Married life

Anyway, our relationship was solid enough to survive the test of nursing school. I made it out alive (barely) in December of 2006. Fifteen days later we wed. Amazing day. We fled the country for our honeymoon the next day. We returned to Fort Smith the next year. Ok, we got married on December 30, so the next year was only a few days. That same week, we moved to Tulsa where I would begin my career as an L&D nurse and Derick would continue to pursue his college career. Phew! A wild, wild few weeks of our lives! We lived in an apartment that was 5 minutes from the hospital I worked at. We hated apartment living and renting. We only lasted one 6 month lease there. We had built and bought our first little home in Broken Arrow, OK.

on our honeymoon in Mexico

First house

The next 3 years are basically a lot of young married, no kids life. We lived 2 hours from home, so I spent a lot of my time sulking about being away from "home".  Which as life and time and an insanely wild last couple of months would have it, we now consider Broken Arrow our home. I mentioned our "life plan" in a previous post... Well, the plan also included kids ASAP. I have always said that I did not want to be old when my kids are graduating high school. This meant, we had to get our family started asap. Derick did not want children until we were 25. So, we compromised. We decided to start trying for kids when he was finished with school.

In the meantime, I worked my little tail off. I worked night weekends, and I would not recommend that schedule to a single soul. I loved my job so much. It truly was a blessing. I got to see so many amazing and incredible things! The miracle of life, well, nothing comes close to being that amazing. When I started out working, I worked only nights during the week. I worked with THE most amazing girls. I'm not lying when I say that. They are still close and important in my life. We had so, and I mean SO, much fun working together. When we started out, we were all newly or almost married with no kids. Now, we almost all have kids and they're all within a year or so of each other. And, yes, it's awesome.

you gotta do something to stay entertained in the middle of the night!

Sarah, me, Alyssa & Ashley

Christmas party 2007

Kristen & I, Shara & Trisha

now we're mommies! (mostly all of us... ahem, Alyssa!)

We were all 3 pregnant at the same time. All three babies were born within a 7 week time-span.

Me, (holding Ashley's son, Kolton), Ashley (holding Shara's girl, Paisley), and Shara (holding Jake)

In the meantime, Derick was working his little tail off in college! He had long hours, I had long hours. Sometimes, the only time we'd see each other was when we were "switching the bed". For those of you who've been blessed enough to never work third shift or have a spouse that does, this is when the third shift spouse comes home, and the normal one is getting up. We were on completely opposite schedules. But we somehow made it all work! Derick is a night owl, so on the nights I wasn't working, we were able to spend time together. Our favorite past-time... TV. Aren't we exciting!?

After about 3 years of all that and knowing that Derick's schooling would soon be coming to an end... we started talking about kids and we decided that soon we would try for a baby.