Thanksgiving 2007Taken the day before our 6 1/2 year anniversary.  We don’t celebrate these “half milestones” at all, but we happened to take our picture (I don’t trust other people’s photo “skilz”; I used the timer and set up the shot myself).  There aren’t a whole lot of pictures of the two of us, but it is interesting to see how different we are now as opposed to 6 1/2 years ago and as opposed to 10-plus years ago when we first met*.

2001 was a nice year.  The year after the millennium change (I remember that New Year’s Eve was spent in my dorm room watching the increasingly lame festivities on television).  Five years since my high school graduation, each increasing year made me more aware of my Grandmother’s passing.  I wish she could have seen me go to college, could have me T, could have gone to my wedding, been a great Grandmother to my children and as important to them as she was to me.   I was living in the dorms with my favorite roomie Dan**, planning away our wedding, working in the fabulous soil lab with my friend Michelle and studying Medical Technology with a great group of friends.

It’s hard for me to know what exactly T was going through at the same time, but I do remember distinctly what was happening very close around me.  My sister was deep into alcohol and drugs and bad “friends”.  She was happy I got engaged the year before and even asked if she was going to be my maid of honor.  I said yes.  Yet, she was seriously shirking on her duties.  I was doing all the work.  I did have the help of my friend-at-the-time, but I still bore the brunt of the planning.  We planned my wedding shower for May 5th, a Sunday.  My sister was out wherever the night before and was impossible to wake up.  Only when I told that our Grandpa had died, did she fly out of bed.  Yes, Grandma’s husband had passed away at the age of 91, almost precisely 5 years and one month after she had.

The shower was good.  Later that month, I had planned a sort of “bachelor-ette” getaway with my friends from school.  We made it a weekend in the Dells visiting an indoor water park, getting an old-time picture taken of all of us and generally seeing the sights and having fun.

Our wedding day started out sunny and pleasantly nice for that time of year.  May 25th was also my Godmother’s anniversary and 2 days before my 23rd birthday.  My hair was did nicely, my sister woke up on time, getting our makeup done was fun (a little girl at the department store said “look mom, there’s Barbie”, what a compliment!), my friends were fabulous.  My relatives were at the church, my flowers turned out beautifully (full of Lily of the Valleys, like I had wanted… there was a bumper crop that year) and everyone was happy.

After the ceremony, my aunt (dad’s sister) told me that Grandma was keeping the rain at bay for us.  We had pictures in the park, in the cloudy gloom, and made it to the reception before the rain came.

Hotel checkouts are early, so we didn’t get much sleep.  Opening presents was fun.  Everyone was sleepy-eyed, but happy.  My aunt had put in a card from my Grandfather.  It said that he asked her to give us the money for our wedding.  I’m sad he passed so soon before it.

After the wedding was our honeymoon.  We moved close the big city so I could do my internship.  September 11th came, I was learning about Hepatitis progressions and antibody cycle when T texted me that “we were being attacked, planes had flow into the twin towers”.  I muttered a legitimate “Oh my God” and continued to half pay attention to the doctor.  They let us go at noon with the stern warning that if we had been working, we would have had to stay.  I spent several days at home, glued to the television, scared when that plane went down in Jersey (?) a few days later (I have a picture of that on the tv, behind the laptop, behind the cat).

In January, we found out I was pregnant.  T was laid of the next week.  He took several odd jobs until he finally got his current one in March.  It was a tough couple of months with me still going to school and feeling sick, him working crappy jobs and Cobra insurance mix-ups at the OB’s (complete with me crying at the reception desk).

Later that year, I had SE and I quit my job two weeks before I was slated to return to work.  Five months after that, I found a new job, part-time and lovely.  When SE was a year old, we bought our house.  What a trip that was!  And our apartment wouldn’t let us out of the lease and we got money and someone to sub-let and it was a big mess.

Soon after the house was moved into, I became pregnant with SM.  Maybe surprisingly, I took 10 weeks maternity leave and went back to my job.  Things continued on and you’ve probably read about my new job, trying to sell our house and being pregnant with our third child all at once.

Our marriage has been a wonderful time so far.  Mostly good, some bad, always being there for each other.  I’m not one to get sentimental and weepy, so this is my best effort.  I’m so glad I found this wonderful man some ten-odd years ago… happened upon after some crappy turns of events with other people, but without them, I never would have met him!

And here we are: new baby, house being built, family close by, house being built, trying to find our groove with patching all these parts of our lives together.  So far, it’s going fairly well.  He keeps me sane and somehow puts up with my craziness.  I love him dearly and couldn’t have asked for anything more.

Happy Half-i-versary, FB!

*I know you’d love to see the progression, but my wedding photos (not to mention the scanner) are packed away and so are our older photos.  I will have to revisit this next year sometime.

**Names have been changed to protect the innocent!  Haha… the nickname she gave me was Max, for Maxwell because we’d always listen to his cover of NIN’s “Closer”.  So we were ‘Dan and Max’.  It was funny to write on our door in the dorm.