Our Story - Romantic Scrapbooking

As some of you know, I've been taking part in Noell Hyman's Romantic Scrapbooking course. I haven't really kept up on a lot of the challenges - I think, in part, because the story of my marriage and my relationship with my husband is very long. We've been married for 24 years and together for over 25, and there's a lot of story to tell there! When I scrap, I tend to keep my journaling brief, and that doesn't lend itself feasible to a long story like ours.

I met Rob when I first was hired as a crew person at McDonald's in 1987. He had already been working there for a couple of years and was set to leave for college at the end of that summer. We didn't really get to know each other that first summer - in part due to some incorrect first impressions as documented in this layout:


The second summer, however, Rob and I started to get to know each other and realized that those first impressions were totally wrong. Before he left to go back to school, I gave him my address and told him to write to me, really not expecting to get anything in the mail.

I did get letters. On purple stationery (which my mom swears was "a sign.") Before Rob came home for Thanksgiving, he told me exactly when his plane was coming in - and then he just happened to call me 30 minutes after he landed.

We went out on our first date the night after Thanksgiving - he took me to see the movie "Scrooged." His family of 5 people only had one car at the time, so he had to coordinate rides with his brother and sister. One of the most endearing things about that night was waiting in line to use the pay phone at the movie theater - Rob was totally embarrassed! He muttered: "I'm 20 years old and I still have to call Mommy and Daddy for a ride home from the movies!"

Rob came back home for Christmas and that's when things really began to pick up. I was still kind of holding back, though, because I knew he was going to be gone all Spring & didn't want to deal with the heartbreak of a long-distance relationship (I was still in high school at the time). But then, Rob got his report card from the Fall semester and learned that he lost his scholarships due to low grades. He would not be returning to school in the Spring. Although I felt horrible for him, I knew this was a sign to begin taking this relationship seriously.

We became inseparable after that. After I graduated from high school, we began to plan our future - buying a car together, saving to get our own apartment, planning to get married in a few years.

And then I became pregnant.

That changed our plans significantly!

We were married 6 weeks later - in January of 1990.

I was 18 - Rob was 22.

Our son, Zachary, was born in July 1990. I began college full time that fall. Rob was promoted to management at McDonald's and worked the closing shifts so we didn't have to worry about child care.

I became pregnant again in the spring of 1991 and gave birth to our daughter, Alyssa, that November. I remained a full time college student throughout my pregnancy.

Very few people gave our marriage a chance. We were both so young, only together for one year, neither of us sure of what we wanted to do in life. But we knew we wanted to be together more than anything else. I also think that we became determined to make our marriage work because there were so many people who didn't think it would. Rob and I are both very stubborn people!

Our 24 year marriage has endured raising two children, two college degrees, graduate coursework, two changes in careers, one parent with a traumatic brain injury, another with a heart attack, the death of two grandfathers (one 5 days before our wedding!) and two stints of unemployment. We've gone through all of this as partners - and I think that's the way our marriage has worked!

So, thank you for reading this long, rambling story. And maybe I will break this into chunks & work on some more layouts!

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