Today is our 7 year anniversary. And it's probably one of the most mundane anniversaries we have had yet. Alex woke up at 6:00 for his first day of rotations. I got up at 6:45 to get Johnny ready for school. As I was getting ready to load the kids in the car I got a text from Alex saying he left his wallet at home. So after school drop-off I spent 20 cruising around the hospital parking ramps looking for his car. I will teach lessons this afternoon. We may go out to dinner tonight, depending on when he gets home. We may just go out for a drink. Who knows! Life keeps ticking along at a pretty rapid pace, and isn't really going to afford us the time to stop and celebrate.
I think this has been a year of paradoxes for our marriage. It's been a really hard year, with grad school, adding a second child. financial stresses, but there have been so many good things happening at the same time.
At first glance it may seem like we don't have as much fun as we used to. We don't go out on dates, we don't go see movies, we don't travel, we don't workout
Our time together is very limited, but we have so much meaningful time together. We've learned how to make it count, because we've had to. Alex is gone all day, he studies all even and most of the weekends. Dinner time is race to eat as fast as possible while keeping a baby happy and a toddler in his seat. So when we do get a few quiet minutes to just talk, we make it count. we talk about our day, our goals for tomorrow, our beautiful children who, even though we breath a sigh of relief every night when we get them to bed, we can ever seem to stop talking about. And we pray together. Not as much as we should, but we do it. And when things get really hard it's always our first line of defense.
I have been challenged more than ever before in what it means to die to self. And at the same time I have never felt more strongly that I can stand by this man through anything. I believe so firmly that when the storms of life come (that is when, not if, because if there's one thing you can count on in life, it's that storms will come) you can either let them tear you down, or you lean into the storm and come out stronger on the other side. We have been through other storms together, infertility, miscarriage, health complications with our first born, and I know they have made our marriage stronger. So much so that when I think back on favorite moments in our marriage I don't think of the time we spent Paris, (although that was great) I think of the time we spent sleeping on a foldout couch together in our son's NICU room. That was the hard stuff, the real stuff, but it was also the good stuff.
So, here we go, year 8 of marriage. Bring on the good stuff.