Happy TEN! (10) year anniversary baby!

Kiley & I celebrated our 10 year anniversary on the 20th of this month. I can hardly believe it has been 10 years!

A friend of ours offered to take the kids that Friday night & keep them until about noon on Saturday. It was so nice to have the night off & be able to enjoy the quiet together! We went to Cheesecake Factory for dinner, walked around the mall (tax free weekend=millions of people at the mall), and made a stop at an anesthesia bbq. It was fun to visit with old friends & meet some new peeps as well!

This is us 10 years after the first picture! Boy have we changed!!!

I know most of these pictures won't mean anything to any of you, but they sure do bring back a flood of memories for me & hopefully for Kiley, too! The pictures are not in any specific order. Have fun trying to figure out if which ones are sooner than later! It also makes me feel so old as I post these pictures from 10 years ago to now.......

I rarely think of all that we have accomplished together in the past 10 years. I kind of get stuck in the now & how to make it through each day. But as I sat here going through picture after picture (believe me, we have thousands & thousands of pics on this computer) it made me realize that we have accomplished so many things in these short years together & we still have many many more years to come.

Some of our greatest accomplishments since 1999:

*Having three children & one more on the way! This is huge to me because being prego, having the baby, & then trying to raise them in this chaotic, evil world is not an easy feat! Not to mention, IT IS EXHAUSTING!!! Ask Kiley, living with me for 9 months while I am pregnant is anything but easy! So please pat him on the back or send him some words of encouragement for the next 5 months! Way to go babe! You have almost made it through 4 long pregnancies with me!

*Putting Kiley through BYU, Medical School, and now Residency. We have known nothing but school, school, & more school! What great memories we have from the good old BYU days. But I do have to say, I think Med School is a time that I will always cherish & every now & then, long for. We had such a simple life & great friends. We lived off of love & student loans & nothing else really mattered, well except for making sure Kiley did well in school & passed those darn tests that he would study hours for! Residency has been a whole new ball game. Nothing we had expected. So grateful we have only 1 year left! I am so grateful for Kiley's hard work & dedication to his education, but most importantly to his family. I wouldn't do it any differently than we have! Now it is my turn to go to school!

*Training together for a marathon back in 2005. Kiley didn't get to run it with me, but he did train with me up until about the 10th week of training then he had to leave for a month. It was so much fun to run ourselves to death TOGETHER! There is nothing like pushing each other & supporting each other through some major hard running.....we did a 20 miler for one of our training runs & were both ready to die, but made it together! That was a time period that I will always treasure! Let's do it again babe....well after this baby comes & when you have more time.....

*Competing in our FIRST triathlon earlier this year was a huge accomplishment for the two of us! We had so much fun & really enjoyed it! Again, this is something we'd like to continue doing, but gotta get this baby here first!

*Moving to Arizona, then back to Utah, then on to Texas. To me, moving is a HUGE accomplishment & although each move seemed so hard at the time, we made it & have survived & loved everywhere we have been! Change is good!

*Along with that, having our FIRST home built. That is a tough process for anyone & trying to agree & work together on prices, upgrades, etc, is NOT easy! But we had fun & have LOVED our house!

*Our oldest will be baptized in a few short days. What an accomplishment! Like I mentioned earlier, it is not easy raising kids these days & I am so grateful for the Gospel of Jesus Christ in my life & my little families life. We are so far from perfect, but together with our knowledge & testimonies of the gospel we are trying to teach our children to make good choices, to love everyone, and to know that our goal as a family is to be together forever. I am so grateful for the knowledge I have of eternal families & am even more grateful that I can teach my children this amazing principle & blessing!

*This is always an ongoing accomplishment, but one I really want to mention-everywhere we have lived, we have met some wonderful people & made some life long friends. We are so grateful for the relationships we have, FAMILY & FRIENDS! It is so wonderful to know that we are loved & looked out for! Thanks guys! We love you all!