Our 8th Anniversary

On July 13th Robert and I were blessed to celebrate our 8th Wedding Anniversary. Where does the time go? Have I said that before? We celebrated by going out to dinner together at a restaurant in Old Town Alexandria called Bastille. The dinner was good, but the conversation was fantastic. Its pretty rare these days to get to go out, just the two of us, and we relish in our time together. We decided to take a little stroll down memory lane and talked about the day we got married (in 2002), and on that day, where we thought we would be in 8yrs (in 2010). It was so fun to look at the road our life had taken us on, with so many unexpected curves and bumps, and how far we are from the picture of where we thought we'd be; yet how much happier we are.

Generally, we both thought that there was a chance we would still be in the military, stationed at whatever base they sent us to and that if we were no longer military that we would be living back in Illinois. We both thought we would own a home by now, and thought that we would have had at least two kids. I vividly remember thinking that we would be married for just a couple of years before having kids, and that they would be a couple years apart-which after 8 years of marriage would have given us a 6 year old, a 3 year old and maybe even another! Never did we image we would wait 5 years before having a baby, that we would leave the military and be led to Washington DC, that we'd still be renting (and be absolutely ok with it!), or that we would have experienced any of the number of things we've been blessed by in 8 years time.

What an amazing, fun, and eventful 8 years...I cannot wait to see what the next eight will bring for us! And in honor of our little stroll down memory lane, here are a few photos I found on our old computer of that beautiful summer day in July '02-

Oh, and just as a side note...do you know how far technology has come in 8 years? I believe these pictures were all taken with real film cameras, my proofs are all real photos that I had to flip through an album to look at, and in order to even have them on the computer I must have scanned them with one of the first scanners ever invented! HA! (ok, maybe thats a little exaggerated, but still) So the poor quality and pixelation (is that at word?) is not my fault. One of these days maybe I'll pull out my album of proofs and get the photos scanned in and up to date with this century :)