Boy meets girl, boy serves mission, boy comes home from mission, boy marries girl, boy and girl have children, boy and girl start wildly successful business, boy and girl live happily ever after.

It sounds like a fairy tale, and before they got married Vanessa Quigley did work as a character at Disney World, but this family narrative is also what others might perceive from the outside looking in at the family life of Nate and Vanessa Quigley.

Still, as is the case with most families, the Quiglies are learning that the perfect family may not be a family without challenges or trials, but instead the family that best helps us become what we are meant to be, and the family that teaches us the lessons we came here to learn.

Nate and Vanessa Quigley have been married for over 25 years. They are the parents of seven children, and in 2014 they founded chatbooks, a company that allows people to easily print photo books straight from social media.

Today, their chatbooks app has over 100,000 five star reviews, and has been featured in Good Housekeeping, The Today Show, and in The New York Times.

This is All In, an LDS living podcast where we ask the question, what does it really mean to be All In, the Gospel of Jesus Christ? I'm Morgan Jones, and I am thrilled to have Vanessa and Nate Quigley on the line with me today, Vanessa, and Nate, welcome.

Hi, thanks for having us.

Yeah, great to be here with you.

Well, I am grateful for your willingness to do this interview with me. I want to tell those listening that this is something that Nate and Vanessa and I spoke beforehand, and as we talked, I felt really strongly that this was something that they have to offer, but something that a lot of people will relate to, and that it will resonate in people's hearts.

And so, like I said, just so grateful for your willingness to do this, but when we spoke in advance, we talked about family narratives, and I love Vanessa, you brought this up this idea that we all have a narrative in our mind of what our families like, what our family will be like.

And so, can you start by telling me when you first got married, what was the family narrative you imagined that the two of you would create together?

Yeah, family narrative is everything to us. It's our family story. I mean, we've built a whole business around helping to capture and share this.

The story is that make our family, you know, what we are, but I would say Nate and I both up until the point we got married, we had led pretty fairytale lives, you know, a couple of bumps in the road, but up to that point, we were like, all signs were pointing to just happiness and all of the things.

And we wanted a big family. And it was an important bump in the road when I got back from my mission, been writing Vanessa for two years, she'd been writing me, she was dating another guy.

That is a bump in the road. Quite a bump, but we made it that bump.

I know, because we fell in love, it's freshman at the U.I.U. in the dorms, it was love at first sight, you know, who makes it through the mission, right?

But we did. So we conquered that big bump. Yeah, no, that was the first bump. And I think that like added to our story. Absolutely.

We both felt like individually and together, we were guided by the star that was just going to take us to new heights. And, you know, we got married and we were thinking about our family.

We knew we wanted a big family. We knew we wanted to live overseas. We both had like aspirations for our careers. And everything was going pretty well for.

Yeah, I thought pregnant right after we got married. That was not the plan. It was a surprise, but it was amazing.

But it didn't support our big family goals. Yeah, but you're right. I mean, it all felt very, very tale because, you know, we have this great life at BYU with our little baby, who we've just completely crazy about.

Our poor cat got shoved to the side really quickly. Then we got to live, you know, four blocks from the beach in California and go for Sunday Night Walks and their palm trees.

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