Happy 30th Birthday, my love!

Today is my husband's 30th birthday! He's not a big party guy and so there isn't a huge celebration that some, like myself, would enjoy. Instead, I booked the day off work and we're spending the day together.

September 8, 2010 marks 10 years that Shane and I have been together whether dating, engaged or married. I am so blessed! So, this birthday means a to me. It's actually the 11th time we've celebrated his birthday together.

Let me take you back down my memory lane to August 19th, 2000. Not even 2 months earlier, I had graduated from high school and moved to the big city to work. Shane and I knew each other as acquaintances from the past and when we found out in July that we had both moved to the city, we started hanging out. There was a few of us who would get together but after a while, the others couldn't always make it and that left the two of us to get to know each other.

By Shane's birthday in August, I was still very convinced that my feelings for him were strictly friendship only. So, I suppose I deemed it safe to plan a birthday celebration for my friend. I put together a picnic in the park, mini-golfing, dessert at The St.Boniface Cathedral and a visit to a friend who was working at Boston Pizza for just the two of us. That sounds pretty romantic to me now but at the time, it was just fun with my friend, or so I told myself =) Come to think of it, we haven't gone back to that park or the Cathedral, so I think it's funny that I picked those places!

We had a wonderful time together that day and though I may have been in denial, the friend we went to visit definitely started thinking things after seeing us sitting together and chatting in one of the booths at the restaurant she was working at that evening.

If we hadn't started with a friendship, there is NO WAY I would have planned that day. That would have been way too bold for me, except that I felt safe planning a day for my friend, not my potential boyfriend.

Within the month, we would be staring denial in the face. Shane was hoping and planning to go to Hawaii to do a YWAM DTS in the fall of 2000. He didn't want to get into a relationship before then....which ultimately came down to him telling me that he didn't want to start a more-than-friendship relationship with me because he was going away. Suddenly, I had to stare my feelings in the face, but still didn't quite face it. I just thought that my devastated response, that accompanied sadness and tears, had to do with the fact that I would miss his family if I couldn't hang around the way I had been =) Hee! Hee!

Well, the rest is history! I won the heart of my Shane and we started our official more-than-friends relationship September 8th, 2000. YWAM didn't enter the picture again...until now, 10 years later. But now we're going together so it's even better!

I have been the blessed gal who gets to celebrate Shane's birthday with him each and every year over the past 11 birthdays! I love him more every year and so I'm excited about learning to love him more with the ones to come!

Happy 30th Birthday to my husband! Great things are in store this year!