'00-'09 The Last Decade, A retrospective

(One of my friends did a review of the last 10 years and I realized that so much has happened to me in the last 10 years, so I thought I'd do one too!)

During the past ten years, I finished my master's degree at ASU at the same time Joe finished his undergrad:

We moved from Arizona to Chicago, where we lived right next to the John Hancock building and the law school.

Joe went to Law School at Northwestern and studied hard:
...while I was an embryologist and made many babies:

..and we spent every winter freezing to death.
Joe and I spent two summers apart, and then finally I got wise and had my first baby, Adam:
..and we moved together to Texas for the summer and then back to Chicago for the last year of law school. I adjusted to being a stay at home mom and in the meantime fell in love with this little guy:

And we got used to being a family of three:

Then Joe graduated:

We moved to Texas to stay and Joe took and passed the bar. He started work at Fulbright and Jaworski as a lawyer. We had our second baby, Michael:

and built our first house together.

We adjusted to two little boys:

...and being a family of 4.

We had baby #3, Ellie, our princess,

and suddenly our lives became a lot pinker. We adjusted to being a family of 5:

Joe got his dream job as in-house counsel and we bought our second house in Texas.

We all really enjoyed having a princess in the house,

and having three perfect children.

We bought a few acres on a small lake 1/2 hour away
...including an island.
Joe got himself a tractor (to work with of course)

and then we had baby #4, Nate.
Nate is the perfect end for us and so we are adjusting well to 4 kids.

We bought our 3rd house in Texas and then sold the first two. We also bought a weekend cottage on our lake property...

and have spent every spare second since then fixing it up.

Some of the statistics of the past decade for us. I have spent about 35 months looking like this:

We have moved 8 times. Two of us finished school and 2 of us started school. I had 3 jobs, Joe has had 10. We went from 2 cars to no cars to one old car to two years of heavily buying and selling cars to 3 years of the same cars.

The kids have been involved in many things: t-ball, soccer, swimming, gymnastics, jiu-jitsu, dance and piano:

We went on some amazing trips:

And have gotten to know some of the most amazing friends in the world.

We have grown a lot and learned many life's lessons.

We have learned to appreciate our family.

We feel so blessed and lucky, look at all of the blessings that we have. We can only hope for as much in the next ten years.