Welcome to Shafferland!
I'm Bekah. He's Ryan. This is our story.
2026 marks twenty years since I entered the blogging world, so I thought I'd update this page with twenty fun facts about us!
1. I was a surprise baby. My parents thought they were about to become empty nesters...and then I showed up! I was born on Mother's Day, one week before my oldest sister graduated from high school.
2. My mom was an instructional assistant in first grade, and Ryan was in her class! She loves to tell people that everything he needed to know, he learned in first grade.
3. When I was in college, I worked in the school's Financial Aid Office. They hired me to write a Policies and Procedures Manual, because I was a writing major in need of a job. I ended up working there all four years, was quickly pulled from the writing project to do other office tasks and never wrote the manual.
4. My post-college career list has been...eclectic. I've been a financial aid counselor, a radio producer and air personality, a stay-at-home wife, a community advocate, a grant writer, a program coach, and now I'm the Pastor of Congregational Care at my church. (Fun fact: God has used every one of those previous jobs to prepare me for what I do now.) Ryan has had an equally eclectic list of careers, including (but not limited to) mattress maker, physical therapist assistant, executive director of a nonprofit, and now he is the Sales and Lifestyle Coordinator for a retirement community.
5. I have written four books and published two of them. My first book, written before I was married and published fifteen years ago, is called His Advent: Still His Greatest Gift. My second book, published almost a decade ago, is called Be Still: Learning to Know He is God. I dream of writing and publishing more books, but we'll see how the Lord leads!
6. I've had MANY hair colors in my life. My natural hair color is brown, I had a brief, accidental experience with neon orange, followed by Ronald McDonald red, and now it's blonde...because it's really white. Blonde is all I can keep up with when it comes to root touch-ups.
7. Ryan and I are both major planners. We are all about lists, calendars, and color-coding. I feel like in most marriages, only one spouse is a planner, so I find it to be quite a gift that we both love to plan. Because we do plan so thoroughly, we often have a full calendar 2-3 months out.
8. Speaking of planning, Ryan planned a great first date for us, a great proposal, which you can watch here, and a great surprise birthday party for my 40th. He is the best at planning great surprises - because I'm hard to surprise!
9. We were married two months after Ryan proposed. We live in Indiana but traveled to Siesta Key, Florida for our wedding. We were married on the beach at sunset, and it was the best. Know what wasn't the best? The three hour traffic jam we got caught in ten minutes before reaching our destination - after almost 24 hours in the car. But oh, what a story it made!
10. We celebrate our monthiversary every single month, and we've been married 13 years now. We try to do something special or go on an extra date that day in honor of our relationship! We also take a picture every month on that day. I have all of them!
11. We also recreate ten of our wedding pictures every year on our anniversary. It was kind of an accidental tradition we started on our first anniversary and we have done it every year since!
12. We love traveling around the USA. I am terrified of flying, so we drive wherever we go. Back in the pandemic, we had an RV and fell in love with traveling in our little home on wheels. We've since sold it, but we hope to one day buy another and tackle the "five year plan" I've crafted for traveling back and forth across the country! We are also on a quest to visit all 92 counties in Indiana. We are about 1/3 of the way there. (The pandemic and the dog we brought home shortly after that have slowed us down considerably.)
13. We love coffee. We looked into buying a coffee shop (twice), we stop in a coffee shop in every one of the counties we visit, and we drink coffee from morning to night every single day. We still sometimes wonder what it would be like to run a coffee shop. Who knows? Maybe someday!
14. It took 9 years for Ryan to get on board with the idea of becoming dog parents, but we are both so glad he said yes. Some friends of ours raised miniature Bernedoodles, so we got on a waiting list for a puppy. Two days before Lexi was born, I was bitten on the hand by a random dog walking down the street. I was actually still in a bandage when I met Lexi for the first time! We brought her home when she was about 8 weeks old, and she just celebrated her 4th birthday. She is SO opinionated and all personality, but she sure makes us laugh!
15. I used to have a party trick of knowing the title to every single episode of Little House on the Prairie. My college roommates would play the start of an episode (after the title displayed) and time me to see how long it took me to name it. I could usually do it in under five seconds.
16. I scrapbook everything. I started scrapbooking in when I graduated from college, and for ten years, I did the old-fashioned post-bound books with printed pictures. For the last fifteen years, I've created digital photo albums that I order when they run sales! I make books of our regular, daily life and also books about all our travels and special events. I have just about 100 books from our marriage.
17. Ryan and I are both warm blooded (another marriage rarity) and like to keep our house in the mid-60s.
18. We love to thrift. We have found some great deals at thrift stores and think a day of thrifting is one of the most fun dates we could have!
19. We collect an ornament from each place we visit on our travels and each major milestone. We fear we may have to add onto our house by the time we've been married 50 years - just to make room for the ornaments. I take a picture of every ornament, print it, and write the story of that ornament on the back. Every year when we decorate our trees, we read the stories of the ornaments and relive memories!
20. I'm working on crossing off the items on my 50 Before 50 List. I'm excited to see how many of them I can do before my 50th birthday in a couple of years!
There you have it! 20 fun facts to celebrate 20 years of blogging! Thanks for reading along! If you'd like to see even more of our adventures, you can find us on Instagram and Pinterest. For my writing and speaking ministries, you can find me at my own website. And if you have questions, blog post suggestions, or anything else you'd like to talk about, feel free to email at readingrebekah(at)yahoo(dot)com.
Thanks for spending time with us!!
