Jerad Hill

Blog of Life & Business Persuits

marriage

Looking Back at 2017 Moving on to 2018

At almost this exact time last year, I remember telling myself that 2017 was going to be an amazing year. I thought about all of the projects I wanted to finally get completed and how they were going to change my life. I was going to get back into a gym routine. There were several ambitions I had planned in my head. However, 2017 kind of took me by surprise. What I thought was going to be a fantastic year, turned out to be probably the most challenging year I have had yet in my life.

Since around the age of 30-31, my health started to change. I became aware that I have an underactive thyroid and I was experiencing a lot of acid reflux issues. My doctor started me on medications for both of those issues which I was not thrilled about. All of the sudden I was taking two medications daily when prior to that I would take a Tylenol maybe once every other month. The next several years I would spend trying to figure out what was causing those issues. During 2016 I seemed to have figured out what was causing the acid reflux and managed to somewhat fix the problem without the continued medication. I was feeling pretty decent as 2017 approached.

The year even started out pretty good with a lot of new business coming in. I had a good feeling that January was giving me a good idea of what the rest of the year would look like. My wife and I had been working on our adoption paperwork and the only remaining items were my blood test and an in-home study before we could enter child search.

I typically have my labs ran every year but I had not had labs drawn in a few years. My labs ended up coming back with a few abnormalities. Nothing life-threatening, but I was not expecting the results I received. Up to this point, I thought that I was gaining distance from health issues, but there were lab results showing me otherwise.

Off and on during my 30’s I have felt kind of defeated in the area of my health. I was never battling anything major but the constant acid reflux and bloating really affected me emotionally because I generally didn’t feel like myself. With these new lab results, I ended up depressed and anxious about my current situation. I couldn’t get myself to the gym because I didn’t feel good both physically or emotionally.

Parenting got more challenging this year as my kids grew and become more independent thinkers. My struggle is mostly with finding the right balance as a parent. My oldest is now in second grade and I am starting to see that he holds in his emotions as much as a seven-year-old can. He has struggles and has not come to me with them. I want my kids to know that they can come to me with anything. The challenge is figuring out how to do that within the constraints of their personalities. This will be a lifelong process but it was tough this year because it was the first time I became aware of it.

My marriage also got really hard this year. This is my ninth year of marriage and my wife and I have discovered a lot about each other this year which started with me feeling the need to really open up in some areas. We have never been good communicators and that has allowed a lot of assumptions to build up. There are also a lot of things we found we have resented each other for that would not have been a big deal at all had we just communicated about it in the first place. We started counseling which has been really good for me. I have always left the past in the past but I am realizing that it is hard to understand why I am the way that I am without analyzing the past. It has been an interesting journey this year looking at myself in this way. It has not been easy and it has led to more depression and anxiety. As a married couple, counseling is helping us become better communicators and we have never been so close to being on the same page with everything. It’s truly liberating.

With all of that said, my business has seen ups and downs this year too. The year started off really good but took a dive during the summer. I think that since summer vacation was shorter for most schools in this area most people went off radar through summer. Once school was back in, I was flooded with new business and was once again busy. What made it tough is that I did not expect it to go the way that it did. On top of that, I did no marketing for photography so I did not have much photography business to supplement the lack of clients for Hill Media Group. Because the first half of the year had been so busy and stressful, I did not have any time at all to work on my side projects, so they suffered a lot. I lost a lot of ground that I had with my side income.

There were some great moments in 2017. We had some fun trips with the kids, despite our camping gear getting stolen. There were memories made in 2017 that rise above the difficulties.

Looking back at 2017, it would be easy to call it a bad year. It was a tough year and not what I originally expected it to be. Regardless, I have learned a lot and am far enough removed from it all to know that 2017 was actually a pretty good year. Just because I felt that the year had defeated me doesn’t mean that it was bad. I am sitting here a few days into 2018 writing this and thinking about how much more aware of things I am. Everything that happened last year has made me a better husband, father, friend, and business owner. It was not easy by any means, but building character never is.

Going into 2018 I have some decent momentum behind me. I dealt with everything that happened in 2017 and am wiser because of it. I plan to continue to invest in myself in 2018 because if I am not healthy I cannot be the kind of man I want to be for those in my life. I can’t let anything that afflicted me in 2017 or the years prior determine who I am in 2018 and going forward. I am excited about this year, not because I think it’s going to be an easier year, but because I believe it will lead to more growth.

How did your 2017 go?

Learning to Ask For Help

I have written many posts and filmed many videos about how to do a variety of different things from learning to use a camera to fixing a hacked website. Giving back to the internet community that has given me so much is very important to me. I enjoy helping others. However, working for yourself can be quite lonely at times, so can being a husband and a parent.

This year I have had to ask for help in a variety of different ways. I have had to ask for help with work, with parenting, and with my marriage. It has been a tough year. I fought asking for help up until this point and I am still working on why that was the case.

It’s easy to travel the path alone, especially with so much information at our fingertips. We can carve our own path using information and insight from others who have gone before us. The problem is that we often end up implementing that information incorrectly or not having the complete picture. Think about the Pinterest perfect recipe you downloaded that resulted in a direct hit to your confidence level as a novice chef. We take the information made available but lack the years of experience needed to pull it off.

In working with clients, I have found that when I lack information to perform a task for them, asking for help or assistance is the best option. Some people fake it until they figure it out. I prefer asking for the information needed. Other areas in life I have not been good at asking for help. I have not asked for much if any help with my business, my marriage, and with my kids. I have relied on information gathered from books, blogs, or podcasts. Gathering information from sources such as those is not wrong, but you often don’t have the right context to implement it. Sometimes it lines up and works perfectly, most of the time it seems like something out of right field.

Growing up I always felt that I needed to fight to overcome any weakness others saw in me. I was ok at sports, not the best, but not the worst. Most of my family did not see me as the child most likely to succeed. My grades in school were average. I already felt that I was at a disadvantage so asking for help made me feel like I was showing my weakness.

Most believe that asking for help is a sign of weakness. I definitely did, and at times I still do. Asking for help, however, is a sign of humility. Often humility feels like weakness because it requires letting others in. The truth is that it takes a lot of courage to ask for help when you need it.

The other issue with our world today is that it is easy to make it seem like you have it all figured out. We handcraft our social media feeds to show a carefully curated life of success and good times. It is easy to believe that you are alone in your struggles, which is so far from the truth. I believe this is why dramatic television shows are popular. These tv shows are displaying real struggles that we can relate to and since we are not relating on a personal level with good friends, we find our acceptance in tv instead.

The path I started on this year is far from over. I am working on being better at asking for help when I need it and on building up a personal network of people that can be more than superficial friends. This was not modeled for me growing up so it has been and will continue to be hard work for me.

There is no valor in taking on unnecessary pain in life. We were put on this Earth together to be in community. My generation is the first generation where our network is not the people in our neighborhood, meaning we do not have people close to us that are literally close to us. When you are having a tough time with something, ask for help. The resources are limitless and I believe people are yearning for it more than ever.

What are your thoughts on asking for help? Do you have a good network of people around you that you can go to or that can go to you when they need help?

How Wives Can Help Their Husbands Parent Together

It’s been a slow go, but I am trying to chip away at the questions that were given to a few of us to answer during a men’s panel that I was on. I thought I would handle the topic of parenting together next.

Here is the question: How can a wife help her husband feel that they are parenting together?

This question can mean something different depending on your household dynamic. I will do my best to be as general as I can and get specific when need be. In my home, my wife runs the day-to-day of the household. I work during the week and she is at home running the house. My wife spends a lot more time in the home than I do and a lot more time with our kids than I do as well. It is the current state of our household. I work outside of the home, she takes care of the family and our home. I help as much as possible around the house, but sometimes I feel like it is her house that I am living in. I know this is not true, but sometimes it can feel like it. I am trying to work to change the amount of time I spend at work. Right now, I work a typical 8-5 day. Now that we live closer to my office, I often come home for lunch. I used to photograph a lot of weddings on weekends but have cut back a lot so I can be home on as many weekends as possible.

My goal is to be able to reduce the amount of time I spend working during the hours my children are awake. I love my business, but I am missing valuable time I could be spending with my children. My kids are young and want to spend time with me. When they get older, they will have friends and other activities which will leave me plenty of time to work more if I want to. So let’s get back on topic.

Most men work and are not around the home as much as their wives are. This is the case in my household. Some households have a working husband and wife, but often the wife still runs more of the home than the husband does. My wife spends all day with our children. I see my kids for about an hour in the morning and for a few hours in the evening before bed. I get the weekends with them as well, but weekends are a different dynamic than the work/school week. I feel like more parenting happens during the week and the weekends are more fun and activities. During the week, my wife does most of the parenting on her own. When I get home, I help with dinner, play with the kids for a while and help put them to bed. Part of my evening routine with my wife these days involves relaxing. By the end of the day, we are both tired and just want to chill.

In business, there have been situations where I become part of a project that was already in motion. Though I feel I have a handle on the project and understand where it needs to go, taking action without knowing every nuance could lead to a blow up down the road. This often happens at home with the kids. I find myself in situations with my kids and parent the way I feel is right in the moment, but sometimes my method ends up clashing with something my wife has already tried or set in motion. I get frustrated because I was not informed. It’s hard to stay on the same page when the majority of my time is spent at work and my wife’s time with the kids.

There have been other instances where I have attempted to parent a certain way and then my wife contradicts my method by directing the children in another way without taking me aside and asking me about it first. This happens to all of us. I do it to her as well. Many times we are reacting to a situation. Something happens and we swiftly deal with it. I feel that sometimes we respond maybe a bit too swiftly.

It really comes down to communication. My wife and I do a pretty good job of recapping our days to each other. By the end of the day when I come home, my kids are usually tired. They only have a few hours left before bed so they have had a full day. I often get to deal with the meltdowns that happen during those hours. When I get home from work, my kids are hangry (hungry + angry). Not really. I just wanted an excuse to say that work in this blog. My kids are pretty great and only occasionally have meltdowns the moment I walk through the door.

Parenting on the same page takes communication. Without communication, you are walking into a war zone. The home can be a war zone sometimes. If I was not communicated to, there is unknown intel that I need to navigate the landscape that is our home. My daughter may have had a rough day that involved missing some of her nap and getting disciplined recently for hitting her brother. She could still be upset when I come in the door and try to love on her.

On occasion, my wife will text message me to let me know what is going on. Sometimes it’s during a phone call on my way home. It helps me understand what is going on and what to expect. Knowing what to expect helps me prepare myself and I am able to be what I need to be for each of my children when I walk through the door. Most of our parenting related frustrations with each other has to do with discipline. My wife and I both have our good days and bad days when dealing with disciplining our children. It’s not a simple job and we both kind of hate having to do it.

Big Picture Parenting

Most married couples are on the same page when it comes to the bigger picture. They know how they want to raise their kids and what they want their kids to experience. Some couples may have a few differences in the big picture area, but it’s easier to work on those differences because they are part of the bigger picture. There is a lot of time between thinking about those things and having to act on them. Bigger Picture items could include what kind of school we will send our children to and whether or not we will allow our kids to drink soda. These are not typically “in the moment” decisions we have to make.

In The Moment Parenting

Most parenting decisions are made in the moment. They are responses to situations that transpired. This is where differences start to become clear between a husband and wife. Decisions made in the moment lack communication. We feel that we need to act right away, so we make a decision. This decision may be a new one, which was not discussed prior to acting on it.

Because we feel that we need to shut down the situation in the moment, it often ends up being a sole parent decision. Usually, that has to do with discipline. My wife and I have most of our issues there. We often see pretty eye to eye, but we have our moments.

There are other decisions that we make in parenting that end up being in the moment when they could have waited until later. Not everything has to be handled in the moment. I recognize that sometimes it is just easier for my wife to make a decision on something at that moment. At work, I make decisions all day. If I had to stop and check with someone else before making my decisions, it would drive me crazy. I do understand that it is often easier just to say yes, or no, or sign up for something at that moment because it seems right. It might also seem like a small thing that doesn’t matter to you, so you deal with it in the moment.

All of these “moments” throughout the day are often something the other spouse misses out on. Those moments add up and can make a person feel like they are not really doing any parenting. I have moments of my own like that, but I realize that my wife and I have our jobs and we are the CEO’s of our individual jobs.

CEO, CFO, and CPO’s

As mentioned before, my wife pretty much runs the home. She is the CEO of the house. That doesn’t mean she can do whatever she wants. I am the CFO of our home, because I handle the majority of the finances. My wife and I are both CPO (Chief Parenting Officers). It’s a joint position run as a team. She brings her years of Early Childhood Development training and being a Nanny for many years to the table. At the time of writing this, she also has almost six years in the trenches with our children. I am a very observant person who also reads a lot, so I have some of my own tactics and methods that I have developed. I also try to stay very in tune with my children emotionally. I am better at this with my boys than I am with my little girl.

As a team, we are continuously learning what we do well and what we do not. To the best of our ability, we try to do this together. This means that one person is not doing everything while the other watches sports. My wife spends most of the time with our children, but I make sure that I get opportunities to be with all three of my children alone as well. When I am home, I am with my family. I don’t watch sports or other tv shows while my kids are awake. My wife and I do watch shows we like after our kids are in bed. I will watch shows with my kids sometimes. Shows of their choosing (Power Rangers). I make an effort to be involved.

Proactive Parenting

It really does come down to communication. Actions speak louder than words. If you come home from work and don’t contribute, you are not going to feel like you are an equal parent. We are a parent to a child or children. We are a spouse to another adult. It takes intent and you have to prioritize your family over other things to be as involved as your spouse is.

With better communication, you can parent proactively. Talk about your kids together. Tell your spouse about the cool things your kid is doing and the things he or she may be struggling with. Don’t let these things come up and blindside your spouse.

As you can see, it takes effort from both sides. Don’t attack your spouse because you feel that she isn’t including you in parenting decisions. Turn off the football game and talk to her about it. Don’t attack your spouse because he isn’t as involved of a parent as you. If you don’t share much with him, how can he feel as invested as you are?

It’s all about the children. I deeply care about my work, but it will not get in the way of me being an involved parent. Right now it is very popular to work your tail off to achieve in your career. Everybody wants success, and they want it yesterday. The concept of work-life balance is all the buzz right now because people find themselves working most of their waking hours and realize their family is left off in the distance. It’s sad. You can start a hundred companies in a lifetime, but you can only start one family. Sure it is common for people to start second, and even a third family after failing the first few times, but is that healthy? I think not. Give all you have to your family. You can find a way to work and find success. We live in an extremely pliable world these days.

Do you have some tips on how to better include your spouse in the parenting role? If so, share them in the comments below.

What is Most Important For Men in Marriage?

I struggle even answering this question because it is hard to answer on behalf of all men, “What’s the most important thing for Men to have in their marriage?” All I can do is answer for myself and hope that my response aligns with other men, perhaps some men can chime in down in the comments section.

Consistency

Men are creatures of habit. At least, I am anyway. I like consistency. I like to know what to expect. I don’t mind being spontaneous at times, but it has to be within my level of comfort, and to be honest, somewhat my idea.

Women are typically more flexible and spontaneous at times, at least from my experience. If they were not, why are women always desiring their husbands be more spontaneous? Not to say that women don’t desire some consistency, I simply think there is a difference between what men and women require to be comfortable.

Most men have a day that revolves around a routine. I wake up every day and follow a very similar routine. Sure it sounds boring to some, but all men have a routine or some kind that is consistent. Routines are very important, especially with children. Routines can be modified from time to time, but the idea of having a routine is that for the most part, you can expect what will happen next.

Thinking about it more, it might not even be consistency that is important, it’s knowing what to expect and not being surprised.

The World is Random

Though I often hold tight to my routine, the world does not understand that. My clients needs don’t always fit into my routine. Having allergies for the last two weeks doesn’t fit into my routine. So the last thing we want after a long day of having our routines tested is inconsistency when we get home.

It is important to me that the place I am supposed to be most comfortable be consistent. After a long day of inconsistency, I just want to fall back into my routine.

Home Can Be Random

My wife and I are both busy people. I run a business and she runs a household with three young children. Both of us spend our day getting wrenches thrown into our routines. This is just part of life. I know that despite the best intentions my wife and I both have at the start of the day, it only takes one client phone call or a child meltdown to throw everything off for the rest of the day.

Recentering

When we get off path, it is important that we recenter. If we continue to go off path, who knows where we will end up by the end of the day. A routine does not have to be 100% consistent every day. There are ebbs and flows in every routine. However, there are cornerstones of a routine that hold it up. It is easy for me to recognize what those cornerstones are with my children.

The routine cornerstones for my children are making sure they go to bed and wake up close to the same time every day. They need to be fed at consistent times. My youngest still takes an afternoon nap. When she doesn’t get her afternoon nap, she falls apart around 3pm. The activities that fill in the gaps can be different each day so long as the cornerstones of the routine remain intact.

Routine Cornerstones of a Husband

I will be the first to admit that when the cornerstones of my routine are threatened, I get cranky. I spend all day dealing with everybody else’s needs, so when I come home, I simply want to fall back into routine for a while. The challenge here is that I also realize my wife has been dealing with the needs of our children all day and would love to curl up next to one of her routine cornerstones as well. This is where I have to remember to give my wife grace first, before showing frustration.

I used to start each day by going to the gym. I still do on occasion, but it has been hard for me to get up early and make it to the gym. When I make it to the gym in the morning, the structure of my routine holds up much better. I also find that my routine is more flexible throughout the day. Having a healthy routine that can withstand some inconsistency requires a good foundation. If your day starts inconsistent, it will most likely end that way as well. Encourage your husband to find a way to start his day in a positive way. He shouldn’t be leaving the house stressed, he should be leaving replenished. Husbands, make sure to encourage your wife in the same way.

Syncing Routines

Communication is important here. A wife will not know what is important to her husband if he does not tell her and vice-versa. You should make it a goal to discover the cornerstones of your spouse’s routine so you can strive to achieve consistency in those areas. Once you both have a good understanding of these cornerstones, you can reform the foundation of your routines to match. The cornerstones of our routines mainly contain similar things, we just need to sync those up and add in some consistency to prevent structural damage.

I mentioned it before, men are creatures of habit. We can be a bit abrasive when our routines are shifted. I have found my routine threatened simply by my wife making me breakfast. I normally handle my own breakfast so when I am surprised by a breakfast containing items I did not choose, it throws me off for a second. In that moment, I have to remind myself that my wife was thinking about me and decided to make me breakfast. I should be happy about that. I literally have to remind myself that every time. I have recognized that I would rather appreciate my wife for an unexpected breakfast than get upset about my routine being threatened. It takes work. One time she made oatmeal for the kids and I. Apparently I was not interested in the unexpected oatmeal she made for me because my response was, “I hate that kind of oatmeal.” Yes, I sounded like a four-year-old.

How to achieve consistency

You will first need to find out what the cornerstones of your spouse’s routine are. Once you have that figured out, you can work that into the household’s routine. If you are typically the one who cooks dinner, make sure it is at a consistent time. If dinner seems to be a stressful situation for your husband because of inconsistency, send him a text message mid-day and let him know what will be cooking when he comes home. Understand that mid-day is also a good time to suggest eating out if you foresee the day getting away from you. I have also realized that giving my wife a solid notice before I disrupt her routine is important as well.

Consistency is simply what I find important during this chapter in my life. It might not be what you need or what your husband needs. Each person is different and has different needs. If you pay close enough attention, you should easily be able to figure out what the cornerstones of your spouse’s routine is.

My Grandparents were married just shy of 68 years when my Grandmother passed away. They retired when I was young. I remember them having a solid routine. My Grandfather would spend time out in his shop building things. My Grandmother would spend time in her office researching and reading. They were a pretty well-oiled machine. They had a routine that included spending time together and time in their zones working on things they loved. If you called them at 11:20 in the morning, you knew they were just sitting down to lunch.

Using my Grandparents routine as an example is hard to compare to a young family with three kids, but I believe that their marriage lasted until the end because they found a way to provide consistency to each other in the areas that mattered most. Watching my Grandfather struggle to find a new routine after my Grandmother’s passing confirms this.

Let me know what you think about this. Is routine important to you? Do you think it’s important to your spouse? What areas of your routine are frequently disrupted? How do you think you could fix it?

Money Ain’t The Motive

I can’t honestly start this post off by saying money has never been a motive of mine. When I was younger, money was a motive. I wanted to make more of it, so I could buy things. Money was not talked about as it is today. There were no podcasts on finances. Only people older than your Dad were talking about it. What we did have was the beginning of what MTV and the influence rap music was having on us. It was all about money and getting it any way possible. After maxing out a credit card and slaving to get it paid off, I had learned my lesson. I did not like being a slave to anything. What took me many more years to learn was how to actually save money. There always seemed to be something I wanted and I never had enough money to have what I wanted and save money at the same time.

In my early 20’s, one of my businesses required me to work long hours. It was a lot to have on your shoulders. The retail space is hard but stack two online businesses on top of that, plus some freelance work and it was too much for one person to handle. What I didn’t mind at the time was not having much overhead. I worked my butt off and was able to keep, I mean spend most of the money myself. I had an HD TV before you could even watch anything in HD. Stupid stuff like that. I had became a slave to something else, my business. There are many other ways to lose some or all of your freedom and I have experienced some of those as well.
[Read more…] about Money Ain’t The Motive

7 Year Anniversary Gift – Copper

When my wife and I started discussing what we would do for our 7 year anniversary, the topic of gifts always comes up. This year it was decided that there would be no gifts. My wife knows that I never keep my promises when it comes to gift giving. I am not sure which will be the bigger gift, this project, or the fact that I am doing a tutorial on it and pinning it to Pinterest.

In the past years, I have tried to be creative but have not really come through with anything really nice that would be worthy of hanging onto for any length of time. This year, I wanted it to be different. A quick Google search let me know that the 7-year anniversary gift was copper. Further research led me to a project that involved listing important dates with pennies. I really liked that idea so I went to Amazon to order the items I would need to create my own project (Project List Below).

I already had a few tools, so my list of items needed was not that long. It was a rather inexpensive project to pull off. The hardest part was finding pennies for the correct years.

My wife crafts. She has a room that is full of crafting tools, paper, and other materials. Being a man, I wanted to do this on my own and I didn’t want to leave a trace, so I opted to create my project at my office. I had an X-ACTO knife in my Slot Car Box. Slot Cars are a longtime hobby I have had since I was a child which involves building cars and painting the body that goes on the car. It’s kind of like building model cars, but you get to drive them on a track.

Having decided what I was going to make for her for our 7-year anniversary copper gift, I got started.

Here is a list of items I needed to pull off this project:

It took me a few minutes to come up with 7 milestones that have happened since we met each other. We have yet to purchase a house and neither one of us has graduated from med school so all I had was the day we met, the day we married, and the birth dates of our three children. I felt that I needed to have at least 7 dates on the list. If I could have come up with more, I might have gone for 10. To make 7, I added my wife’s birthdate and my own to the list.

I have Adobe Photoshop on my computer so I used that to create the page layout but I could have easily used Microsoft Word or something like that. The only part I was concerned about was making sure that the text and the pennies would be spaced evenly on the page. I wanted it to look good once it was in the frame.

After the text design was done, I printed the page on my Canon Pro-100 printer that I use occasionally for printing photos. I wanted the text to be crisp. The only other printer I had was a black and white laser printer. A test print with that laser printer did not look that good. The text did not turn out as sharp on the page. I bought a 50 pack of cardstock knowing that I would probably go through a few pages trying to get it right.

The most tedious part of this project was sorting through pennies to try and find the correct year for each of the milestones. I needed a 1980, 1986, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, and a 2013 penny. I keep just about all of the change that is given back to me at the conclusion of a purchase so I had a lot to work with. The center console of my truck had about 3″ of change it in and in my office, I had a red solo cup full of change. I poured all of that change into a bucket and my employees and I started sorting. I also occasionally save one dollar bills. All that stuff adds up!

It took us about 10 minutes but by the time we had sorted through all of the pennies we had found at least 2 for each year. I wanted the cleanest pennies so it would be easy to see the year.

Here is the project laid out before attaching the pennies. Looking good so far.

Since the card stock was 8.5×11 inches, I needed to trim it to fit the 8×10 frame. This frame did not have a matte so I could not simply hide the excess behind the matte, it had to be cut to fit.

Attaching the pennies to the card stock could have been done a couple of different ways but I wanted them to be as close to the paper as possible and I did not want to use a liquid which could have made the paper soggy. I happened to have some high-end double-sided tape that I had bought when I changed out the glass cover on a Mac Laptop. Small roles of this stuff are kind of expensive but since I had it, and it’s thin, I used it. I could have just as easily used double-sided scotch tape, but I did not have any. Don’t buy the 3M VHB Tape that I used, it’s really expensive. Just use double-sided scotch tape.

The pressure on the pennies between the picture frame glass and the backing would hold them in place pretty well so I was not concerned with how tough the bond was between the pennies and the card stock. I used the glass from the picture frame as a straight edge so the pennies would stay aligned down the page.

The pennies are attached and it’s ready to see how it looks in the frame.

I was pleasantly surprised by the finished product. My employees were impressed with the idea and that I was able to remember exact dates. I have always tried my best to remember these dates because they are extremely important to me. Not everybody can remember the exact date they met their spouse. I even remember the day we started dating, which was Feb 19th, 2006. My wife is not so good with dates which makes it even more fun that I do remember these things.

Reaching the 7-year mark in marriage is a milestone itself. I have heard it said by many professionals on relationships that it takes about 7 years before you can truly be selfless in regards to your spouse. I was 28 years old when my wife and I married. I had been in relationships in the past where both of us in the relationship was selfish, so I have tried my best not to be since my wife and I married.

I am looking forward to the next 7 years and the next 7 after that. My wife and I have never been happier in our lives. Though having 3 children close in age is a lot of work, we believe it is the best work we could possibly be doing. We both agree that if we could go back and do it over again, we would not change a thing.

Happy Anniversary to my beautiful bride, who is just as beautiful as the day we first met.

I love you Mallory!