As I pondered the topic of my FIRST blog post, I realized it had to celebrate the love of my life. We will celebrate 20 years of marriage in 10 days. He is the catalyst for me being able to make this dream of mine come true….actually, he’s helped me make many of my dreams come true over the last 20 years.

Our love story began when I was a 14 year old freshman and he was a hot Senior football player. He caught my eye as he bounded down the steps to our high school cafeteria. I began to …what we now refer to as “stalk” him. He soon took notice and we actually began to “date” before I was allowed to date. So our weekend nights consisted of pizza and movies in my parents’ living room. Our early years were filled with experiences that most teens don’t face together: boot camp love letters, a year tour in Japan for Kevin, followed by a 6 month deployment to Europe to support the Bosnian conflict. I should remind you that these were the days before internet….so we wrote actual letters and sent cassette tapes with our fave love songs and LIVED for those weekly phone calls from the barracks pay phones. Those were tough years-but they made us stronger and we allowed each other to grow and change into the young adults we were meant to be. We were each other’s loudest cheerleaders.

Yes, we married young and spent our early years in married bliss pinching pennies and living on love. We ignored the statistics and followed our hearts. We prayed a lot, followed God’s calling on our life and leaned on Him when life got tough. We’ve been through so much: raising 3 beautiful daughters (two of which came as a package deal–TWINS),  deployments to Afghanistan, moving to and from foreign lands, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, buying & selling homes, health scares,  baptisms, confirmations, deaths of loved ones, 2 cross country drives, living in the desert southwest-Japan-Hawaii-the southeastern coast -12 moves in all!!! I could go on but I must say through it all, Kevin has been my rock in this crazy life we’ve built. He supports my wild ideas and instead of coming up with reasons it won’t work, he comes up with ways to make it work.

We began our next chapter with new orders in January and life as we knew it in our sweet seaside town changed drastically. Kevin listened to my crazy idea of quitting my awesome teaching position as a kindergarten teacher so that I could pursue rebuilding my photography business into a full time venture again. I have missed my photography world and am so thrilled to have his support as I break into it again!! Thank you love for everything!!