Anniversary Weekend

This weekend Mike and I celebrated our 11th year of marriage!  Friday night we sent all three kids to my parents' house to spend the night so we would go out for a nice date.  Dinner is always on the agenda, so we went to Mama Roja's on Lake Hefner for dinner.  The food was very good, and it had a fun atmosphere, but we decided it wasn't quite anniversary worthy.  Oh well...it was so nice to just spend some quality time together.  Later that night we met up with our friends Jamie and Taylor (who happen to share our June 4th anniversary) to play some pool on their new pool table.  We had such a great time with them!  All in all it was a wonderful, laid back night spent with my best friend.

The picture to the left is a copy of our wedding program that Mike designed and drew.  I loved that he was my knight in shining armor.  Mike and I met back in August of 1996 in Shawnee, Oklahoma.  I was a sophomore and he was a junior transfer student at our small, liberal arts college.  One of my best friends, Heather, was an art major, so she had several classes with this "mysterious, talented new student from New York."  I thought mysterious was a good word for Mike.  He was also cute and he absolutely intrigued me.  I was determined to meet him.

We ended up meeting briefly on busy Friday night at Deem's Bean Scene, a coffee shop very close to our college campus.  A few weekends later, I decided to have a party at my aunt's house in Oklahoma City.  She had a great pool in her backyard, so it seemed like a perfect Labor Day Weekend place to hang out.  My roommates and I started inviting everyone we knew and Mike ended up catching word of it.  I was very surprised when he showed up along with a few other guys he knew from the dorms.  It was there, at that party, that we finally got a good chance to really talk and start to get to know each other.  After that weekend, we started finding other chances to talk-- a bench on campus, in the cafeteria, at a table in the GC, etc.  Finally, he asked me out and our first official date was September 22, 1996. 

We had no idea during that first date, that 14 years later, we would be where we are with the awesome kids that we have.  I can honestly say that he is my best friend.  We can laugh until we have tears coming out of our eyes. We can both feel free to share something that is on our heart and know that we will always have a listening ear. We give each other the space we need to pursue our own interests.  And there is always this sense of being so comfortable together-- that our conversations are just easy.  After all these years, I still really like the guy! :)

Thanks for a great anniversary weekend, Mike.  I love you!