Thirteen Years and Going

I know I'm cheating a bit here, and falling back on the same format I've used the past couple of posts, in which I use pictures to tell most of the story, rather than words. Perhaps I'm being lazy, or I'm pressed for time, or I'm just enjoying the poignancy of looking back. In any case, here it is:

Dave and I are celebrating our 13th anniversary today. We went out to eat to celebrate the ocassion on Sunday evening, and with that done, we both almost forgot about the fact that today is the day of our actual anniversary, and honestly, we don't have much time today to reflect on the past thirteeen years - the present is too busy and exciting...and good. It's good. But I'll take a look back for a moment, to our beginning, when we were practically infants. Good grief, we were so young!

We don't regret getting married when we did, but we do sometimes think about how young and inexperienced we were. We made plenty of mistakes in those first years, that's for sure. Probably some people thought getting pregnant in the first year and having a baby just before our first anniversary was one of them...but we don't.

We were still children at that point, but starting our family early (and with such a treasure as Aimee) was a good thing. Adding our first son a couple years later was also a good thing.

The next few years weren't always easy - they were probably our most challenging. Certainly it seemed unwise to most people for us to get pregnant yet again, it scared us a little, too. But we knew God had a plan for our family, and that he would always provide for our needs. That's probably what we learned most in those years, Sometimes it was seared onto our souls in a painful fashion. And we were still learning it when we had that third little one and found ourselves readying for number four in pretty quick succession.

I think people thought we were crazy, foolish, or both. But that's something else we learned after getting over the hardest of those times. Listening to wise counsel is good. But laboring under the weight of other people's convictions, ideas, and criticism is not. It was freeing for us to begin to make choices based on our own convictions, and to be confident in those choices. It was also freeing to acknowledge our mistakes, but not to be weighed down by guilt - to learn from them, to make better choices the next time, and to walk our family's journey with more confidence. And we still didn't consider any member of our growing family a mistake or an unwise choice.

When Scarlett, as number five, was botn, it was like a culmination of that learning process. Yes, we were having :"another one," and yes, our house was "too small," and we still didn't have any money to speak of, and a gentle birth at home in said too small house may have seemed ridiculous to some, but the whole pregnancy and birth was faith building and family bonding.

Our move to Ohio a year and a half ago was another positive step for our marriage and our family, which is still of seven - and no, there's no annoucement coming! We are not growing in number, but everyone is certainly growing. And growing.

And we are happy. Now, I know some who might be critical of our choices might say we are all about our kids, that pretty much our whole married life thus far has been about kids. It's true that we only had a few months together before I became pregnant, and it was no longer just the two of us, But that hasn't taken anything away from what Dave and I have; on the contrary, our emphasis on family, been a major part of what has caused us to continue to grow together. We grow our family together, we trust God for our family together, we are happy together.

And when we get a chance to go out just ourselves, sans children - and a little older and wiser ourselves these days - we still have things to talk about.