Strengthening Our Marriage

Kelsey shared this blog post with me a few weeks ago about how a human’s overall lifetime happiness is at its lowest when they have young children. While this is sad, I also know from my life so far, it's absolutely true. Obviously I have a long way to go before we'll know for sure, and we don't even have experience with raising multiple children.

But the toll that having a child has taken on our marriage and our relationship has been enormous. I never envisioned parenting being this difficult, and while the good times far out shine the truly difficult ones, it all takes time, effort and energy away from our marriage.

The tension lies in the fact that we know that an example of a healthy marriage is the best gift we can give our children, yet there seems to be no time left in the day to work on a healthy marriage between changing diapers, building towers, filling up a sippy cup, running the store because we're out of applesauce and applesauce is the only thing in the universe that our toddler wants.

Again, the good times far outweigh the hard times, but parenting is serious business, and priorities get lost pretty easily in day-to-day routines.

Which is why we made an intentional decision to attend a marriage conference again this year. The last time we attended a Weekend to Remember was in the fall of 2011 when Kelsey was pregnant with Rooney.

The first time around, we worked through a lot of issues and felt charged and ready to take on parenting. It was hard work to talk through all the junk we had going on, but we came away feeling a lot stronger in our marriage.

And now, it's been about two and a half years since (where did the time go?) and I really felt that we needed to attend again. Not only for the marriage reminders, but also as a nice weekend getaway for us.

We originally planned on attending in Des Moines, but with a lot of March family birthdays, the weekend didn't work for us. But, thankfully spring break and gracious Aunt Kar-Kar and Uncle B were able to take Rooney in for the long weekend while we scurried away to Omaha.

Double bonus because we got to attend the conference and explore a new city at the same time.

Great conversations, great food and shopping were just the thing we needed.

Over the next few weeks (or months) we hope to post some quotes and nuggets that we took away from the conference. Like this quote (not sure who it's from... I googled it and couldn't find it. The speaker said it was Robert Louis Stevenson):

Learn to make the most of the best times and the least of the worst times.

The best part about the Weekend to Remember conferences is the variety of speakers. This being our second time, I really appreciate getting different perspectives on the same material. We were blessed to hear from some very wise people. One of the couples has a dozen kids. Can you imagine the parenting wisdom they have?!

If you're looking to rekindle the flame in your marriage, we would highly recommend checking out a Weekend to Remember conference near you. You can get half off the price by clicking here and using the group name WORDSOFWILLIAMS.

How do you keep your marriage top of mind?