March 20, 2012

I can't believe we've been married nearly a year.  While I was looking for my journal I came across a book about writing personal history. Although I did not find my journal I found some fun writing prompts about the first year of marriage.

I feel so blessed that I can say that my parents loved my choice for marriage and I married into a family who loves me and accepted me on day one.  Going into marriage, Aaron and I had some high expectations and I honestly feel that for the most part marriage has been better so far than anything I could have expected.  Aaron and I have had so many chances to learn and grow together and although we personally haven't endured a great hardship we have grown together as we have watched all that his family has endured this year.  We have had so much opportunity for service and it has helped strengthen our love and appreciation for one another.

I've learned so much about Aaron this year and it has been the best year of my life so far.  As I look back over the year there have been some pretty hysterical things that have happened as we've tried to figure this marriage thing out. For example, our first apartment was a dive.  Aaron jokingly says that he had to move me into it before we found another place so basically anything would be amazing after the first place.  It had a tiny kitchen that I could hardly fit in alone. There was no oven so every meal we made was stove-top. There were only a couple of cupboards so we had to use our dishwasher to store our dishes rather than for washing them.  The bathroom was smaller than a half bath and had mold problems.  It was a basement apartment and on the door to the apartment there was about a 3inch gap from the bottom of the door to the floor, which enabled bugs to easily crawl into our house. One good thing about our place was the air conditioner, but wait, even that blew dirt around in the air.  Like I said before, it was a total dive but we didn't care much because we were newly married, had no debt and knew the living conditions weren't  permanent.  While we lived there we enjoyed living close to Aaron's parents while still having our own little place. Aaron was able to make us a beautiful bedroom set at his dad's shop and made the same design for Joe Cummings, who happened to be teaching a very expensive carving class which Aaron had been wanting to take for a while.  The work was traded in order for Aaron to take the class and he loved the skills that he learned.