Three birthdays (of sorts) have taken place recently in our house. In reverse order of importance:

Due to my lack of consistency in posting on this blog over the past couple of months, I missed the fact that the blog turned a year old on August 1. In the big scheme of things, this is not a big birthday. But I've really enjoyed this project over the past year, and it has been a hugely important year in the life of our family, so even if it's almost a month and a half late, I'll still throw a small inner celebration in SalvationLife's honor.
MUCH more important: my son turned three last week.
And my son would never have been turning three if my wife hadn't married me ten years ago last week. Yes, this is usually called an anniversary, but it's late and I'm trying to string a blog post together for the sake of getting something up.

I've got more to say about every one of these, but for now, a few thoughts on each of them in actual order of importance:

Being married to my wonderful, beautiful wife for 10 years is a big deal. It's really hard to believe it's been a decade. A lot of life has happened in these ten years together:

We've lived in three different places (Georgia, Guatemala, and Texas),
each begun and finished graduate school,
made lots of new friends along the way and said goodbye to quite a few as well,
lost people whom we loved dearly (including Chepe, four grandparents, a baby we never knew, and my Dad),
been overjoyed by welcoming a son and a daughter into the world,
and really enjoyed living our lives together through all of it.

I may not ever be accused of being an overachiever in anything related to my work, but I seriously overachieved in marrying the girl I did. If there's ever a "How in the world did he get her?!?" Hall of Fame, I'll be a first-ballot inductee.

Our son's third birthday was a big day for all of us. It's the first year that he was really able to anticipate it, and we all really enjoyed the day. Last year on his birthday, we caught ourselves sometimes being too busy with preparations for celebrating his birthday to actually enjoy doing things with him. "Sorry, buddy, I can't play with you right now because there's too much to do to celebrate the fact that you're alive" didn't seem like much of a way to help a toddler know how much he's loved. So, we were more intentional about taking time with him this year, and it was a good day for all of us.

One thing that surprised me on his birthday was how much I missed my Dad. I still never know what's going to hit me and what won't. I missed my Dad on his own birthday and Father's Day, but neither of them really got to me. Yet two of the days his absence has hit me the hardest have been my kids' birthdays. He loved his grandkids, and I would have loved seeing him with them.

And then the blog's birthday... Not too much to say about it, but because I'm a statistics nerd, I was curious to see which posts have been read the most since the blog's launch on 8/1/10: