After 20 years in showbiz working on movie sets, Jaimie Trueblood decided to shift and become the primary caretaker of his four rambunctious and talented boys. For months on end while they were traveling with the boys on a musical tour, his wife, Amber, who is a licensed marriage and family therapist, took every opportunity to work on Stretch Marks, a book of practical parenting tools for mothers who are being stretched in all directions by the demands of work, family and the household. It has been a year since the book’s publication and Amber is knee-deep building a brand on its success. All the while, Jaimie provides the much-needed role of a supporting husband and most of all, a doting stage father to a rock band in the making. It is an incredible story of balance, complementation and harmony – an inspiring story that Matt Kelly brings to us in this episode.

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Embrace The Unexpected With Amber And Jaimie Trueblood

I want to thank both Amber and Jaimie Trueblood for coming on with me. I greatly appreciate it. I’m honored to have you here.

Thank you so much for having us, Matt. This is going to be fun. I’ve been looking forward to it.

You and I had such a wonderful conversation when I was thinking about working with Melinda. This is a great follow up. If one of you go ahead and start and introduce yourself, I know we’ve got Stretch Marks, the brand that you are building incredibly well, I would say. I love your whole theme and everything you’ve got going there. Maybe go ahead and talk about that.

I’m Amber Trueblood and I’m still in the foundational building of my business but I have a book called Stretch Marks and a podcast called Stretch Marks. I’m working on other tools. I’m primarily focused on serving overwhelmed moms and giving them the inspiration, the practical tools, the support, and the community to add calm, ease, simplicity, and some clarity to their lives. That’s my big goal, and we have four boys.

They’re incredibly talented boys from what I know.

They keep us on our toes trying to keep up with them. For most of the time that we’ve had children, Jaimie was working and I was home with the boys doing side projects here and there. It was in 2019 or 2020 that we’ve done the switch and he’s taken on more of the primary caretaker mode with the boys, which is wonderful because they’re so loud and they have so much energy. He’s a much better match for that.

Jaimie, I did a little bit of digging. I go on social media spots and I was looking. I thought it was so interesting. On your Facebook, you’ve got, “Does stuff in places. Prone to whatnot.” I always thought that’s cool. I like the way that reads. Could you elaborate on that maybe?

I nailed it. My Instagram is, “Washer of dishes and folder of laundry,” so I got a little more specific there. My doing stuff in places now is trying to create calm here at the house so she can do her thing.

It’s the same way you did before that. You had a different type of real job.

My life before that was not calm. It was about twenty years in showbiz and I was working on movie sets. All the big movies that you don’t care to admit you watch but do I’m sure several times over, Transformers, Fast and Furious, and all those movies. It took us all over places like Atlanta or Puerto Rico. We didn’t travel too much and that’s when I started to slowly get out of it when things started to shoot primarily less in LA and we’re out of town. That was too much time away from these guys. Fortunately, Cameron is the town’s little dude. He got into a musical, a School of Rock musical, which is an Andrew Lloyd Webber thing and it was a tour.

We had wanted to homeschool the kids that you’re anyway to see the country so it was serendipity and I didn’t want to be part of that. I wanted to be totally part of it. I put my job on the backburner and we hit the road as you probably know. It was supposed to be six months. They became twelve months and became sixteen months. We went to over 50 cities. His younger brother Dylan joined the tour, so both of those guys are on stage. I went from having my job photographing the cool kids in showbiz to sneaking iPhone videos of my kids on stage. I became that guy and it was great. Once we got back, we settled in a new city because we realized we didn’t miss LA that much or at least the traffic. We love our friends and family there but the traffic. We found a little town outside San Diego and we moved here.

Matt is from here.

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You’re from here. There you go.

I spent most of my life there from four years old until 2011. That’s when we moved to Park City.

You went from paradise to paradise.

We found Park City in 2000 and got a condo up here. We’re back and forth for about ten years. We had a blast here and decided at one point that we’re going to try it. We’re going for it. My wife is from San Diego too. We’re like, “We’ve never lived in another city or other town. We love it up there. We love skiing. Let’s try four seasons and life at 7,000 feet,” but we go back to San Diego a lot. You’re north of us, right?

Yeah. Amber wrote her book while we were on tour. She was writing in hallways, on airplanes, and wherever she could. Once we got settled, she’s been doing her thing and I realized I didn’t miss that life of 14 or 16-hour days in other cities. I’m happy to be here and be a full-time dad and let her do her thing. There you go.

It sounds like you both have lived fantastic lives. What the show is also a lot about is supporting each other in your individual lives and what your individual missions and intentions are. It’s always coming together to make sure that you’re balancing each other out so you can enjoy that side of life along with being a couple, raising a family, and all. Amber, you are a mom for a while, first and foremost before you got the Stretch Marks idea and it seems Jaimie jumped on board with you and decided to leave that career and travels behind and support Stretch Marks and what you’re doing,

It was fortuitous that the tour came in between that transition because for us, it was nice. One of the things I was thinking about as I was reading the description of the show and what you’re all about is, I was thinking about how both Jaimie and I grew up as only children with single moms. That taught us a lot because we didn’t grow up with delineated stereotypes when it came to gender roles, which was our moms and they did all of it.

That helped so when we came together, it was like, “What are you good at? What am I good at?” We have different skillsets so it works out nicely. We’re not fighting over doing the same things. For the most part, we have a clear delineation of how we parse up all of the different things that need to be done when you’re trying to raise four people and be happy, adventurous and have fun together. Because I had been doing predominantly the home base side, and he had been out in the working world, the tour took both of us being hands-on 24/7. That was an interesting transition for us.

Every week I would schedule the flights, rental cars, the Airbnbs, and pay our bills from the road. We had some rental properties and stuff so I would take care of that financial stuff while Jaimie would take them to the museums, skate parks and/or keep them busy while I was packing up that Airbnb to get ready for the next thing. We had this transition time of 1.5 years almost where we’ve got to figure out how we worked best together. All six of us together 24/7 have prepared us well for this time.

That’s a great experience that you all had and I can relate that to how the show came about with Missy and I. We started a company a few years ago. We launched CatTongue Grips and Missy had been in the working world and all before we had kids, but then she didn’t work while we had our children. With CatTongue coming up, it started picking up momentum and all this. She stepped in and to my surprise, I had no idea she had it in her but she’s our CEO and she runs the thing. She is unbelievable and would be such an asset to any company but who would have known that. I started looking around and we went to some different networking groups and different things.

I realized some of the challenges that women have to get back into the working world and once they’ve stepped away to have their children. A lot of women end up being entrepreneurs because of that. It’s difficult to get hired back on and that’s one of the things that we want to investigate. I don’t have the answers, but what’s the best way for women to have the children physically? If they do want to have the desire to work and have a career, what’s the best way for them and for companies to be engaging and supporting that pregnancy?

Also, supporting that new child into this family and allow these women that are incredibly capable? Amber, you’re a perfect example. You’re organizing and doing all of that stuff that you’re talking about. That’s what we’re looking to learn. How are we going to figure this out? How are we going to make it so people have this new mindset about, “These women, don’t look at them as moms because they were the ones that birth the child and carry the child. They are also brilliant in the workplace?”

You hit the nail on the head when you said that there are a lot of women who turn to entrepreneurship as an option because it’s something you can start at your own pace. You can pick something you’re passionate about because that’s the benefit. It is both a luxury and occurs when you want to go back to work and you also don’t want to do anything. If you’ve given up 10 or 15 years of your life to devote to your children, you don’t want to be away from them for 10 or 12 hours a day doing something that you hate or do something that doesn’t align with your values. It doesn’t feel worth it because you’ve already spent all this time and energy. That’s part of the draw that entrepreneurship has.

You have the opportunity to delve into something that’s important to you and taking those hours away from the family doesn’t feel like a sacrifice. You can get wholeheartedly excited about but on that same note, entrepreneurship is challenging because you’re in a silo. Sometimes you’re reinventing the wheel 30 people in your city have probably tried to do the same thing or done it successfully. If you’re not tapped into that, that’s why these networking groups, leadership groups, and different types of female entrepreneurial groups, for me, have been priceless.

I don’t know if this is a new trend because I’m new to this world but several years ago, I remember feeling isolated as a mom. I either have friends that are kind, compassionate, and sweet but didn’t have this obsessive drive to want to do more. I felt weird. I had a lot of, or at least this was my interpretation of what their perspective is like, “Chill out. You have four little kids. There will be time. Relax.” I was like, “But.” I felt guilty for wanting something else outside, in addition to all the amazing things I’ve had.

I had friends that were successful businesswomen, but they lacked that compassion of, “I want to help you. What do you want to do?” It’s this teamwork connection and thriving because others around you are thriving and growing together. I’ve found now three different groups of women that are exactly that combo of both which have the same values about community, giving back, and family that is important to them. They also have incredible problem-solving skills. They’re smart, driven and creative. For me, it has been an incredible awakening to be like, “I’ve found my people.” They built multiple businesses, they’ve sold this and they’re talking in numbers that boggled my mind, “When I sold this nine-figure business, I did this, and then I started a third business at the same time.”

Those are amazing stories. Those are the kinds of things that they have support within their life from somebody that they love and is close to them, supporting them because that’s how you get to that level. You’ve got to have somebody. Jaimie, can we talk about the satisfaction of hanging out with the kids, taking them to places, and doing that because I’ve been doing a lot of that. I love it.

I’m the luckiest guy in the world. Everybody wants to work and save money so they can spend more time in the future with their kids. It’s nice to be able to not just be thinking about what I can do in the future, like the time I would like to be spending that time with them. It’s amazing because I have people that are trying to figure out if they’re going back to movie sets or not. They’re still trying to figure that out. How can I keep working enough to where I can retire, enough not to keep working so I can spend more time with my family?

Meanwhile, their kids are on TikTok towards eighteen. I’m lucky that I get to spend much time with them now before they have girlfriends and they’re going off on their own adventures. That’s what’s perfect about the tours because they were so young. They weren’t missing this or that back home. We would keep in touch with people. They took it one day at a time. They had each other as their best friends. It’s been great. As people say it does go so fast. Cameron is growing, which is mind-boggling and he’s as tall as ever already. It feels like, “Where did the time go?” I’ve been there. In the past few years, I’ve been there for almost every second.

I have to say even before that when you were working crazy hours when you had a movie. For a while when we had three, we would travel with him if the movie was away. We’d be three months Cleveland, New Orleans, or Atlanta. Once I had the fourth, I was like, “I can’t do it anymore.” He took local work and he had one movie that was in Atlanta. He maybe had 30 hours off every weekend. He would work all night on a Friday night, hop on a plane on Saturday morning and get to LA Saturday afternoon, spend 24 hours with us and fly back every single weekend. I remember one time we drove down here to go to Legoland. He flew into San Diego and took an $80 Uber to meet up at Lego. Was it somebody’s birthday or something?

Yeah.

He was going the extra mile by far, even before he wasn’t working. I know you are a horrible skier. I always think of when we would take them skiing. He never wanted them to go skiing school because he was like, “I want to teach them stuff. I want to be the one to teach them how to ski.” I would be like, “I love that about you, but I’m scared as heck with the four of them on this hill.” It’s scary to try to control all four of them. Luckily, they picked up, as you well know, quickly. It got relatively safe quickly, but it still was scary. I’d be like, “Can we put them in a half-day of ski school so I don’t completely go gray this weekend?”

That was a good exercise carrying for them.

We would ski backward with the two younger ones.

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The Edgie Wedgie that goes on the front of the skis to keep them together.

Nobody told us about those and now that I think about it and I’ve talked about this before with the talks that I’ve done is the way business and society was set up was smart. Men did this because most men were the ones that decided how to set up the communities. We go to a Thai restaurant to get Thai food, you go to an accountant to get your accounting and numbers done and you go to the dentist to get them to work. Everybody has a specialty that they can focus on but at home, you are the taskmaster of everything when it comes to decorating, doing bills, preparing food, planning vacations, reorganizing the garage, making sure everybody has socks or shoes that fit them. It’s the type of tasks and the type of personality that all of those different types of tasks take are different.

Unfortunately, most of it all has to be done and taken care of. Somehow many of us women, and most of us, I would dare to say, grow up somehow thinking that we’re supposed to be good at all of it. We’re supposed to enjoy and be stoked that we’re doing a little bit. That’s one thing that I tried to help women with. I’m not saying it doesn’t have to be done, but it’s okay to be like, “I’m good at this stuff but not so great at this.” I don’t love it but what I found is that if you have more things in your life that you do love than the stuff that used to drive me nuts to do that was more tedious and boring because I didn’t have stuff in my life that was fun and fueling to my brain or dance classes physically.

I noticed that when I started bringing stuff into my life, it wasn’t suddenly like, “I get to cook dinner.” It didn’t bother me. It was like, “I’ll do dinner.” It balanced that out a lot more. If men were to stay at home and had developed into being the stay-at-home gender in charge of that, we would have had these communities of families where we would divvy it up. It’s like, “You love to cook. You love to garden. Do the food. You’re in charge of this and I’ll take care of the kids. I’ll do an art project with them.” We would have 10 or 12 women that would say, “Who’s great and enjoys what?” and we would divvy up the labor that way. For whatever reason, we didn’t evolve that way, at least not in this country. It’s a real disservice both to us and our families because it’s not easy.

Running the house is not easy at all. That’s why it takes two people working together.

I’d love 5 or 6.

I keep asking if we can marry more people, like when I meet one of her friends or she meets mine.

Bring it. Come on.

In Utah, that still is somewhat okay in certain areas. The polygamy thing isn’t completely gone.

I’m sure it would come with other issues, but it does help on the surface.

I remember that you brought up the skiing thing. An a-ha moment for me was the winter of 2019. Early on, the kids had a race up in Jackson Hole, and Missy and I were up there with the kids and everything. At the end of one of their race days, the four of us were skiing down together and I shout out, “I can’t wait to get in the pool in the Jacuzzi.” Missy says, “I’ve got some emails and stuff. My phone has been blowing up, so I have to meet you.” We keep on skiing and in my head, I’m like, “This is the first time a transition is happening where she’s going to be sitting in the condo on her computer catching up on the day while I am at the pool with the kids. This is cool. This is working out fine.”

That’s that balance of stuff. You guys can speak to your relationship and what you’ve seen, but with Missy using her mind as you alluded to Amber, with CatTongue, her conversations and her and I are so much more on an even playing field. I’ve been doing commercial residential real estate for 22 or so years. That’s been my career. I come home and I’ve got that and she’s separated by everything that she does at home with the kids and stuff all day long.

 

Does she want to hear about all of my work stuff? Not really because in her mind, she probably wants to be able to work. She wants to be able to use her mind to do something like that but she’s not because she’s locked down at the house with the kid the whole time. There’s a little bit of this, “I’ll hear it but it’s not exactly what I wanted to do. I like to be out there and have interaction with adults, the challenges, everything that a job and a career brings, and also have my kids.” There’s that separation that happens in so many households.

Economics is the thing that’s hard to balance out and to play with for a lot of people because one person has to work and the other one is not. You let the gal find herself the job that works and the husband be able to have the time away from work in order to help at home, and bring that all together is a big piece of the puzzle. If we can possibly figure out how that can be done on the scale that individuals and couples want it to be, households are going to be run so much smoother and happier. There’s going to be less divorce out there and kids are going to be happier because both parents are happier.

Missy is reading the business pages now. She’s up to snuff with what’s going on in the world on the business. We can talk about our kids and balancing up our chores at home but also what’s going on in the world, the economics, and all the different stuff going on in the world in which she didn’t have as much of an interest in before because she didn’t get to go to these networking groups. She didn’t go to talk to different adults. She didn’t have all this conversation. It was me as a sounding board on that and bringing that stuff home. Have you guys had that experience now? Amber, you’ve got a business going and you’ve got bills coming in because of your business. You’ve got to be sharpened on that. Jaimie, you’ve had all these years of experience in business and now you’re home with the kids. You guys have totally mixed all the rules up and are communicating on another level.

I’ve got to be honest. When I was doing my business, fortunately, in my world, I got to be the camera guy and there was some business stuff here but I honestly primarily got to be an artsy guy. I got to be a crazy, artsy guy, which is fine because it’s trying to find a business that suits your personality. Amber has always been good at the important things that I’m good at quoting movies like Dumb and Dumber, which is fine. I found a career that could pay me for that knowledge. That’s the thing. We were playing to our strengths and that’s the important thing.

That’s what I was going to say too. We are still doing the same roles because I was handling the finances and investments. I did some property management from home. There’s some term for it, but he’s better at doing the creative stuff, anything sentimental. Our boys do a lot of drawing, and they do a lot of things. He will ask, “You didn’t date this. Who did this drawing?” He’ll date it, files it and keeps everything. He takes videos of everything, he documents and on, and I’m the one who’s making sure that we have toilet paper and socks.

It’s funny because we’ve kept the same roles. Now, all my audience and my interactions are more in the outside world than they ever were before and his are less on the outside world, which is funny. Tell me if you think differently, but I almost think that goes with our personalities, more so than the last couple of years of our relationship. Jaimie is more about family. He wants to be around me and the boys and maybe 1 or 2 other people occasionally. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re not somebody who’s like, “I need to go to the brewery. I need to be around my big groups of friends on poker nights.” You’ve never been like that since I’ve known you now.

We’re similar in that sense, Jaimie. Locked down from quarantine, we called it quarantation because it was a vacation for our family. The four of us hung out together and did stuff around the house. We had a 50th birthday and another 50th birthday. Our friend invited us all over to do yoga at 6:00 PM. I’m like, “Missy, here we go again. Let’s get back in this little bubble that we had.”

When you’re on a movie set, you are around 50 to 100 people, literally 12, 15, or 16 hours a day and sometimes 5 to 7 days a week. Many those days, months, and years, I was like, “I can’t wait to get home. I want to take them to Legoland,” and now I’m in that position. I did a lot for those people. It’s showbiz. I did enjoy being with a lot of those people but now you could say I’m trying to make up for the lost time. By being on tour and being with them now, I’m grateful.

I did everything I needed to do in that world and proved everything I need to prove in that role. I don’t have anything like, “I need to do Transformers 19 because I did 14 and 15.” I’m fine but now it’s to make up for the lost time, and they’re fun. They’re fun kids. They’re always wanting to do stuff which is great. Frankly, a lot of my friends these days, even years ago, I was like, “Let’s go skateboarding.” They’re like, “My knee. My back.” These guys, they love to do everything I love to do, which is to skate, do music, be artsy, and be an idiot in public. We can’t do any more now.

It sounds like this balance readjusting has been fantastic for your relationship too. You’ve been together for many years and now is a refreshing change. That’s what I think a lot. Missy and I had that and you guys have that. I’ve talked to some other people, not doing the podcast, but often about it that have had that kind of experience. That’s what I want to get a message out. Don’t be afraid to take a risk. Husband or wife, whichever one has got whatever roles, what do you want as an individual out of life? How much time do you spend with your kids? How much time do you want to be in a career? Figure that out individually and together, and work out how that can happen. You can still pay your bills and live the life that you want to live. If you’re both individually happy and satisfied with what you’re doing, you can bring that together and have a more rewarding relationship.

When they talk about the five love languages and stuff, Jaimie is good at verbally telling me like, “I appreciate you,” all the time. It’s his natural way, but it happens to be great for me. Things like that that we do where we acknowledge verbally out loud and appreciate what each other is doing. That will serve you for days or years. That’s been huge. Also, a lot of men, at the end of the day, want their wives to be happy. One of the things that women need to be responsible for is when you are stressed out about work or something like that, it’s easy for the man to come in and say, “You don’t need to do that.”

You have to be clear like, “I’m just frustrated about this, but I’m enjoying this.” It’s on us to be clear about what enjoyment you are getting out of it so that it doesn’t get interpreted as like, “This is stressing you out? Don’t do it. I got this. I’d be happy in other ways.” It’s a constant thing that we’re always learning and trying to keep in communication about to make sure that we understand each other’s needs and what we’re doing.

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Some of the few times that I am angry at her and that I might have expletives come out of my mouth is when I catch her at the kitchen sink and she’s doing dishes. I’m like, “What are you doing?”

He’s like, “That’s my job.”

I’m like, “No.”

I’m like, “I already played The Office on my Netflix and I’m fine. I’m good. I can have a zone out break.”

That’s when I get angry. “Those are in my world and I know you don’t like it, so get out of there.”

What was going through my head as Amber was speaking about the frustration that she sometimes has with work was that’s what it’s all about. You want that type of thought process going through your mind, the goods, bads, highs, lows, frustrations, wins, losses, and everything that comes with work. As you were saying that, including Jaimie, with Missy when she says like that to me, I walk in and I go to start, “What’s going on? Do you want to go out back and hang out on the deck?” She’s like, “No, I’ve got this thing to do and I’ll do it tomorrow.” That’s my cue to get out. I do the dishes, laundry, yard work, or whatever. Be productive somewhere else within the house and enjoy myself knowing that is cool. My wife is out there grinding out something and getting satisfied in doing it.

When she started to ask me, “Are you okay if I try to start my own thing?” We’ve been talking about this 3:00 in the morning in Atlanta on a freezing cold, moldy soundstage, and I’m like, “I would love nothing more than you being the CEO of some nine-figure and I can just be a pool boy and be with the kids.”

We’ll have to take a pool soon.

I know. We have some shocks. Every founder has to be open to it. My dad was a stockbroker and he did not want me to do what I was doing. He thought it was much a pull on me. We weren’t musicians. When cameras were banging on drums, I was two years old, and nobody wanted their kids banging on drums when they’re two years old. We were open. We could see that he had potential even in diapers. Try and be open to everybody and what their wants and desires are because you never know where that will take you. Our encouraging him to do his thing and get better took us on this amazing adventure that we’d never had on a two-year-plan.

We wouldn’t have been anything. I always say I never would have planned having four kids. We did them all on purpose. We planned each one but not from the get-go. I never thought I would be a stay-at-home mom because neither one of us had stay-at-home moms. I never thought I would homeschool my kids. I would have laughed in somebody’s face if they would have told me that. I never thought my kids would be in a Broadway show and for 1.5 years traveling. Jaimie said we just go where the opportunities lie.

If we were close-minded parents like, “No, you cannot do music. You must play baseball,” we wouldn’t have done an amazing tour and we wouldn’t have been spending our Saturdays watching kids run around at Sunburg. Be open to the universe and whatever it’s going to bring at you and roll with it.

You did that with your kid. You’re not professional skaters that I know of, right?

 

No. That’s funny. We have a joke up here that we’re a couple of beach bombs raising ski racers. You can imagine in this community, a lot of the parents did ski, at least in college, and the World Cup is the next stage. There are quite a few Olympians up here, even with medals and stuff, that are parents and they know what they’re doing. Missy and I have no idea how to tune a ski. We have no idea where to turn supposedly. Our kids have been doing it. We moved here when they were 4 and 6.

They mentioned to us that they wanted to ski race while we’re making the move. They loved skiing and being up here, and that helped. It was a catalyst for us along with us wanting to change things up and see how it goes knowing we could always go back to San Diego if we wanted. They’re at a serious level now. They’re flying down the hill and they have coaches. It’s a detailed type of training that they do.

I don’t care to learn it and try to catch up. I’m more of taking the approach of who I am and I make them laugh. We have a full tuning setup in our garage and they each have about six pairs of skis for their different disciplines and stuff. They’re down there and tuning it on. I’m like, “You missed an edge over here.” They’re like, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Get out.” I drove around with them because I don’t know and I’m not going to try.

I’m the comic relief in an intense situation with them when they’ve got a race coming up. Missy is smarter than I am by far across the board and she does know how to tune. She’ll get in the garage and she’ll help them tune and everything. She spends more time with the coaches and has learned a lot about different things and details of the ski racing thing. It’s our personalities. That’s where she likes to be and this is the role I like to play. We laugh and the kids laugh at us.

There’s such a neat lesson in that though for other parents because a lot of times, as children, they wish their parents had done the same, or we get a lot of adults that will say, “Can you adopt me? I want to grow up as one of your kids in my next life.” It’s sweet and it’s a compliment and all that good stuff. You can think about that in a family where maybe your kids are still little. I remember when I interviewed Missy about stepping into the uncomfortable zone, where you don’t know what it’s going to look like. You don’t know if it’s going to be a good decision or a bad decision, or you go off the trail for a little bit.

There’s the opportunity for many incredible experiences and bonding that you couldn’t have possibly anticipated. There are such amazing potential goals with stepping into that uncomfortable zone and you could always move back to San Diego. There’s almost always a feasible exit plan and you can say like, “We’ll see where this goes.” Often, there are other decisions you can make down the road that can shift things back. We’ve found and you clearly found that if you can step into that uncomfortable zone, amazing things can happen and it’s fun. Did you start a company called CatTongue Grips?

Yeah, that’s right. It probably would have never started in San Diego.

Have you thought about instead of using traditional bindings, taping their boots to the skis starting a new trend that way?

Duct tape around the top. A brief story. I’m with my son and he had a binding break. At the top of the racecourse, the coaches dig a pit. One of the coaches stands in there and before the kids go down to the race, they come in with their skis and get out of their bindings. The coaches cleaned off all the snow underneath their boots and made sure their bindings are set right. They slap them in so they’re in as good as they can possibly be before they get to the start gate.

For some reason, Wade’s piece of his binding broke loose when he came out of it, and their coach duct tape the thing down so that he could run. Wade told us the story later where he was like, “Is this okay?” He’s like, “Don’t pull out of it. Once you’re in, stay in. It will last for the race. I promise you, Wade. Don’t even think about it. Just go.” That’s what he did. That was amazing for Wade to have the mind and he had a good race. He was able to clear that out of his mind and head on down the hill.

I’ve got to tell you too the most important thing, besides the iPhone charger or charging cords, were our rolls of 2-inch paper tape. We were lost without them because they would put our luggage back together as it fell apart on the tour in the airport with underwear flying out the holes in the sides.

We had to have a 50-pound limit on every bag. In the winter months, we were traveling with twelve checked bags. We also had, in addition to that, guitars, ukuleles, portable drum set, bass, five skateboards, five scooters, helmets, pads, piano, and a bunch of books every time. We got good at it, but we would open up the suitcases and be repacking stuff so that we could be at 49.5 pounds on everything. We’d be giving stuff away to the people behind the desk because if we were over, we would be like, “We have to give it away to strangers because we’ve got to get on this flight.”

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That’s commitment.

One time, we were leaving for Cincinnati and we didn’t fit in one car.

You need a U-Haul.

With all our luggage plus six people. I had people in rental car agencies talk about genderism a little bit. They’d be like, “I’m sure this minivan is big.” I was like, “I appreciate that. I’ve done this for many weeks now. We do not fit.” We packed up our two cars and we’re getting ready to go to the airport. We locked up the rental house. We go to get in the cars and we only find the keys for one car. We have no time to spare. We can but we just packed up a boatload of stuff. We called an Uber and we took all the stuff out of the car that we can’t drive anywhere. We put it in the Uber and I left the car there. I called the car rental agency on the way and said, “Your car is downtown at this address. I can’t get it back to you. I don’t know what to do.”

We get there and we checked-in. We had matching jackets. He puts his hand in his pocket and he’s like, “Oh.” I’m like, “Now I’m going to have to ship it to Budget. How am I going to get this key back to them because they’re going to charge me $300 plus whatever to tow the car?” We’re on the other side of security. I find this security guard who says, “I’ll walk it over to Budget for you.” I was like, “Thank you. You’re the best.” I’ve got 800 stories like that, so Jaimie keeps asking me, “When are you going to write the book about our tour life?” I’m like, “It’s on my list.”

I was imagining with that much stuff to move it around and with those kids, that is a serious group effort. That’s exciting. What an incredible period of time you had it.

We had not lived in this house. This was a new house for us. I remember my oldest saying, “I keep having these moments where I think we’re going to have to leave soon,” because they were used to hopping on the road every Monday.

I’ll call them little artists. They clearly are. I’d imagine there are a lot of artists out there that are used to being out and about, touring, and playing for their fans. I feel for them. We love entertainment like plays, music, and comics. We don’t care. We go. That’s one of the things that’s hurting Missy and I. We miss going and seeing live shows of any kind. I can imagine a lot of those people that are entertainers, I hope they can get back to doing what they love too, at some point in time here.

It’s a tough time for everybody. Try to figure it out.

This has been incredible. To be respectful of your time, I do have one more question I want to wrap it up with and this all stemmed from an event where a number of statues in our country were torn down. Things that involve the Confederacy and people that had slavery involved and that kind of thing. I’m not going to get into politics. That’s not the point of this at all. Once I started seeing those things being down, I started thinking, “That’s interesting because now there’s an actual number of locations that are zoned for statues that are beautifully placed and set up for.

It’s been like that forever that they don’t have anything on them. We have an enormous discrepancy between men that have been memorialized in statues and women around our country. What if we had a push to replace each of those stands with a female?” That brought me to thinking I should probably ask my guests as we go along. Do you have a choice or a woman that comes to mind that you think would be deserving of such a statue?

It doesn’t sound appropriate, but the boys and I watched Greyhound, which is a Tom Hanks, a World War II movie. My mother and I were talking about that and we started talking about Hedy Lamarr. I’m going back and picturing the Paramount Hollywood area, maybe a statue of her. We started talking about Hedy Lamarr because she was not only a beautiful, talented actress, but she was a scientist and inventor. A lot of what she came up with her husband at the time is used in a lot of the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology we have today. She was feeling guilty about being this movie star and hunkering up with all her house and her money while everyone else is fighting the bad guys.

 

They were coming up with technologies with torpedoes, jamming, transmissions, and everything. They tried to bring it to the military, but they were shooing them away like, “You go be a beautiful woman. Stop bothering us with your ideas.” Maybe a statue of her reminding people to be open-minded to everybody and their ideas, even if they’re women. In the ‘50s, they started using those ideas finally, and then they have proper props decades later. At the time, they were like, “Just go make your movies.” Those might be open to people, especially women out there that have seen great ideas.

My answer is a little trickier because the first thing I thought about was a nondescript female statue that’s built with mirrored materials so that any woman walking up to it sees her faith in the face. It sounds cheesy, but it’s important for all of us, especially young women and young kids, both boys and girls, to see the hero in themselves and take that ownership like, “Here’s a statue with my face on it. What am I going to do to earn that?” That was my thought.

That is amazing. You two are creative. I’ve got yours written down, Jaimie and Amber. That’s what I love about this. I’m getting started with the show and I have no idea where it’s going to go and what’s going to come with the conversations. Amber, that’s something brilliant that I had never thought about. I picture it. You walk up. Also, I picture the sun shining off it or the moonlight signing off of it. It’s always got this gorgeous glow to it from wherever you’re at to see that statue. That’s amazing.

Thank you. You’re an incredible couple. I can’t thank you enough for coming on and sharing your life with us. It’s all in the effort to hopefully help some couples out there and some young kids that are going to be getting married to start off on the right foot or make a change even after twenty years like you did and Missy and I did. We’ve been married for more than 22 years and that visit came around a couple of years ago. Balance up and let’s all live our full lives.

Thank you for having us. This has been fun.

I appreciate that. You have a great rest of your day.

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About Amber Trueblood

Amber is a licensed marriage and family therapist, speaker, author, retreat-host, and mother of four sons. Amber is obsessed with providing mothers simple and realistic tools to guide them toward a happier, calmer mom-life. Her approach includes helping clients clarify their unique combination of values, lifestyle, priorities, and family dynamics reinforced with a solid commitment to self-kindness and self-honesty. She inspires and emboldens moms to choose and implement the tools and tactics most likely to work for their individual personalities and priorities. With confidence, clarity, and a clear sense of purpose, Amber’s clients and students can minimize their relationship & parenting challenges and improve their mental health & emotional sanity.

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About Jamie Trueblood

Born in Spokane.