So, I was thinking this morning that if 5 years ago I had said, "Five years from now, I want to be married and pregnant," I would have gotten my wish.
To my knowledge I said no such thing. At that time I didn't have much of a grasp of the passage of time or the concept of 5 years. At that time, "5 years ago" would have been my junior year of high school and "5 years from now" was too far away for me to even fathom. But somehow between then and now I must have reached adulthood, because 5 years seem to have gone by with hardly a thought, one blending into the next. Funny how the passage of time changes once you no longer mark it by what year you are in school.
So, Valentine's Day this year is significant, not just because it is the first Valentine's Day as a married couple, but because it has been 5 years since we made those first baby steps in this direction. We would probably ignore the holiday altogether if it wasn't our "anniversary". :-P But it is.
This blog entry is dated February 14, 2008, which is the day I started writing it, but it's now actually over a week since then. I never finished the post on the actual day because I decided to go back and read old blog posts and emails from the time... and spent a couple of hours reminiscing about those very earliest days. :-) I'm not really even sure what I want to say now. I just didn't want the day to go by without some sort of marker for the occasion. Five years is a long time!
It's funny how we still look back at a lot of events from our first months as some of the best dates we've ever had. That first Valentine's Day, well, it was significant but not really "romantic"... It was 3 days after I broke up with my boyfriend of 4 and a half years. It was long conversation, mixed-up emotions, dinner and a movie with 2 other friends. It was the start of long emails and IM's, baby steps, and a whole lot of talking, analyzing, and thought-checks. But there was that first hockey game. There was Phantom Friday, and the weekend that followed. Concerts, movies, sports, and a lot of going out to eat! There was Niagara Falls. The summer in Dunkirk, picnics at Point Gratiot, waving during the long commutes, leaving notes on each other's cars. My surprise birthday party at Chuck E Cheese. The football game. That was just the first 8 months!
We've been through a lot in five years, and maybe not everything is fluttery butterflies anymore... we're pretty comfortable with each other at this point I think. ;-) Being married is a big, new adventure... with an even bigger adventure preparing to meet us in just over a month. In five years, our friendship has deepened into a love so real that next month we'll be giving it a name.
So how did we spend our big 5-year anniversary V-day this year? Well, we had a very romantic dinner together in the campus dining hall, followed by the movie "50 First Dates" (which we saw in the theater on our first anniversary) and some warm delicious dump cake for dessert. Date choices are somewhat limited when Joe is on dorm duty. :-)
I am a bad wife and I didn't get him a gift this year. He, on the other hand, went all out. A dozen roses? Giant box of chocolates? Sparkling jewelry? Not my husband. He went to the Catholic bookstore and bought me a Fontanini Nativity set. A stable, the Holy Family (and Jesus comes out of the manger, he checked :-)), 2 shepherds, 4 angels, a flock of sheep and donkeys, and 3 wise men on camels. Beautiful, hand-painted, kid-friendly, to scale, not covered in glitter. I cried when I opened it. The man certainly knows me. :-)
This post has been long, eclectic and rambling. I guess I really just wanted to say, Happy Valentine's Day to the best husband there is. I love you more than I even knew I could 5 years ago. :-*