Some Background

Have you ever asked your parents how they met?

This past week I did.

I asked them to share more details of their pre-marraige days.

Like a little bit of history on them, what they first thought of each other, and how they actually came to be "Mr. & Mrs. Simmons".

And I've got to say, their story makes me laugh.

Before we begin,

I would like to say - just for the record - that everything you read here is entirely accurate.

I did not warp anything in anyway whatsoever.

In other words,

what you read is directly quoted from my mom or dad.

It's just in "Audrey narration form".

So without furthur adu,

here is a little background on my mom and dad....

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My mom, LeAnn Huber, grew up in Hyde Park located in beautiful Cache Valley, Utah.

She is the 2^nd out of 9 kids. 

She was involved in LOTS of activities – swim team, piano lessons, 4-H, ballet, and band (she played the French horn in jr. high). In 1980 her family moved up to the Meridian countryside, where she went through those good ‘ole adolescent years.

She studied hard in school and from her junior year on she worked after school every day (and during the summers) for a company called Zero Defects (my dad thought that this was a fitting name for the company where his future wife worked). At her high school boyfriend’s request (no, this was not my dad), she tried out and made the high school drill team. So she danced on the drill team her sr. year, but ballet was her favorite type of dance (When she was 12 or so she got to dance the part of Clara for her community’s production of the Nutcracker.). Unfortunately, she had to switch to modern dance at BYU due to tendonitis in her toe joints.

The weird, sort of freaky thing about my mom was that she loved math. She attributes this to her having an amazingly smart older brother (and a really smart and patient dad who would often stay up ‘til after midnight helping her with Trig, Pre-Calc, Calc, and Physics). Anyway, she idolized her brother and remembers wanting to do homework like he got to do when he was in 4^th grade and she was in 2^nd grade. She wanted to be “smart” like him, so she tried extra hard in math. She actually loves math and majored in it in college. She ended up getting married before she finished her education, but loved/loves helping us kids with our math questions.

All her hard work in high school paid off and she was accepted into BYU on a full-tuition scholarship. But wait; let me back up to the young adult New Year’s dance that was held in Boise in December of my mom’s senior year in high school. This is a very important dance because it is where my mom and dad met. My mom and her friends were sick of the Saturday night youth dances because none of the “older” guys went, so they started sneaking into the Friday night young adult dances. Anyway, my dad asked my mom to dance a couple of times and for him it was love at first sight. My mom thought he was cute and was excited when he called and asked her out for mud pie the next week (before he went back down to BYU). It was on this date that she got quite a shock. She found out that he was 24 years old – practically a grandpa! She immediately lost interest in him because she wanted to go to college and could tell that he had other plans in mind.

My mom found that the BYU social life can be fun, but actually caught herself thinking about that “old” Lane Simmons on occasion. Her roommate was from Gilbert, AZ and had caught a ride home for Thanksgiving with some guy from Idaho. She had been so excited when she got home that she forgot to pay him, so she looked him up when she got back up to BYU. My mom asked what the guy’s name was and about croaked when she said, “Lane Simmons.” (Apparently, my dad’s family had spent Thanksgiving in Arizona with their grandparents that year.) Anyway, to condense the story, my mom had a change of heart and fell madly in love with my dad over the course of the next year and a half and she ended up dropping out of BYU during the spring quarter after her sophomore year (yes, she gave up her scholarship and everything) and drove straight down to LA where she found some girls to live with while she worked (she actually had a job lined up working at Disneyland, but ended up getting a better paying job at a small computer company) and dated my dad.

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My dad, Lane Richard Simmons, was also the 2^nd oldest out of 9 kids

(Yes, I have a very large extended family, which rocks.)

He was born in Douglas, Arizona, but mostly grew up in Boise and Meridian. 

As a kid, he didn’t have Legos, but built lots of plastic models of hotrod cars. 

He also used an old movie camera that his uncle had given him to make stop-animation movies with his siblings.  When he was 13 years old, his family moved to Argentina where my grandpa worked for the United Nations as a veterinarian and sheep ranch consultant. They lived in San Carlos de Bariloche for one year. He even had a “pet” armadillo for a short time until it escaped! How many kids can claim that? Haha!

Camping, fishing, hiking, hunting; my dad did it all.

When he was 12 years old, he shot his first buck hunting with my grandpa.  He also hiked Mt. Borah, the tallest mountain in Idaho, with my grandpa.  He remembers plenty of fishing campouts and skinny dipping swims.  One time he caught a trout, but while cleaning the fish it slipped back down over a rock ledge into a ten foot deep pool.  He had to strip and then dive down in to retrieve his catch! 

He thought he burned all his pictures from those awful high school dances, but I guess some survived, which I have been able to laugh at.  One high school job he held was making picture frames out of wood with a friend.  For a certain batch of frames he had to singe the edges of the frames with a blow torch to make them look stressed and have character.  Well, the torch got a little carried away (or he did), and an entire batch of frames were over burned and blackened too much.  Don’t know if those ever sold! 

He served two years in the Santa Cruz, Bolivia, mission.

When he got home, he dated around but never found the right one until he saw my mom at a young adult dance!  It was lust at first sight for him, but gagness for her!  He was a creepy old college student at 24 years old, and she was a mere baby at 17!

While attending BYU, one holiday weekend my dad carpooled to Arizona to visit his grandparents and relatives.  A couple of BYU girls that he didn’t know caught a ride with him. When they returned from the break, the two girls realized they hadn’t paid my dad for gas.  The funny thing was that the two girls were my mom’s roommates.  When my mom learned her roommates had traveled with my dad, she was surprised!  Although she wasn’t dating my dad at that time, and her “creeper” chills about him weren’t completely gone, she was starting to think twice about his totally awesomeness character, and soon-to-graduate money-making abilities!  So the roommates convinced her to go with them to drop off the gas money. Although he wasn’t home when the girls arrived, that effort opened the opportunity for them to start dating some more!

After graduating from BYU with a degree in Computer Science, my dad moved to Los Angeles, California to work as a software engineer in the aerospace industry with General Dynamics.  He missed my mom who was still back at BYU.  They started writing and calling each other, and both even made trips back and forth to see each other.  Finally, my mom couldn’t stand missing that hunkiness of my dad, so she dropped her full tuition scholarship, dropped out of school, and hauled off down to California to get a job and be with my dad.  However, he remained uncertain about her intentions, because he was still an old creeper and she still a young babe.  But when she actually finally arrived, it was dream come true for him!  He took her touring all over the Los Angeles area every chance they could get, seeing all the sights.  And it didn’t take long before they were looking at rings! 

Here's my favorite part:

It wasn’t until my grandma called my mom and asked whether there were any “plans” she should be preparing for, that my dad finally got the kick to finally actually ask my mom to marry him!

No down on his knees.

No flowers.

No ring in the cracker jack box.

And no white horse.

It was simply, sitting on the sofa, “do you want to go halvsies on babies with me!”

From there,

they bought their rings at the Los Angeles black market shop,

and got married in the Boise, Idaho temple on Aug. 1, 1986. 

Just so you know, I wasn’t born in nine months. 

It took dad a little longer to figure it out.

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So there it is.

The whole shabang about those two.

And six kids later they are still living happily ever after.

{Mom, why can I find  NO pictures of you?!}