Love your spouse challenge

I've been nominated twice for the Love Your Spouse challenge on Facebook, and I have yet to post anything. That's because I have a terrible memory, not because I don't love my hubby. You're supposed to post a photo of you and your spouse each day for a week; I can barely remember to take my vitamins in the morning so remembering to post an old photo for 7 consecutive days will likely be pretty impossible for me! So, I decided to do one big "Love Your Spouse" post for the blog instead, a one-stop "Victor and Rachel's Love Story" shop. Enjoy. :o)

^^This photo was taken in December 2008, about two months after we started dating. In fact, this might be our first official photo together. We crashed a friend's work Christmas party; this friend was Victor's friend Dottie, and I'm happy to say she is a very close friend of mine now, as well. I'm also happy to say we crashed a few more of her work Christmas parties over the following years.

^^This was taken on our first vacation together. We visited Cancun, Mexico in April 2009. This is still one of my favorite photos of us.

^^This was taken in Portugal in August 2010, at the Vilamoura Marina. This was my second visit to Portugal (the first being over Christmas 2009), and it was when I really fell in love with the Algarve. If you've never been to southern Portugal, I highly recommend you check it out! Also, I'm pretty sure I haven't been that tan since this photo was taken.

^^We stopped in Key West on our Christmas cruise in 2010. Little did we know that we would get engaged just off the coast (literally right behind us) a year and a half later!

^^This photo was from our engagement shoot in October 2012. Our friend Dottie (mentioned with the first photo) took our engagement photos for us. She's taken lots of photos of us and our family since.

^^From our wedding in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic on June 22, 2013. We've done many walks on many beaches together, but this one was my favorite. I loved every second of our wedding.

^^From our reception. I'm 99% sure that we were dancing to a Portuguese song here. We always have so much fun dancing together, and I know that I want all my future dances to be with this guy.

This October, Victor and I will celebrate 8 years of being together. We've gone through so many seasons of life together during those 8 years. For the first 3 years of our relationship, we lived an hour away from each other and spent nearly every weekend together. We moved in together in the summer of 2011, got engaged in April 2012, were married in June 2013, welcomed our first baby, Max, in May 2014 and our second baby, Louisa, in May 2016. We've lived in 3 homes together; we have traveled all over the world (Mexico, Ohio, Michigan, Portugal, Ireland, North Carolina, Dominican Republic, Bahamas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Georgia, England, France, Arizona...I feel like I'm forgetting some places); we've endured at least 3 major snowstorms, 2 hurricanes, and countless summer thunderstorms (the most eventful of which was last night when lightning hit our tree out front). It's amazing to look back on the past 8 years and reminisce about all we've experienced together. I can't wait to see what the next 50 years bring our way!