personal history through 2008

Not super in-depth, but a start. Trying to get back to writing again.

I was born to Shari Clark and Grant Paul Skabelund on a snowy evening (1 December 1982). We lived in Leland and then in Springville before moving to Provo when I began first grade. My memories through kindergarten are few, but I remember visiting Gramma Skabelund's often to play with my aunt Sierra, who, at only eight months my senior, was and continues to be my best friend. My brother Andrew joined our family in May 1985. I remember helping Dad with the garden at our house across the street from Grant school where I attended kindergarten.

More memories accumulated when we resided in our house on 900 East in Provo. My brother and I would walk down the street to the "cookie man's" house. He always had cookies in stock for all the neighborhood kids. Summers were full of trampoline jumping, bike riding, mud pie making, and storming the neighborhood. It was during one summer (1990) that our sweet sister Natalya joined our family. She was the cutest; at eight years old, I felt like a very big and good helper to my mom. I loved to read, swim, and play soccer. My mom read to us often and instilled within us a love of books. I attended Wasatch Elementary and remember riding my bike to school. I preferred playing with the boys over the girls; I would join them in kickball and basketball. I often was picked first for teams in kickball and was always happy about that.

We moved to the Edgemont area when I was in fourth or fifth grade. My parents bought a house along with a huge yard they planned to build a new house on. I loved our gigantic yard. We had loads of trees, many of them fruit trees. It was fun to have so much room to roam, but I despised the chores that came along with it. We had to pick up all the apricots and apples that fell to the ground. My brother and I played well together, but often got into fights. It wasn't until we were young teens that we became friends more than foes.

We moved into our newly built house and I loved having a nice, new, and big room. I attended Farrer middle school and Centennial the first year it opened. I had a hard time making friends since all of my elementary school friends were at Dixon. My best friends were in the pool and on the soccer field. I continued to love reading and would often stay up late reading my latest favorite book. I dreaded the start of high school; I was so scared and knew I'd have an even harder time making friends. I was lucky and blessed, though, with two great friends who helped save the last two years of high school. Melissa Kemp moved in my junior year. I knew she was heaven-sent when I found out she both swam and played soccer. Amazing. I also was friends with many foreign exchange students and made a lifelong friend my senior year with Arlette Riesen. She was from Switzerland and lived with a family in my ward that year. I was (and still am) so grateful for her friendship that year. High school found me in the pool more and more, on the soccer field, in Mr. Watson's pottery classroom, snuggled up in bed with a good book, or at my desk writing. I taught swim lessons almost every summer and didn't work at all during the school year.

At the beginning of my junior year of high school we got a new brother. I was almost sixteen and I reveled in his arrival. I helped my mom out a lot with baby Josh. He probably has more pictures in his baby book than Natalya because I often turned our babysitting afternoons into photo shoots. My mom coached swimming, and still does, for BYU and for a local club team. So I helped take care of him before my own afternoon swim practice. Taking care of Josh further cemented within me a love for babies.

Deciding where to attend school after Timpview felt like a really big decision for me. I narrowed it down to swimming at BYU and playing soccer at Dixie. In a perfect world, I would have been able to do both. It broke my heart to have to abandon one sport. Ultimately academics also factored in, of course, and I chose BYU. I still don't know all the reasons why BYU was the school for me because I suffered through numerous shoulder dislocations and surgeries. I never swam much faster than my times in high school. Frustration was ever-present, but I do know that my time at BYU really helped me to know how to be friends with everyone and to be easygoing.

Ever since I was a small girl I had hoped to serve a mission, and as I approached my twenty-first birthday I began to pray more fervently about it. I was confused because I didn't receive the answers I thought I would. It didn't feel like the right time to go, so I kept praying and waiting. Finally after four years of college, the time finally felt right to serve a mission. I only had a semester of school and a student teaching or internship experience to complete in order to graduate, but I still felt like those things would be fine to finish upon returning home from my mission. I had already completed my French minor and I was trying to not have any hopes about using my French on my mission; President Jackson, though, made a comment that let my hopes for such leap up a little. My dream mission was to serve in Geneva, Switzerland. In reality, my dream mission turned out to be the Ukraine Donetsk mission. I served from May 2005-November 2006. It was glorious, hard, wonderful, exhausting, heart-breaking, lovely, and so many other things. Learning Russian certainly took a lot of work, especially with all that French banging around in my head. I'm so grateful for my mission. I could write pages and pages about this, but won't do so now.

Upon returning from my mission, I finished up my semester of school and got an internship to teach English at Pleasant Grove high school. That first year of teaching was very hard, but I stuck with it. I was blessed to be hired on again, and my second year turned out to be wonderful.