Three Years

Today marks three years that Miles and I have been married. I weaseled my anniversary present out of him a day early and *YAY!* I got an Amazon Kindle. It's kind of like an ipod for books. I am so excited and my first book was the Kite Runner. I just read One Thousand Splendid Suns by the same author and bawled like a baby throughout. It was just amazing.

Anyways, present aside, I am pretty happy. Our road has not been easy by anyone's definition. In April of 2005, we were introduced by a mutual friend. Miles had been pestering him for months to set up a meeting and Wells (said mutual friend) was hesitant because he knew that I had a few hostile feelings towards men at that moment. A nightmare of a previous relationship will do that to you. Wells and Miles were only really friendly through work. They had to correspond through emails and had never actually met face to face. One day Wells was at the chow hall and ran into the nametag "Blanco". They sat down and ate together. Shortly afterwards, Well was sufficiently charmed into introducing us. This was a process I knew nothing about until much later. Apparently Miles had been bragging for quite a while that we were going to get married. . . even though I had no idea that he existed. Stalker :)

So anyways, I was working a 10am to 10 pm shift (I should mention that we were in Iraq) and Miles was working a 12am to 12pm. So after my shift I met wells outside where he was working and there was Miles. We went for a walk, and about 5 steps into it, I tripped on a wire and practically fell on my face. Miles always insists on telling this part because he said that that was when he knew for sure that I was the one. SO we walked and eventually sat down and talked until his shift. Our conversation was frequently halted by the firefight taking place less than a mile from where we sat. Through our whole first meeting, I never really saw his face because it was so dark out. When we started walking back, we passed under a light and I was thankful that I hadn't seen how hot he was before because I would have spent the whole conversation stuttering had I known. I would have fallen a lot more, too.

In the next few weeks, we saw eachother here and there. We were getting ready to leave and neither of us had any more time for 2 hour walks. I didn't even know if I would see him again when we got to Ft Drum. We had no cell phones yet and he was going home a week before me.

When I arrived home to the Welcome Home Ceremony, Miles was there looking rather adorable. My dad was also there. He later told me how nice he thought Miles was and asked if we were an item. I think I said something like "he's too pretty, and I think he knows it". This is something my dad still teases me for.

So now I am writing a book so I will wrap it up. It took us another 4 or 5 months to start dating. We both had baggage from previous relationships that we had to cut out of our lives. We were friends through it all and we traveled everywhere. When my brother had a stroke, it was Miles who drove me to see him. He was my best friend and has never stopped being this to me. We were stationed apart when we were married. We didn't actually live together until April of 08 when he arived home from a 15 month deployment to Iraq. He missed most of my pregnancy and most of Lea's first 6 months on this deployment. It was hard. We worked though it. This anniversary finds us in a good place both physically and in our relationship. I thank God for Miles every day.

!PS! We are officially TTC