The set up...

June 17th is our tenth wedding anniversary!  It's been fun reminiscing over the past month or so, pulling out old boxes and photo albums and showing the kids our history.  We dated for four years before we were married, so we have quite a bit of history together.  Almost half of my life, actually.  Here are highlights of our story in pictures prior to wedded bliss.  Enjoy!  Stay tuned for another post highlighting our ten amazing years together.

Here are three of the oldest pictures that exist of us.  The first is in the band room.  We met in marching band in the fall (my sophomore year and Buzz' junior year) and by spring we were an item.  Sweet, sweet band geek love!

(Buzz' shirt reads "Satan Sucks."  It mysteriously disappeared years ago...)

This picture is us in front of the infamous family (Buzz', not mine) Volkswagen bug in the high school parking lot.  There is not time in this post, but that car had loads of character and every fender and bumper sticker told a story.  We took that car on all sorts of hot dates (literally, the heater was stuck on and would melt your shoe if you left your foot in the wrong position)!

This little beauty is of us in the under belly of the event center where high school graduation is held.  It must have been the year that we started dating, because neither one of us are in cap and gown.  Please don't judge us by our lack of good sense in the fashion department.  Why yes, I am wearing nylons, socks, and birkenstocks.

Here we are a year after we started dating at Buzz' senior prom.  I agonized over my shoe choice because I didn't want to be taller than Buzz that night.  Little did I know that a lifetime of agonizing shoe choices awaited me!

That same spring we were fortunate enough to go to Hawaii with our high school band.  Again, focus on our youthful, glowing faces and not the tragic clothing...

The night I graduated high school a year later, we left on a church mission trip to Peru.  Here we are with some of the people that we met on our trip.  In Lima we were put on television where a pastor wanted us to tell the whole country that even though we were dating we chose not to have sex.  We told our story, I turned a brilliant shade of red when the word 'sex' came out of my mouth and then it was over.  I really wish I had video of that!

Buzz graduated high school a year before me and took classes at the local university for a year.  When I graduated, he transferred and we left together for ORU.  Here we are at our going away party.  Once we arrived on campus, we had to sign an honor code saying that we would behave ourselves.  This was our last hurrah...

(By the way, cigars are nasty.  Don't try them.  And if you do, don't inhale.  I made that mistake, turned green, and was then told that you are supposed to 'puff' and not inhale at all.)

Here we are with a friend just before the three of us started our journey to Oklahoma.  Aren't we clever?  Buzz still wears those sandals.  In fact, he wore them today.  He still owns that shirt too.  Thankfully, I had the good sense to purge all of those items from my closet years ago...

Here we are the first week of school at an all-dorm event.  FYI, this time, we were supposed to dress silly.

Here is our first professional photo together, and by professional I mean that we walked across the street to Walmart to have it done.  Buzz gave in to the photo shoot only because he knew of our immanent engagement, he had resisted my plea for a decent photo for years.  Cute, right?

Buzz proposed to me on New Year's Eve my freshman year of college.  He waited until after midnight and then told me that he had a surprise for me.  To make a long story short, we drove up to Donner Lake, the location of many wonderful memories for us, and he gave me a poem that he wrote for me before getting down on one knee in several feet of snow to ask me to marry him.  I said yes.  Actually, I said, "Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!!!"  and proceeded to tackle him and kiss him mercilessly.  He almost had a heart attack because he thought I knocked the ring out of the box and that we'd never find it in the moonlit snow.  I didn't even see my ring until the next morning because it was too dark and I went right to sleep when we got to his house at 3 am.  One of my favorite memories from the next day was waking up on his couch with his parents standing over me, grinning ear to ear and wanting to hear all about our night.

And so the waiting began.  I was 18 when we got engaged.  Buzz was 19.  We knew that we had to wait a while to get married, and wait we did.  We spent not one, but two more christmas' together as an engaged couple.  Here I am the year after we got engaged, the first year that I got the traditional underwear gift in my stocking from Buzz' mom.  It may be a silly picture to you, but for me it was an initiation into my future family.  I actually got a little teary-eyed.  True story.

We spent a second year doing silly things at ORU between classes (we were supposed to be dressed as skaters.  Buzz pulled it off way better than I did if you ask me)...

...and another Christmas, still engaged:

John decided to spend one of his summers of waiting on a mission trip with ORU.  I got to spend it keeping the company of alzheimer's patients at an assisted living facility.  Guess who enjoyed their summer more?  We wrote letters to each other to be read each day in our time apart.  He bought me chocolates before he left and I ate one every night and tore off a paper chain link in anticipation of seeing him again.  I was really pathetic that summer, let me tell you.  Thankfully for me, he got to come home a week early to be in his brother's wedding.

Love was a common theme in Buzz' family over the year and a half we were engaged.  We watched and celebrated the marriages of not one...

...not two...

...but three of his siblings.  All of whom were engaged after us.

As you might imagine, I was beginning to curse young love.  Finally though, six weeks after his brother's wedding, it was to be our turn.

To be continued...

*This year we are going on a trip together for the first time since we had kids.  We're leaving town for four whole days and we couldn't be more excited!  I may or may not get part two of this post up before we leave, but know for sure that we will be sleeping late, talking without the interruption of little voices, and celebrating the love that God has blessed us with.  Have a fabulous week, I know I will!*