5 years

Nate and I have been married for 5 years yesterday and I can't believe it's been that long. We've had our share of ups and downs. We began our marriage with him being deployed for 9 months, not ideal conditions to begin a new life. His return from Bosnia was tough as well, I had expectations for him to come home and help me and he was still in military mode where everything was provided for him. That first year he was home was incredibly difficult, we fough a lot and we didn't seem to understand each other the way we had before we were married. Next came financial problems, I had spent far more than I should have when he was deployed and I wasn't very good at balancing out what we could spend and what we couldn't afford, we are still making up for that. Once we had worked on our marriage and had bills under control and headed back in the right direction we decided it was really time to start trying to have a baby. We hadn't been preventing since we had been dating, I've always had problems with birth control, once he proposed I stopped all birth control. I spent two years not preventing and not understanding how conception really works. I tried for another year without any assistance before I was referred to Dr. Sebastian who diagnosed me with PCOS and we began the year of medicated cycles. That was probably the toughest year of us trying, every cycle I had hope and almost every cycle that hope was crushed. We had more cancelled cycles than successful attempts. In that year we had a loss that took a massive toll on our hearts. When our second IUI ended in failure we decided to take a year off for me to attend school and save up for IVF. That's when my miracle boy happened. I was shocked that my body actually worked the way it was supposed to and even more shocked that I actually got pregant. Lex made his arrival in October and I still managed to finish school this past spring (only 4 months later than planned).

Nate is definitely the guy I want to spend the rest of my life with even though some days he makes me absolutely bonkers. We have some work to do on our marriage because I still get frustrated with him but we'll make it work. Hopefully in 5 more years I'll be reviewing again and I'll have another little one to mention (hint hint honey....)