A year ago today, we were married! Surrounded by our friends and family, it was the most perfect day. However, that's not where my focus is today. Instead, I want to talk about what the year since that day has been like. After all that's the point, right? It's not the wedding, but the marriage that's important.
Shortly after the wedding and the honeymoon were over, Tom and I sat down and discussed what we wanted our life to look like one year in the future. We established a set of goals for our first year of marriage that were lofty and aggressive, and would require a lot of work and sacrifice from both of us to accomplish. We're not expecting to have such insane goals every year, but we wanted to build a foundation in our first year that would set us up for the future that we both want to build towards.
That being said, it was definitely a busy and productive year! In our first year:
- We moved out of the Cambridge condo into a place of our own, in the area we wanted to be
- Caitlin took (and passed) the fundamentals of actuarial practice exam 1
- We started some holiday traditions, including chopping down our Christmas tree
- We traveled a little bit, crossing off at least one place from our dream travel list
- Caitlin took (and passed) the fundamentals of actuarial practice exam 2
- We bought a house!
- We officially became a two car family
- Caitlin took (and passed) the construction and evaluation of actuarial models exam
Accomplishing the above tasks wasn't easy. There were a lot of long nights and weekends, sacrifices made, money spent on not so fun things like exam seminars, textbooks, and lawnmowers. And sure, there were also a few goals we set that we didn't meet. Tom would still like to find a new job, Caitlin fell short on her running goals, and we don't currently have a litter of corgi puppies (okay maybe that was only Tom's goal). But they wouldn't be goals if they were all easy to reach and guaranteed to happen.
Overall, we're in a great spot. We're happy, we're creating our life together, and we've got plenty of years ahead of us to work on everything else.
Rest assured that we're currently off celebrating this anniversary with all the pomp and circumstance that it deserves. It's been a long, wonderful, tiring, stressful, amazing and beautiful year. And there's no one else I'd rather have experienced it with.
Happy Anniversary to us!