Anniversary Celebration

 We had a bed and breakfast in Wisconsin picked out for a romantic weekend getaway to celebrate our 12th anniversary.  But my back had other plans... So, we stayed fairly close to home. A dozen roses arrived on our kitchen table: 

A dozen roses for a dozen years. Nice. Guess how many roses I got on our 5th anniversary? (You're supposed to guess 5) Nope. 5 dozen! Ha!  :-) My husband arrived on the doorstep with an armload of roses.  It was very sweet.  But I was a little shocked...and not exactly sure what I was going to do with 5 dozen roses! I admit I'm glad it was 12 roses this year--and not 12 dozen.  ;-) We did get away for a little day trip together on Saturday. We toured the James J. Hill house in St. Paul: 

This is about half of it--it was too big to fit in my camera frame!

It's by far the biggest mansion we've toured.

We've enjoyed touring historic homes around the country.

It's always interesting to hear about the lives of the people who lived in them.

If you're curious about James J. Hill's story, you can visit the website here:  James J. Hill House

It was very dark inside, so I wasn't able to take many pictures. I did find this silverware amusing: 

Would you believe this is one place setting?

I wouldn't have the first clue how to use most of these...

Well, we spent the rest of the afternoon/evening bumming around a couple of our favorite shops and spoiling ourselves a little.

Today was the actual date of our anniversary.

Besides church and visiting Grandma (because she needs a cookie on our anniversary)...

...we spent most of our time painting Mike's bat houses together.

Well, we did play a windy round of disc golf together with some people that we love...

Not exactly romantic...but we did hold hands.  ;-)

I hope we'll still get our romantic getaway at some point, but days like these are not to be taken for granted.

 

It was a good day.

12 years

 I'm grateful to say that today was our 12th wedding anniversary. Wow...12 years... Where has the time gone? Recently, I looked through our wedding photos. Crazy... We were a couple of kids! Mike had just turned 22, and I had just turned 21. Just old enough to legally taste the champagne in our honeymoon suite...and I had already promised my life away! I came across this picture in our wedding album recently: 

(Such a bummer it was pre-digital photography...) But I was just so taken by the expression of pure elation on my face. That day, I married my beloved and my friend, and at that moment in time, there was absolutely nothing that could have made me happier. And I've been living the life of my dreams ever since.  Well, for the most part...  ;-) We've always had our differences, and they emerged even before the honeymoon was over. Like at Disneyland Paris when I locked myself in the bathroom and Mike sat outside the door banging his head against the wall. Yeah, I'm afraid it probably wasn't his only head-banging moment... Merging two lives into one isn't always pretty. But by God's grace, it's possible. ~♥~ God has a sense of humor, doesn't He? He doesn't always give us what we want in a mate... but in His infinite wisdom, He gives us what we need. It must be fairly amusing to Him to match people together... Can't you just picture it?   He looks down and says, "Yes, you and you belong together.  This should be interesting..."  ~♥~ Well, I am so grateful for 12 years of walking alongside the man that God gave me. And I pray that by God's grace, there will be many more good years to come.