Memories....Months 31-40

 Happy Monday, friends! Hope you had a great weekend! I'm back on this Monday morning with a few more memories to share with you. If you missed last week, Ryan and I are coming up on 100 months of marriage, and I'm looking back over some of our biggest and most life-shaping memories from the first 99 months! :) 

Today I'm taking a look at months 31-40.

Month 31. 

It was a month of lasts - not for us as a couple, but for me, as I said goodbye to my job at WBCL. My very last sticker stop (where I saw some of you!)...my last visitors at the station...and then the grand finale. This was a life-shaper for us, so I think it's safe to say this is one of our biggest memories from this month. Ryan made one last trip to the station with me to be part of the very last BLT show ever. (My parents also mad the trip up for that.) The station threw a beautiful party for me, where the staff shared sweet memories and funny stories, and then we ate great food together. I have to pause to brag on Ryan for how tenderly he handled this hard-for-me goodbye. When I got up for work on my last day, Ryan had a surprise waiting for me on the couch. He'd gotten a beautiful piece of wall art with Proverbs 31:25 on it. And he said we could spend our evening doing anything I wanted. I asked him to bring home Chipotle for dinner, and we stayed home all evening, watching movies and being together. We've ended and begun so many chapters together, and this was one of them! 

(Above: when I cut my own bangs AND cry while talking, you get this.)

Month 32. 

Another 4th of July date with fireworks over the lake...working together to do some projects at my parents' house...working what turned out to be our final golf scramble...an annual date to the fair...these were some of the opening pieces of our new chapter, in which I got my first taste of a lifelong dream of being a stay-at-home wife. We both found that we loved it more than we thought we would. Though I grieved the joy of the job I'd enjoyed for the previous four years, I easily embraced staying home. Knocking out one commute and having more time to spend together in quality time was truly life-changing. Even things like our visit to the lake with Ryan's family seemed easier to do when we weren't trying to juggle two busy work schedules into a lake weekend! That year was a particularly fun visit, too. 

Month 33.

After giving myself a month to acclimate to stay-at-home life, I dove right into home organizing and improvement projects. Even though we had been married two and a half years, we had never had time to properly sort through the house and get organize our combined stashes of stuff. So I did it, and it was so exciting! We hauled truckload after truckload of excess to Ryan's parents' rental house in preparation for a garage sale. It was a busy month, and I think one of our favorite memories came at the end of the month, when we went to a wedding for one of our friends from church. We got to catch up with part of our wedding party, have a date, and have fun. In double-commuting days, an out-of-town wedding that went late into the evening would have added a lot of chaos, but this time it was fun!

Month 34. 

We marked Madison County off our list this month, which was fun. But oh goodness. It was kind of a trial of a month! Ryan had major issues with his truck battery. My car had a flat tire. We had a mini split put in our house, which meant the workers had to go into the attic and cut holes into the ceilings for vents. The strain of that caused the ceiling in the bedroom to sag. Ryan came up with an idea to fix it, and it worked, but oh my goodness. It was SO tedious! But even with all those things, the crowning memory of this month was having our very first ever rummage sale. We held it over a weekend with a town rummage, and it was super successful. Know what was not successful? Being stung in the tongue by a bee that I did not know had sneaked into my peanut butter and honey sammich. Still, we had a blast with the rummage. I had so much fun putting it together, and a couple of mean customers and the bee aside, we had so much fun running it together! (Big thanks to our moms for helping us, though!)

Month 35. 

For all of the maddening issues of the previous month, this one was FUN! We ran a 5K TOGETHER! (And by that, I mean we both ran in the same race. We did not run together after about the first foot. We had a fall photoshoot at our house and invited some friends over to have one too. While we were at it...we had a cookout. And we carved pumpkins on Halloween! But hands down, our best memory that month was our Great Getaway of 2015. It remains to this day probably our favorite trip we've taken. In the top 3 for sure. We drove to Virginia Beach to visit Mark and Lynnette and see the ocean! They took us to tour Colonial Williamsburg and the Cape Henry Lighthouse. We left there and headed to New York, via Maryland, where we toured a coffee roaster. We spent an entire day hiking in Letchworth State Park and then another day at Niagara Falls! We even walked over to Canada for the evening! Such a fun, fun trip!

Month 36. 

Ahhhh, month 36. A big month! We officially launched our podcast, Spill the Beans that month! Those first few episodes were kind of awkward but oh what fun we had! I loved being back in the audio editing chair, and we enjoyed the beginning of this new adventure! We got an early snow that month, and I loved being home to play photographer with the freshly fallen flakes! But our two biggest memories that month were...Ryan got called to (and picked for) jury duty. I was a jury duty widow for a week while he served, and the biggest part of the story was a the end of the week when he didn't come home at the end of the day. I had no way to contact him, since jurors can't have phones. The hour crept toward six...seven...eight...nine...ten at night and he still wasn't home. We won't talk about how many trips I took driving to the courthouse to look for his car to see if he had a medical emergency...was injured by an angry person after the trial. It was awful. It turned out the trial just ran that late. I had no idea they stayed open late ever - but especially on a Friday - to complete a trial! He finally came home at 11:30 Friday night! Trial over! And the second big moment of that month came from "the picture" taken at Thanksgiving that launched us into a new eating journey That became a life-changer for us both!

And that brought us to our third anniversary which may be the shortest getaway we've ever taken! We had just done that huge trip out east, so we were low on vacation finances and days off. We took a Friday night through Sunday and went to Fort Wayne, but we still had fun! We shopped, went through lights in the park, had coffee, got our Christmas tree, and knocked Allen County off our county tour list! Then a couple of days later, on our actual anniversary, Ryan took the day off and we decorated and had a photo shoot with a professional photographer! It was so fun! 

Month 37. 

This month was full of much Christmassing and goodness! We had our first in-the-family 40th birthday, which belonged to our brother-in-law. We had such fun at that, and I even got to play photographer! I think one of our favorite memories from this month of marriage came at the very end of the month, when we got to celebrate New Year's Eve with our good friends, the Holloways. Our friendship with them had been growing, and it kind of felt to me like God was beginning to help us put down roots in Marion, at our church, with friends, and with new passions and hobbies. And we had no idea that this was actually one of the LAST times we'd hang out like this with them, because in just a few months, they moved out of state, we moved to a new town, and everything I thought I knew to be a sure thing was shaken up!

Month 38. 

This month began a new year, and it began with much gusto. Our dishwasher gave out, and we had to get a new one. Ryan served on a team for a men's retreat. It had been a year and a half since we spent our first and only night apart, but this month brought night #2. We still weren't fans of separation, we decided. We stayed busy with this and than throughout the month, but we hold this as our favorite memory: the owl hike. We went on a winter hike in a state park because it was free. It was in the evening and we were supposed to see owls, but alas, they were not participating that night. (Maybe they didn't get the invitation?) But we did enjoy watching the tour guide do all the owl calls!

Month 39.

We just hung onto our hats BIG TIME in this month. We'd been talking about moving to Kokomo, but we never imagined we would find a house we liked. We did. And we made an offer. And a counter-offer. And we listed our own house. And we started packing. It was a lot to absorb in just a few weeks! But even with all that excitement, one of our favorite memories from this month was our fun Valentine's Day date at Sur la Table. Ryan surprised me with a cooking class, and it was FUN!!! Still one of my most favorite dates. 

Month 40.

Rounding out today's memories...month 40! It started with Ryan's retreat weekend, which was super tough on BOTH of us. I tried to keep myself so busy while he was gone for the weekend. We wrote each other cards for every day, hid gifts for one one another, and prayed for each other the whole time. And I think I about broke my face smiling when we reunited! But the biggest news of that month was multi-faceted. We officially purchased our first home together: in Kokomo. We accepted an offer on our Marion house after FIVE YEARS of trying to sell. We took possession of our Kokomo house and started doing demo/projects/painting. We moved a few weeks earlier than we anticipated, even! Definitely a challenging, wonderful, praise-filled, crazy month!