20 Years

June 7, 1997

Today John and I celebrate 20 years of marriage! We have a nursing baby, so we won't be doing anything special or overnight. We thought maybe we would next year, but both Ruth and Kate will be gone and Johnny will only be 16, so like the rest of our anniversaries, we will go out to dinner and wait until our kids are older to do something extra special. But having Samuel here makes every little sacrifice worth it.

Here's our 20 year Numbers

• 12 babies (11 living)
• weight gained: we are 50 and 75 lbs above our marriage weights (total gained and lost over 14 pregnancies would be astronomical.)
• 5 local moves
• 6 long distance moves
• 2 houses bought and sold and one expected purchase coming soon along with another local move.
• 3 cars (that's probably way below average) so that's something good.

Here's some things I know we've done right

• Monthly, bi-weekly, or weekly Temple attendance.
• Daily couple and family prayers.
• Searching the scriptures as a couple and really trying to come to an understanding of them.
• Having a large family despite difficulties.
• Making gospel teaching a priority in the home.

Hopefully, our 25 year marriage numbers will have lower weight gains as we are both hoping to take some of those extra pounds off.

Here are a few Pictures of us from the last 20 years.

These 2 Photos are from John's Birthday Oct 7, 1996 about a month after we met while attending the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. 

 These two photos are from April 2000. John had just finished all his work for his PhD and we had 2 kids. John had a post doc lined up in New York. Life was pretty exciting.

This is from February 2001. We lived in New York and I was just barely pregnant with Johnny.

 This above picture was taken in 2003. We had 3 kids and lived in Toronto, Canada. John was on his second post doc. 

This above picture was March 2006 at Ruth's baptism. I was 8.5 months pregnant with Rachel. Adam was just under a year and a half and we lived in Wichita, KS

 This picture was also 2006 when Rachel was new born. we thought we had a very big family.

The above picture is from 2007. We still had just 5 kids and lived in Kansas. The below picture is from Oct 2009. We had moved to Utah that year and we now had 7 children. Anya came in Jan 2008 and Joseph in July 2009.

The above picture was taken while we lived in Utah in the fall of 2010. Joseph was 1 and Ruth was 12 and I was about 5 months pregnant with Joshua. John had a good job and we had our lovely home in North Salt Lake. We thought life would continue to be just as blissful. We felt like we had finally made it. We were living in the state of our choice, enjoying extended family, and all was mostly as we imagined it when we got married.

This above picture was taken in November of 2013. Arwen and Josh were added to our family. John had been unemployed for 6 months and was working a job that only lasted 6 months. This was before things really got hard for us and before we ever imagined selling our house and leaving Utah.

This was taken when we were living with my parents just after we moved to North Carolina. I was pregnant with Christopher and completely unaware of what the future held. Things were really hard for our whole family at this time. 

This was just last December when Ruth came home from college for Christmas and Sam was a month old. We knew for sure that all of our kids had made it to our family. John had been working a good job for a few months and life was blissful once again.

And here we are today, June 7, 2017, 20 years of marriage and feeling grateful everyday that we married and chose to have the beautiful family that we now have. We do not know what the future holds, but we do know that with God's help and each other life will continue to be beautiful!