Four Years and One Sam Later...

I just ate the last Magnum bar while clicking through the profile pictures album on my Facebook page. Before I go on, have you had a Magnum bar yet? If not, drop what you're doing and run (seriously, run) to the grocery to buy a box of these. I mean it. You'll thank me. Back to what I was saying about flipping through the past five years of my life recorded in digital images and stored on a social media site. It was a little like watching my life flash before my eyes AND at the same time seeing those same eyes acquire new wrinkles every twenty-five pictures. Sigh.

But, despite having been made more aware of my increasing age and wrinkles, I feel reassured somehow after having watched the last five years flash by in a series of candids. It's easy to forget the life that I've lived and the people that I love sometimes when I spend my days at home seeing only Sam and the occasional meter man/UPS man/Jehovah's witness. It's easy to forget that there have been a lot of good things and a lot of good friends that seem to fall through the cracks of my heart a little with each passing day of stay-at-home-mom-ness. This may sound like a complaint, but it's not, really. Just an observation.

In the last twenty minutes of perusing the massive online photo album of my life, I saw myself transformed from a single girl working with college students to a girl getting engaged to her dream man, to a girl walking down the aisle of her front yard and then living the married life here, there, and everywhere. And then there was that same girl putting on thirty pounds over ten months and then forty-one weeks later welcoming a baby boy named Sam who subsequently took over our lives and my Facebook profile pictures. And now here we are with a twenty-month old in a new city, in a new house with a new life. It's a little breathtaking looking back to see where we've been and the somewhat long and winding road to now.

And so, I'm reminiscing here at the kitchen table, thankful for a life full of Matt and Sam and friends and family who love me and whom I love. In the midst of that reminiscing, I'm reminded how these last five years of my life have been made so much lovelier by the man who surprised me with a proposal almost four and a half years ago in a Swedish castle one cold winter night. And then four years ago today, I married him on a hot, August evening at my parents' house with the people dearest to us looking on.

Happy Anniversary to my best friend and favorite human being.
You are a dream come true.