The glasses were the first to go. That first apartment didn’t have a dishwasher and barely had enough space on the counter for one drying rack onto which we precariously stacked entire dinner parties worth of dishes. Dinner parties incongruous with our tiny space, lack of central air, and an overzealous smoke detector that left guests frequently waving dishtowels at the ceiling while I finished dinner. Dinner parties thrown in the haze of newlywed life with glassware that was pristine and new and doomed to shatter when it tumbled from the pyramid of drying dishes.

The plates and bowls likewise experienced a winnowing. There was the year we hosted Thanksgiving in our microscopic apartment only for the sink to back up and James to spend two solid days washing dishes by hand after it stopped shooting black sludge upward. Plates break in the melée of life, and one year for Christmas my mother convinced one of my friends to sell me the remnants of her identical set to replace my own losses, the style long since discontinued.

The silverware has since followed suit, though its disappearance is more of a mystery. We have three spoons left- three. Are the children digging an escape route in the back yard? Are they hoarding them like a strange Victorian currency? Or most probably, has my zeal for chore mastery and requirement that even young children bus their dishes after meals carried the casualty of spoons heading out with the trash? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that the forks are next for extinction and I panic when I see Maddie flee to the backyard with her fists full of cutlery.

There are, of course, the dictates of style to consider. When you walk the aisles of Bed, Bath, and Beyond as a fresh faced 24-yr old engaged couple, you have utter certainty in how you want your life to look and thus, what curtains and pillows and sheets will please you forever. You are wrong, but it wouldn’t help to know it then. You need that certainty, that giddy optimism that yes, you will always love the orange ikat curtains, in order to face the many unknowns that will come. But slowly, as you grow and age and change together, you look around and realize that some things don’t fit anymore. The towels fade and the pillows loose their fluff, and you are ready for them to move out and make way for the next stage of what you want your life to look like together.

The pristine wedding gifts were like the early habits too. The Listerine strips on the bedside table to give the illusion of sweet morning breath. The years – yes, YEARS – of our marriage where I was a well rested wife capable of sleeping till 9 every morning because of my graduate school schedule, and the subsequent effects on my person that come with 9+ hours of sleep a night. The meticulous cleaning schedule we followed every Saturday and the movie marathons we could have any night of the week. The months of eating only Paleo gourmet meals and the spontaneous travel. The way my hair was coiffed more days than not and we were able to maintain pretenses of people that, perhaps we were, but could not remain.

Some things moved in, rather than out. We finally had space for James’ beloved toaster oven once we moved to our second apartment and he had visions of endless bagel pizzas that were quickly supplanted with reality. I make cinnamon toast in that toaster oven now, toast that is stripped of it’s crust to satisfy the whims of the tiny people who would turn up their noses at bagel pizzas (“too hot” “too cheesy” “not pizza”) in what can only be described as a deep failure of our parenting. When had our first Thanksgiving in our house (a HOUSE! With a driveway! Admittedly too narrow to be used after we scraped up our vehicle and learned our lesson but STILL.), my parents rolled into town with all our wedding china. It had sat dormant for years, a tower of boxes in my parents’ attic reminding us that we had not yet arrived. And now it was here, stunning plates on which to feed my family and welcome them to a space that was truly ours.

It’s been 11 years this weekend. 11 years of slowly replacing the things we brought into marriage. Not everything, as some things endure, age well, prove timeless. But many things have slowly broken down, the product not of poor quality, but of daily use. The result of a life that has been so fully lived for more than a decade.

You never think about all this when you are scanning things at Macy’s, planning out kitchens and bathrooms. It seems impossible that the wedding gifts will break, will tarnish, that the towels will fade and rip. It seems unfathomable that your shiny presents will one day resemble faded belongings of your parents. But they do. They are, after all, just things, albeit things around which a life was built.

11 years of shattered glasses, faded towels, and broken plates. Of curtains that moved out and china that moved in. Of plans changing, our family evolving, all of us learning. Of losing little bits of the life we thought we were building for one that is so much better– even if it only has three spoons.

PS: 1st Anniversary post (why most of you started reading tbh)/ 2nd Anniversary / 3rd Anniversary / 4th Anniversary… and then we had kids and blogging slowly dwindled.