Four Years Ago

Four years ago today a new chapter in my life began. I was FINALLY, after what felt like an eternity, able to be with the man of my dreams, forever. Four years ago “I” became “We”. I had been out of High School for a short four days and nearly everyone I knew thought I was making the biggest mistake of my life. You can’t even begin to argue with the feelings I felt about this man so I ignored what everyone said. Everyone acted happy for me even though none of them really thought our marriage would last.

Four years ago my husband and I began a journey that has led us to where we are today. I remember starting out, it was rather euphoric. It felt like a fairy tale to me. I was strangely comfortable in a place with which I was completely unfamiliar. I had all my things though so I guess that helped. My things, my clothes, my car, my cat, and my hubby. 🙂 That helped soften that fact that I was in a different house, living with my brother in law in addition to my husband and somewhat trapped because I didn’t know my way around.

For me the hardest part was us living with my brother in law. After about a year though we moved into our very own apartment. THAT was just what we needed, a place of our own, us and our two cats.

Here’s our first Apt where we lived on our own, it’s actually a 2 family house, we had the bottom floor, our landlord had the second floor:

I LOVED that apartment and it’s really the turning point in our lives. This is really where we learned how to live together and who we were as a couple. This is the place where we would learn to live in perfect harmony. In our old apartment the stress of having his brother living with us and his father living in a small apartment off the side of the house would cause many arguments and much stress. Once we were in this place for awhile we quit arguing and I’m proud to save we haven’t had a real argument in two to two and a half years. We’ve had a couple “this makes me sad when you do this” talks but nothing significant.

This is also the apartment where our rent was low enough we finally became “unpoor” and slipped into “comfortable enough”. We had planned to live in this apartment for A LONG TIME. But then hubbys sisters husband did the unthinkable and stole a large sum of money from my husbands mom. This jerk had been stealing money from other people in the family too, just not large sums. She also found out that he had been cheating on her for awhile. Needless to say she divorced the jerk. She was unable to afford to keep her house though. The house she was in at the time was the house her, my husband, and their brother had grown up in. It was an incredible house and held many, many memories, especially considering it was rebuilt in 1980 by hubbys father. It was looking like this house was going to slip from the family. Hubby had always wanted to own this house and Hubby wasn’t too happy about the whole house slipping out of the family thing. After sitting down and looking over our finances I told hubby to ask his father if WE could buy the house, money would be tight but it might be possible. His father said that yes, we could go in on a contract to buy and it would make the whole process easier and cheaper. We could stay on the contract to buy until we could afford to get a mortgage of our own. That was our ticket. So in 2001 we “traded” houses with my sister in law. We took her house and full responsibility of it as if it were ours. Our landlord okayed her taking over our apartment and that was it (hubbys sister now has a brand new house with a guy and no longer lives in the apartment, btw). We were on our way to being owners of a home I never see us leaving, our very own “old homestead”:

(I’ve posted house pics before but for anyone who hasn’t seen them they’re here: http://www.nilesweb.com/brandi/house/ )

We also aquired another cat, hubbys sisters cat, she didn’t want to move her and our cat Kenny was in love with her so that was that.

After having lived there for a year we were able to take out our very own mortgage. NOW the house really is ours.

This house has given me some very “neat” experiences, one is actually having land and being able to have like real farm animals. Right now we only have chickens but we have bigger plans for the future, pigs and cows even. 🙂

Here’s a shot of one of our Roo’s ( I LOVE this pic):

And here’s me holding Daisy:

This house has brought us a lot of joy.

This pretty much brings us to today. We’ve acquired one more cat, our first puppy, and lots of bettas!

If there’s one word I had to choose to describe my life since getting married I’d have to use the word Incredible because that’s exactly what it’s been. I can’t believe we ALREADY own a house. I can’t believe how well we get along. I can’t believe how incredible everything has been. My life is 100 times better than I could have ever expected. I have the most amazing husband, I thought he was my soulmate when I first fell in love with him. Now I KNOW he is, there’s no other explanation for how well we get along. We’re very different yet so much the same.

What I really like about being married is the comfort. The beginning was nice, being on cloud nine, being stuck to one another like glue. But the thing that’s great now is the level of comfort, being so close to someone that you know what they’re going to say before they say it. Being able to speak to each other without saying a word. The giddy happiness of being a newlywed is fun but what comes in to replace it is pure bliss. I can’t even imagine what it’ll be like 10, 20, 50 years down the road. I look forward to our future with excitement. Each year has been better than the last.

If there’s one thing I’m glad for it’s that I didn’t listen to everyone who tried to talk me out of getting married at 18 to someone I’d met on the internet. Yes, I had to put off college and things like that but SO WHAT.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s to always follow your heart. No one knows you better than you do. If you feel strongly about something you want, go for it, don’t let anyone, or anything, stand in your way. If I’d let my family and peers stand in my way THAT would have been the biggest mistake of my life.

It has been an incredible four years.