Happy 11th Anniversary!

I’m a pretty lucky lady.  More than lucky.  I’m kind of immensely blessed and, quite frankly, spoiled.  Eleven years ago today, August 11^th, 2001, I got to marry my bestest friend/love of my life.  And I can honestly say that life, since our marriage began, has gotten better and better; I love him even more now than I did back then.  I suppose, you could say, with the way things started for us (Mike having cancer, spending our wedding night in the ER), that things really COULD only improve from there.  But you never know what life’s going to give you, but thankfully, for us, life HAS improved. 

We’ve had rough times; I mean everyone has their cranky-crappy days.  Obviously, our first year: spending our time as newlyweds with Mike having to go through the torture of Chemo and Radiation was pretty much beyond super sucky.  Being completely helpless while watching your teeny-tiny preemie babies go through horrendous stuff in the NICU was insanely hard.  Seven weeks of hospitalized bedrest was really difficult on both of us, to say the least.  And then dealing with the darkness of PostPartum Depression is something that we never want to relive…but….BUT here we are.  Eleven years later.  Stronger, better, more in love and living the life we always dreamed of living.  Two sons and a daughter.  Our health.  Our forever home.  Kinda couldn’t ask for anything more.

And this is one of my very VERY favorite things in our whole entire house.  A few years ago, I resurrected and framed the tattered papers on which I’d glued the scraps of paper from our engagement/proposal day.  Mike had had about twenty of our friends, on my 20^th birthday, come into my dorm room with long-stemmed roses, some with notes, and some without.  When the notes were laid out like this I – EVENTUALLY – caught on to what they were spelling.  (This was extra difficult since the first note had been thrown in the trash by accident, so when I first looked down I saw, “ ill you mar” which made no sense what-so-ever). 

Anyway, so I framed this several years ago and had it hanging in our old bedroom above my bedside table and lamp.  But it was in a place where no one ever saw it and even I didn’t really notice it all that much. But now, even if I’m in a bad mood or had a rough day, seeing this centers me and brings me back to how it all began.  It is the last thing I see before I go to sleep at night and the first thing I see every single morning when I open my eyes.  I love it!