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My husband and I recently started meeting for lunch on Fridays. It is the only time during the week we can sit across from one another, share a meal, and have a meaningful conversation without the hundred interruptions that come along with parenting kids five and under. Getting this time together is a way of being intentional in our marriage. 

I look forward to this lunch all week. Friday mornings I am counting down the minutes to 11 o’clock. I get butterflies and I get a little anxious the closer the clock ticks toward 11. I feel like I am 21 again waiting for him to pick me up for a date.

Before heading to meet him, I always run to the bathroom to touch up my make-up and brush my hair. I want to look good when I see him. He has seen me with a week’s worth of unwashed hair, he has seen me covered in formula and spit-up, he watched me birth our babies never looking away—even when I thought it was too gross to look myself, and he has even cleaned up after me when I vomited all over the kitchen floor from the stomach flu.

But even after 15 years, I still want to put my best self forward for him—even though he loves me at my worst.

After 15 years I still have a racing heart on the way to meet him, I still feel like the girl who fell in love with him sitting on a porch swing so many years ago.

After all these years, I still get excited when he grabs my hand to hold it.

I still get flushed when he makes eye contact as I am talking. After a thousand conversations together it still feels like he never tires of my voice.

I know no matter what storms we pass through, I married the man who still makes me feel like the girl he met all those years ago. 

I married the man who will always give me butterflies when I see him.

Originally published on the author’s blog

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Stacey Tadlock

Stacey Tadlock is working wife, mother, photographer, writer, and cleft and infertility awareness advocate. She is married to her college sweetheart and they have two daughters. Stacey is the writer and creator behind Faithfully Failing where she provides encouragement through scripture and life lessons for those times in life you feel like you are failing in faith, marriage, or motherhood. She hopes through her words women are reminded that no matter your failures God’s grace covers it all. Every day is a new day to glorify Him and a new day to conquer yesterday’s failure with His unyielding grace

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