As I sit here reflecting on soon to be 9 years of marriage, I think back to what started it all. Love. Yes, the warm, fuzzy, “I’m in love”, kind of love.
Nine years later, I’m still in love, there’s just a lot more than warm fuzzies to back it up. We’ve made it through 3 pregnancies and 3 births (the third one we delivered 5 minutes before the Midwife arrived), we’re in the midst of raising 3 little kids – some days the house is clean, other days it looks like I just didn’t care.
Not too much sickness, though there was that one time we were both sick with the flu at the same time. Never do that, especially when none of the kids are sick and you have a nursing infant. Apparently, my husband feels worse than I do when he’s sick, he got to lie in bed all day, I got to sit on the couch (or floor, depending on how many children needed lots of space on the couch) and watch kids tv shows all day. Yup, that was fun. Somehow I still love him.
The truth about love is you’ll do anything for it. You change your entire life for love, you marry someone, move in together, and make a gazillion changes to your life just for love.
Then, you add more kids to love. Speaking of adding kids, fun fact, our second child was born on our 5th anniversary. Good thing we celebrated the weekend before! She’ll never forget when our anniversary is.
So, nine years and three kids in, there’s so many things that have changed. We can no longer just go do whatever we want whenever we want to. Someone has to watch the kids. We’ve had to choose to focus on our marriage and on us. And we have to learn to agree on household rules so the kids know what’s a rule and what’s not.
The thing about love is all the hard work is worth it. It just grows the more you put into it, and the more you do for each other the more you love each other. So, after nine years of marriage, we’re more in love than we were the day we married.