Taylor and I celebrate eight years of this month!

Our household came down with COVID and we’ve been in quarantine for the past 3 weeks. Unfortunately, this meant cancelling our anniversary plans. We’ll find another time to officially celebrate, but for today, let’s go back to where it began:

We got married on a frigid December afternoon in Utah. This was back in the day when it used to snow in December. The temperature reached a high of 2 degrees! Suddenly that short sleeve summer wedding dress that I had purchased on clearance in October wasn’t feeling like such a good idea 🙂

Being a teenager at heart (and in physical development), I had a particular affinity for converse shoes. These were the bridal footwear of choice for the wedding.

The wedding was hosted in a “fall” theme, because the crazed teenage bride insisted that it was still technically autumn until December 21st.

Thank you everyone, our parents especially, for being a good sport about this planning a fall themed wedding in a 2-month engagement:)

After the marriage ceremony, we planned to have our reception a little further up north. In all the excitement, however, we realized that both of our families had left us behind, taking my car with them! FORTUNATELY, one of the wedding witnesses was still hanging around. We made the 45 minute trek with him and his wife in their minivan.

When we arrived at the reception center, our families greeted us with many questions like “Where have you been?!” and “What have you been doing?!” The real question, my loves, is WHY DID YOU TAKE MY CAR?! And if you really must know what we were doing all this time, we were grabbing Mickey Dees nuggets with Susan & Glenn!

The receiving line was boring. The dancing was SO much fun. We ate eclairs and flavored our own hot chocolates. (The chocolate blueberry was a fave.) The entire wedding party and most of the reception guests got up and danced to the sweet playlist our friends Neal & Joe had put together. It was one giant dance party, which is literally heaven to me.

And there we were: two kids committing their lives & souls together for forever and ever.

In the years since, we’ve been through a lot.

Babies started to make their way almost immediately. This was unexpected. We didn’t really have a plan for having kids. We kinda figured it would happen after a few years or so. Who knows where babies come from anyway? To our huge surprise, we found out that I was pregnant only a couple months later! Arrow made her special debut later that September ❤

A couple years later, Archer made his entrance into the world.

Sander, of course, couldn’t be left out of the fun!

Degrees were earned in between penning essays and changing dirty bottoms.

We travelled abroad to Russia and Canada with Archer & Arrow. (We then got serious about our finances and focused on being debt free. This also means that baby Sander hasn’t seen the world beyond Utah yet 🙂 )

It hasn’t all been rosy & glory of course. Sleepless nights with teething toddlers frayed our nerves. Feelings have been hurt when we’ve been insensitive with each other. Taylor refused to adopt my way of thinking as universal law and doctrine. The audacity!

But there has been so much beauty in learning how to communicate & support each other in our rough patches. We practiced being a team instead of opponents in our disagreements. Since we married young, we had a lot of personal development yet to go through. Fortunately, we’ve been able grow together, not apart, as we developed our individual selves.

Yes, it’s been a busy and full eight years of marriage & family. I can only imagine what the next eight years have in store. Definitely more college, new careers, and then raising TEENAGERS. I hope a hobby farm and a new baby are in the works for us as well. (This mama is SO baby hungry omg.)

I love this life that we’ve created together. I can’t wait to see where it takes us next.

Love you forever and ever, Taylor!