Remember when you were younger and you would get a letter in the mail, addressed to YOU??  Not something to your parents about you, not a thick envelope with a wedding invitation where your entire family was being invited, but a letter directly to you!  Unless you had a pen pal somewhere, it was your birthday, or it was within a month of getting home from camp, the chances of our younger selves receiving mail was fairly slim.

So to get an envelope with your name on it was so exciting!  Until you opened it and realized it was a chain letter.  Do you remember those?  It would come typed up (or photo copied at someone’s dad’s office) with your name written at the top and it would encourage you to send a copy of this letter and some momento (like a book or a recipe card or something) to seven other people within seven days of receiving it or else something really horrible would happen!  So, we all did the logical thing and took those exact steps to prevent anything horrible happening.

Eventually, those chain letters turned into emails and a couple of years ago, those emails turned into “being tagged” on Facebook :-)  The latest one is the Love Your Spouse Challenge.  And really, I totally get it!  With a crazy election year, the Olympics starting today (yay!) and how Rio isn’t quite ready while the threat of the Zika virus looms, and it seems as though the world may be falling apart in every sense of the word, there is finally something positive on Facebook again!!  And being a couple that believes in the importance of marriage and how worth it it is to pour into, we are in full support of this challenge!

However, between everything we have going on (read: chasing a toddler (who is gaining speed every day, mind you!), running a business from home, trying to keep the house a tad bit clean, spending time with friends and family and still finding time to eat well and work out several days a week) and making time to spend with each other, participating in the challenge on Facebook just wasn’t a priority.

But I do love my husband.  Dearly.  And since words mean so much to him, I wanted to participate by posting several photos of us and reasons I love him all in one spot, in one day.

I will NEVER forget this moment of seeing you for the first time on our wedding day.  I was so nervous and so cold that I was shaking all over!  But seeing your face when I tapped you on the shoulder and being pulled into your warm embrace made every nerve and chill slip away.  I knew that day was the beginning of an adventure that I was going to treasure for our entire lives.

Getting to travel the world with you has been amazing!  And having such an amazing couple (who turned into wonderful friends) take our photos in Paris on our honeymoon may have been one of the best gifts we could have brought home with us.  Thank you for adventuring with me!

God is my rock.  And you are my physical rock here on earth.  Thank you for the ways you love me and hold me and pursue me.

Announcing our pregnancy two years ago was so much fun!
Thank you for going along with my sometimes crazy ideas and for being so willing to get in front of the camera with me :-)

You have the ability to make me laugh like no one else!  I still remember you telling me when we were dating that the more comfortable you became with me, the more I’d see your goofy side.  And while I loved you back then, I love you even more now because you don’t ever hide your goofy side from me anymore!

Watching you become a daddy to our baby girl was one of the highlights of my life.  She adores you and I love watching you love her!!

These last 5 years of being engaged and then married to you have been the best adventure… I hoped and prayed for you for a long time, but God gave me far more than I even knew to ask for when He brought us together.  He knew the ups and downs we would walk through.  He knew that YOU were the one I needed to hold me up when we hit our low points.  He knew that YOU were the one I needed to laugh and rejoice with as we celebrated our mountain tops.  And He knew that YOU were the one our daughter, and any future children we may have, would need to guide them and teach them and laugh with/at them as they grew up.  I love you for the man God created you to be and the man He continues to mold and shape you into.  Thank you for loving me and Catherine so well!  We both are so thankful to have you!