…I believe the term for this is Money Shot!  Absolutely MY favorite wedding photo! After the wedding, we had an ‘illegal’ parade along Fillmore Street till we reached Snug Harbor (complete with bagpipes!)…For The Love of a Princess…The gangs all here….(actually, not…the ring bearers are missing…) Simple Gifts….

…(All wedding photos taken by Michael Falco –Thanks AGAIN!!!!)

…Mr. Tall Man…

…Gotta play with the new baby camera he bought me for Christmas

………Timmy is the most awesome of fathers….

…And Stepfathers…….

…And his laughter is pure joy. I love to lie in bed at night, and hear him laughing at something on TV, the laughter reaching my ears from the other end of the house…it just makes me melt….Best self-portrait EVER!He is a loving and dutiful son (who obviously came by his crazy honestly) and is now making sure he passes this trait on to the next generation.

…Sunshine and shadows……We are different…

Our first Christmas together, at Sharon Ave… I love this photo, although it is blurry…

…his heart is big, and full and overflowing with kindness and love……and he takes me to the beach!(…And he takes his cars on photo opps…. Top of the world….)

I am not the one who is the romantic… I am not a serious player at the game of romance, of grand gestures. That would be Timmy. For every score of poems he writes me, I can crank out a little ditty.

But this year we will not be together for our anniversary–He is on a long jag of OT and I will be meeting up with an aunt and some cousins for a birthday party out of state.

However, we celebrate our love every day. The day that our lives changed forever, and for the better, is today, 11 years ago.  It was a Saturday morning like this, and the weather on Staten Island was wonderful. We were surrounded by all the people who were important to us that day, and while a good number of them are no longer with us, I am so glad to have had that day…
Our ‘formal’ celebration this year will be in New Orleans in a few weeks. It is our annual honeymoon—(Our inaugural honeymoon was to Niagara Falls, Canton, Ohio for the Football Hall of Fame and then on to Lancaster, PA.)  Our gift to each other is this vacation; the opportunity to explore someplace, usually new to both of us.. Sometimes it falls near our anniversary. Sometimes it doesn’t.

For our first anniversary, we traveled to Paducah, KY to go to the quilt show there…. and wait ladies, before you all get excited about how awesome this man is, he drove to NYC first to pick up my best quilting buddy first!!!!!(We hit up the Chicago quilt show a few years later, but only as a duo….)

We have also gone to Key West, to Montana, to Quebec, back home to New York City, to Asheville, NC, to San Diego… and of course, in a pinch, any beach along the Eastern Shore from Cape Cod to Myrtle Beach…These are our gifts to each other…. a road trip, a fine meal in a strange town, the opportunity to create an entirely new set of memories, together.

So today, hunny, remember this…. I LOVE YOU…. and am so very proud to claim you as MINE….