Dear Husband: Wooden Anniversary
Dear Husband,
You know I thought you were just a summer fling when we met, right? That I thought you were kinda cute but needed a haircut and some new shoes? That I was shocked we were still dating when school started back? It seemed every time we had a date, I saw us lasting just a little longer. By November I was head over heels in love with you. I was thinking there was no way in hell I was moving to D.C. the next summer without you. But my future career with the senator! Grad School! What should I do? Well luckily the Senator had faithfulness issues, lost the election he was running on family values, and the decision to stay where I was for Grad school was made for me.
Fast forward a year to an insanely humid New Orleans night. You had been acting strange all day, you would not talk to me, and seemed …..distracted at best. I thought for sure you had drug me all the way down there to break up with me. I was heart-broken. Turns out you just were trying to get up the nerve to propose! ( I don’t think I should ponder too hard why you were so nervous.) Of course I said yes.
Fast forward almost another year to another hot and humid night, (And rainy….and tornadic…. and muddy), I was not nervous, just glad the wedding was nearly over. I thought about each vow before I said them. I was in this for the long haul, because I loved you, and knew you loved me. But looking back, I was wrong.
I thought what I felt then was love. I loved being with you, I trusted you, I knew I wanted to be with you forever, but compared to now; It was nothing. In the last five years I have learned what love is. You have taught me love is having you help me with my statistics course. Love is driving me to job interviews, in towns we knew nothing about. Love is looking me in the eyes and calming a panic attack better than any SSRI. Love is trusting my gut feelings. Love is laying the flooring I wanted piece-by-piece. Love is getting me Frosted Flakes in the middle of the night. Love is holding my hands and crying during The Son’s birth. Love is letting me sleep in Saturday mornings, even though you got up with the baby three times the night before. Love is holding my hand while we pray. Love is fifty-hour work weeks so I can stay home, going to school, doing homework, housework, and church work, and still making time to go on picnics with your family. Love is the time in the early morning before the alarm goes off, when it is just us, not quite awake, not quite asleep, when I thank God for showing me this kind of love. I love you, and hope to one day be able to show you the way you show me daily.
Happy Anniversary.
The Wife
Filed under The Husband | Comments (6)Friday’s Watch it or Whine: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Alternate Title: I should have taken my suspension of disbelief booster shot before we went.
Warning: if you have not seen it, and you don’t like spoilers then move to the next post!
Seriously, keep reading and you will find out why I was disappointed.
Okay, you can’t say I didn’t warn you!
I have always loved Indy, I love everything about all three of the other movies, especially his whip yielding. Has it really been 19 years since I saw The Last Crusade with my parents? I tried to find a picture of myself as Indiana Jones for Halloween when I was eleven but no such luck. I was super jazzed to go see Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, even if the title did sound like a J.K. Rowling reject. It started out good, I rolled my eyes at him surviving a nuclear blast, I giggled at the smashed up box of the Ark of the Covenant ( a good foreshadow of the return of Marian), I instantly loved Cate Blanchett as an evil communist. I found Shia Labeouf labeoutiful, even if he is seven years my junior. The setting in Peru was stunning, I thought the whole concept with the Mayans, and the skulls, and natives and everything were spot on. I loved the return of Marian and the whole family aspect of the movie (An adventuring family? Rock on Incredible style.) So I am only pointing out good things right? I liked the movie right? Wrong.
Why not? ALIENS!! Not like from across the border, but from like outer-space. I do not like Sci Fi! I have tried it with a mouse, in a house, with a goat, on a boat, and I STILL DO NOT LIKE ALIEN MOVIES Sam I Am. And this movie was chock full of them. They even had a space ship. Gah! Me no likey. Stupid George Lucas, doesn’t Star Wars have enough Aliens for you? Could you not have left my Indy alone? Anyway, it had good points, but it is definitely my fourth favorite Indiana Jones movie.
Filed under Time Suckers, Watch it or Whine | Comments (7)With a jump and a roll, off he goes.
The Son has been taking Toddler Gymnastics this Spring and he LOVES it. His favorite parts are the girls, but he loves all of the rolling, jumping, swinging, and balance beaming as well. His last class was this week, swim class starts week after next. If you are wondering if gym for toddlers is a waste of time, and money, I could not disagree more, seriously go check it out for your kids. Or put it in your to-do file right after get married and have children, ya know, whichever.
Here is The Son sitting on his dot watching Miss Trish show him how to do something.
Here is The Son waiting his turn to swing over the foam pit.
Here he goes!
I am ready Miss Trish! (isn’t Miss Trish the perfect name for a gym teacher? Like a piano teacher named Miss Melody.)
WHEEEE!
Climbing out of the pit and on his way to the slide.
That was awesome! What is next!
Vault front rolls!
And back rolls from the vault!
Trampoline time!
Ommf. The mat at the end is his favorite.
Sliding down from the trampoline.
Stretch and rolls on the ramp mat.
Yeah! Best somersault of the year!
We finish with a celebratory ice cream cone, of course.
Filed under Parenting for Dummies, The Son | Comments (2)Huckabitching
Things that have happened to make me want be all stabby this week:
1.The Husband and I go to breakfast yesterday morning without any toddlers, The lady behind us proceeds to CLIP HER FINGERNAILS and use RACIST SLANG while we are eating. Romantic background music it was not.
2. My family put about 30 hours into getting a really awesome, moral, kind, smart person ( and member of our church) elected yesterday. He came in third. Out of three.
3. In exactly four days I will look like a cross between Bert and Groundskeeper Willie. My eyebrow lady has done up and quit. QUIT! And did not leave a forwarding address! I have endured years of having her smoking odor hover directly over my face because she was just THAT good. Damn.
4. And on that smoky note, people who smoke in front of mass groups of children, like at the park, next to the story time door at the library, or the worst? WITH A CHILD IN THEIR UTERUS!! Who does that still? Don’t they know better? Really?
5. The fence people that got my fence 90% done and then left, without saying when they were coming back! Did I mention that The Dog is still at my parent’s house?
6. I dropped my camera and it is falling apart now. And I can’t afford a new one, at least not the one I REALLY REALLY want.
7. The New Kids were on the Today Show, and they were old. And although Joey was still the hot one, he really needed to hang up “Please Don’t Go Girl”. I will not be going to that concert.
8. And finally the odor in my kitchen. It is …putrid? Pungent? Stanky? And it is The Husband’s turn to clean it.
Twack. Twack. Twack. Ouch. Banging my head against the desk did not help. I think I need to take a nap for about a week. Something…good? I guess? happened today. My counseling center called me and asked if they could bump me for someone else, apparently they feel I am the least crazy of her patients. I told her to just cancel my appointment, I don’t really think I need to go anymore. It is very comforting to know they are there if i need them, hopefully I won’t.
Here have some pictures of The Son, he brightens the suckyist of weeks.
Yowza! This is not supposed to be a decorating site!
I got more emails about decorating questions from this post than anything else I have ever written about! Most of them were about The Son’s room, so by popular request, here are the details.
The sheets, crib skirt, quilt, one of the pillows, and the rug are all called Baby Boats by Pottery Barn Kids, they were from the spring ‘06 collection, but I found some on eBay. We have the bumper too, but it has been in the closet since he was born because we were terrified of SIDS. I plan on doing something (a quilt?) with it some day. The Husband bought the life ring the day we found out he was The Son and not The Daughter, he got it from HSN! The FFIL made the toy chest, and I painted it and added the Oh Buoy. Because I like puns. A lot. The crib is called Jasmine by Delta and is from Baby Depot, it was so not expensive. Shelves are el’ cheepo from Lowes that we already had, I just painted the brackets to match the room. The main paint color is called Spa Blue from the Lowes American Collection. Carpet, is..uh, I have no idea, My Mom and Dad bought it for us. The framed boat water color paintings were a gift from my SIL’s mom, who painted them.
I stenciled the scripture, paddle and buoys with stencils bought from here. The lamp was broken and in the trash waiting to go out at a furniture store. I saw it, they gave it to me, The Husband fixed it, and I bought a little boat from Hobby Lobby and glued to the base. The sailboat pillow was made by my mom. The Futon was The Husband’s from forever ago, and instead of a futon cover, there is just a cheap red fitted sheet from Wal-Mart on there. The end table is from the goodwill and it (and the dresser, and the toy chest) is painted True Blue from the Lowes American collection, again. You can tell where we shop!
The Roman shade is again made by my super talented Mom, and MMIL found a round mirror at an outlet somewhere, and The Husband just nailed rope stolen from my Dad’s garage in a coil around the edge. I use cheap sand buckets to hold board books so The Son can get them and (yeah right) put them away himself. I painted Once upon a time on a wooden bucket for his ever growing collection. The Frames are from the dollar store (that was the day I got flashed by a psycho when I was eleventy billion months pg!) and just spray painted them. In them are old pictures of our family in nautical scenes. ( The Husband’s grandmother in her Hubby’s Naval suit, my Mom feeding seagulls at the beach, my grandfather in a boat as a child, etc.)
Here is detail of the drawer pulls, they were one of our only splurges, and really make a huge difference to the used furniture (this dresser was JHJ’s as a child). I slapped a changing pad on it and never bought a fancy changing table.
I saw a super cute growth chart at Pottery Barn Kids that I loved and was like 90 bucks. The Husband bought this paddle for eight dollars at Wal-Mart and I stenciled “anchors aweigh! How much did The Son grow today?” on it. Boats on the top shelf have been given to us or bought on vacations. The Kermit was The Husband’s as a child.
My favorite part of the whole room is the clouds on the ceiling. Every cloud was painted by a family member or very close friend. We have clouds from all of our parents, brother’s, SIL, Grandmother, cousin, CAT, Tark, even the Dog (quite a story how we did that!). Cloud was one of The Son’s first words. I brought them down to the tops of the walls and it adds a lot of dimension. There is no picture of it, but the fan in the room has a yellow ring around the light fixture, so it looks like the sun, the clouds go away from the center of the room. I love looking at them and telling The Son who painted each cloud.
Here is my FFIL painting his cloud.
Altogether we think we only spent about five hundred dollars doing the whole room. We splurged on the bedding, (MMIL bought the boat rug), and the drawer pulls. Every thing else we made, found, or repurposed. I hope this answers all of your questions!! I will email you personally for the questions about the other rooms.
Filed under The Son, Time Suckers | Comment (1)Amazed is too small a word.
The Son does something everyday that has me in awe of this tiny human. How is he this smart? How is his little body so perfectly formed? What did we do to deserve him? Give us an example of his daily wonderfulnesseses (that is too a word! shutup!) you say? I will give you two.
Just as I was getting him ready for bed, we were lying next to each other in our bed. He had finished nursing, was all snuggly in his shark jammies, but was not quite asleep. I was so overcome by emotion for this child that I started to pray out loud while holding him close. I said, “God” at some point and he stopped me, “Gawd, Mama?” “Yes, do you know who God is?” Okay, this next part y’all are so going to think that I am making up, but THIS IS TOTALLY TRUE, not even exaggerated. He pointed to the ceiling, “Gawd tere. ’s Daddy.” I was flabbergasted so I asked again, “Who is God?” “Gawd Daddy tere.” (pointed up) We finished praying together and he said, “Amen, Nigh-Nigh Mama” and patted my back. Where did he learn that? I have not taught him about heaven, or that God is our father yet, and The Husband says he has not either. So, yeah. Wow! Is he just a sponge and picked it up at church? Or does he just know? If so, talk about faith booster shot for grown-ups. At least this grown-up.
The second thing that he did is much less spiritual, and more, um, we shall go with earthy. He peed in his own hair! I put him down for a nap, he went to sleep, and then woke up crying about ten minutes later. I went in his room and his diaper was on the floor, not a first there, and his hair was soaking wet and reeking of pee. All I can figure is that he had taken off his diaper, fell asleep on his back, and when he had to pee, um, bits and pieces stood up, and gravity did the rest. I slapped a new diaper on him and put him back to bed. Bad mommy, right?
So what has/have your little ones done to amaze you?
Filed under The Son | Comment (1)It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, part 2 of 3.
OH YEAH! I totally forgot that I never gave you part 2 or part 3 of this post! Sorry about that. So when we last left we had just bought a severely ugly house. REALLY, REALLY ugly. We worked…. We cleaned…. We painted…. We sanded…. We bled…. We sweated…. We cried…. And now for the afters. I tried my hardest to take the pictures from the exact same angle.
BEFORE
AFTER
BEFORE
AFTER
BEFORE
AFTER
BEFORE
AFTER
BEFORE
AFTER
BEFORE
AFTER
We still have a lot that we want to do, notice there are no pictures of the bathroom here. But I still have not told you the best part of the neighborhood! Stay tuned for part 3.
Filed under lexapro lexplains it | Comments (3)