In the beginning...

There are a lot of things to read on the internet these days. It can keep you busy for hours. So I've decided to change things a bit here and tell you about myself. It won't happen all at once. I'll have to do a little at a time, but I'd like to do more with this blog than I've ever done before. Life is a journey and this is where mine began:


Jennifer Maurer was born in the summer of 1975 in Bountiful, Utah, in the Great United States of America, to wonderful parents named Nick and JoAnne. I was the fourth child in the Maurer household with one brother and two sisters to help shape me. At the time, we lived in Centerville, right across the street from the elementary school. Dawn was 12, Greg 9 1/2, Nichol just 2 and then there was Jenn.

My parents are both 2nd generation Americans born to Italian immigrants. We are truly American with many different nationalities in our family history, but Italian was the most dominant, since it was so close. I remember my Sicilian grandpa teaching me words in his dialect, but refusing to teach me the whole language, " Otherwise you'll know what I'm saying!"  he said.

Nick and JoAnne both grew up in Southern California, were high school sweethearts and married at the tender ages of 20 and 18. They both came from strict Catholic families, married in the Catholic church and even sent their first two children to a Catholic school with nuns in every classroom. They wanted to do what was right and teach their children about God and Jesus Christ. Every time my mother had a question about the Gospel or the Bible, she went to her priest. He never gave her a satisfying answer, and so she still went to church with all these unanswered questions, hoping to get an answer one day.

That day arrived when two Mormon missionaries knocked on her door. She had been bombarded with Jehovah's Witnesses recently and placed a sign in her front door that stated, " No Jehovah's Witnesses". The first thing these young missionaries said, when she opened the door was, " We're not Jehovah's Witnesses!"   They had been referred to my parents by friends who had recently been baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. My mom had no time to talk that morning, but agreed to them coming back another time in the evening. When they returned, my mom had her list of questions ready and one by one, the answers were given. All but one or two of the questions were satisfactorily answered by two young men no older than 21 years of age. My mom was astounded. After many return visits from the missionaries and church visits, my parents were baptized in 1971 into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints along with their oldest child.

For years my parents would go to Utah to hunt and fish. My mother's parents had a couple of houses in Beaver, Utah where he would stay most summers. This, combined with joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints prompted my parents to move to Utah.


I lived in Northern Utah until I was nearly 8 years old.My life started, as I said, in Centerville, then we lived in Farmington when I was in first and second grade. And then my parents wanted to move South, because my dad went to work with my grandfather, my mom's dad.

I loved  my childhood in Northern Utah. I loved having everything close by. My parents had no problem with driving to Salt Lake City for shopping, or other events. We visited many different places in Northern Utah. Nichol and I had dance classes, piano lessons, school and church friends. We often went with my brother Greg on dates when he had to babysit, because it was a weekend and he didn't want to stay home, just because he had to take care of his little sisters. I rode my bike, roller-skated, jumped on the neighbor's trampoline (and sprained my ankles many times). And we went to Lagoon, an amusement park, went to county fairs to see my brother in action with the FFA (Future Farmers of America). Nichol and I were children with teenage siblings, so we had the best of both worlds, I think. Every fall my dad went deer hunting and he later went bow hunting with Greg. Nichol and I had lots of neighborhood friends and it was just fun.

In the summer of 1983, we packed up and moved to Beaver, Utah to live in one of the houses owned by my grandpa. That was a particularly hot summer when much of the snow-packed Rocky Mountains were melting fast and the reservoirs could not contain all the water. The day we moved, we saw water coming down our street. I remember seeing many houses and streets flooded. Fortunately, our house did not flood, because we could not move everything at once and my dad had to go back up North to get the rest later.

By this time, Dawn and Greg had moved out of the house. Dawn graduated high school in 1982 and was living in New York as a nanny. Greg had just graduated high school and was in San Diego at Camp Pendleton going through Boot Camp for the United States Marine Corps.