Madly in Love Monday

This weekend Engineer and I worked on our little garden and this is what love looks like friends:

It's intertwined, gritty, earthy, and sometimes smells like manure. ;)

Engineer's brother is getting married this weekend and we are very excited to welcome a new member to our family.

We try to take a stroll down memory lane each anniversary and flip through the pictures of our wedding album. I still get all mushy when I see how young and twitterpatted we were. We had no idea what we were getting into; like the fact that the way each of us folded socks would come up in arguments for years to come. (Engineer just read this and said that his way is perfectly practical – ahem.)

When we got past all of the courtship stuff and got married it became the real deal. Him...me...his ridiculous way of folding socks...and that's it. There was no bailout package, no contingency plan, no other option; the "I dos" meant a lot of "I won'ts" and "please don'ts" were to come.

Engineer and I will both testify to the fact that the first year was not easy street. Then we moved to England away from family and friends and it was like the first year all over again. We had to trailblaze our own path together - twice.  That turned out to be such a blessing for us both; it made us stronger as a couple.

In our pre-marital counseling two things really stuck out to us: the pastor told us to move far away from our families to create our own and to get couple friends. We took those things to heart and although moving 5000 miles away from home might have been perceived as a bit drastic, it worked. We relied solely on each other and made lots of couple friends and it probably was the best thing ever for wedded bliss.

After 11 years wed, we are starting to get a handle on this marriage thing...even the gritty, earthy, and potentially smelly bits.

1-4-3 EM