Now we are nine

Gack! Who are those very young, refreshed, skinny, happy-looking people? It tugs at my memory, but I have a hard time placing them...

Friday was the ninth anniversary of our wedding. It's funny. When people ask how long you've been married...and about three people asked me when I mentioned our anniversary...and you say 'nine', the response is a universal shrug. What do you say about nine years? It's not ten years, you know?

Naturally, I've got a few things to say about it, even though it's a funny number.

We might not look quite so beautiful as we did on our wedding day, but I'd argue we've earned each and every wrinkle and grey hair...starting with Daddy (then, just new hubby) falling over a cliff on Kauai during our honeymoon. Thank goodness he never hit the bottom or people doubtlessly would have wondered...especially when they found out he'd lost his new wedding ring in the ocean just days earlier. "We knew there was something wrong about that girl," they'd say.

Our misadventures continued for some time after we were married. There was the brand new rental car we totaled in England. There were a couple of minor medical emergencies in Belize. The nightmarish birth of our son and the ensuing years of grief and worry, the impossibly more nightmarish arrival of our daughter and all of the developmental concerns repeated over again, with even more angst...especially for Daddy who'd witnessed her arrival as a premature infant with no heartbeat...followed far too closely by the unexpected death of Daddy's mother.

Then came the stuttering and hearing loss (Smunch) and the intermittently crossed eyes (Mam). I don't know what's in store for us next, but there are some things I'm pretty confident about.

Our nine years of married life have been far from smooth, but many of the bumps in the road just brought us closer together. At the best of times, we are the best of teams. You'll notice there are a lot of 'we's in this post and very few 'I's. It's because we've always been together. We didn't necessarily agree, but we tried to see the other's point of view. We tried hard. Sometimes we succeeded. Sometimes we were frustrated, but we're still the best of friends. And, as long as we're both here, I don't see that changing. How lucky we were to find good partners!

How lucky I am to have a guy who knows every single foible and blemish, but loves me anyway. I'm wildly undeserving.

And I remembered all these things, thanks to that lady who threw that party for us nine years ago. On a day when I was absolutely fed up with the kids and feeling like a horrible parent, she gave us the best anniversary present ever and took the kids...for dinner, for bath, for sleeping, for waking at the crack of dawn and for breakfast. Ahhh. Thanks, Mom!

It was just an evening. But it's the only evening we've had like that since we've had kids. No pressure, no time constraints. Nice dinner, a stroll around town and sleeping without waking to little people fighting or blasting PBS. Sometimes it just takes a tiny bit of that kind of time to remember what's really important...