10 Sweet Years!

We celebrated our 10th anniversary last week, August 26th, together and still very much in love. God has blessed us with such a beautiful relationship. Our ten years have been sweet. They have been a very busy ten years, and I am pretty sure that we will never pack as much into another decade as we have the one we just passed. In the past ten years we have bought and sold our first house, had four children, completed a university degree, moved to the farm, grieved over the loss of a nephew, rejoiced with the birth of many nieces and nephews, and of course now grieve again with the loss of a parent. As we have walked through issues in our life, our family, and our marriage I know that God has been there, in every circumstance he has given us enough grace to make it through. Our marriage has been filled with joy, we truly are blessed, and I credit God's grace, and some AMAZING pre-marital counsellors for the fact that I can say marriage has been easy. I know everyone says marriage is hard, and I have seen that, but for us, even the moments that could have been incredibly difficult we have made it through with relative ease (again, full credit to some amazing pre-marital counselors). I am so thankful that our families supported us in getting married even though we were way too young, and many outsiders thought it was crazy. Although the older I get the more I realize just how hard it must have been to let your children get married as young as we were, haha, so I can't guarantee that I will jump up and down if Cheyanne comes to me at nineteen and says she wants to get married, but we will talk about it, lol.

I had looked forward to our tenth anniversary and was excited to share it with our families but somehow, with all that was going on, it just seemed sad and I almost wanted to skip over it. I felt like there couldn't be a celebration without Don there to celebrate with us. Michael and I talked about it and decided that our plans to head somewhere hot this winter in celebration were likely going to have to be put on hold this year and so he worked it out with our milker to take our anniversary weekend off, and we headed to Kelowna for a couple of nights away. It was good to get away, to have no kids to worry about, and to be off the farm where memories don't flood you quite so often. As we were starting out it was hard, we both felt the heaviness, and yet we were trying hard to focus on our joy, to not cause the other one to dwell on the emotions we were feeling. Throughout the weekend little things happened that made it so we couldn't help but tear up as we realized how Don would have laughed at this, or we could have told him about that. Grieving really is an overwhelming process that becomes a part of every aspect of your life, I am thankful we have a loving FATHER who walks us through it. Inspite of these moments it turned out to be a truly blessed weekend. We were able to enjoy our time, have a little fun, and cry together. Just being able to be together for a full 53 hours, with no kids, was such a blessing. On Friday we got Michael his new phone, which was a joking point of friction all weekend as we competed for whose turn it was to play with it. A lot of the pictures I am posting on this blog were actually taken with his phone!  We spent the evening cruising Okanagan lake at sunset, and ended the night with a huge Moo-Lics ice cream cone on the waterfront. Saturday we toured wineries and enjoyed not having any type of schedule, then we ate dinner downtown Kelowna, listened to live music in the park, had a cartoon made of ourselves, and walked along the lake enjoying the warm evening. Sunday we hit the mall, it was fun, and I am pretty sure Michael purchased more things than I did, haha. We came home somewhat refreshed, and enjoyed a family dinner at my parent's house.



 I decided that it would be fun to where white again in honour of our 10th anniversary, and of course it matched my favourite pair of heels!



we took a lot of pics of ourselves over the weekend!



Summer Hill Winery



These bottles have art work from Robert Bateman on them, we purchased the ones on the right. They were some of the first wines we tried, from Summer Hill winery. They were also one of the causes of  sadness for us as we both recognized right away that Don would really appreciate the labels being he was such a Bateman fan.

Cedar Creek Winery

This is Quail's Gate Winery

 

This is the package that the Duke and Duchess (Prince William and Kate) drank when they were in the NWT, we bought the Chardonnay as a thank you for my mom for watching the kids (she's a bit of a royal nut, lol)

Mission Hill, they had a great tour and we learned a lot!

Mission Hill uses the Pelican everywhere, this is their Vault

These were our winery purchases!

Getting ready to go out for dinner Saturday night

the heels Michael made me walk something like 10 blocks in,

I was not impressed, haha

getting a cartoon drawn of us :)

when Michael sat down, the artist chuckled and said

"this is going to be fun" hahaha!

Here we are, dancing on the board walk :)

thankfully for the walk home I pulled out the flats from my purse and

we strolled along the shoreline, a far more enjoyable walk then the way there!

While we were away the kids had lots of fun too and we often got pictures and texts telling us what they were up to. It was fun and definitely made it easier to be away from them. My favourite line while we were away happened when the girls were playing at Renee's house and Cheyanne yells out "run Judas is coming to take over the world" haha, I would love to know exactly what was going on in that imaginary game :)

while we were away Emme got a new hair-do, thanks Auntie Brit!

Bella enjoyed time by herself at Grandma O's while Mason was napping,

and the other girls stayed with Auntie Renee and Uncle Daniel.