Happy Anniversary sweets

**You'll have to excuse my picture choices. Our computer is giving us fits and I can't scan the pictures in that I really wanted to use. So, these will have to do!**

Today is Blake and I's 7th wedding anniversary!

What a wonderful day to remember. I cannot believe it's already been 7 years!

We were able to go to dinner with Little Miss on Saturday night and celebrate.

Blake and I are very fortunate to have wonderful examples in our parents of what marriage can look like when you are committed not only to each other, but to God.

I never thought I could love Blake more than the day we got married. But it's amazing to see how just getting married and starting life together brings you that much closer!

Don't get me wrong, there have been ugly moments. I really don't believe any good and strong relationship (marriage or not) can really be CLOSE without some conflict. But those moments have strengthened us and taught us so much and made us into what we are today.

I thank God for my marriage and how incredibly blessed we are to be best friends, even 14 years after we first started dating.

Thank you babe for making my dreams come true and for supporting me in everything I do.

And because I simply can't have a post that doesn't some how touch on adoption I have to share how adoption has changed my marriage in so many ways.

To watch my husband love our birth mothers and truly care for them, is indescribable and incredible. To see that he opened his heart to adoption when we were only 19 and fell in love with my ideas...priceless. This man is incredible.

I have often thought about the impact of a healthy marriage on adoptees. When children start to understand their adoption story and the promise we made to them to become their forever parents, it is only natural to see it as the same commitment we made before God when we married. We made a promise to each other in our hearts first, then we went to God and made a promise to Him to stay married. Then we made it legal and documented it. I changed my name and got my new identification with my new name.

The same is true in adoption.

When you adopt a child and your marriage falls apart, it is only natural for a child to wonder if their parents are going to change their minds about them too. I know I would question that if I were a child.

Not that healthy marriages are not important to every one of us and the foundation for our children, but when that fails in adoption it's that much more traumatic. I often think of when we promised their birth parents that we would become their parents, we also promised them that we'd stay happily married (of course that's not really written in, but they chose us as a couple). It's just another reason for us to focus on our marriage everyday and keep that relationship a priority above the rest!