In 2010…

In January, I started officially dating a guy who had emailed me through my old blog . We had met a few weeks prior and thought we would just be friends. But his charm and personality won me over. Throughout the month, we played the “dating” game, where we wouldn’t return each other’s calls or texts and we both kept trying to play hard to get. I finally got sick of it and told him that if he didn’t start asking me out more than 48 hours in advance, I was going to make other plans. That evening, he showed up at my house with flowers, chocolate and cheese–swoon goes my heart. We spent most of the weekend together and two days later, on January 31st, I told my mom I had met the man I was going to marry.

In February, I debated about whether I should continue dating this guy. Even though I really REALLY liked him, I knew he would be leaving in the fall for the Air Force.  On Super Bowl Sunday, we both finally let our guard down, and after one too many drinks, we told each other how we felt. Eric said: “I can see myself falling in love with you.” Two weeks later, he met my whole family, and that night he told me he loved me.

March rolled around and we went on a St. Patrick’s Day pub crawl on the 6th. That was the night we decided it would be a brilliant idea to get married because then we could move in together (I didn’t want to live together before marriage) and we would have a few months as newlyweds before he left for Air Force training. In the next two weeks, I met his parents for the first time, he officially proposed, he finally told his parents that he enlisted for the Air Force and, oh by the way, we were getting married…in two weeks. A week later, both our parents met each other for the first time.

On April 2, 2010, we were married. We honeymooned at a local vineyard, and moved into our first apartment together on April 7th. A week later, we went up to San Francisco to move all his furniture from storage and move it into our one-bedroom apartment. We celebrated my 26th birthday at the end of the month with a romantic dinner. The last week in April I found out my boss was taking a leave of absence but even that couldn’t put a damper on my newlywed bliss.

In May, we finally sat down to look at our budget and realized we were in big trouble. We were spending more than we were making, and we found out our credit card debt was a lot more than we had originally thought. This was our first attempt at budgeting. But that didn’t stop us from going to Las Vegas for a blogger meet-up and from welcoming Bentley into our home after some friends of ours offered to give him to us. And our family of two quickly became a family of three…

In June, I realized my new boss was making my life hell and decided I needed to find a new job. I also realized I was more in love with my husband than the day I married him and couldn’t picture life without him. After several discussions, we mutually decided it would be best for our relationship for him to stay here and try out his luck on becoming a firefighter. We decided we would move to San Francisco so he could go to paramedic school. The job hunt began.

By July, I had applied to several jobs in northern California and turned down interviews after realizing I didn’t want to be working at any of them. I was depressed about my current job and Eric and I were arguing more and more about finances. I had always been good with money and I hated being broke. By the time our trip to Kauai with his parents rolled around, we both needed a break from the financial stress. A vacation was exactly what we needed to reconnect and to decide what our priorities were.

In August, we took another look at our priorities and decided not to move to San Francisco. Eric put all his effort into finding a job that would further his career, and landed his EMT position on his first interview! I got serious about paying off our debt and decided to end my old “single girl” blog and start this blog to chronicle our new life together. As luck would have it, there was a fire in our apartment complex that Eric ended up putting out. A local fire chief saw the story in the paper, and recommended Eric for the local fire academy! He was accepted into the August 2011 class.

We struggled financially in September when Eric was only working part-time during training for his new job, having to pay an extra week’s worth of rent because of an overlap during our move, and an unexpected $400+ car repair. But we managed. We sold items on Craigslist, Ebay,  and through consignment stores, held a garage sale and reigned in our spending. By the end of the month, we had moved into our new–and less expensive!–shack home.

In October, Eric and I were experiencing growing pains. From housework to budgeting to work schedules, our relationship struggled. We decided to implement husband-wife days to spend some quality time together out of the home, and also re-focus our priorities. They were a huge success and since then, we’ve gone to Disneyland, went Christmas-tree shopping, and had mini spa days–all in the name of husband-wife days! I had had three job interviews and been turn downed by two of them. I thought I was going to lose my mind…

We spent November watching our money and wondering how we were going to afford the upcoming Christmas presents. We had our first Thanksgiving together and celebrated our one-year the-day-we-met anniversary. We made one of the biggest purchases to date–a flatscreen TV and Blu-Ray dvd player. But it was worth the happiness factor. Toward the end of the month, I found out I landed an awesome job. I finally felt like life couldn’t get much better…

Until December, when we paid off our credit cards.

In 2010, I got married. We adopted our furry child, Bentley. I landed an amazing unbelievable job where everyone is friendly. And we paid off our credit cards. 2010 will go down as one of the best years in my life. I can’t wait to see what 2011 has in store for me.

Photo credit: Luigi Morante.