Missing "Us"

Those that have been married and have had children while might be able to relate. I found myself in "a funk" last night. I decided to make a montage of DH and I. Just us. No pictures of the kids. Wow...was that hard. We don't have a SINGLE picture of just the two of use in almost FOUR years!!!!! We've been married almost 5, so yea....there's a big gap in the "us" picture department. So, I started digging through my scrap booking box. You know, the big box of scrap booking stuff that I have from when I liked to scrap book...before we had kids. I then started sorting through those pictures to find some of us to scan.

In order to scan the pictures I had to install the drivers for our new printer/scanner combo onto our dinosaur desktop since they're not compatible w/ the Windows Vista that's on our new laptops. That gave me time to look through the rest of the pictures from the period of our life when DH was in the Marine Corps and we didn't have children. Big....mistake.

I found myself weepy and mourning that period in our life. It was just us. We lived 3,000 miles away from family. We had enough money to pay all our bills. DH didn't have to worry about paying for medical insurance. We didn't have to worry about him taking an $1,150 a month pay loss. We could stay out until midnight if we wanted. We could drive to Las Vegas on a weekend whim if we wanted. We could do what we wanted, when we wanted, and didn't have to worry about anything except being back when he had to be at work, not going more than 500 miles away, and leaving extra food and water out for the cats while we were gone. He actually got a full month off every year for vacation instead of the measly 1 week a year he gets now (yea, that's a joke). Except for our children, our life right now SUCKS! I mean yea, we have awesome parts of our life that we wouldn't change for anything. Sweet Pea and Little Dude complete our life. We're friends with Jack and Jill. We're in a house (of sorts, LOL). But I MISS our old life...and found myself mourning it. I've mourned that part of our life, the "early days" often but more and more in recent days.

But, then I stopped and gazed upon the faces of my precious, sleeping children and I am glad we have them. We just didn't want children before 5 years of marriage, and yet by our 5th year we have two. We wanted 5 years of "us" before having to share each other with children....and we wanted it that way because we know once we had children that "us" time would be rare. Heck, we try to be together as man and wife and we get interrupted...EVERY STINKIN' TIME!!! Is it any surprise that the past year has been so rocky for our marriage!?!?!? If only we had family who would be able to take the kids for a weekend...but Little Dude would NOT tolerate that. *sigh*

One day...if these kids don't tear DH and I apart...