Celebrating 10 Years of Marriage

Nathan and I are celebrating 10 years of marriage, and I wanted to add to the celebrations by telling our story with a few words and a lot of pictures!

I’ve been lucky enough to be married to this wonderful man for 10 years, but we go back farther than that. Nathan and I met in August of 1998 a couple of weeks before we started high school. We were both in band and both on the swim team, and our paths crossed a lot our freshman year. Our sophomore year, luck would have it that we had every single class together but one. We hung out with the same group of friends, so even though we only had a few classes together our junior year, we saw each other a lot. In the fall of 2001 (our senior year) I started to see him more than just a friend. I admired him for his work ethic and his kindness and integrity. My own faith was growing and blossoming at the time, and I saw him as someone I could grow in faith with as well. I told our friend Joshua about my new feelings, and he spilled the beans to Nathan. On October 20th, 2001, we went on our first date. A few days later, our marching band went on a trip to California. We got to go to Disneyland and California Adventure. Here are some of the first pictures of us together:

We dated our entire senior year of high school. Nathan was always caring. Once I found this note he had left in my clarinet case while I was having my lesson after school:

He took me to the senior prom:

Little did we know (as you can see by the date stamp above) that we would be getting married almost exactly four years from the day of our prom.

 

We graduated high school together:

And went to grad night:

We were unsure if we’d stay together after high school since I was moving up to Tacoma for college. But we decided to stick it out with the middle distance relationship. We were taking on the world together but apart.

The college years were hard, but we spent a lot of time on the phone with each other. I went home about once a month, and he came up to Tacoma to visit a few times during the year. In the summers we got to see a lot of each other. He was a regular at my parents’ house, and he came on vacation with us a few times.

Eventually, we started talking about getting married, and on November 24th, 2005 (the fall of our senior year of college), he proposed! Here we are at Christmas, a month after getting engaged:

I graduated from college 6 days before our wedding.

May 20th, 2006 was our big day. I can’t say it enough, I’m so lucky to be walking through life with this man. Our wedding day is still one of my happiest days and best memories.

The early years of the marriage were so much fun. We lived in an apartment in Tigard where we took turns putting each other through school. I started grad school a few days after returning from our honeymoon. I used to study while Nathan played video games. After a year I got a teaching job and he went to seminary to get a Masters in Biblical Studies. Those years were so crazy and so good, and I wish I appreciated them more at the time. Most of the pictures of us together are from travel. We didn’t take many pictures “just because” like we do now.

One of the best parts of being married to Nathan has been watching him become a father. In the fall of 2010 after four and a half years of marriage we welcomed our first child into this world. It has been such a privilege to learn from and with Nathan as we are on this parenting journey.

Then our family grew some more and we navigated dividing our time between two children and still devoting time to each other.

And most recently, we welcomed our third child.

So here we are ten years later! We’ve had some hard times and some wonderful times. After ten years I am still just as excited to wake up to each new day with Nathan and our family. Here’s to ten more, and ten more after that, and on and on. Let’s see where tomorrow takes us!