9 & 10

With our recent 12 year anniversary, I realized that I never did blog posts for our past two year's wedding anniversaries. Since we've been in school here at BYU-Idaho, our anniversary is in the middle of the Fall semester, and so it's made us a little more creative in finding ways to celebrate. :)

10 years! The day we got engaged on the left (Aug 2005) and anniversary pictures (Aug 2015)

In 2014 Jon and I celebrated 9 years of marriage! We had been living in Idaho for about 3 months, and going on some sort of mini-trip together (as is our usual tradition) was just out of the question. We had been hoping to go to Twin Falls and stay in a bed and breakfast and explore this new countryside that is Idaho, but unfortunately with classes, and Edwin only being 7 months old, it was just a hard-learned lesson that our money and time was tighter than ever. Instead we stayed in town and went out to dinner at The Hickory! We had heard great things about the BBQ there, and we were definitely not disappointed.

As the traditional gift for 9 years is wicker, I got a picnic basket (of sorts) for Jon, filled with brownies and Martinelli's for an indoor anniversary dessert picnic. HAHA!

Seriously, you don't want to picnic at the park when it's covered in snow and -11 degrees outside.

Year 9 wrapped up nicely, and then we were off on new adventures in 2015. It was a year of major growth for us all individually and as a family! Then November came around again.

For years and years we had planned on going to Hawaii for our 10 year celebration. Neither Jon nor I has ever been, and we really looked forward to it! But... we had made some major goals to have all debt paid off by April of 2016, so instead of going on a trip, we saved our money and had a nice dinner at the Copper Rill in Idaho Falls. :)

The traditional gift for 10 years is tin/aluminum, so I found this Celtic aluminum infinity knot Christmas ornament on Etsy and gave it to Jon so that we can see it on our tree each year and remember our first decade of eternal marriage!

The best part of celebrating our anniversaries is of course never the trip or fancy presents, but getting to talk about our year, what our favorite parts were, what the worst parts were, and what we want to do better in the coming year, or 10 years!

Our hard work definitely paid off, because we were able to pay off 100% of our debt by the beginning of March this year :) I am so proud of us and the work that we've done in the past 10 years to build our family and get to this point. We also appreciate all our friends and family members who have supported us and helped us reach this goal. Now we are saving for a Year of America road trip this Summer, and who knows what anniversary 11 will bring??