Today, Billy and I are celebrating 17 years of marriage. Seventeen years of "I do." Seventeen years of sooooo much more than just words and cake and pretty dresses and handsome men. Seventeen years of learning, compromise, change, trust, mortgages, kindergarten registration, baseball tryouts, drivers permits. Seventeen years of soooooo much good-- seventeen years of smiles and laughter and messes and big fat belly laughs because the only other option was tears.
Today, I'm stopping to catch my breath, count my blessings, and tally up those seventeen years of food, football, and four amazing boys we get to call our sons.
I have to put food first because I feel like I've been cooking for two decades straight. Who knew, so many years ago, how much food 5 guys could go through in a week? Certainly not me. I feel certain Kellogg's and General Mills will be calling me any day now to see if my household will become a "test house" for all their new products. If there really is a Big Brother, he not only knows what goes on here, but is probably shaking his head at the cereal bowls, spoons, and sheer amount of milk I go through daily!
It's not all head banging on the kitchen counter every afternoon, though. Some of my favorite memories exist simply because I made an extra batch of Rice Krispy treats one afternoon or because we decided to stay home and grill out instead of heading to a restaurant. i do hope when I get to the big Kroger in the sky that there's a yellow piece of paper and a total of all the money I spent feeding these growing boys ( and maybe a few of my favorite cashiers up there, too). And Cokes, definitely Cokes. But I digress.
There's no way I can even begin to grasp how much impact football has had on us and our family. I think the first "real" tears Tucker ever cried was when his Dad's team lost a nail- biter. He stayed up that night and wrote his dad a note, professing him the greatest, smartest football coach ever-- win or lose. Then he taped it to the wall where Coach would see it first thing when he came home that night. The boys have chosen football games over friends' friday night birthday parties and learned to crawl on the field house floor while Coach graded film from the night before.
Football has moved us from house to house, community to community, school to school, and neighborhood to neighborhood, introducing us to some of the best ( and maybe a few of the worst) people around. Our boys were all welcomed with field house baby showers and babysitting offers from the best moms from offense and defense.
Football has allowed our family the joys of winning big games and celebrating together afterwards; Football has also taught all of six of us how to handle defeat on the field and off; what to brush off and what to let sink in; how to move on after the death of a young coach/friend; and how to put everything into perspective. The past seventeen years has all been wrapped around football, and we are better for it.
Finally, the best part of the last 17 years runs us ragged, football to baseball to wrestling and basketball. They eat me out of house and home, keep my washer and dryer on repeat cycles, and have given me a new appreciation for spring scent bathrooms cleaners and deodorizers. I have come to accept frogs and salamanders touching my skin. I can throw a pretty good spiral most days. And I buy every pair of pants and jeans with the full expectation that they will make it about a month before they come home with a hole in the knee.
Congratulations to my best guy, and happy anniversary to us. I look around at all we have accomplished and I like what I see: 2 quarterbacks, a wide receiver, and a determined little brother. I see more messes, more ridiculous belly laughs, more falling Christmas trees, more Friday night lights, more Saturdays on a diamond under the sun, and more good than bad.
I see you and me looking just as good as we did back then. Maybe even better😉
Most importantly, I see you and me, still together, still putting up with each other, still smiling while we do, still counting our blessings, and marveling at this crazy life we call ours.
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