The first ten years...

It took a while, but I've finally managed to complete a picture time line of our first ten years together.  It's been fun reminiscing about the life that we've lived.  I am so grateful that God has joined Buzz and I together.  I truly live a life that is above and beyond everything that I had ever hoped for.  My husband is my best friend.  We've grown up together and supported one another through all the twists and turns that our lives have taken.  The best part of celebrating our first decade is looking forward to loving each other for the remainder of the years that God gives us.

So... after much time waiting, it was finally Buzz and I who stood together at the altar.  At some point leading up to the wedding we stopped caring as much about the details of the day and were just eager to get on with our lives as a married couple.  On the day of our wedding, my hair was a disaster (I still want to strangle the lady that did it - and I'm not a violent person), I was stuck in a hot dressing room for what felt like hours while Buzz frantically tried to finish setting up the tables for the reception, the photographer's camera broke... really I could go on and on about what didn't go right.  But the most important part of that day happened beautifully, just as perfectly as I'd always imagined.  I stood before our friends and family with the man of my dreams where we pledged our love to each other and were joined in marriage before God.  When I think of the wonder of those few moments, all of the other mishaps of the day fade into insignificance.

Here we are driving away after the ceremony.  We were unbelievably happy to be on our way!

After our honeymoon to the northern California coast, we drove our truck (which didn't have air conditioning) for three days to get back to Tulsa.  Once there we moved into our new apartment, got our few boxes out of storage, and unpacked our wedding gifts (amusing side note:  Buzz thought that it would be funny to register for toilet paper at Target.  Guess what we got from nearly everyone who came to our wedding?  We literally didn't have to buy toilet paper for the first year of our marriage!).  We both found jobs at the same hospital.  I worked as a nurse technician, and Buzz as a patient transporter.  The summer went by quickly and we returned to school in the fall.

The next spring Buzz graduated with a degree in Pastoral Christian Ministries with an emphasis in missions.  His parents and brother came out and we had a great time celebrating his accomplishment.  Later that summer we decided that we would like a second bedroom for guests and moved into a new apartment.  Buzz started a full time job with an orthopedic hospital, also in patient transport, but with this job he got to valet park cars as well.

A year later it was my turn to graduate with my Bachelor of Science in Nursing.  We enlisted the help of my parents when they came for my graduation to help us load up a u-haul and move us back to Reno.  Here we are just before leaving for my pinning, a traditional ceremony that graduating nurses participate in.  It was a bigger deal to me than graduation itself.

Once in Reno, we both got jobs fairly quickly.  I started working on an orthopedic unit doing 12 hour night shifts three times a week, Buzz started working as a surgical orderly doing 4 ten hour night shifts a week.  It's funny now to look back on that time when we were both working and before we had kids and remember how carefree we were.  If we wanted to buy something, we did.  If we wanted to go somewhere, we went.  We paid off a large amount of student loans and had little vision beyond where we would travel next.  Buzz even bought a jet ski for our many weekends spent at Donner Lake.

Some time around our third anniversary, we started to feel discontent with the lack of direction of our lives.  Buzz had been working with the youth at our church and had been struggling with not being allowed to lead the kids in ways and directions that he felt were important.  For years he had planned on applying to graduate school and yet could never bring himself to mail in the application.

One hot, lazy day at the lake with his family, Buzz' brother began to ask him about whether he would ever consider going back and applying to medical school.  Buzz had started out his first year of college as a pre-med student and had changed his major when he transferred to ORU.  Here is a picture taken during this conversation.  Such an ordinary picture... but I will never forget how that conversation changed the course of our lives.

Here's where Buzz asked me what I thought about the whole thing... I know, adorable, huh?

Over the next few weeks I could tell that Buzz' discontent was increasing.  He wasn't himself, he didn't have a passion for the things he was doing with the church.  He did, however, talk with much excitement about the things that he saw and the patients that he met at the hospital.  After many long heart-to-heart's, Buzz and I made the decision for him to go back to school to finish pre-requisites for medicine.  It would take him a year and a half of course work before he could even apply to medical school.

Shortly after Buzz paid to enroll in classes and notified his work that he would be significantly cutting his hours, we found out that we were expecting our first baby.  I realized around 2am that a baby was likely on the way and we drove to Walmart right then and there to buy a test.  Sure enough, I was right.  Here we are around 3am that same night:

Funny thing about Sparkle's name... we disagreed on the spelling all the way up until I was on the table getting a c-section and Buzz couldn't do anything but give me my way.  As a result, all of our shower pictures have her name wrong.  She gives us a hard time every time she sees them.

We bought our first house in the fall of 2003 and Sparkle was born in March of 2004.  I love this picture of her and Buzz when she is just a couple of hours old.

Here's one that speaks to the reality of having a family while still in school: Buzz studying for a physics exam while holding our newborn in his lap.  We hadn't even left the hospital yet.  In fact, he went to school and took his test before picking us up at the hospital later that afternoon to take us home.  I wonder if we realized how much of a reality this sort of thing would become for our family.

From day one Sparkle transformed our lives.  We were in awe of this sweet little creature that God had blessed us with.  She was an easy baby and slept most of the day and night.  I continued to work nights and Sparkle was easy going enough to just lay by me while I slept for a few hours to recover from my shifts.  Can I tell you how much I miss those days?  Sweet, sweet sleep...

She traveled well too and we took her everywhere with us.  The pace of our lives didn't really slow much.  Here she is at her first baseball game:

(Buzz had shaved his head for a road trip with his brother.  For the record, not my favorite look.)
Here we are six months later when Buzz' hair had grown back and I was once again sleeping through the night. Much better!

The University of Nevada medical school accepts it's applicants in a rolling fashion.  They send out acceptance letters first in January, then again in February and March.  It stronger the applicant you are, the earlier you get your letter.  We hoped and prayed that we would get an acceptance letter in January.  On the day after the letters went out, we waited eagerly for a knock at the door from the mailman (the letters came certified).  At one point I couldn't stand it any longer and went to check the mailbox to see if the mail had come.  It had and my heart sank.  When I pulled out the pile, however, there was a 'sorry we missed you' slip from the post office stating that we could pick up our letter the next day.  We put aside our frustration with the fact that the mail man was too cold to actually walk to our door to ring the bell and set out in our car to find him.  A few blocks away from our house, he handed us the letter that we were hoping we would get:  Buzz had been accepted into the class of 2009!

Here's our family later that spring at Sparkle's first birthday party.  Buzz was in the process of finishing prerequisites for school that fall and we were enjoying the time that our family had together before beginning a new and challenging chapter in our lives.

In June, a day before we were to celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary, we were thrown a curve ball.  Buzz had applied to the University of Utah for medical school, but had been put on the waiting list.  I grabbed the mail on my way to work and there was a large packet with a big red U in the top left corner.  I ran inside and told Buzz, "This doesn't look like a 'thanks very much, but we're not interested any more' type of letter."  He opened it and sure enough, a spot had opened up and was being offered to Buzz.  We spent our entire night away on our anniversary discussing it and decided to go for it.  The school was larger than Nevada's and more reputable as well.  Also, and this was the kicker for us, there were no requirements for away rotations.  If he had stayed in Nevada, he would have had to spend a large portion of his third year and two additional one month rotations during his fourth year away from home.  We made the decision, broke the news to our families, and put our house on the market.  It sold in nine days. Ah, the glory days of real estate!  Wasn't it cute?

And here are Sparkle and Buzz proudly displaying their new school pride:

Sparkle was 16 months old when we moved to Utah.  We moved in with Buzz' sister and her family for a few months until we figured out where we wanted to buy our house.  Here we are just a week after we moved.  I do so miss those mountains!

Here we are at Buzz' white coat ceremony at the start of medical school.  Such an exciting day!  Our plans had changed so quickly and our move had been such a blur that I remember feeling like I needed to pinch myself over and over again to believe that we lived in Utah and that med school had become a reality for our family.

We closed on our second home in October and found time to unpack boxes between Buzz' classes and my work schedule.  I was once again working nights, but this time in the float pool at the children's hospital.

While Buzz' classes were demanding, we had the wonderful benefit of a traditional M-F school schedule and calendar for the first two years.  We traveled a little and had a fair amount of free time to spend together. Here are some pictures of us from our first year of medical school:

I'm not going to lie to you.  Our first year in Utah was difficult for me.  It was hard to meet people with common beliefs and interests.  Buzz had a good social network at school, but I didn't have much to go on.  In addition to a lack of social contact, we had been trying to have another baby for a year with no success.  Looking back over our ten years of marriage, this time was, for me, the hardest by far.  

To shake me out of my funk, Buzz decided to drag me up a mountain and throw me back down again.  Not really.  But the hike was more that I had bargained for, that's for sure!  We started our hike several hours later than is recommended and had to move quickly to make it back down by nightfall.  We made it to the top, 7.5 miles one way and an elevation gain of around 4400 feet.  That was tough work, but paled in comparison with our journey down.  And can I just say that I never thought I had a fear of heights until I was standing at the summit of Mt. Timpanogos with the wind gusting around and my legs so exhausted from our assent that I didn't feel like I could stand up straight?  Here we are at the top:

One of us enjoyed the afternoon more than the other!

We were told that sliding down the glacier was the most fun part of the hike and that kids do it all the time.  I have since read that the vast majority of injuries that occur on the mountain happen while doing just that.  I can attest to the painfulness of the route.  Here I am before I lost most of the feeling in my fingertips for a full two weeks from clawing at the snow and ice in order to avoid sliding into a giant pile of boulders that were in my path.

By the time we reached the bottom of the glacier, I was bleeding from several places.  Buzz was grinning ear to ear... until he saw my blood and tears, then he very solemnly pledged that he would never make me summit another mountain with him again.  He's kept his word.  Not that there are any mountains to summit here in the Midwest, but still.

At any rate, my fall down the mountain seemed to do the trick and we found out that we were expecting Sunny later that month.  I was very, very sick when I was pregnant with her and lost over 10 percent of my body weight.  Not surprisingly, I didn't take many photos during this time.  We did manage to send out a Christmas card that year with our sweet girl holding an ultrasound picture of her sister.

I started having regular contractions somewhere around 24 weeks while on a night shift at work.  There had been a finding on ultrasound that made our doctor feel he needed to be extra cautious to protect against early labor, so I was placed on modified bed rest and was unable to work the remainder of my pregnancy.  Here we are at the zoo once I had reached 36 weeks and was released to normal activity again.

Sunny joined our family in May of 2007.  Buzz was sick and had taken a large amount of cold medicine to try to get some sleep before a big exam the next morning.  My parents called and said that they were coming whether or not the baby was on the way because I sounded just miserable (the little stinker wouldn't come out, after all that time on modified bed rest!).  We moved Buzz' desk up two flights of stairs so that he could study while our post-baby visitors were in town, then went to bed.  I started contracting almost as soon as I laid down.  After an hour of staring at the clock and listening to Buzz snore, my water broke.  Poor Buzz.  Sunny was born at 7:15 am and he was supposed to start his exam at 8.  He got hold of someone at the school and was given permission to take the exam a little late.  He kissed his newest little girl and left to take his test just an hour after she was born (just in case you were wondering, it was his lowest test grade ever).  What was that I said earlier about being in school while having a family?

Later that day our friend brought Sparkle to the hospital and our family of four was together for the first time.  Sparkle adored her little sister!  We thought she was pretty wonderful too.

Here we are about about a week after Sunny was born.  Isn't Utah a beautiful place?  I never would have guessed before we moved there.  Most of my experience with the state had been driving through the salt flats.

Later that summer we spent some time at Buzz' parent's cabin at Donner Lake.  It was much needed family time before Buzz started his most difficult year of school that August.

Even though Buzz was working hard, our family still managed to enjoy many of the great things that Utah has to offer.  Here are several pictures from that year that show many of the fun activities we did and beautiful places we were fortunate enough to visit.  At an RSL game:

Our favorite mountain kid spot, Cascade Springs:

At Thanksgiving Point:

Can't remember the name of this hike, but it's trail head was 8 minutes from our house:

Big Cottonwood Canyon:

Cecret Lake:

And another along the trail to Cecret Lake:

(Thanks for indulging me.  I had forgotten how much I miss the mountains until I started looking through photos to write this post!)

That fall Buzz applied for residency positions and we spent two weeks in November traveling the Midwest so that he could interview.  If you ever happen to find yourself in St. Louis and you have kids who are at least eight years old, you should visit the City Museum.  I have no idea why someone at Wash U's program told Buzz that I should take my 4 and 1 year old there.  I have never been so afraid that I was going to lose one of my children!  They go down into tunnels under the floor and up into the ceiling and you can't figure out where they are going to come out.  Here they are in the one spot in the place I felt okay with them playing.  Even then I was grossed out by the number of germs I was sure they were picking up from the balls:

Buzz had loved the program in Kansas City where he had done a month long rotation that summer and we decided that if the program liked him too, we would move our family to the Midwest for residency.  For the rest of that winter and spring we spent as much time with our friends and doing things that we would miss as we could.  Here we are on a carriage ride downtown on Christmas Eve:

And here's Buzz and Sparkle's final ski trip before we moved:

In January we found out that our family was going to grow again: our third baby would be arriving in September.  I never would have planned a cross country move while pregnant, or to have a baby during intern year, but once again God knew better than we did.  We love little Sevvy so much and couldn't imagine our lives without her!

In March we found out that Buzz had matched to the program that he wanted in Kansas City!  Here's our family at the Match Day breakfast that the medical school hosted.  Sparkle was just as excited as we were!

In the midst of packing up our house and with it under contract, we decided to take a trip to Disney Land since we would be much farther away once we moved.  I have never seen Sparkle so happy!  Sunny liked it too, but would have done better with a few naps.

Later that month, Buzz graduated.  It was another pinch myself type of experience for me.  I could not have been more proud of my wonderful husband!  I thought that I'd cry, but I was too busy grinning from ear to ear... and wrangling my children.

Just a couple of days later, our friends came over to our house for the final time to help us load our biggest moving truck ever.  It was a 'you pack it, they drive it' sort of thing and I highly recommend it to anyone who has a move in their future!

My need to 'nest' came in handy when unpacking all of our boxes and making our new house our home.  Within a few weeks we had unpacked every box and found homes for everything that we had brought with us.

Here's a picture of our family taken just after Buzz started residency...

...and here's the more realistic version:

In September we welcomed sweet Sevvy into our family.  She came a couple weeks early and Buzz had to miss one of his call shifts when she came, but we were so thankful that his program worked with him to give him time off.  Sevvy is an easy going baby, and is adored by all.  We are so thankful for her sweet, chubby, smiling face!

And finally, here we are just a short time ago at Sunny's third birthday party.  A month before this picture was taken we found out that we were expecting another baby, due to join our family in late December.  It's crazy to me to see how much our family has grown and how big my babies are getting!

So... that's it!  I guess you could say that the theme of our first ten years has been having babies and getting schooled.  As for the next ten years?  Buzz will finish residency in two years and hopes to practice in the area we currently live.  I am looking forward to feeling settled and raising up our kids to be every bit as wonderful as we know them to be!  We look forward to discovering God's will for our family and loving each other every step along the way.

The set up...

June 17th is our tenth wedding anniversary!  It's been fun reminiscing over the past month or so, pulling out old boxes and photo albums and showing the kids our history.  We dated for four years before we were married, so we have quite a bit of history together.  Almost half of my life, actually.  Here are highlights of our story in pictures prior to wedded bliss.  Enjoy!  Stay tuned for another post highlighting our ten amazing years together.

Here are three of the oldest pictures that exist of us.  The first is in the band room.  We met in marching band in the fall (my sophomore year and Buzz' junior year) and by spring we were an item.  Sweet, sweet band geek love!

(Buzz' shirt reads "Satan Sucks."  It mysteriously disappeared years ago...)

This picture is us in front of the infamous family (Buzz', not mine) Volkswagen bug in the high school parking lot.  There is not time in this post, but that car had loads of character and every fender and bumper sticker told a story.  We took that car on all sorts of hot dates (literally, the heater was stuck on and would melt your shoe if you left your foot in the wrong position)!

This little beauty is of us in the under belly of the event center where high school graduation is held.  It must have been the year that we started dating, because neither one of us are in cap and gown.  Please don't judge us by our lack of good sense in the fashion department.  Why yes, I am wearing nylons, socks, and birkenstocks.

Here we are a year after we started dating at Buzz' senior prom.  I agonized over my shoe choice because I didn't want to be taller than Buzz that night.  Little did I know that a lifetime of agonizing shoe choices awaited me!

That same spring we were fortunate enough to go to Hawaii with our high school band.  Again, focus on our youthful, glowing faces and not the tragic clothing...

The night I graduated high school a year later, we left on a church mission trip to Peru.  Here we are with some of the people that we met on our trip.  In Lima we were put on television where a pastor wanted us to tell the whole country that even though we were dating we chose not to have sex.  We told our story, I turned a brilliant shade of red when the word 'sex' came out of my mouth and then it was over.  I really wish I had video of that!

Buzz graduated high school a year before me and took classes at the local university for a year.  When I graduated, he transferred and we left together for ORU.  Here we are at our going away party.  Once we arrived on campus, we had to sign an honor code saying that we would behave ourselves.  This was our last hurrah...

(By the way, cigars are nasty.  Don't try them.  And if you do, don't inhale.  I made that mistake, turned green, and was then told that you are supposed to 'puff' and not inhale at all.)

Here we are with a friend just before the three of us started our journey to Oklahoma.  Aren't we clever?  Buzz still wears those sandals.  In fact, he wore them today.  He still owns that shirt too.  Thankfully, I had the good sense to purge all of those items from my closet years ago...

Here we are the first week of school at an all-dorm event.  FYI, this time, we were supposed to dress silly.

Here is our first professional photo together, and by professional I mean that we walked across the street to Walmart to have it done.  Buzz gave in to the photo shoot only because he knew of our immanent engagement, he had resisted my plea for a decent photo for years.  Cute, right?

Buzz proposed to me on New Year's Eve my freshman year of college.  He waited until after midnight and then told me that he had a surprise for me.  To make a long story short, we drove up to Donner Lake, the location of many wonderful memories for us, and he gave me a poem that he wrote for me before getting down on one knee in several feet of snow to ask me to marry him.  I said yes.  Actually, I said, "Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!!!"  and proceeded to tackle him and kiss him mercilessly.  He almost had a heart attack because he thought I knocked the ring out of the box and that we'd never find it in the moonlit snow.  I didn't even see my ring until the next morning because it was too dark and I went right to sleep when we got to his house at 3 am.  One of my favorite memories from the next day was waking up on his couch with his parents standing over me, grinning ear to ear and wanting to hear all about our night.

And so the waiting began.  I was 18 when we got engaged.  Buzz was 19.  We knew that we had to wait a while to get married, and wait we did.  We spent not one, but two more christmas' together as an engaged couple.  Here I am the year after we got engaged, the first year that I got the traditional underwear gift in my stocking from Buzz' mom.  It may be a silly picture to you, but for me it was an initiation into my future family.  I actually got a little teary-eyed.  True story.

We spent a second year doing silly things at ORU between classes (we were supposed to be dressed as skaters.  Buzz pulled it off way better than I did if you ask me)...

...and another Christmas, still engaged:

John decided to spend one of his summers of waiting on a mission trip with ORU.  I got to spend it keeping the company of alzheimer's patients at an assisted living facility.  Guess who enjoyed their summer more?  We wrote letters to each other to be read each day in our time apart.  He bought me chocolates before he left and I ate one every night and tore off a paper chain link in anticipation of seeing him again.  I was really pathetic that summer, let me tell you.  Thankfully for me, he got to come home a week early to be in his brother's wedding.

Love was a common theme in Buzz' family over the year and a half we were engaged.  We watched and celebrated the marriages of not one...

...not two...

...but three of his siblings.  All of whom were engaged after us.

As you might imagine, I was beginning to curse young love.  Finally though, six weeks after his brother's wedding, it was to be our turn.

To be continued...

*This year we are going on a trip together for the first time since we had kids.  We're leaving town for four whole days and we couldn't be more excited!  I may or may not get part two of this post up before we leave, but know for sure that we will be sleeping late, talking without the interruption of little voices, and celebrating the love that God has blessed us with.  Have a fabulous week, I know I will!*

Game on!

We had a great time with the cousins yesterday at the Royals game!  

I explained some of the rules of baseball to Sparkle while she sat on my lap and instructed her when to cheer for our team.  She informed me that she already knows the rules because they play kickball at school.  Smarty pants.  Cute smarty pants, but still...

Sunny may or may not have cared more about the candy that Aunt and Uncle T bought than for the actual game.  Oh well, at least it kept her busy.  That and the free Build a Bear polar bears that the first 8,000 kids got for free (the KC zoo just got a polar bear... it took me a while to figure out why they gave out polar bears on such a hot day!).  What a great day to take a bunch of kids to a game!

I know that the Royals are... the Royals.  But isn't this enough to make you their biggest fan?

Sevvy also may have had her first taste of cotton candy while at the game, which will probably make her a Royals fan for life too!

After the game the kids were allowed to get in line and run the bases while a stage was set up for a free Jeremy Camp concert.  I hadn't heard his testimony before and I enjoyed listening to his songs in a new light, knowing all that he had been through.  Google his story if you haven't heard.

The kids were a little worn out and every last one of them fell asleep despite the blaring music and glaring sun.

Thanks to TTTB for spending the day with us.  As always, we had a great time!

Sometimes...

...her whining is just plain annoying.  Sometimes it makes me laugh.

Sunny:  Mommy, [Sevvy] grabbed my hair and ate it and she's going to eat it all and then I'm going to be a girl-boy!

Bedtime song

I recorded this video to share on my blog almost six months ago, but only in the past week have been able to get the video uploaded onto my computer. I still love it just as much as I did before, so here you go!

We sing this song every night before bed, and have ever since sparkle was a little baby.  It will forever be one of my favorites.