The "Happy Birthday Nate" tag

Nate and his BFF, Josh, in Central Park last weekend

Ok, so Julianne tagged me quite awhile ago for this, and I just remembered after visiting her blog to read this amazing tip on how to get crayon out of the dryer as well as clothes. You should all check it out!

So since I talk about myself plenty, I decided to do this one about Nate, since many of you may not know him all that well, and also, it was his birthday yesterday, (33 folks, 33!), so I should talk about him, cuz I love him!! 

1. He is the second oldest of 8 kids, the oldest will be 34 this month, and the youngest is 24. That's right people, 8 kids in 10 years... CRAZY!!

2. One day the Olson family TV broke. Instead of fixing it, Chris and Heidi (Nate's parents) decided to start a family band. Nate started playing the violin suzuki (sp) method when he was 5 years old. When he was in HS, he had always been in Orchestra, but wanted to be in the band. He dreamed of playing the trumpet. Instead, they assigned him to play the bassoon. haha!! Nate actually has his Masters degree in Music Performance... not on the fiddle, but on the bassoon! I have never heard him play the bassoon, except on a cd.

3. Nate LOVES food. This is not a surprise to anyone who knows him. Some of his favorite foods are hummus (it has to be GOOD hummus though, he is VERY picky!), crab legs (with butter), popcorn (with butter), greek food (more specifically chicken gyros, NOT lamb, he hates lamb), and more recently, salmon tacos (YUM!) He is not, however, a big dessert guy. Which means that I eat all the desserts in our house... BAD!

4. Nate LOVES to teach, especially the Gospel, and he really is an amazing teacher. I am not just saying this because I am his wife, but he really is the best. He puts so much time and effort into each of his lessons, and wants nothing more than to have everyone come away wanting to be better in some specific way. A fun fact about him teaching... when he was in Michigan getting his Masters, he taught institute, and he would purposely dress ugly so that it wouldn't be distracting to the ladies. haha!! I thought that was cute. He wanted it to only be about the gospel, and if he looked good, the girls wouldn't have been able to concentrate on the spirit! Ok, so I am mocking a little, but it is only out of love. Love you honey!!!

5. Nate was born cross-eyed. Yes, that means that we could definitely have a cross-eyed child someday. So far, so good! But he had to have this surgery, but they didn't do it until he was a year, so now he doesn't have depth perception. One of his eyes is near sighted and one is far sighted, they don't work together. Which means he can't tell how far or near objects are from him. This can be very troublesome when driving, especially at night. He does have his own ways of working around that though, like hugging the line, as that helps him to at least gauge where in the lane he is. It often looks like we are veering or heading into oncoming traffic, but we're not. It's weird! Some of you may also have noticed that one of his eyes looks like a lazy eye when he is talking to you. That is because he doesn't need that particular eye at that time, so it has trained itself to not focus. Again... it's weird, although I don't notice it anymore. I don't even know which eye is which anymore. 

6. Nate is very involved in specifics with our children. He was, and is, very passionate about me breast-feeding. It was really important to him that our kids were breast-fed for as long as possible. He stayed up all night with me the first night home with Asher, as I couldn't get him to latch on. If it weren't for Nate, I would have given him a bottle after about 5 minutes! Nate's dad says "no tv AT ALL for the first 2 years of a baby's life", and Nate is very strict about that. We both are. He is always very concerned about our kids getting sick, and is also pretty strict about them not having sugar and eating healthy. Don't worry that pretty much all of these things are up to me, so of course it's easy for him to lay his demands down! :) No, really, it has been so great for me, because knowing that they are important to Nate, makes them important for me, and we really did decide all of this together. But, like I said, most of it was his idea. So yeah, he's a good daddy. He loves his boys!

7. Nate doesn't really get mad. I can think of maybe 2 times in the entire 4 1/2 years we've been married, that he has gotten mad at me and, not yelled, but was clearly VERY upset. It made me feel so bad, as I knew he must have been pretty mad to let it show like that. The first time, and the one I remember the most, was over our Folk Dance culture class, believe it or not (that's the class we took to learn about the countries we were to be visiting on tour). It was really stupid, but it was apparently, a very big deal at the time. 

I could go on and on forever... maybe I should just keep going and do the "100 things" post that I did back in the day.  Don't worry, I won't.  But I will leave you with one final tidbit...

8.  Nate has been engaged 3 times (including me).  That's right folks, 3 different fiances.  He broke one of them off 2 weeks before the wedding... yikes (yeah, I don't think that ex-fiance is a big fan of Nate anymore!)  Needless to say, my Grandma was very worried that he wouldn't go through with it.  On the way to CA to get married, we were just coming out of Reno, and Nate asks:  "why are we getting married again?"  WHAT?!  It actually ended up being a great conversation, as I think engagement is hard, and sometimes you just have to get through it, and often lose sight of why you are doing this in the first place.  So, of course we ended up getting married without any problems.  He finally just realized that I was the girl of his dreams. duh! ;)