Happy Anniversary!!

Happy Anniversary to Laren, the love of my life and my best friend!! It's been a great 13 years!! Tomorrow is the actual day (December 28th), but because of the move, I will post a little about it today!
We got married in Washington state in the Seattle Temple. In our 13 years of married life we have moved 11 (almost 12) times. We have gotten 2 Bachelors Degree's (one for each of us: His in Civil Engineering, Mine in Elementary Education), and added 5 kids to our family. We had a slow start to our child bearing, were unable to get pregnant for a year and a half. It was quite a trial, especially after we moved to Utah and everyone we knew was expecting!! In our married years, we have suffered the deaths of Laren's Grandma and Grandpa, my Grandpa, and my Dad. We started our early married years poor as church mice and it took us a few years of "working life" to come out of that.
Laren's career has since taken off and we are blessed by being much more prosperous now!! We have had work heartaches. Laren has had 3 different jobs, professionally and countless jobs while still in college. His first college job was throwing pizza balls for Rizzutu's Pizza and then Working on Professor Bell's Ranch (a psychology professor of mine at EWU, in Cheney, WA where we started married life). His best paying part-time job was unloading trucks for UPS, we even had great medical benefits at that job. Because of the great insurance, I was able to have my wisdom teeth removed for only $33! (Of course I thought I would die as I put in a miserable night of throwing up every 5 minutes for hours and hours afterward!)
My job was working at Farm Credit Services in Spokane, a lending company for farmers and ranchers. I worked a few odd jobs since then, mainly through temp agencies in Provo. After 2.5 years, we were blessed to finally welcome our first child into the family: Kayla Lynn! The timing couldn't have been more perfect, I had just finished up my student teaching the week before she was born. (She came 5 days early.) I was able to take my last class, a health and nutrition class independent study and graduated in August of '96 from BYU. Laren graduated in April of '97. We moved to Arizona where he took his first job in Phoenix with ADOT, the Arizona Dept. of Transportation. We lived in Glendale to start with, then Tucson for 6 monts until settling in Mesa.
While in Arizona, we added Alyssa Suzanne, then suffered a difficult loss of a baby through miscarriage and we named that baby Jared Laren. I have ultrasound pictures of his hands. He had all 5 fingers already, I was 17.5 weeks along. They don't know what happened, why we lost him. But they did know it was a "him". In the process of extracting him from my body, my uterus was perforated (cut) and I lost too much blood. I ended up back in the hospital and at home with an IV and a home health care nurse. It was tough times, healing physically and emotionally.
Then we welcomed Kyle Laren into our family, miraculously a year later! He was born at 34 weeks. Amazingly he needed no oxygen or anything at birth. Later he would need physical therapy to learn to walk (he finally walked at 17 months), but now he is 6 and doing just fine! Rilyn Nichole was born a month after we moved to Colorado at 36 weeks. I had placenta abruptia and the bleeding wouldn't stop, so we had to induce. Again she was born healthy without any problems. It was such a blessing to have her in a somewhat tumultous time as we were in between moves then, similar to how we are now.
And we had our little caboose, Tyler Talmage almost 2 years ago in January of 2005. He came just 11 minutes after arriving to the hospital! No time for an epidural or even a doctor. He was delivered by a very young nurse (I'll bet she was only 22, if that! She certainly looked a lot younger but I know nursing school takes a good 4 years so that is why I'm guessing her age to be 22.)
So we have spent the past years of our marriage life raising our families, serving in our church and growing Laren's career. I am fortunate enough to be a stay at home Mom, though on some days it feels "unfortunate".
Through the hard times, Laren has always been my best friend, my confidante, my greatest supporter, our provider, my level head and logical thinker and protector. He is a great Dad who feels remiss if he doesn't get time, often, to play with our kids. He gives them piggy back rides up the stairs to bed and brings them, one at a time, home with him on Sundays from church. (We drive separate because of his calling, he goes early and stays late.) The kids love all of the attention they get from him and I love him for being such a great Dad and Husband.
Thanks for the 13 great years, Laren! Here's hoping for another 50 or more years together!!!! I love you!!