8 Years, 1 Week, 1 Day, Still Married

We got married eight years and one week and one day ago.

Which means we've stayed married eight years and one week.

(Staying married is actually much harder than getting married, if you were wondering.  Also your parents don't pay for it, and you have to buy your own booze.)

On our anniversary (July 10th), David and I actually left the baby with my mom and went out to dinner, just the two of us.

And we talked about the baby the whole time.

We had planned to go to one of our favorite restaurants downtown (locals:  it's Bridge) and I was actually going to have a small glass of wine, but then I freaked out and decided the ten-minute drive downtown was "too far."  So we went to one of our favorite neighborhood restaurants instead (locals: it's Onesto).  Not as fancy (we ordered pizza) or special-occasion (we go to Onesto pretty frequently) but I just wasn't ready to be that far from the baby!  And since it took less than an hour, we decided to get Ted Drewes for dessert.

It was not lost on us for a moment that we thought we'd have an eighteen-month-old baby by the time we'd been married eight years.  Our master plan for our lives has been seriously rewritten, and I still don't understand why things didn't work out for us.  I had some real moments of sadness throughout the day, reflecting on how different our family is than how I expected it to be, how so much of our lives has gone perfectly according to plan, and how so much of it has not.  I thought a lot about how good things are, and how good things should have been.  I loved on Carol, but I really missed our sweet Eliza, and I got teary-eyed at dinner when we talked about her.

But of course, it was not lost on us that we were so freaking lucky to have a 12-day-old baby waiting for us at home this year.

I enjoyed our dinner and adult conversation that occurred without a small human sucking on my boob, even if the conversation was mostly about the small human who sucks on my boob.  It was nice to have a little bit of time with just the two of us, and the sips I took of David's sangria were heavenly.

But taking the time to pose for our annual anniversary photo was probably the best moment of the whole day.

And, yeah.  We're still in it to win it.  Here's to staying married.

(For all our previous anniversary pictures, you can click here.)

After we'd gotten ready for bed, I was holding Caroline when she made an amazing discovery:  her thumb!

This tastes AMAZING!

She latched on to that thing and slurped away at it for a few minutes.  It's a tricky little bugger, though--she hasn't been able to find it again since that day, although she keeps trying!  A for effort.  Her fist and pointer finger frequently make their way into her mouth, but she hasn't had the same delighted reaction.  

The possibility of future orthodontic work and a germ phobia both have me hoping she won't be a thumb sucker (mommy wasn't, daddy was), but it was still one of the cutest things I've ever seen.