A Truly Romantic Milestone

By Phil Roberts

Our five-year wedding anniversary was a special romantic milestone for my wife and me. Three years earlier, we began trying to have children, but not successfully. We had prayed, and cried, and sought fertility treatment--all without avail (later, the fertility treatment would catch up with us, but that's a different milestone). While taking a break from all of this in the fall of 2003, with zero hopes of a baby on our mind, we suddenly found that Lisa was eight weeks pregnant. We were shocked, stunned, and elated!

When March 20 rolled around, our fifth anniversary, Lisa was seven and a half months pregnant, and had recently left her full-time job so that she could stay home with the baby when she arrived. Friends of ours owned a beach house at Fernandina Beach (north of Jacksonville, FL) and invited us to spend a few days down there for our anniversary. We talked, hung out on the beach, read, ate good food and generally enjoyed the romance of just being with one another.

In hindsight, it was the calm before the storm (five kids would be born to us within 20 months of this milestone), and yet regardless of what lay just ahead, it was something like paradise. We're six months away from our ten-year anniversary now, and I know that it will all be different, but I'm hoping and praying that we'll be able to recapture just a little bit of the peace and romance that we enjoyed together in March of 2004!