Because we celebrate three years on Wednesday...

I have been reminiscing a lot about our first few months of marriage and how far we've come since then. You have often heard me talk about that tiny apartment we were living in back when we had two incomes and plenty of time to hang out. Let me give you a quick tour.Our front (and only) door. In the summer, we kept the real door open and just left the screen door shut to try to let in some air. With no central heat or air, things could get a bit stifling if I was trying to cook dinner. Obviously the above picture was taken in the fall.
So, that's it, ya'll. Three rooms (not counting the laundry, which was I was incredibly thankful to have, and the tiny bathroom off of the kitchen. Yes, it's true. You had to walk through the kitchen to get to the bathroom. Doesn't seem super sanitary to me, but we did it.) And the only room that could be closed off (again, other than the laundry and bathroom) was the bedroom, but when the door was closed, there was a huge gap between the floor and the beginning of the door, so, really, it was like you were still in the same room with the other person. When we first looked at the apartment, all engaged and smitten with each other and the idea of marriage, we were like, we don't need space. We will want to be together all of the time. Everyone laugh with me now. So that was the setting for our first year of marriage. And honestly, I mostly have wonderful memories of that little place. We were a five minute walk from Piedmont Park, and a five minute drive from everything else. In fact on nights when things seemed too closed in, we would get in the car and drive through down town just to let our brains "air out." It gets me a little teary eyed just looking at the pictures. It was a fun time. But, there were some not so fun times as we tried to adjust to marriage and living together. Let me give you an example.

Scott and I are so different in so many ways. And mostly this is a good thing. But one major difference we had when we first got married is that Scott liked to stay up late and sleep in, and I liked to go to bed at a reasonable hour and wake up early. I felt like the weekend was wasted if I slept in, and he felt like it was wasted if he went to bed early. This was the start of many an argument in those first few months.

The other major sore spot in the marriage was Scott's love for X-box. This sore spot started on our honeymoon. We rented a house in Rosemary Beach that was equipped with a large, flat screen television and an X-Box, and I thought that Scott could play the X-box on that trip if there were times that I wanted to lie out in the sun, and he didn't want to. No problem, right? Wrong. That X-box took over, and it even created some arguments on the honeymoon. Ah, the memories. So, I had a bad taste in my mouth over the X-box from the very beginning.

Well, often on the weekends, Scott would "go to bed early" with me (not that early--11:00, midnight even), and then, I would wake up to find him sitting on the end of the bed playing a football game on X-box. The first few times this happened, I calmly asked him to turn it off and come to bed. Seriously, we had several conversations about this. Well, one night, I reached my breaking point. I woke up to find him once again sitting on the end of the bed, in the middle of the night, playing X-box, and I just snapped. I jumped out of bed, started yelling, throwing pillows at him--it was bad. I am pretty sure he didn't play X-box in the middle of the night after that. We laugh about it now, but it is such a picture of the adjustment that first year was.

So, babe, thanks for no longer playing X-box in the middle of the night, and I am thinking that yelling and throwing pillows was not the most Christ like way I could have handled the situation, so please, forgive me. I am thankful we survived the whole X-box catastrophe. It was a low point, wasn't it;)

These days, we stumble into bed around 10:00, exhausted as can be. We no longer feel the need to argue over that one. Thank you parenthood for solving that problem in our marriage.