Life History

Birth and Early Life

My name is Jessica Rae (Porter) McFadden. I was born 21July 1991 to Richard (Rick) James Porter and Bonnie Jo Brown Porter. I was born at Madison Memorial Hospital in Rexburg, Madison, Idaho.

My sister Samantha Jean was born 9 October 1992 and a brother, Joshua Benjamin followed 13 July 1994. The following year, my sister Katie Jo was born (20 June 1995). Jeffery Stewart came next on 3 April 1999 and Ammon James came 13 October 1999. Sarah Janae was my last sibling, 27 born September 2002.

Teenage Years

When I was 12, my family moved from Evanston, Uinta, Wyoming to Magna, Utah. We moved down in the spring. I didn’t start school again until the end of August, so I had the summer to play with my siblings and try to make friends with the girls in the ward.

I started school that fall at Matheson Junior High in Magna, Utah. I was in eighth grade.

            I quickly made friends and fit in great. I made friends with one of the girls in the ward – Alyssa Haslem. We quickly became best friends and did everything together. She was two years older than me, but that didn’t matter. I started my sophomore year of high school at Cyprus High School. Alyssa and I still did everything together. I was on the DECA team as well as the FBLA team. I went to the competition but I didn’t place at them.

            In February of my sophomore year, I went snowboarding with my Aunt Karin Holman and her boyfriend Barry Holman. She didn’t know this, but he was going to propose to her that day. We snowboarded for a little bit. It was my first time going. On my second run down the hill, I fell and hurt my arm. My wrist especially was hurting and I wasn’t sure I could do anything with it. My teacher (who was super cute) helped me put my arm into my hoodie pocket and took me down to the lodge. My aunt quickly came and the doctor looked at it. He said he thought it might be broken but up there on the mountain, there was nothing he could do.

            Karin didn’t want to leave me, but Barry asked me to make her leave so that he could propose, since it was all set up already. I convinced her to do one more run down the hill with him. While they were at the top of the hill, the employees closed the lifts for an hour. Karin didn’t know how to snowboard well enough to do the Black Diamond hill that they were on but she was very worried about getting back to me.

            Eventually she got back down and we headed home. My uncle is one of the best orthopedic surgeons in the country and he was waiting for me at my grandma’s when we got back. He took one look at my arm and told me without X-rays he couldn’t know for sure, but based on what I was telling him and where my pain was centered, he was sure my growth plate was broken. That was a big deal because if not set correctly, my bones in that arm would cease to grow correctly. He casted it and told me to come back in six weeks to get it off. That was one of the longest six weeks of my life. I hated having that cast on.

 I was happy as could be. Life was great – I had so many great friends, all the boys loved me and I was having fun. Then my parents dropped a huge bomb on me. We were moving!

In August 2007, my family moved from Magna, Utah to Sugar City, Madison, Idaho. We first moved into a little house in Newdale, Idaho while we waited for everything to finish up with our new home. We lived in a tiny 3 bedroom house. We lived there until October, when we moved into our home in Sugar City. It was just a block from the high school. I started my junior year at Sugar Salem High School. For the first few months, I didn’t really have any friends and ate my lunch with my sister Samantha, who was a freshman. I was on the Yearbook Staff and also on the school’s Business Professionals of America (BPA) team.

Slowly, I started making friends. It wasn’t easy. I started with the kids on the Yearbook Staff with me. I expanded that slowly and soon was part of a group of friends. Probably my best friend was Jamie Murri – a girl who was on the yearbook staff with me. We hung out at school and her family was in my ward.

In April 2008, I got a job at Taco Time in Rexburg. I was so excited to be making a little bit of my own money and to have somewhere to go. I quickly made friends with the people I worked with – Damon McFadden, Brittni Matz, Mindi Klingler, Amber Matz, David Wilcox, Keegan Davis, Cameron Christensen, Kira Rasmussen and a few others.

In August 2008, Damon McFadden asked me if I would go to a movie with him. I agree and he walked into the other room. Kira and I proceeded to laugh at him. I guess we weren’t very nice.

Damon and I went to the movies and then started dating. We dated on and off for a few months – until just after Christmas. In January 2009 we got serious and decided to only date each other. We did everything together, from trying to work every shift at work together to going to every school dance and spending our weekends with each other, driving or walking around Porter Park.

I graduated from Sugar Salem High School in May 2009, one of 84 graduates. I also graduated from LDS Seminary that month.

Graduation night the school had a “lock-in” where you got to spend the whole evening and night (until 4:00a.m.) having one last hurrah with all your high school friends before “real life” started. I went for an hour or two but in the end, I just wanted to be with Damon. I was madly in love with that boy. He came to get me and we spent the night watching movies and laughing with his friends. I went home about 4am. As Damon and I were leaving each other for the night, he whispered that he loved me for the first time. We decided the next day it didn’t matter what happened, we were going to spend the rest of our lives together.

After High School

Right after I graduated, my Dad noticed that there was an ad up at the Sugar City offices. They were looking for a part time receptionist. I applied and got the job. I loved it! I worked two jobs for quite some time. At this job, I filed paperwork and helped the mayor with things he asked. My supervisor was Sharon Bell and I also worked under Marcie Smith. I worked here until April 2011 when the city offices started a remodel.

Damon and I continued to spend all our time together. In early July 2009, we looked at rings together. I picked a few that I liked and left it to him to decide what to get me. 21 July 2009 was my 18^th birthday. Damon took me to the first half of the last Harry Potter movie. Afterwards we went to Olive Garden for dinner. I was sure he was going to propose to me there. Instead of a ring, he gave me a black and white diamond penguin pendant. It was beautiful.

1 August 2009 started out like any other day. I got ready and Damon picked me up to get breakfast. Instead he took me to the Nature Park in Rexburg. We got out of the car, but not before he blindfolded me. He took my hand and we walked all over the park, me not being able to see anything. After a bit he let go of my hand and told me to take off the blindfold. He was on one knee in front of me, holding the most beautiful ring and asking me to be his wife. I of course, excitedly said “YES!!!”

The next day, we decided Damon would ask my parent’s permission to marry me. We had a hard time getting up the courage to ask them. It was a Sunday and my Mom was making French Dip Sandwiches. About the time everyone walked into the kitchen, I tossed my ring across the table to my Dad. He stunned, asked Damon “And what kind of ring is this…?” Damon responded with “Well Sir, I’d like to ask you for your daughter’s hand in marriage.” Everyone started yelling and cheering and talking excitedly – except my parents and Damon and I. My Dad told Damon we would have to talk about it later. After a long, quiet dinner we went on a walk with my parents.

They were understanding and encouraging of our dreams. They asked questions and listened while we explained what could possibly drive two eighteen year old kids to want to marry. In the end, my Dad told Damon he would have to get back to him on an answer to getting married.  

My parents didn’t have a lot of money and Damon and I knew that we would have to pay for our own wedding. We set a date – 6 November 2009. We worked so hard, both working two jobs and saving money to pay for our wedding. We had 3 months to get everything and save a little to start our lives.

Damon had a family friend selling a minivan for $500. We decided to spend a bit of our wedding money and get the van. It was great for us to have our own car. We also decided that we were going to rent the mother in law apartment on his grandma’s house. She wasn’t living there at the time so we started to get it ready.

The day of our wedding was perfect. The sun was shining when the day started. There were so many people at my parents’ house. Aunt Mary Ransom came to fix my hair and do my make-up. She ended up doing all of my sisters as well. We had planned on doing my hair up but that morning, I decided that I wanted it down in curls. I loved how it looked that day.

When it came time to go to the wedding, I couldn’t find my shoes. I had little gold flip-flops I was planning on wearing. I had bought pink cork bottom heels for the wedding but I didn’t want to wear them that day because I didn’t want to be taller than Damon. I looked everywhere and it was getting late. I could only find one shoe, so I gave up looking. I ended up going barefoot for the whole day.

Bishop Craig Bean married us in the Sugar City grey church. It was a beautiful ceremony. He talked about how the most important words you can learn in a marriage were “I am sorry.” At the time, I thought he was crazy – but I quickly learned that he was right.

 Afterwards we worked hard to get the church ready for our reception. I had decided on pink, yellow and orange daisies for my wedding. They were so beautiful. Damon and I had worked together to make a playlist of all our favorite love songs to play that night. I can’t remember all of them that were on there. A few of them were Never Gonna be Along from Nickleback, Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing from Aerosmith, My Best Friend by Tim McGraw and Crazy for this Girl from Evan and Jaron. We had an ice cream sundae bar. My Mom made over 1000 cookies for that in the weeks before the wedding.

We danced that night. Damon danced with his Momma, I danced with my Daddy to I Hope you Dance from LeAnn Womack. Damon and I danced to From This Moment from Shaina Twain. Our song is actually Lucky from Jason Marz and Colbie Calliet but we wanted to dance to the other song.

We had a simple honeymoon. We didn’t have a lot of money so we decided to go to Idaho Falls. We found the cheapest hotel we could – a little hotel right on the falls called The Driftwood Inn. We stayed there for a few nights and wandered around old downtown. We ordered in pizza and laughed for hours. Then it was time to get back into real life.

We were both working full time at Taco Time and he was working part time at KFC while I worked part time at Sugar City Hall. It was a busy, busy time.

We started college at Brigham Young University-Idaho in January 2010. I was majoring in Preschool Education with the intent of going on to child development. Damon was majoring in architecture. We were both going full time and working a lot of hours. We hardly had any time together and we were always broke but we were so in love and having so much fun!

We started preparing to go through the temple as soon as we got married. In preparation for that, Damon needed to get the Melkezaidic priesthood and we needed to get our patriarchal blessings. We got our patriarchal blessings done on Easter Sunday 2010. It was such a beautiful day, beautiful blessings. We took temple prep classes in the fall of 2010 and set a date to be sealed.

13 November 2010 we went through the Rexburg Idaho Temple and were sealed for time and all eternity. Our families were there and it was such a perfect moment. I cannot remember feeling the spirit stronger any other time in my life than I did that day. As soon as the sealer finished sealing us, Damon leaned over and started to give me a kiss. Everyone laughed and the sealed said he wasn’t done talking. It was so funny.

In February 2011, we moved from our little apartment in Salem to a basement apartment in Rexburg. It was twice the size of the apartment we were living in and it was closer to school and work. We were so excited to have more space! 

A few months before we went through the temple we had decided we wanted to start trying to have a baby. We started trying in August 2010 to get pregnant. In March 2011, we found out we were expecting. Damon had already left for school when I took the test and I didn’t want to tell him such exciting news over the phone. I called my Mom instead and got a doctor’s appointment for that day. I had an ultrasound that morning and found out I was only three weeks pregnant!

My due date was 24 November 2011… Thanksgiving Day! I was so excited to tell Damon. I bought a cute little Willow Tree of a Dad holding a baby and put it on the kitchen counter. I told him I had something for him on the counter and he walked back and forth like four times before he found it. When he saw it, he picked up one of the positive pregnancy tests and said “Does this mean I’m going to be a Daddy?”

I was so so sick for my whole pregnancy. I threw up four or five times a day and got very dehydrated multiple times. I lost twenty pounds. I was working in the preschool on campus and it was a lot of work just to make it to class every day. I was still working at Taco Time and it was just too much for me. I emailed my boss at City Hall and asked if I could come back. I started back to work there in April 2011.

Even with being so sick, life was so good! We were so excited for November to come. In July, we had an ultrasound to find out the sex of our baby. I already knew I was having a girl, so when the ultrasound showed a girl, I wasn’t surprised. I immediately started buying the things we would need. Pink and purple and sparkles! We talked about so many names. We would pick one and then decide it wasn’t right. We called her McKenna, then she was Cambria and finally, we called her Aria. We couldn’t decide, nothing felt right. One night I went back to the very first name we talked about. I told Damon that I thought her name was supposed to be Ada Mae. He looked at me and said “Okay, that sounds good.” From that moment on, she was our sweet Mae girl.

5 November 2011, we went to Olive Garden to celebrate our anniversary. I took a lot of time getting ready that night – I wanted to look perfect, on the off chance it was our last day without having any kids. I didn’t think it would be because I wasn’t due for a few weeks.

When we got to Olive Garden, there was an hour wait. We decided to stay and it was standing room only. I started having light contractions. Not too bad, but enough to make me stop and breathe. We had dinner and then headed home. I went out to my Mom’s that night to show her the things we had bought for the baby when we went shopping before dinner.

The next morning – our second anniversary - we went to church. I only got a few minutes into sacrament before I was having pretty regular contractions. It was getting too uncomfortable to sit, so Damon and I went home. We only lived across the street so it didn’t take too long. We went out to my Mom’s house, where we painted a turkey on my belly. I bounced on a ball, did jumping jacks, ran up and down the stairs – anything I could think of to get my contractions hard enough to go to the hospital. That evening, I calmed down and we counted contractions. We ended up going to the hospital, but they sent me home because they weren’t hard enough to do anything.

The next morning, I went in to my doctor and Damon headed off to work. The doctor told me to go home and walk, jump and stay active. He said that if I was still having contractions that evening, he would break my water.

We went to the hospital about 6:00 and he broke my water. He started me on Pitocin and then we waited. Ada Mae was born at 3:41a.m. She was 6lbs 9oz and 18 inches long. I was so in love with this perfect little girl.

When Ada was five weeks old, we moved into a new apartment that had a washer and dryer.  We loved that apartment!

I changed my major at school after Ada Mae was born. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to go into, but I knew it wasn’t preschool education. I ended up putting my major as University Studies. I kept going to school, but changed to mostly online classes. I worked a few days a week and did homework, but mostly I played with the sweet little girl I’d been blessed with! I was so in love with being a wife and mommy.

In April 2012, my parents moved an hour and a half away, to Pocatello, Idaho. I was so heartbroken. I was very close to my family and to have them be so much further away and not be able to spend all day with them was very hard on me. I went down to see them every other weekend.

In August 2012, we decided it was time to have another baby. I found out I was pregnant a second time at the beginning of December 2012. We announced it to our families and were just elated to be having another baby. I found out my due date – 5 August 2013. I was not excited to be pregnant all summer, but couldn’t wait for another sweet baby to join our family.

School started back up in January and I was taking twelve online credits. A few weeks into the semester, when I was 10 weeks pregnant, I got Influenza A and was extremely sick. I was already so sick with morning sickness and then had the flu on top of that. I couldn’t hardly move off the couch, let alone take care of my daughter and get homework done. The doctor was really worried because I was so sick and Influenza is especially bad for pregnant women. I couldn’t take the medicine intended to help treat Influenza because of the baby. My husband and father in law gave me a blessing that the baby and I would both be fine and heal quickly, which calmed my heart so much. I had been so worried about my sweet baby.  My cousin and her fiancé picked Ada Mae up and took her to my Mom so that I could rest.

I dropped one of my classes and got back into the swing of life slowly. A day or two after Ada Mae left, I went and picked Ada Mae up. I know that the blessing I was given was the reason I healed so quickly.

In early 2013, Damon decided he didn’t want to major in architecture anymore. We prayed about it and he decided he would transfer to Idaho State University and work on a degree in civil engineering. That meant a move to Pocatello, Idaho. We were very excited for a new change in our lives.

In March, I started looking for an apartment. I went to my Mom’s and stayed for a few days. We looked at dozens of ads, walked through about 10 apartments and couldn’t find anything in our budget that was in a good neighborhood and would fit our growing family. It was very frustrating. The day before I was supposed to go home, I was feeling very upset and the last apartment we had found fell through. I was crying while my Mom drove around Pocatello with me. I told her I felt like God wasn’t answering any of my prayers and that there was nothing decent for us to rent.

Not five minutes after I said that, we saw a little for rent sign in front of an apartment complex. My Mom quickly called the number listed and asked if it was still available. It turned out that the for rent sign had only been put up that morning! We went and walked through it. It was a really nice, two bedroom apartment in a good neighborhood. It had two and a half bathrooms and the bedrooms were both really big. There was a laundry closet, a storage unit and a huge living room. It was up kept and had a lot of nice yard space for my kids to run in. I was so excited but sure it would be out of my price range. I asked and it turned out that it was less than we were paying in Rexburg. I quickly signed the lease and paid the deposit. I didn’t want to lose such a great deal.

We started packing and soon had our whole house in boxes. I was trying to finish up one semester, prepare for the next one and get the house ready to move. We had an ultrasound in early April 2013 to determine the gender of our second baby. My Mom and sister came down. I was hoping for a boy, but really had no idea what the baby was. We went to the ultrasound and found out we were having a baby BOY!

Damon kept saying for my whole pregnancy that he wanted another girl, but he was so excited when he found out it was a boy. We had no names picked. We couldn’t agree on anything so we just called him baby peanut. The next week, we moved to Pocatello, Idaho. As we got settled into our new lives, I started another semester at school.

We kept debating names and finally decided we were going to name him Watson, after Damon’s middle name. We liked it but weren’t sure and after a few weeks of calling him Watson, we decided that wasn’t right. We discussed what felt like hundreds of names, finally narrowing it down to a few. We liked Sawyer and we liked Jack. There were others but I can’t remember what they were. One day we were talking to Ada about her brother and asking her names. She kept saying things like “my shoe” when we would suggest a name. Then Damon said, “Ada Mae, what about Oliver?” Ada shot up and said “Olber, my bruber!!” From that moment on, the baby was Oliver Watson.

I finished up my semester at school in late July and was really itching for baby boy to be born. I felt huge and uncomfortable. The midwives told me I was measuring forty-one weeks pregnant. I was only thirty-eight. I was hoping Oliver would be born on my birthday, but that came and went with no baby. We had a huge chocolate cake and I tried to enjoy the day. I was having contractions but they were small and I knew it wasn’t time yet.

The Sunday after my birthday was 28 July 2013. My brother was preparing for his mission and had an ordination in preparation for that at church that day. I was so uncomfortable, pacing and rocking all day. I thought for sure he would be born that day. We had a big family dinner. Damon was so sick with a migraine that day and I knew I couldn’t have the baby that day with everything going on.

I went home but asked my parents to come over and help me get Ada into bed because I was so uncomfortable and also, for my Dad to come give Damon a blessing of healing. That night, I knew I was in early labor.

I had a doctor’s appointment the next morning and we went up to it. We ended up sitting in the waiting room for over two hours waiting. Damon had to go to work, so he left and my Mom came up to wait with me. The midwife finally saw me. She said I was measuring forty-four weeks pregnant and said to go home but if my water broke to not wait a second to come to the hospital because she felt like my labor would go fast. She was right!

I mowed my Mom’s lawn in hopes of getting my labor going for real and also to get my mind off it. Then I sat down and waited. About 3:30p.m.  my mom told me if I didn’t call the midwives and tell them I was in labor, she was going to. I was grouchy and in pain, with contractions coming every minute. She rushed me up to the clinic where the midwife said I was at a four and to head over to the hospital.

At 4:11p.m. we were in the elevator of the hospital and my Mom called my husband to tell him to shower and come up. (He was at work.) I had another contraction and she called Damon back to tell him to skip the shower and come straight to the hospital or she would miss the birth. I got checked into my room and got an I.V. lock put in, just for emergencies. I had decided to do Oliver’s birth un-medicated because of complications in Ada’s labor. Damon got there and at 5:13p.m. Oliver Watson was born. I pushed for less than ten minutes with him. He weighed 8lbs and was 21.5 inches long. He was such a long skinny baby. His poor little face was so bruised from the fast labor, but he was so perfect and I was so in love.