With everything going on in our personal lives, I almost forgot to celebrate the fact that I have had the photography business for FOUR years now!!! When Steve and I first sat down and talked about the business over four years ago we wrote a “Five Year Plan” with a list of goals. I can’t believe that we are officially in that fifth year. So many things have changed and I have grown so much – just take a look at one of my first shoots. Uhhhh, yeah. For one, the “I” in my business is now a “we”, which was never a goal, but one that I think surpasses many other goals on my “Five Year Plan”.
We haven’t updated you in a few weeks about our new family ventures with the business or even personal family changes, but we will be doing this a lot more now on our “Walking on Wednesday” posts that have been converted into posts on marriage and family. I am so thrilled for Steve and I to be collaborating on these posts starting this Wednesday. All this to say, today we have a special announcement that will hopefully make the long time readers pretty happy :-)
I wanted to give you a quick glimpse into one thing that has become very apparent to Steve and I. That is, that our relationship, which we always thought was pretty good the past few years, was probably a little strained. We didn’t even know it, but now that we have the hindsight twenty/twenty glasses on, we can clearly see what was actually happening. We just got soooo into the routine of taking care of the kids, me doing the business, and Steve working crazy amounts of hours, that we fully relied on our one night a week date night to keep us going. And, we thought that was enough! But, now that I have Steve home all the time, we realized that it wasn’t close to enough. Or maybe it was enough, but why settle for just enough? There were things in our relationship that were slipping through the cracks without us even realizing it. It was creating an invisible wedge that was (very) slowly driving us further apart and we didn’t even know it. In the past two months Steve and I have realized some things that make us feel super blessed for where we are right now. It’s amazing what things people don’t realize are wrong until it’s too late. One thing that has come out of this new adventure is that we are newly inspired to embrace life even more as a married couple – to be better partners to each other and to put our relationship first- second to our relationship with Christ, but definitely above everything else – even our parent roles. Steve and I have found renewed inspiration in the things we love to do – his writing and my photography! And, do you want to know how inspired Steve is??? Well, to my surprise, Steve sat down last week while I was out of town to write the next chapter to our love story. To those who haven’t read it yet, he has already written 26 chapters that you can find here. Then our lives started to get too crazy with being parents and work and the business that he had to put the story on pause. Well, I am happy to report that it is back!!! And hopefully we can have it finished and bound one day for our children to read. And their children to read. If there is one legacy we want to leave behind, it is our “love multiplied” mission statement: Love Multiplied is the dream that the legacy and story we pass down for generations to come is how our love grew deeper and stronger throughout our marriage. That on the foundation of our marriage, our love multiplied into something far greater than we ever thought our hearts could contain.
This Friday Steve will be posting the next chapter to our love story. If you want to catch up, you can read chapter one here. Then you can go to “Categories: Our Love Story – One More For Love” to read the rest of the chapters. I hope you enjoy! :)
Warmly,
Stacy
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