How I Chose the Name for my Blog

In honor of this new website, I thought today I’d share a little more background as to how it got its name. In case you’re wondering, yes, it does have to do with the song “Time in a Bottle” by Jim Croce.

In the summer of 2009, Curtis and I were between our sophomore and junior years of high school, and had developed a bit of a liking for each other. [read the beginning of our love story here!] 😉 One night, we were chatting on Facebook (okay so maybe it was most nights…) and he also happened to be watching Muppet videos on Youtube. He sent me the following video saying “This made me think of you, I think this should be our song.”

And so we agreed to make this “our song.” (well, not the Muppets version specifically, it was really more because of the lyrics 😉 ) The reasoning behind that was because we only saw each other twice a week, and all we wanted was to have more time to spend together. Curtis even sang it to me several times. We had no idea how much more applicable the song would be for us one day, we were just two high school sweethearts with big dreams of a future together.

Flash forward 3 years to 2012. We had been “officially” dating since the last day of 2011. We still had those big dreams of spending our lives together, but at this point, we were living 1600 miles apart. And to think we had it bad when we were only seeing each other twice a week – at this point, even twice a month would have been gratefully accepted! Still, we’d always try to make the most of whatever time we had together – whether that was while visiting each other or over Skype. We were always looking forward to the day we could stop saying goodbye and make up for all the time we spent apart.

On our wedding day, July 27, 2013, Curtis surprised me by singing this song to me in front of everyone at our reception. I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. By this point, we knew that in 2 years he would graduate college and begin his commitment with the Navy. Knowing that, we took advantage of every moment we were able to spend with each other over the next 2 years. I think this is one of the biggest advantages there is to being a military couple. Time spent together becomes so much more valuable, and we’ve learned how to spend the time we have together doing things we both love.

In October of 2012, I started this blog. Every other blog I’d ever started would have the name “Jessica’s Journal,” but I was ready to try something new. When I thought about my life and my relationship, I kept coming back to the lyrics of this song. I realized that this was what I’d want to do with a blog – is to write about how I spend my time, and to save up all our memories so we’ll be able to look back and cherish them forever.

My favorite lyrics in the song are “If I had a box just for wishes/and dreams that had never come true/the box would be empty except for the memory of how/they were answered by you.” God answered all my prayers and gave me more than I ever hoped for when He gave me Curtis. Just think of this blog as the box that’s filled with the memories of answered prayers. 🙂