About Me

I am so glad you stumbled upon my blog!  Thank you for stopping by.  Please stay as long as you want because I am sure that you don’t have anything more productive to do.  I would love for you to come back often. Several times a day would be awesome!  We love visitors. 🙂

My name is Mellissa,. I am a teacher by trade.  I owned and operated a preschool for many years while my own kids were little. When the last one started 5th grade, I decided that I was bored and needed a little more flavor in my life.  Now I work with students ages 18 to 22 with special needs.  I teach them academic skills, job skills, social skills and various life skills.  It is extremely fulfilling and I laugh every day! I am also a certified positive discipline instructor, teaching parents how to use positive parenting skills in raising happy and productive adults.

I think most, if not all of us, as individuals and parents struggle to keep ourselves stress free and happy.  There are meals to be made, homes to be cleaned, kids to be dropped off, picked up, and taken care of. Then there is that work and home life balance that so many struggle with.  It is easy to go through the motions of every day and forget to stop and smell the roses.  I think sometimes we even forget that there are roses everywhere.

This blog was made to help us see the roses, smell them, pick them and then give them to someone else to enjoy. It is especially important to spend focused and undistracted one on one time every day with our kids. This blog will give you some ideas on how to do that and still make time for yourself.

I believe that every person on this planet has a million characteristics that no one else has.  You are uniquely you.  You are the only one with your hair, feet and hands.  No one smiles like you do.  No one’s hugs feels like yours does.  I also believe that each person was put on this earth for a special purpose.  Hopefully, this blog will help you find that purpose for you.

I am grateful for you.

Why is this blog called The Beehive Connection?  Well, bees like parents, are busy, and productive..and legend has it, that Melissa (that’s me) is the queen bee of the beehive, so why not. You can call me your highness, if you are so inclined. 🙂

Who am I?  

I am the 3rd of 11 children.  In the picture I am on the front row all the way over to the right.  You will notice that there are only 10 kids in this picture.  That is because the last child came a couple of years later.  There is a total of 6 boys and 5 girls.  We are a crazy bunch!

Where did I come from?

I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah.

What was life like as a kid?

I loved having a lot of brothers and sisters.  They were what I call “built in friends”.  I did girly stuff like play with dolls and Barbies, and I did boyish stuff like climb trees, and pull the legs off of grasshoppers.

My family didn’t have money to travel around the world, or country for that matter, so we spent time discovering the beautiful and diverse landscape of Utah through camping and long drives.

Where did you meet Ox?

My husband is Nathan, but his nick name is Ox.

I met Ox when I was a Junior in high school.  He had just graduated from a rival high school.  We met at a dance place called The Bay.

We saw each other almost every day until he left to serve for 2 years as a missionary in Finland.

In the meantime, I studied at the University of Utah and dated a lot.

Ox and I were married 5 years later.

Wedded Bliss!

Ox and I were blessed to be able to buy a fixer upper a couple of months before we got married.  We had more ambition than sense, and gutted the thing expecting to have a lovely home by the time we got married.  Ox is super handy and can make anything beautiful (He grew up in a general contractor family after all).  However, we both worked full time and I was still going to college, so it took us longer to get the house complete. 7 years to be exact.

Below is a before and after picture.  While we lived in that house we had four kids.  After 14 years of amazingness we moved to what many of our friends and family call “the boonies”.

Before

After

We have since moved 40 minutes away from that location, but loved the home we made from the old house.

More stuff about us…

We have four kids!  We love them so much! They are all young adults now. Sheesh time flies.

We love to travel and visit different places all over the world.

A few years ago, we were blessed to be introduced to an orphanage in Tijuana Mexico where we help organize, paint, fix floors and ceilings and play with the kids.  We love that place.

We are also involved with Builders Without Borders.  Our participation is going on 7 years.  During the first week of June, we build 2 to 3 houses for deserving families in Mexico.

Random things that make me a weirdo.

Food:

• I Include chocolate in my diet as if my life depended on it.
• I go to a restaurant, order the first thing I see on the menu that looks good and if I like it, never trying anything else…..ever.
• I dip random things in chocolate, like bacon, green beans, and chicken nuggets.

Family:

• Ever since my kids were little I told them that I was the best mom in the whole world. They actually believed it. They would come up to me and say “You are the best mom in the whole world”.  They realized that I had been scamming them when they became teenagers. But they still tell me:)
• I never leave the house or let my husband or kids leave the house without getting a kiss and a hug. (I just never know if that is going to be the last time I see them)

The Internet

• On any given day, I have several Chrome windows open with a dozen research tabs each, just short of the stressful zone where I can no longer see the icons on the tabs.