Seventeen Years

I have now been married for seventeen years. Seventeen years of highs and lows together, seventeen years of getting up, making coffee, and living every ordinary day together. Seventeen years of running out of clean wash clothes. Seventeen years of arguing and making up and laughing at ourselves for being so difficult in the first place. Seventeen years of living life.

A selfie we took last night

Not only seventeen years. Five Children. The first a surprise "too soon" after we got married arriving ten months after our wedding. The second a preemie. Nine long stressful days in the NICU which later seemed like nothing when compared to the third's almost nine weeks in the same NICU. Then there was the month and a half spent in Kazakhstan adding child number four. And finally the trip to China for child number five. It hasn't been the easiest way to have five children. But it has been the best!

We have been through some hard times when everything seemed bleak and impossible. We have been through some really fabulous times when the world was bright and shiny. But the important thing is that we have been through it all together and our lives have become intricately intertwined, a beautiful tapestry woven of every ordinary miracle of every moment in the past seventeen years.