Seventeen years

They have flown past and we have done so much growing in so many ways since then!  Seventeen years ago today we were married in Cupar registry office, with a small band of friends, and a 12 week old baby in attendance as the only family representative.

I wore a £10 cream two piece outfit from the Save the Children shop in St Andrews, and the FH wore his suit.  We had a shared buffet back at the house after the wedding, and then another small gathering of friends in the evening - I think the baby and I had a nap in between!  I made a wheat-and-dairy-free cake and a neighbour iced and decorated it with tartan ribbons for me.

All the money in the world spent on that wedding wouldn't have made the marriage any different over the past seventeen years, I am convinced, and so we celebrate the intervening years more than the day we said we did.  We still "do" all the promises, and we have thought about having the marriage blessed, and in our typical fashion, we still haven't got around to it.

Looking back at the photos, I can see that things have changed: all bar the marriage and the rings and the child have gone by the wayside.  Some of the witnesses are not together themselves any longer, the FH can't fit in to the suit these days, my outfit went back to the charity shop as I had lost weight and it didn't fit, and we have moved so far from that time and place.  We are older and perhaps a little wiser; if not wiser, certainly more experienced as we have learned new things.

Marriage is a day-in, day-out commitment which is something of a rarity in this day and age, when things change so often, and the trend seems to be for people to have a short attention span.  It needs to be flexible enough to bend when times change, strong enough to support us when times are tough, and precious enough to cherish all the day long.