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We'll Build This Love From the Ground Up

Dear Reader,


Family ties are great. They are hard to maintain sometimes, but they are well worth the effort. God gave us families for a reason. I have seen it time and time again that being part of a family can help you come back from any setback or go forward to accomplish any goal.

It must be said that my family is perfect for me. Heavenly Father knew what He was doing when He helped Lauren and I come together to form our own family and bring together our extended families. My in-laws are very generous and my parents are very loving. My siblings (in-laws included) are all fun to be with and they each teaches me in little ways. This past year with new family and lots of grand experiences has shown me how it important it is to be part of a family.

This time last year, Lauren and I were preparing for our wedding and thinking about where she would be applying to grad school. Last fall we worked hard to finish as much school as we could and we planned to wait on have kids until she was done with grad school. We figured we would start trying to have children in her last year of school. That way, we could have kids while she could obtain a stable job and I could go on to grad school.

Last fall was also when my father-in-law was expecting to finish out his calling as a bishop in the ward where they lived back east. That calling ended 6 months before expected. Shortly thereafter, there was a big change at his workplace that ended with him starting a new job in Utah, meaning that he and my mother-in-law, along with her parents, moved to Utah. This happened just before mine and Lauren's graduation from Brigham Young University.

However, all of these unexpected things came together because of what happened to us as a couple. We were inspired to start trying to have children. We found out we were pregnant in January.

This means that everything fell apart and came together at the same time. My in-laws were gracious enough to let us rent out their basement in Utah because we decided it was probably not a good idea to go out of state for grad school while having a child at the same time. It was just too much.

That is why family is so important. Thanks to our family, we will be able to manage having a child while Lauren is in school and I am working. It would have been a much harder ocean to navigate had these things had not all come together when they did.

Thus we have embarked on the adventure of living close to family: in-their-basement close. This means that we are also close to my parents and for the first time in years, all of my siblings are within an hour of each other. It is an adventure that I am more than happy to be on, even though it is far from the adventures that I imagined we would be having at this stage for our family. We are very excited for our family to get a little bit bigger, especially after seeing so many changes in all of family over the past year.

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