4 long, yet somehow short years ago, I said "I do".   

   Sometimes I like to let my mind wander back to that time, and try to capture all that I was thinking/feeling on that one magical day....did I have any clue, any idea of where I would be today?  Two small children to call my own and an adventure of a  life that keeps taking me down paths I couldn't have seen coming?  Would I do it again?  Of course.  But oh, what change four years can bring. 

   In many ways, I hardly feel the same person I was four short years ago.  Life has a way of changing you, irrevocably, and there is never any going back.  Children change you.  Moving changes you.  Change, changes you.  You're just a body and a soul, drifting through seasons and states and weather and houses and churches and communities and pregnancies and births and time and you will never be able to stay the same.  

   Marriage is work.  If anyone tells you that it isn't, feel sorry for them.  Because they are either in denial, or they have a surface-depth relationship with their spouse.  It IS work.  Just like parenting, or any craft, skill, hobby, art, career, masterpiece....doesn't anything worthwhile require work?  The only things I can think of that don't require any work whatsoever usually aren't worth that much either.  And of course it is work with the highest stakes and the highest rewards. 

   But I can't think of anyone I'd rather be "working" with.  It is a rare and beautiful thing to be fully known and understood, and I'm lucky enough to have found that.  I know that some days I take that for granted, but I don't want to.  I want to stay in awe of it...like the way that you feel that first time you realize that someone really GETS you, and STILL likes you. 

   I'll never forget the way I felt the first time I met him.....he came over to me with that contagious, beaming Randy-smile, and I felt so...liked.  He was so friendly.  So open.  So charming.  I liked him from the start.  Sure, we had a long journey ahead of us.  But there was just something about him, from the very beginning.

   I'll spare you all the sappy details by just saying, I'm thankful.  Thankful for the past four years, and excited for all the ones ahead.

Here's to the future, babe.