Today is our fourth wedding anniversary. To celebrate on the interwebz, I wanted to post pictures from a time in our lives when it was just the two of us (plus the dogs of course!): our honeymoon in Europe. More specifically, I chose to post all of our selfies from the trip because now that we have our beautiful one-year-old, it's a little harder to find time to celebrate ourselves. : ) To my dear husband: you work so hard on a daily basis to keep me (and Brooklyn) happy and healthy, and even though this period in our lives is more hectic, you still take the time to kiss me and tell me how much I mean to you. For these things and so much more, I am so grateful to call you my partner. I love you and appreciate ALL you do! Have fun reminiscing over all the selfies I made you take with me. Let's take another trip soon, mmmmkay? ; )
There she is -- all seven pounds, 13 ounces of her. On her first day of life. Let's be completely transparent for a minute: this post will pretty much be ENTIRELY about the life of our sweet daughter, Brooklyn, who was born last May. In my opinion, pregnancy, birth & raising a child is the most rewarding and most difficult/time-consuming thing there is. All mamas probably would agree. So the hubs and I didn't "do" as much as we normally would in any other given year, but we "did" something pretty important. ; ) Life with Brooklyn has been a beautifully chaotic, imperfect journey. Before she was born, I received so much thoughtful advice from all the moms in my life (and I'm so thankful for it and them), but no one can ever really prepare you for motherhood. It is messy at times and leaves you in awe most of the time. There is no instruction manual and you're really just forced to embrace it all at once. And it's a lot easier if you do so with humility and grace (hindsight is a beautiful thing, am I right?). I read a quote this morning by Kristin Armstrong about transitions. Modifying it a little bit, I think it portrays the transition into motherhood pretty perfectly: "Times of transitions are strenuous, but I love them. They are an opportunity … to rethink priorities and be intentional ... We can make our new normal any way we want." I'm so happy and thankful that our darling girl makes our new normal. Now, before I launch into the multitude of photos of our firecracker that I've yet to share, I do want to point out some of our other pre-Brooklyn highlights of 2014...
Mimi and Pappy's house!
We couldn't resist using the top photo in our holiday card this year. Brooklyn looks like she's punching herself and she's making the MOST hysterical face. I had plans of writing "We hope you have a "knockout" of a New Year!" but Shutterfly's design wouldn't let me edit the text and in my 11 p.m. haze of ordering the card, it was all I could do to get photos together to fill the spaces. : ) And plus, taking a decent photo with three furry children and a squirmy, wanna-be-active-all-the-time six-month-old is nearly impossible. I think my dad found a new appreciation for my job that day when he took our family photo. ; )