Where did you meet your husband?

This week is always a little more. It is a birthday and anniversary week, followed by another birthday next week.

A couple of weeks after we were discharged from hospital
in 2002.

This week we're celebrating our 17th wedding anniversary and the 12th anniversary of me and our younger son spending 20 days in a Japanese hospital. 

Our son doesn't remember those 20 days, because he was born in the middle of them, but I remember it all too well. Nonetheless, we'll celebrate his 12 years of life tomorrow after he comes back from his trip to Canberra.

Anniversary

Christmas morning 1993, Bali.

I've been trolling through some old photos that we keep here as opposed to Japan. I've scanned a few in so that geography doesn't matter. 

Periodically I find a way to drop into a conversation that I met my Australian husband in Indonesia. Not strictly true, we did meet earlier, if only in a short-term missions group as we prepared to go to Indonesia on a study tour. But it makes for good conversation! 

Possibly we did meet even earlier than that, but we don't really remember. We lived in '91 and '92 in sister/brother residential colleges (dorms) at the University of Queensland.

A group photo of the tourers. I know where a handful of these
folk are (three of us are in Japan), but the rest . . . 

We both have albums of photos from our trip to Indonesia in December-January '93/'94, and even some photos with us together. I didn't remember that we sat next to one another at Christmas Dinner in Bali back then in 1993!

21 years later we've been married 17 years (on Saturday). And it will be a busy anniversary. No quiet romantic dinners. We're dropping a teenager at the airport, presenting at a missions conference, and then flying to Melbourne. The luxury is that we're flying child-less. We haven't done that since our honeymoon! Fitting that we flew to Melbourne that time too.

Oh, and if you're wondering, there was no romance to ruin distract us on our mission trip. We were strictly warned off that track before we left Australia's shores by the single missionary leading the tour. Our romance began about 2 1/2 years later . . . and it is a long story.