Welcome!

Welcome to Plum Creek Traditions! I'm Tanya, a 28 year old stay-at-home mom, and this is my blog.

A little bit of background about me:

I grew up in a very close knit family with very strong values. As children, my brother and I didn't receive an allowance, because lets face it, you shouldn't get paid for being a functional member of society. That's not to say that our parents didn't offer us opportunities to make some extra money, but those jobs were usually intense and ranged from everything from helping relandscape the yard to repainting the bathroom. My parents expected our absolute best from us, and I cannot thank them enough for that.

I was blessed enough to be able to attend a lutheran grade school and highschool. Here I was able to find myself and reinforce my beliefs. This is also where I met my best friend and my love Daniel. After highschool we went to the same college and began dating. We were both lucky to find someone right away that had the same beliefs and goals. Our relationship is very old fashioned. We had both only gone on a date or two with other people, and we both decided that it wasn't for us. By 2002 we were engaged and married by 2003. Yes we were both 20 and below the drinking age when we got married.

We started out planning a pretty big wedding and then finally one day it hit us; why are we doing this? Is this our wedding, or is this a big party for our friends and family. Dan and I talked about it and decided that we wanted the day to be about our religion and the commitment we were making to each other. So, our wedding was small. It was at our church, and the reception was in the church reception hall (which was also used as a bible study room, for coffee and snacks after church, and various school/church functions). We made our own invitations, our own decorations, and our food consisted of subway sandwich trays and various salads. Our wonderful friends and family helped decorate, prep food, and serve food. Our wedding did not have alcohol or dancing. Not only were we underage, but we wanted to show respect to the recovering alcoholics in our families and keep our underage friends out of trouble. As for the dancing, we really couldn't have a DJ playing rock and roll in a church building and we really couldn't afford it. Do we regret not having alcohol and dancing at our wedding? Absolutely not. Yes I do wish I had been able to dance with my dad, but he DOES NOT dance and he had already tortured himself with wearing a tux (he said he'd never wear one, in fact, he didn't even wear one to his own wedding!) Our wedding was a complete reflection of us. Dan and I have always considered ourselves to be "old souls", and having an old fashioned wedding fit us to a T.

After we got married, Dan finished college and started work with an insurance company, and I continued working for a book and magazine distributor that I had been working for since I was 16. In 2006 we had our beyond beautiful daughter Leila Ryan Magruder (yes she is named after the Eric Clapton song "Layla" just spelled different). We tried to have kids for 3 years, so she was a long awaited blessing. A year later I was forced to leave my job (that's a whole other story. Message me if you really want to know), and I found myself working in a temporary job at my husband's work. I busted my butt at that job and even earned an employee of the month through the temp agency, which was only 1 out of 5 spots in the whole country. Unfortunately, like everyone else, the company was hit by the failing economy, and even though I had been promised a permanent position, it was no longer an option. Daniel and I shed a lot of tears and had several very long conversations, and finally came to the conclusion that we would try me staying home with the kids.

I'm a numbers person, so I ran the tax numbers and found out that my loss of income would drop us into a tax bracket that would enable us to cover our tax expenses with our child credits and other deductions we had. In addition to this, our lack of child care and gas expense would definitely put us in a decent position...treading water financially. This is NOT an ideal situation for any family, however, if it meant that my daughter wouldn't have to go to day care anymore and I could focus on going to school full-time, it was a necessary evil.

Right after I started staying home, we found out I was pregnant with our unbelievably cute little boy Jack Arthur Magruder. This was so exciting and so scary, but we made it work and here we are today.

This past year, I started school full time at Northern Arizona University online, at the same time taught myself how to sew on the very generous Christmas gift from my parents. This lead to me starting my own business with the help of my husband, of course. Thus, Plum Creek Traditions was born.