8 Years In.

Dan and I celebrated our 8-year anniversary on Monday. In full disclosure, we celebrated on Saturday by eating hibachi and going to Last Licks. On the actual day, both of us had forgotten it was our anniversary until several hours into the day when Dan received an alert on his phone about it.

The 8-year anniversary gift is pottery and bronze, but the closest thing we got to that was eating our ice cream in bowls instead of cones.

Guess whose ice cream belongs to whom. Man, are we opposites or what. But I need some opposite-of-me in my life.

Before I got married, I was pretty scared of getting married. I felt like I had been bombarded with terrible marriage stories where husbands were living double lives or had secret problems they hadn't disclosed and that then I would be scared and trapped and probably have babies to take care of by myself.

And those things do happen. I have lots of friends who have been through what seems like every possible thing a person can go through, and they are still pushing forward making hard marriages work or they had to get divorced and they are working every day to raise great kids all on their own.

And so while Dan and I had a great courtship and I knew he was a good guy, I also braced myself for whatever was going to happen after we got married--after the so-called "honeymoon" stage was over and all of the truth came out.

But Dan is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of person. He didn't hide the fact that he doesn't like to tidy up, but will if asked. He was open with me that he wasn't totally sure what he wanted to do for his career but was sure he would do something good. He was open about his love for the Gospel but readily admitted that there were things he didn't understand.

This picture is blurry to represent how our strong love makes everything else blurry so we can only see each other.

I should've been a poet.

It never even occurred to me that I would be the tough one in our marriage. Not tough as in strong, but tough as in difficult. It never occurred to me that I would be the one that would have a mini-faith crisis when I was pregnant with Gwen or that my anxiety would spin out of control time and time again and that Dan would support me as I received professional help, or that I would become so sick with each pregnancy that Dan would have to be mom and dad for months while I lay perfectly still on our bed, counting down the seconds until I wasn't pregnant anymore. I never thought we would have a kid with special needs and that Dan would come up with a special "shoe hammer" that he would tap all over June's tennis shoes until she thought they fit right each morning while I worried that she was going to miss the bus.

And there are millions of other things, like the fact that he cleans the kitchen every night after I'm already in bed, delivers tearful Christmas morning devotionals to our girls, or takes the girls out in the snow because I hate it, but there's just not enough room to mention them all here.

I love you, Dan. I really do. Thanks for being the best decision I ever made.