10 Months and 8 Days....

That is how long I have been married to my best friend in the whole world. He proposed to me on July 24th, 2009. I came home from work and got ready for a date he had asked me on that night. I found out while driving around that we would be having a picnic. I happen to have an obsessive infatuation with picnics, especially on summer nights and especially surprise ones. We sat on the lawn above the Provo temple. No one was there, which is a rarity on summer evenings, but this was our evening. We enjoyed a yummy pasta dish from the Pizza Factory, lemonade and a yummy dessert. Then we laid on the picnic blanket.

I rested my head on his torso.

He played with my hair.

After a stretch of blissful silence, he sighed and said:

"Well, I wanted to get you a ring..."

And in my head I thought about how tight money was and started telling myself that it was ok and that it might just take a while longer and how it didn't matter anyway and that I was going to marry him regardless and who needed a ring to be engaged when he said:

"So, I did."

I felt him slip something onto my finger. I hadn't even thought about looking at it when big happy tears escaped my eyes and I was hugging him tighter than is probably healthy and laughing out loud with pure happiness. After laughing with me at my reaction, he exclaimed "You didn't even look at it!" So I did, once I wiped some tears away. It was beautiful and perfect and oh so shimmery. It was a very happy day.



10 months and 8 days of marriage later, and I can say that though that night was magical and so wonderfully happy, it has been trumped by an accumulation of various tiny events and kisses and making dinner and road trips and finding out we were pregnant and quiet moments of realizing I'm the most blessed girl in the world. I've learned that happiness in marriage is what you make of it. So many people told us before we were married that marriage was going to be different that we thought it would. It was going to be hard, especially the first year. And you know what I would like to tell them? Keep your doom's day warnings! This has been the best 10 months and 8 days of my life! Because your first year of marriage was the hardest does not mean that it is going to be mine. I am sure that harder trials will come, that we will not always see eye to eye or be able to come to a reasonable solution together. We may even get mad at each other and argue. We might hurt each other's feelings and let each other down. We might struggle through hunger and poverty (oh wait...we're already at the poverty point), and I am sure that raising children will not be a piece of cake, but from this first 10 months and 8 days, I think that I may safely say that the rest of eternity together is going to be what we make of it. I'm thinking it is going to be the happiest eternity of my life.