10 Years and the hilarity continues...

This past weekend the Mr. and I celebrated our 10 year wedding anniversary. I know, we got married when we were like 12, because I could not possibly be that old..

yeah, look at us, wow we were young!

This weekend had us reminiscing about the good ole days and how we met, which then had us laughing at our younger selves, so I thought I would share a few stories with all of you. If you usually hang out here for decor and DIY posts feel free to ignore this one and pop back later this week…

(this photo was taken right before we started building our house)

First off we met on a blind date, the Mr. and my cousin worked together and she thought we would make a cute couple (don’t worry she was my maid of honor and took full credit for her mad match making skills in her speech). I totally trusted my cousin, but I had to get a look for myself so I met her for lunch at her office one day and we stopped by the Mr.’s cubicle.

Struck completely dumb and stupid by his incredible good looks, charm and over all perfection – wait what?

This is the last time I let the Mr. proofread one of my posts, he totally added that bit…

but I will say I thought he was “totally cute” (just imagine my 17 year old self saying that) and immediately started babbling on and on. He asked me if I wanted to see a movie the next night – I tried to play it cool and accepted his invitation. Then all my cool went out the window when I began to describe to him how to get to my house… (this was before the days of GPS and Siri), I was all in babble mode and told him –

“it’s really easy to find, it’s the house next to the house with the green grass!”

and he was all “um ok, green grass, got it…”

OK I realized later that um yeah, this was like saying “hey I live in the house with the blue sky!”, but since our neighbors had just built their new house and had it hydro seeded with that neon green stuff, this statement totally made sense in my head (like most things).

Clearly the Mr. was already falling in love with my quick wit and intelligence…

We went to the movie and then proceeded to talk back at my house for 3 hours. It was getting late, so I walked him to the door (I’m such a gentleman), where he totally hung on to the door knob for dear life and then firmly shook my hand. Wow, that’s some game Mr. :)

I was all moony and giggly despite the friendly hand shake…and then I didn’t hear from him for 2 weeks! What?

I had mentioned to him that I was getting my wisdom teeth pulled that Monday and probably wouldn’t be able to hang out for a while, so he, being the dumb 18 year old he was, thought – ok great see you in 2 weeks. In the meantime flowers were delivered to our house for me, and I again was all giggly and moony thinking “he does like me!” when in fact they were from another guy…

again – some game Mr., way to impress :)

Needless to say we finally made it out on a 2nd date and were pretty much inseparable after that.

Cut to 3 years later when he asked me to marry him with a ring pop. (again be impressed with his game! Although truth be told I would have said yes even if he presented me with a lint covered life saver from his pocket) It was a cherry one (the best kind), and he put it in a real ring box. You wouldn’t believe the look on on our waitresses face (in a very hoity toity nice restaurant) when she saw the ring box and was all “oh my gosh let me see” and then I showed off my rare beauty :) love that guy…

Don’t worry I eventually got a real ring (which the Mr. just replaced with a gorgeous one for our anniversary, finally upping his game!) and we got married in the middle of a blizzard. Which kind of made it the best wedding ever since we were all snowed in with no where to go, we had the best party.

We went to Mexico for a week (thanks to my generous parents) and immediately moved to a tiny 400 sq foot apartment in Chicago for the Mr.’s unpaid internship. It had this tiny spiral staircase in it and we almost killed each other trying to get our box spring down it. It also had a space heater in the bathroom which should have tipped us off right there. You had to do this awful mad dash out of bed to get the space heater going so you didn’t die of hypothermia when the hot water ran out after approximately 4 1/2 minutes of a shower. It was pretty much the taj mahal, but we made so many fun memories there.

I thankfully got a job right away and was able to pay the rent…and not much else. I was an ~~awful~~ excellent cook back then, (which worked out well since we couldn’t really afford groceries anyways) and we survived on pancakes, bags of frozen hamburgers and spaghetti. (I know this is making you want to check out my recipe page, I’ve come a long way I promise!)

After a year we had had enough of our tiny heatless apartment and ramen noodles. So,we headed to Des Moines, IA where the Mr. had gotten a job offer (with a paycheck this time!). This is where all my adventures in home improvement began and where the Mr. started to realize he was in trouble with my crazy DIY-ways…

We bought a tiny 1942 fixer upper, and I proceeded to refinish all the hardwood floors (while the Mr. sat on the sander studying for his GMAT) peel wallpaper, tile the floors, tile the shower (I would love to know if that is still standing) and paint every surface in sight. I still excelled at cooking pancakes at this point, but soon graduated to more gourmet endeavors (like tacos ha) just as the Mr. was finishing grad school.

Flash forward 7 years – 2 kids, and 5 moves later, we have come a long way and I wouldn’t trade a minute of it for the world. God has blessed me so much with this man and I can’t wait to laugh our way through the next 5o years!