Ten Years, Ten Photos

Today Terry and I are celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary*: which… WOW. As always, the rapid passage of time is absolutely terrifying me right now.

(Seriously, HOW IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME? Is it happening to you, too? Is everyone’s lives flashing by them at lightning speed right now, or is it just me? Because, at this rate, I’m honestly worried that I’m going to wake up tomorrow and be 102, because that’s how fast time is passing…)

Anyway. Ten years ago today I was waking up in my parents house, on a day I’d counted down to for an entire year, and which I never thought would actually arrive. (And now it’s TEN YEARS AGO. Do you see why I’m terrified by this? Because I AM TERRIFIED by this.) It was a beautiful, sunny day, which we hadn’t really expected, or even dared to hope for, really, but I know we’d have enjoyed the day regardless, whatever the weather: I think it was the only time in my life that almost every single person we love was in the same room at the same time, and it doesn’t really get better than that, does it?

To mark the occasion, I feel like I should probably be writing some kind of deep and meaningful post, about how Terry has basically saved my sanity multiple times over the past few months, and how I genuinely don’t know how I would survive without him. I also, however, feel like I’ve kind of used up my quota of “deep and meaningful” lately, so rather than bubbling all over my keyboard yet again this month, I’m just going to keep things light, and share some photos with you instead: one for every year, in fact.

This is probably going to be a lot less interesting than you might think, unfortunately (And you didn’t think that was even possible, did you?!), because Terry and I are really, really bad at remembering to take photos of ourselves together, which means that almost all of the ones we have are of the “arm out selfie” variety. I’ve done my best to hunt out the few that AREN’T extreme close-ups of our two faces, but it was slim pickings (Honestly, if all you had to go on were our photos from the first few years of our marriage, you’d be easily convinced that we didn’t even KNOW each other, that’s how few pictures we bothered to take together…), so these will just have to do, I’m afraid. So, here you go: the past ten years in photos…

2007

Confession: I actually kind of hate our wedding photos. We got married the year after Terry’s transplant: we were dirt poor at the time, and although my parents very generously stepped in to help with the costs of the wedding itself, I decided to try to save money by doing my hair and makeup myself, and… yeah. Honestly, I’ve no idea why I thought this would work out, because I’ve NEVER been good at doing hair and makeup, but instead of paying for a hairdresser and makeup artists, I spent a small fortune at the Benefit counter, and was all, “WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?” Well, folks, I’ll tell you what could go wrong: my eyes could break out in HIVES the week before the wedding. And, indeed, DID break out in hives the week before the wedding. They’d started to heal up by the day itself, but the skin around them was still like dragonhide, and my amateur makeup skills were just not equal to the task of hiding them: a problem compounded by the fact that – for reasons I still don’t understand to this day – I ended up having to get ready in a huge rush), which is why you will not find any framed photos of our wedding day in our house. Ever.

(Also, I’m not one of those people who looks back on photos of their younger self and thinks, “I wish I still looked like that.” In fact, I can barely look at photos taken earlier than 2011, say – which is when I got my teeth straightened, and moles removed from my face – without cringing. Because of this, I have seriously considered persuading Terry that we should renew our vows, just so I could have some decent photos. I wish I was joking about this.)

2008

As you’re about to find out, most of the photos I do have of us together were taken on holiday: this one was taken on board the Breathless motorboat at Disney’s Boardwalk in Florida. My parents had booked us a nighttime cruise on it, to see the Epcot fireworks from the water – it was amazing, and not even the state of my eyebrows (Also a theme, as you will see) will ruin that memory for me, no matter how hard they try.

2009

Another trip to Florida: this time we’re having dinner on the top deck of a glass-topped train, which took us on a little trip through Florida. This was another really fun experience, which I would love to do again sometime, if it’s still open!

2010

Yeah, I really wasn’t joking about almost all of the photos being taken on holiday, huh? Here we are, clowning around in front of our rental home in Florida (Yes, AGAIN…): I have absolutely no idea what’s supposed to be happening in this photo, but it looks fun, whatever it is!

2011

This was our first trip to California, in 2011, which was also the year I stopped hating every single photo of myself ever taken…

2012

I absolutely love this photo. It was taken by our friend, Barry, at the wedding of our other friends, Steven and Lindsay, who got married at a gorgeous venue, near the top of a hill. This photo was taken just after dinner, as the sun was starting to go down, and I can still remember how beautiful the quality of the light was!

2013

Miami, 2013. By this stage, we’d realised that we had approximately 92,675 photos of me wearing various different dresses, compared to roughly 5 of the two of us together, so we were making an effort to redress the balance a little. We were really stressed going into this trip, because the sale of our house had fallen through right before we left, and the house we wanted to buy had been taken off the market (which was a real bummer, given that I’d been mentally choosing furniture and decor for it for months…). There had also been a lot of other stress going on in the background, and, on our first day in Miami, I remember Terry fell asleep in a shady corner by the pool, and slept for about five hours straight… After that, we had an amazing trip, made even better by a phonecall on our last day, letting us know that the house we wanted was back on the market, and that we still had a chance of buying it. I’m writing this post from it now, so you all know how that worked out!

2014

(Er, this is NOT the house we bought, needless to say. Which is probably a good thing, really, because can you imagine trying to clean it?!)

A flying trip to London in 2014… Because we’d just bought a new house, there was no foreign travel for us that year, but we did head down to Kent for a few days, for Terry’s brother’s 50th birthday party, and we stopped off in London en route. Hopefully we’ll make it back soon!

2015

Welcome to a slightly blurry Las Vegas! If you read my post about this trip at the time, you might recall that Terry and I actually got engaged during a trip to Vegas. This was directly before Terry was diagnosed with kidney failure, though (He was admitted to hospital just a few days after we got home), and he was really, really ill the whole time we were there, so, as much as we enjoyed the trip, we’d always wanted to go back, and appreciate it without the crippling fear (me) and constant sickness (Terry). We got our wish in 2015, when we spent a couple of days there during our trip to California that year, and we absolutely loved it – it turns out places really ARE much better when you have at least one working kidney: who knew?!

2016

I think I’ll always think of 2016 as my Bad Year, but there were a few good bits, too, so here I am, awkwardly patting Terry’s stomach (The hell?!) during a day out in September. As I said, not a whole lot of happy memories from this particular year, but we got through it together, and I think that if we can get through the various trials we’ve had thrown at us over the years, from kidney failure to miscarriages and loss, then we can probably get through anything, can’t we? So, right now, my biggest wish is that I get to write another post like this, in another ten years. I can’t even imagine what my life might look like by then, or what kind of photos might feature in that post (if blogs still exist by then, that is!), but I can’t wait to find out, and I know that, whatever the future brings, at least we’ll have each other.

So happy anniversary, Terry: here’s to the next decade!

(*We actually celebrated yesterday: look, we’re an old married couple now, Friday nights are strictly for vegging in front of the TV! Also, if you go out to dinner early enough, and during the week, you can get the early bird special, which is super-romantic, no? No?)

(I’m joking, there was no early bird special, just a nice meal out, and some champagne…)