“Enjoy your marriage first,” I'd often hear whenever I expressed to my desire to start a family shortly after our wedding.

“A baby will change everything - your marriage will be over,” I was even told.

Well, here I am, one whole year post-baby, two years post-marriage, and more blissfully happy than ever before.

How is that possible, you ask?

It all starts with a little thing called perspective. Add in a bus-load of gratitude and stir gently. Don't forget to throw in a heaping amount of realness to the recipe, and you have yourself exactly the opposite of what you'd expect.

With all of that, my marriage is everything I didn't think it would be since this baby entered our lives.

My courtship with my husband started out extra passionate, incredibly fiery, and now that I think back on it- completely unsteady. We gave ourselves three whole months to get to know one another before I said yes to his proposal, and before ever having gotten to know life past the dating stage, we were planning a wedding.

Our first year together was spent in that haze of infatuation, totally clouded by emotions, passion, and sheer shock that we had found each other. It was a whirlwind year of fancy restaurants, parties, long days on the beach followed by longer nights out on the town. I thought we'd live this way forever- and I could not have been more wrong.

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