8 years

Today is our 8th wedding anniversary. And as of yesterday we have been together for 14 years altogether. I feel like this is quite an accomplishment. It hasn't been easy and there were some extremely rough points throughout. But there was never really an option of not being together. Well, I guess there was the option but neither one of us wanted to take it. From almost the minute I meet BT we just were. And I like to think that we will always just be.

My father-in-law likes to say that I can't count the first 6 years. I guess in his head the clock starts over when you say "I do." But those 6 years were important. We figured out a lot of things between us in those 6 years and got through some of our hardest times. So those years were important and I will always count them.

One of our hardest times after we were married came when we became parents for the first time. That is a difficult stage, maybe not for everyone, but it was for us. It was one of the few times I wasn't sure we were going to make it. But we did and we learned how to be good parents for Bub and how to do it together as a team and, in the end, that too made us a better couple.

Just this morning we were having a conversation about how different people are when they are 20 versus 34. How when you are 20 it's easy to take things for granted and to not know the value of something. How BT takes his schoolwork more seriously now than he did when he was 20. It's amazing really to me to think about who he was when we first meet compared to him now. 20 really is awfully young to find the person you are going to spend the rest of your life with but that is what happened. We've grown up together and make plenty of mistakes together. We've also made 2 babies and bought a house and keep 2 dogs and made so many happy memories together. I hope that we continue to find more happiness in each other. I cannot imagine it any other way.