Can you believe we are in August? This is craziness! The years are flying by and sometimes I find myself coming to the realization that that means I am getting older. Sure, I'm not that old, but I'm also five years, almost six years out of High School. E and I sometimes find ourselves trying to remember our age. We both feel like we are still only 18. I definitely don't feel like we are nine months away from our fourth year of marriage. I don't feel like we've been together for almost six years.
I guess, time really does fly when you're having fun.
When E and I first moved in together, January 14, 2011: Huntsville, TX (I still remember that day like it was yesterday), we had literally $0.00 in our bank account. E had only lived with his roommates in college for one semester. We were just fresh, baby-faced 18 and 19 year olds trying to make it "work." We had to learn how to live together. I had never lived with anyone besides family so this was a huge change for me. The first year we lived together was, to put it in best terms, rough. Aside from not having money, E was in school and I was only able to find a part-time job paying $7.25 an hour. We were barely scraping by. We managed to get approved for government assistance which we only stayed on for about four months, this gave me time to move into the full time position at my job and E had left school to also get a job.
At the start of 2012, we were eagerly waiting to get married. By this point in time, we both had new jobs. E was working three jobs making about $250 a month and I was working for Keller Williams Bryan-College Station making about $8.50 an hour working full time. We managed to make it by but we still had our moments where our account was either overdrawn or just plain empty. May 12, 2012, I walked down the aisle, not really knowing where our life was headed. I think we both had our heads in the air. Neither of us knew the trials we would face together, but neither of us expected that even through those trials, we would come out stronger than ever! Immediately after our wedding and "honeymoon," E headed to Houston to live with his parents and start working in the Union. I stayed behind in Bryan, eagerly waiting to rejoin him. After a few months apart, many weekends back and forth traveling, we had finally saved enough money to move into our apartment in Cypress. This would be the start of our trials.
2013 proved to be one of the hardest years ever! In March, my grandmother (who was like my mother and practically raised me) passed away from Stage 5 Cancer. Four weeks later in April, my mother passed away in a total accident. Only 3 months after that, I lost my job, two days after that E's grandmother passed away suddenly in her sleep, and two months after that we miscarried our first baby. Somehow, we managed to come out of all of that darkness. We decided to move away from that apartment and find something new. A brand new start was what we needed.
In August 2013, we moved to Katy, where we met in fourth grade. We settled into a gorgeous apartment, I found a wonderful job, and E was just starting school for his Union Pipefitter job. 2014 was our turning point. I managed to find a new, even better job working for Capital One Bank as a Fraud Investigator, we were able to travel. We took a five-day cruise to Mexico, we enjoyed a full week in Las Vegas, and we even headed to Florida for a week during November. After returning from Florida, we decided to start our weight loss journey. I was about 200 pounds, and E was about 300 pounds.
By January 2015, we had both managed to drop about 10 pounds each. We endured another miscarriage, this one much earlier than the first. But we picked up the pieces and kept on. Today, we have managed to lose 35 pounds each, we are days away from another long vacation, we both have really amazing jobs, and I can officially say that we have made a wonderful life for ourselves. We came from $0.00 to being able to afford things and never have to ask for help with bills. We take trips and enjoy each others company by working out together daily. This gives us time to spend together and is my favorite thing, especially because we are both very competitive so we push each other to go further than we thought possible.
All this to say, I love our life. It's not always easy, but it's an interesting ride. I still find it hard to believe that just four years ago, we were in a completely different situation, living a completely opposite life. I don't think that when we lived in Huntsville, I could have envisioned us being where we are today in just four years. So where do we go from here? Well, Christmas is on the way, so there's that. But really, we go up. We climb the ladder and work hard. We are eagerly looking forward to being able to build our first home together. We are eagerly looking forward to all that life will throw our away.
Side note, it's hard to believe that I will be 23 in just a months time, and E will be 24 in two! That's just unbelievable.
Thank you for reading and letting me be "chatty".
May life and God bless you with happiness and even when you go through the dark, may you always find the door to lead you into the light.
God Bless
