Anniversary!

Today we celebrated eight whole years being married! I pretty much gave a run-down of the ups and downs of the last eight years in my previous post. For some reason, this anniversary really feels like a big achievement. Like wow, being married isn't easy, but right now we're rockin' it. We're not always rockin' it because we are normal people in a normal relationship. But, we always get back to a place where we both know that being together is better than being anything else. It just seems like, at this point, we have lived a serious amount of life together. Sometimes it's really hard...but we got this.

So, naturally, Dylan celebrated by having dinner at a beachfront restaurant in Corpus Christi with John. I went to work, and after that I scrambled to get my kids under control, fed and to bed...a process which involved removing yogurt from eyelashes. After that, I climbed atop a tall ladder to deal with a chirping smoke alarm. The excitement didn't end there...I then flipped up seats, tore up floor boards, and attacked the car with an upholstery cleaner in an attempt to clear the stench of death and rotting from my vehicle. Yet again. Sometimes I give the kids raisins or a granola bar while we're driving, but I honestly don't know what in the world could have spilled and caused such a rank smell. And sadly, I have a feeling the car will need to be deconstructed beyond what I'm able to do by myself to really clean it up, so the boys and I will have to drown in stench until the end of the week.

Nothing about the way the day played out made me sad, however. Nobody ever said that this time of life was titled "The Time of Fun and Leisure." Actually, it was sort of a testament to how far we've made it in life, which is a LOT further along than we were on our wedding day eight years ago. I'm sure Dylan and I will grab an opportunity to share a meal alone together in the next six to eight months and pretend that it's an anniversary celebration, and that is good enough for me. Maybe my sweetheart will give me the gift of a car detail for our anniversary?

I couldn't find a picture of D and me together, and I don't have all night to track one down. So instead, I'll post the most important product of our years together. Thanks for snapping this sweet photo,  Mom!

Of course, we have just two years until our 10th anniversary. Like a teenager saving money from an after-school job to buy a car, we've been socking a little bit away every month so that we can take a well-deserved vacation somewhere international when the time comes. And I'm not talking the Caribbean. I'm thinking more along the lines of the Mediterranean. We've got a lot of living ahead of us before we take that trip, and I wouldn't choose to be on this ride with anybody but my one true love, Dylan. XOXO