17 Years Ago Today!!

At this time 17 years ago today I was waking up in the apartment that my fiance and I would soon share together as our first home. My maid of honour was there with me. We got up and showered and headed off to the hairdresser for a wedding "doo" and makeup. The esthetician thought it would be a great idea to wax my eyebrows. I'd never had my eyebrows waxed and thought "sure why not?" Not a good idea! The skin above my eyelids was red almost the whole way down to my eyelashes... and not just a little bit red...they were RED! oops...great...the Godzilla bride with the red eyes..here we come!! We figured it would settle down by the time of the wedding...hmmm..... not to be. Oh well my moh came to the rescue... she plastered my eyes with eyeshadow to cover it. It ended up turning out okay. The other girls came over to the apartment and got ready with us.
The wedding was supposed to start at 2......at about 2:15 the phone rang and someone (I think it was my Dad) was calling to see where we were. Dad had forgotten or somehow didn't know that he was supposed to come pick me up. Anyway someone did come and pick us up and we got there just fine... albeit a half hour late! People told me afterward that they were starting to wonder if I had changed my mind and wasn't coming at all!! :) The wedding took place as planned and the rest is history.
We bought our first house 15 months (Oct/91) after getting married. It was a cute little 2 bedroom house with a huge flat yard. A great yard for little ones to play in!
We wanted to have children fairly soon after getting married. Sooo... Our first daughter, Lindsay, was born May 14, 1992, two months short of our second anniversary. When she 15 1/2 months old our second daughter Courtenay was born on August 29, 1993. That second bedroom was filling up! We were having a great time with our little girls and soon after Courtenay was born....well one year, we were expecting our third. Amanda was born on April 3, 1995. We now had 3 children, 3 and under, in our tiny little 2 bedroom home. It was beginning to get quite crowded, especially once we put Amanda into her own bed! The bedroom didn't have space for the 3 beds so we had a mattress under one bed that we pulled out at night for Amanda. We stayed in this little house until a month after Amanda's second birthday.
On June 20,1997 we moved from our little 850 square foot house to a 2400 square foot house!! Wow - we were lost in the expanse of it!! What a wonderful change this was. The 3 girls were so used to sleeping together in the same room that we kept them crammed in one bedroom for the first little bit until they got used to the new house. After a short while we moved them to separate rooms.
The following spring, on May 2,1998 our fourth and final baby was born. We called her Janelle. She was a tiny little peanut... weighing 6lbs 9 oz. Our kids ages at this point were Lindsay-6, 12 days after Janelle's birth, Courtenay 41/2, Amanda 3 and newborn Janelle. It was a busy but happy time for our family. It was like I'd brought home a living dolly for the girls to play with! They loved her!
I was also homeschooling the girls at this point. I had taught the first two kindergarten together the year that I was expecting Janelle. So we started them in grade one together while having a toddler and a 4 month old!! Wow!! I was busy! And very tired all the time. I didn't realize until some time later that I was very iron depleted! So my days were long.. but mostly happy ones! You have to know by this point that I love babies/children otherwise I wouldn't have had the four or homeschooled them. We lived in that house for 9 years. We moved to our present home last summer on July 3rd and again... a little bit bigger than the last house - to accommodate our growing family. We are no longer growing in number but instead- in stature!

We aren't planning any grand celebration today. We are having some friends over. Our wooden pool deck is in need of some work. We think that the people we bought the house from last summer just threw a coat of paint on everything so that it would look pretty and fresh for a quick sale. Now after a year of weathering the paint is peeling off the pool deck and it's a real mess! So Steve is bringing a pressure washer over to blow the rest of the paint off the deck so we can refinish it. After that we'll get the BBQ going with some chicken and burgers. I also plan to make some potato salad and some macaroni salad and probably a caesar or greek salad as well. Then for desert we'll have some of our fresh strawberries and ice cream.

Hope you're all having a great weekend.
:) ☺ ☻