Today, Rich and I celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary--well, if by celebrate, you mean Rich woke up by 5 am to get showered and read scriptures before getting kids up for early morning seminary and Khristine spent all morning dealing with a fussy, teething baby! Actually, we did get to sneak out for an hour to have lunch
alone at The Olive Garden. We thought it was funny that we had to take the 15 passenger van for our "alone" date, since Rich's car was in the shop!
We spent our lunch talking about some of the funny things we remember from our early days of marriage. I remembered that we were late getting to our open house in Camarillo. We were driving from Monterey, and we mistakenly took Highway 1, which took forever. When we finally got to the 101, it was bumper to bumper traffic. It was almost time for the open house to begin, so Rich tried to speed things up by racing off every off-ramp, speeding through the intersection, and racing back on the on-ramp, skipping as much heavy traffic as possible. In this way, I learned about the Pettingill driving habits! Rich remembered the morning sickness that I had within about a month of marriage. His black curly hair, which I found so attractive when we were dating, actually made me want to throw up, along with his breath! He also remembered our first fight, which was over buying a laser printer for our house because he was having trouble getting to school early enough to print in the computer lab. Sadly, I held that $800 debt over his head long after it was paid off! I remembered our first Christmas tree, which was actually more like a branch, that we got for free. I tried to make inexpensive decorations, which were very large, homemade raffia bows that really accentuated how small the tree was. We remembered together how our car broke down somewhere in Nevada on our way back from Christmas break. This was in the days before cell phones. Somehow, we found out that Lewis and Jeri were miraculously stopped in the same town, and they helped us get the car fixed so we could continue on our way the next day. We also both remembered eating ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch together in the Tanner Building at BYU, in the quiet school days before we had the twins. Not quite 9 months after we were married we became a family of four (the twins came almost 3 weeks early). It has never slowed down one bit since!!!
I am posting a bunch of pictures here of our family. I guess you can't have 8 children in 15 years without mostly focusing on the children. However, I think it says something about our marriage that we have spent the last almost 7 months with Rich home full-time without killing each other! Actually, to tell you the truth, it has been a lot of fun spending so much time together. I will really miss him during the day, and so will the kids, when he heads back off to work one of these days. I only have pictures from 2003 and later on the computer, so that is what you get. It is also representative of what life has been like that I could only find two pictures of just the two of us from the last five years. Every other picture has one of us holding a baby! But you know what? We wouldn't change a thing!!
We have had some big events occur this week. First, Anna turned 1! We had the typical birthday celebration for her--balloons and streamers, cake, and friends over to watch her open presents. It was a fun day, mainly because we all absolutely adore her and almost everything she does! Here are some pictures from her big day: She is so petite she can fit in the 5-gallon drink container; enjoying the birthday cake Katie made for her--homemade funfetti and sherbet ice cream; on daddy's lap opening presents and discovering her new dolly;I hope nobody minded fingers inthe cake as she checked it out 
before we ate it
!
The second big event was that Jacob and Katie each got a cell phone this week, making them apparently the very last freshmen in the world to get them! They are each working at various money making schemes to pay for them ($16 a month.) So we have become a texting family. This has interesting ramifications. They can text us to tell us they are ready to pick them up from this or that activity. They can text with cousins who live out of town. They text with questions from school during a break. Also, they can text insults to each other, and back and forth with Daniel when he gets on my phone. At least we don't have to hear them out loud! I actually think it is a great way to keep in touch.
