Ryan's Gift
Getting ready to go to dinner soon...
1. It's really, really hard to fit 20 years into a single book. As it is, this is bursting at the seams after I left a million things out.
2. I discovered it's difficult to locate the line between "us" and "the family". In the end, it's a mix of both.
3. These are not all the pages, just some of them.
4. This project took longer than I thought. Been working on it for awhile. It's not finished. The pictures and stuff are in, but it still needs the journaling part. I'm out of time, so that will have to come later. Pretty sure he'll think it's finished until I tell him it's not.
5. 20 years. Where did they go?
It's probably a given we have a cheesy song?
Is it weird there's a picture of me and some other guy on the first real page? Don't worry. It makes sense. Pretty sure Ryan was behind the camera. This was the night before we left for Oklahoma City from Biloxi. We weren't dating. (I wasn't dating the guy in this picture, either.) Who knew we'd be married a couple of weeks later?
A whole bunch of cool stuff I found that I didn't really even know I had kept. Hotel receipt from our trip from MS to OK...ring receipt, journal pages, the calendar from his day planner...
The early days...I lived in Oklahoma City and he lived in Anchorage for most of the first year. I keep trying to imagine that without e-mail and texting and unlimited long distance plans. Because, none of that existed. We used to talk for 1 hour every Saturday night. That's all we could afford. The whole thing pretty much sucked.
Sigh...AWACS. Who knew the entire direction of our lives would be determined by a jet?
That picture was taken probably a week or two after we got married. What kind of people don't take pictures on the actual day they get married? Us. The rest are pictures of Alaska. Who leaves a place as beautiful as that? Us. Sigh... The right side is in Ninilchik...possibly my favorite place on earth.
I was trying to present all the pictures/memorabilia/etc.. in chronological order. It didn't exactly happen that way. This project sort of got on top of me and became an organizational challenge. While the front is in order, the back (mostly after kids) is not. He won't notice.
Being able to apply stickers in a straight line is not something I've mastered...He won't notice. :-)
He's going to love this gift. Pretty sure of that. :-)
