Jacobson, JoAnna (Rothe)

Ok, we are now officially old enough to have children in High School and it just seemed like yesterday when we were in High School ourselves.  It blows me away to think that it has been 20 years since graduation.  Am I really that old?  I remember meeting a guy when I was 16 and him telling us that he was 35 years old.  Man, that was OLD!!!  Now, here I sit at the TENDER age of 37.  I guess the true test of your age is to have the 3rd graders you teach ask if you can still do a cartwheel.... "Of Course I can, I'm not that old". I really found out how old I was that evening when I had to lay on the heating pad for 2 hours just to get my back to a state that I could stand again.

What has the world handed me in the last 20 years?  Well, I didn't wait very long after graduation to set out into life.  I moved out into my own apartment the day after graduation and decided that I was going face this fact that I was out of High School head on.  Two weeks after graduation I met my sweetheart, Kevin Rothe at the summer evening of the drive-inn movie (That makes us really old when you have to explain to your children WHAT a Drive-Inn movie is).  Remember "The Good Ole' Days??  After that evening, we were together every morning, noon and night.  After 9 months of dating we decided to get married.  April of 1990 I became JoAnna Rothe.  We decided to wait for a while to have children, so we set out for jobs, cars and houses.  We purchased 2 homes within the first 10 years of our marriage and had 2 children and 2 cars.  We wanted to take it up a notch and decided to move out of Provo and into Springville and buy one more home, but didn't 

realize that our pattern of buy a home meant a child came with it.  Two weeks after purchasing our 3rd home, I found out I was pregnant with our 3rd child.  This was not in our plan books.  It had been 8 years since our daughter was born and my plan for my life did not have 3 children in it.  I had found a job teaching 3rd grade at American Heritage private school in American Fork where my two children were going and our life was going just as planned. Well apparently it was going too well, and God needed to stir it up just a little bit.  That is just what happened... June of 2004 our little "Tazmanian Devil" came into our family.  Since then I have been home with him and I decided to start my own business out of our home - Stuck on Thoughts vinyl lettering.  Not only am I a business owner and mother to our 3 children, we have taken in 2 foster children which has been a very rewarding (but hard) task.  My life is very busy, but with that I have seen 

some wonderful rewards.  My children are now 16, 13 and 5.  Tyler is a Sophmore, Katelyn is in 7th grade and Triston will be starting Kinder this fall.  Man, all my kids in school.... "What should I do"  I have decided to go back to school and get my RN.

The past 20 years have been crazy and fulfilling, both at the same time.   I am very excited to see all of you at the reunion.  I look back at High School and find all of the regrets of being so shy, not getting involved, and worrying about what everyone is thinking about me.  I hope this reunion will give us the opportunity to make up on those regrets and not worry about what other people think of us and just reap in the rewards of all of our accomplishments.  Good job with whatever you have done with the past 20 years!  Be happy with life..... Love JoAnna Jacobson Rothe