9th Wedding Anniversary

Yesterday my husband and I celebrated 9 years of marriage!  What a road it has been.  We've had wonderful highs, and terrible lows.  It hasn't always been easy, but I'm thankful that in our hard times, we've chosen to be stretched instead of broken, and that we hopefully stand stronger because of it.  We were engaged just three months after we started dating, and we were married one year and one day after we got engaged.  So, it occurred to me that now, we have been together a decade.  Feels weird to say that.  That thought made me wonder what percentage of marriages last 10 years...even though we have another year to go for that.  I found this article from Web MD interesting.  It discusses some of the factors in marriage, such as education, whether your parents were married, etc.:  Which Marriages Last 10 Years

I also found it interesting that some of the articles I found said that divorce rates drop after the 10-year mark.  I wonder what it is about that first decade that is so difficult?  For those of you who have been married for at least 10-years...what year was most difficult in your marriage?  Your first year?  Did you have the "7-year-itch?"  There were a few different stress points in our marriage so far, but for me, I would have to say our first year together was probably the roughest.  Merging two lives, two different opinions of how to do things, and living away from both of our families for the first time (2+hours from mine, 1.5 hours from his) was probably the most difficult.

With yesterday being the mid point in our week, that means we had Wednesday evening activities at church.  Since my Wednesday's include prep for church that evening I was looking for something quick to feed the kiddos for lunch.  That is usually a good time for me to bring out my sandwich maker.  Do you have one of these?  Ours was given to us a wedding gift--think it was $10 at the time, but it is still kicking, and oh...the many, many sandwiches it has made.  :)  If you do not have one I highly recommend it.  They now range in price depending on how fancy you want to get but the most basic was around $15.  You throw in some bread...whatever filling you desire and let it do the work.  In about 3 minutes you have lunch.  You can also forget the bread and fill it with pancake or cake batter to make up yummy treats.  Yesterday I had American cheese, and some left over chives I put into the sandwiches, and my kids devoured them.  I don't know what it is about those little triangle-shaped pockets of cheese that takes an ordinary grilled cheese and makes it something my kids are much more interested in, but I'm glad they're that enthusiastic about them.  Here is what they looked like before I separated the triangles: 

What are some of your go-to quick lunches?