A real date to celebrate the first

We went out on our first really real date since Chloe came home, this weekend.  We hired a babysitter, left all three children behind, and only put Chloe to bed (so as to not know she was being left with a babysitter).  We took the night off to celebrate the anniversary of our first date.

September 1999 a few weeks after our first date at the Kolache Festival

A lot has changed in 12 years, the dorm I met him at is now an office building and the Bennigans we ate at is now an AT&T store.  We now have three kids to bathe before we can leave for the night and a budget with very small numbers in it when it comes to entertainment.

But a lot has stayed the same.  We're still here in Aggieland, what was supposed to be a stop to enjoy the best years of our lives, has turned into our home where we've learned that the years keep getting better.  We drove to our date in the same pick up truck we did 12 years ago, and I held the same hand and looked into the same blue eyes.

December 1999 about a week before we got engaged

The first time I met Kyle I knew that I had just met my husband, I knew that my future would include him, for some reason God saw it fit to show me that much of my future.  He didn't show me what the rest would include, not the days I thought that maybe I had just lived a perfect day nor the ones when I thought that surely we would never figure out becoming one flesh.  But he allowed me to experience each one, in order to mold me into the woman and wife he wants be to become.

And we're just getting started.  I wonder what it's like to when you get to fifty years, what it's like to no longer remember being anything except each other's.  To know how to submit to one another and put the other's needs before your own, everyday.  I have tried it both ways and it has taught me, a marriage without God at the center is impossible, a marriage with God at the center is still one of the hardest things you'll ever do, but absolutely worth every moment.