Our 19th anniversary is in a few days: May 28th, to be exact.

We aren’t big on dates and we have several anniversaries that we celebrate. Once, over dinner, someone asked us when our  inad was and how many years we’d been married: we actually had to get up and go look at the plate on our wall inscribed with the date. Numbers just don’t matter that much to us, I guess.

We got married on Memorial Day weekend, in Terre Haute, Indiana.

About one percent of our readership just got the joke: Memorial Day weekend… in Indiana??? What were we thinking? It’s the same weekend as the Indy 500. Hotel rooms around the state are booked out a year in advance. Prices on everything double. But I was not an Indiana girl, none of this occurred to me until about three weeks before the wedding when my, soon to be, father -in-law connected the dots and shouted, “WHAT?? You’re getting married race weekend?? YOU CAN’T GET MARRIED RACE WEEKEND!”

I committed the ultimate Indiana faux-pas and answered, “Race?? WHAT RACE?!” Yeah. My in-laws seriously considered calling off the wedding. 🙂

Nonetheless, we were married on a perfect late spring day, surrounded by friends and family, all of whom smiled and threw rice and were kind enough not to point out the all kinds of insanity it is to get married that young.

We’d planned to go camping in the Pocanoes for our honeymoon. Instead, I had back surgery three days after we tied the knot. Not exactly everyone’s dream honeymoon, but we figured if we started with the “sick and poor” part of our vows it had to get better from there, right?

I was 19 years old.

That means that this year marks half my life that I’ve been married… to the same man… somewhat of a feat in my generation. Thankfully we come from long lines of lasting original marriages on both sides, a legacy we are profoundly grateful for.

Notes from 19 years:

• I was pregnant or nursing for a decade. A DECADE! Holy cow.
• We moved house 6 times before we ultimately gave up and became nomads.
• We’ve used bicycles, motorcycles, cars, mini-vans, conversion vans, RVs and a truck as primary modes of transport from time to time.
• We’ve lived in 3 states.
• We’ve traveled to 27 countries.
• We’ve potty-trained five people. 🙂
• We’ve owned two houses.
• We’ve lived (for more than a few weeks) in tents, RV’s, apartments, houses, and hotels, respectively.
• We’ve wandered across five of the six habitable continents.
• We’ve homeschooled forever (or so it seems!)
• We’ve done richer and poorer.
• We’ve done sickness and health.
• We’ve done good times and bad.
• We’ve nearly killed each other more than once, but so far, death has not seen fit to part us.
• We’ve celebrated anniversaries in the USA, Canada, the UK & Thailand.

It doesn’t feel like it’s been 19 years. I don’t feel old enough to have been married that long. How we ended up with four mostly grown kids is a real head shaker of a mystery.

This year, we’re celebrating quietly near Nelson, New Zealand. Perhaps we’ll make a tramp through part of the Abel Tasman National Park. Perhaps we’ll take our kids out for dinner, perhaps we’ll just snuggle into our camper and laugh about the funny twists life takes that bring a family planted in the American mid-west to the far side of the world over two decades.

Happy Family Birthday to us!