13 is my lucky number!

Oh my...we look so young!

13 years ago I was sealed for Time and All Eternity to my sweet heart!  It has been thirteen years of happiness, sorrow, growth, disappointment, thriving, trials, laughter and tears...we have made it through five beautiful children, many moves, two houses, one of them we had built/did some ourselves, and through all the craziness, we are still together!  If anyone would have told me that marriage was difficult while we were dating, I may not have believed them.  But thirteen years later, I would have to say that it is one of the most difficult, yet rewarding parts of life.  It takes some of the most difficult qualities in life to attain to make a marriage work.  Trust, love, dedication, selflessness, willingness to admit faults and love each other despite all our imperfections.

We are most definitely not even close to being these things, but every day, we strive together to become better people individually and together.  We can look back at the trials we have gone through and know that we made it through the other side together and still very much in love.  Marriage takes prayer during the times we want to strangle each other or walk out the door.  It takes prayer when things are happy and can't seem to get any better!  It takes a loving Heavenly Father reminding us the importance of an eternal family!  It takes laughing at each other, with each other and working to not take offense!  I am the queen of laughing at myself.  I tell Blake all the time that what I say is so funny!  He doesn't always agree, but I do often make him laugh at the fact I think I'm so funny!

I am looking forward to another thirteen years and through eternity to make him laugh, for us to grow old together and look back at our life and say we made it.  Despite all our human tendencies, we, with the help of our Heavenly Father and amazing support of families, made it!