Status Update

Last Thursday Mike and I celebrated our 4th wedding anniversary.  We celebrated with breakfast at Drake Diner which is our favorite breakfast place (and if you haven't been, I highly recommend a trip anytime of day, their menu is fantastic) and then we had a great dinner at Centro which has sort of become an unintentional tradition for us. When it came time to decide what we wanted for dessert we actually decided to hop over to Django for more cocktails instead. In the end, we were very happy with our decision :). In general, we're not huge gift givers/receivers when it comes to each other which is definitely the case on our anniversary. Instead we plan a day/evening of activities to do together on our special day. I prefer some quality time together over a gift any day and luckily, Mike does too.

Looking back on our big day, we still find ourselves giddy with excitement over how great it was. In fact, if it were socially and financially acceptable, we'd throw a big shindig with our family and closest friends every year. We're both certain it'd be just as amazing now as it was 4 years ago because our family and friends are pretty much the coolest people ever.

4 years married and 10 years all together = a status update in my book. "Toto, I do believe we're not in Newlywed territory anymore." We talked about this during our dinner and Mike laughed because he sees it as insignificant, which it is really, but I pointed out it's just one more phase we've passed during our time together.

Here's a breakdown of our last 10 years:
- 2 undergraduate degrees, 1 master's degree, and 1 master's degree in progress
- 7 job changes within the wonderful world of teaching
- 10 moves
- 1 house purchase
- 3 cars
- 1 new roof
- 4 National Park visits
- 4 plane ride vacations
- Approximately 7 road trips of varying lengths (not including our trips to MN and IL to see family)
- 1 vacation in an RV
- At least 30 weddings between our family and friends, 7 of which included 1 or both of us
- Approximately 127 pints of beer from Court Ave. Brewing Co.
- 1 dog

The craziest part is, aside from our vacations and most of the weddings, all of this was accomplished in Iowa. Never, ever, in a million years did I ever see myself or both of us living in Iowa for this long and yet, here we are. It's certainly been an adventure and I have loved every minute of it. Scratch that, probably not every minute of it *read: new roof* but 99% of our minutes together have been fantastic. I can't wait to see what the coming years bring.

Most importantly, over the past 10 years, we've learned we'd climb to the top of the highest mountain and back for each other however braving the climb together is always much more spectacular.