratitude to myself, and all of my thanks to you and who you are. Even after you have left this physical world, you continue to be a radiant example and standard in my life. I feel you next to me as I counsel my wife in her struggles. I know that you are watching over my shoulder as I continue to study strategy in Scrabble. And I feel your presence as I sit in the Lord's house and strive to be a better person. I missed dressing you up as a tank for Halloween. We would have laughed at that for hours until you told me to shut up or else you would run me over. I missed eating platefuls of food at Thanksgiving. And I will miss spending Christmas Eve with you more than ever. Yet I know that you are still with me, and that you feel welcome in our home. I think about you every time the Runnin' Utes suit up to defend the honor that their team has fought for. And I sometimes cry as they prevail, always knowing that somewhere my father is jumping up and down with his hands in the air. Your voice still remains a vivid memento of your life here on earth. And I still remember how it feels to hug you and have you kiss me on the cheek. I have taken strides in becoming the husband that you expected me to be to my wife, and pray every day for your approval. There isn't a moment that goes by that you aren't in my thoughts and prayers. I know that you think of me often too. Please feel free to stop by on Christmas morning. There will be presents under the tree which read "To: McKenzie and David From: Dad". If Santa can feel at home enough to come down our chimney, then surely you will feel home enough to walk through our door. Hope to see you soon.

Your Son
David Jr.

2009 Scion XD

Dave and I are so excited! We purchased our very first car together! On friday, Dave found out that we were getting a little more money from his dad's life insurance. It was really ironic because we had just paid a large amount of tithing on the last check we got from his dad. We had taken a while to pay the tithing because it was such a big number to us. We finally got up the courage to do it and we were blessed for it. Another ironic thing was the car we were driving (Dave's mom loaned us her car) has been having a lot of troubles lately and it was getting pretty frustrating. When we found out about the money we were getting, making a smart investment on a car that would last us years and years was the first thought that came to mind. We did a lot of research and this car seemed like the best value for the car. We are so excited and are so grateful for the blessings that Heavenly Father showers on us when we just obey his simple commandments.

DaNGER MOUtH

Dave had a concert in Rexburg last night. It was a lot of fun to have one again! He hasn't had a concert in quite a while. He had fun with the crowd and I think everyone had a great time!

How to Host a Murder!

Last night Dave and I hosted a How to Host a Murder party at our house. It was so much fun. It was themed in the 1930's at a movie premier. Our guests came as the characters that they were assigned and ranged from writers and directors, to movie stars. It was really fun and everyone got into it!



I was a movie star and Dave was a writer.

Ward Halloween Dance

We had a BLAST at the ward Halloween dance. Dave dressed as Woody the cowboy, complete with a pull string, Andy's name on the bottom of his boot, and rosy cheeks!


I was a 50's chick with a poodle skirt. It was fun to be able to dance together because we have never done that before! We have some really great friends in our ward that we went with and enjoyed dancing together and acting like dorks! Tonight is our How to Host a Murder Party! We are so excited to get all dressed up! I'll let you know how it goes!

Passover by: David Guymon

My dad was an amazing storyteller. He had the ability to create reality out of the most inconceivable exaggerations in a way that left him seeming god-like. It wasn’t until a decade after the story was told that I realized that the large scar on my father’s right knee was from an ACL surgery and not from his battle with a great white shark while swimming off the coast of Nicaragua with Colonel Ollie North, as dad had always told me. As an 8 year old who lived for the sole purpose of doing everything my father did, I prided myself in being able to recount the story of the shark’s tooth scar and my dad’s camaraderie with Colonel North to every kid in the neighborhood. I’d bring them by to have dad show my friends the actual scar. He’d let them touch it and ask questions like, “Did it hurt as bad as it looks?” Of course, my dad fed our imaginations with exasperating his story in such detail that we were left standing on the edge of the Nicaraguan sands in awe. He did everything that nobody else’s dad had. To this day, I still prefer to believe the Ollie North version of my father’s scar to what actually happened. Reality just doesn’t do dad justice.
It was Thanksgiving Day of 2007 and Dad was in town for the holiday. He had recently taken a job in Tampa Florida as the CEO of a youth behavioral hospital where he got to act like John Wayne and get paid for it. Thanksgiving was the first time I had seen him since he moved away from Utah three months earlier. We were gathered around the kitchen table at my aunt’s house listening to my father extemporize another lavish story about a quelled rebellion in the hospital that he worked at, where someone had stabbed a kid in the arm with a ballpoint pen. I like to pretend that it was with a scimitar instead, because that sounds more exotic and Florida is an exotic place to a boy from the desert. While wrapped in the adventure of a day at work for dad—version CEO—I found myself distracted by the twitching that occurred in his forearm just below his elbow. By the way that he paid no attention to it, I knew that he knew it was there. He just didn’t want any of his family to know.
Dad came back for Christmas and New Years. Weather was a favorite conversational piece of his during this trip, pointing out that while he had been very homesick, he hadn’t missed the snowstorms and grey skies that defined Utah winters. “We have a lot of white stuff down in Florida,” he’d say. “It’s just sold by the kilos down there.” His sense of humor was the same, but something seemed different. Dad would take coughing gasps during bouts of laughter, mostly at his own jokes. His face would turn red and sweat would begin to bead from his widow’s peak. I noticed his bags didn’t make it too far into the house when he arrived either. Perhaps he was too excited to be around family again to worry about bringing his luggage all the way into the house, but that wasn’t like him, to leave his things in the middle of a room. He was a CEO, a consummate organizer. A professional obsessive compulsive. On arrival, he seemed to have just dropped his duffle bag and brief case right as he stepped in the door as if he had strained to carry them that far. As he gave his round of hugs and sentimental greetings, I grabbed both of his bags in one hand and carried them downstairs to the guest bedroom.
That night, as he made his way down the stairs to his room I saw that he walked with a limp in his gait and leaned against the handrail to compensate for balance. As he made it to the bottom of the stairs I noticed that his pants fit a little loosely too, but figured that the Florida heat must have shed a few pounds off of my pop’s round belly. It wasn’t until a few days later that I’d find out that the gulf climate had nothing to do with his weight loss. On Christmas Eve my dad sat me down and told me one of his most dramatic stories yet. Down in Florida, the doctors had diagnosed my father with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. This story wasn’t strewn with exaggerations or workings of a gifted imagination. It was made of facts. Pure facts. It was a terminal illness. There was no cure. On Christmas Eve my dad told me that he was given 2 more years to live. What he couldn’t tell me was that the next morning would be our last Christmas together. Nine months later, he fell into a coma and passed away.
I was driving from Rexburg Idaho to the hospital in Salt Lake City when I got a phone call telling me that my dad was gone. I had left home for Utah an hour and a half earlier to tell my dad goodbye in person. The doctors had told me that he had no brain activity—only epileptic seizures—and that he couldn’t feel any pain. They had said that he’d probably be able to hear me if I were there to talk to him in person though. He died while I was still in the state of Idaho. I had three more hours to drive to the hospital after I found out that my father was dead. That was plenty of time to think about his stories.
I got to the Jordan River Medical Center at nine o’clock that night. My dad’s younger brother, who had been there to watch him pass away, escorted me through the intensive care unit. I finally saw my dad at 9:05, a little over three hours since he had died. The room cleared out as family saw that I had arrived. It was hard to look at my father’s body lying in his hospital bed, so I looked around, avoiding eye contact, and took in the subtleties of the room first. His computer bag was there, along with his shaving kit. I guess someone had had enough hope to bring his personal belongings in case he woke up. The fluorescent lights seemed to be a few more days away from burning out. And the window to his room was propped open. That must have been how he got to Heaven.
I finally sat down on my father’s bed, next to his thigh, and held his hand. His flesh was washed to a yellowish pale. As I interlocked his fingers with mine I could tell that rigor mortis was slowly setting in. Real men were supposed to be tough. Big boys didn’t cry. So for the next ten minutes little David fell over on his daddy’s chest and unleashed the waterworks. I was thinking about the stories he used to tell me as a little boy when I was trying to fall asleep. They were always the same. I wanted it that way. I would always tell my dad to tell me a story about a boy named David. I told him that the Ninja Turtles had to be in it, and that we had to be fighting evil at Chuck-E-Cheese. He always complied. And he always told the most magnificent stories.
I buried my dad the following Saturday, three weeks after his 45th birthday. Everyone was crying at his gravesite, except me. I had cried on his chest in private, but I always made it a point to never cry in public where people could judge me to be weak. My dad was the strongest person in the world to me. So I would be too. Still, everybody else was crying. As a cold breeze began to dust the Elysian Gardens where my father lied in repose, my grandpa stood at my side and put his arm around my shoulder. His wife had died of breast cancer when dad was my age too. My father was the oldest child to seven siblings when his mother passed away. I had been born nine months earlier.
It didn’t occur to me until two weeks later that grandma had gotten sick at 44 and died of a terminal illness at 45, just like her son did. It also didn’t occur to me that their death dates were five days apart in September. When I brought it up to my mom, she wrote it off as a coincidental anomaly. But I knew better. It was a modern day Passover. Like myself, and my dad, grandma was the firstborn child in her family.
That night I went to sleep, and when I woke up the next morning life went on. My wife and I packed our bags and drove back to Idaho one dad fewer than when we came. When we got home I carried both of our bags all the way to our bedroom and threw all of their contents into the dirty clothes hamper in the closet. We had amassed half of a month’s worth of dirty linens since we last did laundry. We were so rushed to leave the week before that our kitchen was still a mess, the smell of old garbage filled the house, and our fridge and cupboards were empty. While my wife washed the rotting dishes to stay the attack of a plague, I went to the grocery store to get dinner. Sequentially pacing the aisles to fill my shopping cart with the catalog of goods that my wife had sent me with, I paused in the frozen meat section. There was a sale on lamb meat and I figured that that would hit the spot. I asked the butcher for his bloodiest piece of veal and told him that I liked the meat particularly juicy. He eyed a leg of lamb in his display freezer and wrapped it tightly in plastic and paper. A corner of the wrapped order was damp with lamb’s blood as the butcher handed me the meat. It was inconsequential as I wiped the blood left on my hand on the back of my pants. They were the same denim jeans that I had worn to the hospital.
I carried the entire lot of plastic grocery bags into the house in one trip with bags of canned soup threatening to cut my fingers off. Ten bags in all dropped to the dirty linoleum floor of our kitchen as my wife helped me put our groceries away. She had finished cleaning the dishes sometime before and now our cupboards and fridge were full. That night we sat down to our first meal at home in a week and enjoyed every bite. Macaroni and cheese was one of our mutual favorites. And it was a quick meal to make too. There was no veal on the table that night, just macaroni and cheese. To this day I’ve never eaten lamb. The meat from the grocery store never even made it into the house. I used it for what I needed to and threw the bloody remains into the dumpster in the parking lot.
As we climbed into bed that night, I kissed my wife’s forehead and told her that I loved her. I forgot to lock the door and said that I’d be right back. We didn’t want any burglars intruding on our first night back at home. As I got up, I could feel pressure in my ankles and a cold starting to set in to my neck. I walked out of the bedroom, feet dragging along the cold carpet till I passed the kitchen. Stopping to grab the garbage that had flown under the radar, I tied a knot in the top of the plastic bag and set it outside of the front door before I locked the night out, and us in our safe haven. I closed the door on the world and on the week that had passed with my Dad. And I could hear the sound of droplets land on the plastic garbage bag. The sky was clear out the window. The moon shone uninterrupted. And there was no rainfall to be found. The sound was the lamb’s blood. I guess it hadn’t yet dried from the stroke I had painted on the top of our doorframe. Hopefully, God would pass me over.

I am SO excited for the Holidays!

Am I the only one that is totally excited for the holidays coming up? I feel like I am 5 years old again! I have already bought most of Dave's presents for Christmas and it isn't even Halloween yet! But I am SO excited! We already bought some ornaments and Dave's stocking too. It is a Christmas Story one. It has a picture of the pink bunny suit on it. It is pretty funny. But I don't really know if I am extra excited because I am married now and this is my first Guymon Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years or what, but I am so excited!

5 Months of Marriage!

Last night Dave and I went out on our biggest date ever! It was so much fun! We got all dressed up and we went out to eat at Olive Garden. It was so good! I just love that place, and best of all, we have leftovers for today! After dinner, we went to the movie W. It wasn't the most amazing movie I have ever seen, but it was just fun to be able to go there as a couple. I love being able to celebrate our little anniversaries :)