Thirteen Years

posted by Maureen

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the day Dan and I first met way back in 1998. Well, as of last Thursday, March 29th, we have now officially been together for 13 whole years! 

Aug. 1999 - a very young Dan and Maureen!

We've only been married for just under two years though, so you could certainly say our "courtship" was a bit on the long side. The funny thing is, we both sensed fairly early on that this relationship was for keeps. We just had some growing up to do I guess, having met at 18 and all. That said, I have to admit that it may not have been mutual love at first sight. The blame is all mine though. It's true...I may have turned down a large number of date requests from my wonderful husband, and he may have become known to my family and friends as the-guy-Maureen-won't-go-out-with- but-who-just-won't-give-up. He was pretty good at it though, I have to say. He wore me down through such tricks as bringing breakfast-in-bed to me in my dorm room on weekday mornings and making me homemade pasta from scratch on the one date I begrudgingly agreed to. One weekend night I found him throwing snowballs at my window and serenading me with "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" from Top Gun on his way home from a night out. Quite the charmer ;)

(Alert! Serious sappiness coming your way. Consider yourself warned ; )

Eventually, in late March of 1999, I finally fell for him, and you can consider me fallen ever since. Fast forward thirteen years, and I'm quite honestly still head over heels for this man. Cheesy as it may be to say, my heart sometimes feels like it could literally burst with happiness that we are having this baby together and about to begin another of life's amazing adventures as a team.

(We will now proceed with our regularly scheduled programming...)

So, all that is to explain how we can't quite bring ourselves to completely re-start the clock with our wedding anniversary and only celebrate the two years that we've been married, instead of the full thirteen we've shared. We think our long history together is pretty darn cool, so we've decided to just continue celebrating both. 

So, how did we celebrate Thirteen Amazing Years of Dan and Maureen? By continuing our recent trend of housework of course, followed by a little date night out. 

First, we rolled out the new rug that we bought for our living room to help keep our lonely coffee table company. 

We really like the pop of color it brings to the room. Plus, yellow is my favorite color, so it couldn't go wrong. My apologies for the close up shot. I'd pan out to show the whole room, but then you'd all see the mess that is our living room at the moment, and I just can't have that.  Better to maintain the illusion that it's all super neat and organized :)

Our next task was to pick up our latest Craigslist find - a new dresser for our bedroom. 

Finding this dresser took many weeks of Craigslist hunting and garage sale scouring. Getting a good deal on a nice dresser, is no easy task, as it turns out. We're pretty happy with it, save the super musty smell that is keeping us from putting our clothes in it as of yet. Hence the below shot of 9 bowls of baking soda that we've put in the drawers to try to absorb the smell. Hopefully with that and lots of trips taking the drawers outside to lay in the sun, we'll one day be able to actually use the darn thing.

Housework for the day complete, we finally, we got ourselves dolled up and hit the town for a  little celebrating at St. Michael's Alley in Palo Alto. 

Our dinner was so yummy and relaxing. I even splurged and had a tiny bit of wine so we could toast our good fortune of having had all these great years together. After dinner, since we were feeling lucky and all, we confidently marched into the local convenience store and picked up what was sure to be the winning Mega Millions lottery ticket. How could it not be when it was filled out with all our lucky numbers on our anniversary, no less?

I'm sad to report that, in a shocking turn of events, we learned on Friday that we were not newly minted multi-millionaires. We didn't even have one single matching number. Shocking, I tell you. Just shocking. 


It was a very happy day though, and I'm glad we took some time out to celebrate us. I know that's going to be a bit harder to do once our little kicker joins us in August. I even got to break in my first maternity dress. The  black conceals my growing belly bump, but trust me. It's there!

And that, my friends, was how we celebrated Anniversary #1 of 2012. Anniversary #2 is coming up on May 29th, and we're hoping to do a little babymoon trip to celebrate that one. 


That's all for now. I'll be back to catch up with you later this week. Happy Monday to you all!