9 years

Tomorrow I will have been married to Paxton for nine years. I will spend our anniversary three thousand miles away as I am out with my family helping while my sister goes in for brain surgery. But time spent away from Paxton makes me appreciate him all the more. Considering the difficult things my family has endured in the past few years, having my dad gone for a year in Iraq, losing my baby boy, and watching my little sister go in for her third brain surgery has given me a lot of time to reflect what my family and my marriage mean to me. I guess when it comes down to it, family is my reason for everything I do. It is why I get up in the morning and why I sometimes get up in the middle of the night, why I sing in the shower and sometimes cry in the shower, my motivation for making good choices as a kid and my reward for making good choices as an adult. I have so many people to thank for these nine wonderful years, my parents and siblings included but most of that credit goes to the wonderful man I am so lucky to call my husband. I thought I loved him when I promised to spend the rest of eternity with him, I thought I loved him even more when we held our first beautiful baby he helped me create, I though I loved him even more when he had to hold my life together when we lost our Colin, and yet now I realize each of those experiences I loved him to the greatest capacity I could and with each new experience, my capacity to love him grew. I have learned that great trials and sorrow can stretch someone to their limits but in that stretching one can also expand the limits of love and faith beyond what they could feel before. I can only dream of the love I will share with him in another ten years from now and another ten years after that. Thank you Paxton, for this wonderful life I am so lucky to get to share with you.