We three are family.

Today as I type this I celebrate 28 years of marriage and I thought today is a perfect day to introduce Andrew.

Andrew is all I ever wanted in a man and more. His integrity, honesty and loyalty can be relied on 100%.

As many of us walk down the aisle of a church to be married we think, and we hope we know; this that we are vowing will be for life; a loving, healthy, productive life and always together as husband and wife. Andrew and I have been blessed with being in love every day.

I met Andrew when I was eighteen, and he was twenty-three. One of our early conversations that he initiated fired me up. He told me he had “seen my sister” as a means of saying “he had seen someone who looked like me”. I rounded on him and asked with some fierce loyalty to my sister as I recall “well; was she with our mother?” to which he replied, “no she was alone”.

Poor Andrew, he copped a spray from me about how I have a sister with Down Syndrome and she is never without our mother or myself. Just to give him an extra shove off and to make it clear he wasn’t for me, I finished with something to the effect of “and when our parents can no longer care for her she will live with me and no one will ever stop that from happening if it ever needs to”

To which my soon to be boyfriend replied that his family also had a down syndrome little boy who had died a few years earlier, and he understood my need and desire to care for my sister rather than put her into care and if I felt or acted any differently about my sisters needs and future he would think so much less of me.

Wow – correct answer. So yes that initiated our first date.

How time flies, Wendy adores Andrew her “brother in law” and yes now he is happily living out the promise and understanding he gave me even before our first date; Wendy now lives with us and has done now for almost five years.

One of our staff asked me the other day how did I know Andrew was the one for me. I replied the day that I chose to do something for him over what Wendy wanted I knew. (what is a little sad I now don’t recall what the actual thing was I just know it was a simple thing and that it happened – like going out with him instead of taking her for a drive along the coast for ice cream)

Wendy, Andrew and I now live together as a family and it is lovely. Andrew sits beside both of us at the dinner table, and when we watch a movie Wendy loves to sit on the sofa between us.

Each night when she goes into her bedroom to sleep Wendy calls out “Good night sister, good night brother in law – and once the door is closed – “I love you”. But she cannot and will not say “I love you” if we are in front of her.