15 Years

It's been 15 years since this happened:

 

Since then, we've had 5 kids, 6 homes, about 10 different jobs and business start-ups between the two of us. We've enjoyed countless family hikes and trips and adventures. We've been through amazingly hard stuff and rejoiced in amazingly good stuff. 

My kind parents took the kids for the weekend and Jared and I had a delightful time in Salt Lake (easy and cheap and perfect since we got married there). We'd had so many crazy weeks in a row that we really didn't plan much. But it was heavenly to simply hang out and have no big agenda. 

We went to a beautiful, powerful temple session at the Salt Lake temple (where we were married) and did some sealings right there where we were sealed. We wandered around City Creek mall and enjoyed a perfect evening at Temple Square - cool sweet evening air, gorgeous flowers, the lights coming on on the Temple... 

(The photo above is the only photo we got of the two of us all weekend somehow...)

We ate brunch at a new favorite restaurant: The Tin Angel (the lobster omelette and panzanella and fresh heirloom tomato salad was wonderful) 

We stayed in on a rainy night and enjoyed the amazing tomatoes and other great produce we found at the downtown farmer's market:

We talked a lot and so enjoyed having full conversations without the interruptions of kids or phone calls or tiredness (often our only time to talk when is after Jared gets back from church meetings when we're both so tired that we're hardly coherent). We pulled out this Book of Questions left over from our dating years and learned lots of new little things about each other as we traded off randomly picking questions from the book to ask each other. It was so nice to talk about something beyond schedules, the back yard, work, worries about our kids, issues going on in the ward, and the like (all great topics, but sometimes it's nice to deviate from the norm!).

It was such a nice mellow weekend and so important to have time to fall in love all over again.

I'm so grateful for this amazingly kind, strong, uncomplaining, competent, handsome, helpful, faithful, good man of mine.

Marriage isn't easy. For me, it's involved a long and often painful process of getting my expectations and hopes in tune with reality and with what really matters. It's also involved learning to see beauty and importance in qualities and interests and needs that didn't seem beautiful or important right off the bat. I've gone from thinking I could help Jared become certain things that I though surely he'd want to become to accepting all the marvelous things he is and counting my many, many blessings. Marriage has helped me see flaws in myself - and work on fixing them - like nothing else could. And marriage has brought me support and help and partnership beyond what I dared to hope for.

I wrote more about my thoughts on marriage on our last anniversary (and put up a video of our lives together) here if you want to check it out.