30 days of gratitude #8

Today is not my wedding anniversary, but 5 years ago a certain man and I met for the first time. We met in a coffee shop and I will never forget the first time our eyes locked. He smiled. I smiled. It was history from there.

Travel, home ownership, marriage, a child, we've been through a lot. He's my partner in this life. Our days are not as carefree as when we first met, GOD NO. But our lives are just as rich. For me, there is something very sweet about having a hard day and knowing you get to go home and be with the people you love the most. 

Mike is a fine fella. He always does the dishes (he hates the way I load the dishwasher and I'm totally ok with that!) He is a terrific dad. He pretends to listen to my work stories. He lets me play my music most of the time. He makes me laugh. He is a quirky, adorable man.

We are a family. I'm grateful today (and every day) for my husband.

Love you, Mike!

The marriage, in the aftermath of child.

Really I think a large book could be written about what having a child does to a marriage. I'm just going to say, in my edited bloggy fashion, that it's hard. When you spend a large part of your childless relationship giving attention to your partner, and receiving it from said partner, it's wierd when suddenly there is a tiny little human that comes along and seizes all of that lovely energy. The sexiness fades. Nighttimes become the sacred time when all is quiet and the baby is down and you get to be ALONE. Alone with your sweatpants and Hanes Her Ways. (And maybe your bowl of ice cream and sex and the city rerun.) That is when your body is free and you are not being clawed by child. Not a time when you feel like tearing each others' clothes off if you know what I mean.

Marriage sort of of morphs into a tag team parenting approach, where one parent relieves the other, who relieves the other. And you feel grateful for the other, because without them life would be UTTER CHAOS. And yet sometimes you feel angry at them, and you do the ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE GOOD-FOR-NOTHING thing of comparing who does more and that is the worst approach ever but you STILL DO IT.
 
Mike and I celebrated a wedding anniversary yesterday. And I had a very sweet blog post I was going to write that required some recent pictures of us. As I was scouring the TONS of recent pictures of us, all of them except one have a certain (adorable) little girl in them, too. And that made me a little sad when I realized how much energy we DON'T put into each other. Sometimes it just feels impossible to. But actually I don't really believe that.

ANYWAY, we DID SOMETHING about all this over the weekend. This weekend our old nanny stayed at our house ALL NIGHT while Mike and I stayed at a hotel. Sure the hotel was local, but it was not here. Sure we woke up at 715 the next morning but the point was we COULD have slept in. Sure we had to pay an exorbitant sum of money to have a babysitter and a hotel within 15 miles of our home but suddenly that ridiculous sounding expense is WORTH IT. Ellie will be 2 in May and this is the first time we've ever been away from her all night. It felt healthy. And it felt really good to just have my husband along. It felt really great to just enjoy his company. And you know what, we had a BLAST. It was really, truly awesome.

The point: having a child is hard on a marriage, which I truly believe is somewhat inevitable. Having a baby makes you restructure and rethink ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING. It sends you on a little toddler tizzy but as you go reeling into the vast expanse of all things child you bring it all back around to him. Your partner. Your partner who is also in the same baby warp. You both at the end of the day have each other to share with, decompress with, and appreciate.

I love that husband of mine. I'm happy to be on this crazy journey of life with him. Hard times and all.

Us. (in third person)

Meet Mike. Mike is from Colorado. Mike works at the  University of Colorado. He likes to play trivia, watch movies and go hiking.

Meet Summer. Summer is from Maine. She went to nursing school at the University of Colorado. She likes to play boggle, the guitar, and to go hiking.

Mike meets Summer/Summer meets Mike. Things work. Turns out they work out GREAT. Life is fun together. Love comes very easy.

Summer thinks Mike is so groovy!

Mike and Summer buy a house. Mike and Summer get married. Mike and Summer have a baby.

(Ellie!)

After the baby arrives, Mike and Summer don't watch as many movies as before. Summer doesn't play the guitar like she used to. They don't go hiking as much. They have a lot of other, very grown up things going on.

Mike and Summer learn what it really means to be on a team.

Mike does the dishes. Summer does the laundry. Mike puts the baby to bed. Summer gives her baths. They give and take. They appreciate each other.

A lot has happened in their lives since they first met. But they try to remember, amidst the hard responsibility kind of stuff, to have fun together.

Summer thinks Mike is even groovier.

Happy Valentine's Day, Love.

The tireless rantings of supermom

Recently my mother came to visit. I greatly look forward to these visits because a)she's my mom and I love her, b)maybe, just maybe I can actually get a break from the little one and use grandma (aka Lala) as a distraction. Let's let Lala be the new toy! Plus, as a mom it feels GREAT knowing the strange person that's coming to visit actually really loves your kid. You know they do.

Enter small child. Yes she is intrigued by the Lala. Yes, she wants to look, to play, to touch, but only, ONLY if she is within arms, no FINGERS reach of her mother. That would be me. And what that means is that having a visitor, even though it IS my mother aka Lala and even though she loves her SO much and is all about PLAYING and BUYING her things and TALKING on her very sophisticated kid level, NONE of that takes away from the fact that she must, oh she must, have me along too. She must be sitting on my lap, NO kissing on my face, NO climbing on my back, NO sticking her finger in my ear (no I'm NOT exaggerating). Which, ahh, so sweet right? Hahaha! Well ok yes, sometimes it is sweet. But sometimes, say when I'm trying to STAND UP and simply WALK to oh I don't know, some object a mere yard away, it's not so fun to literally PRY my young child off of my legs. Literally pry. And in the prying you know that she's using you for balance so you pry yourself away and then the child falls (extra pathetically I might add) because she was LEANING on you! And you LET HER DOWN all because you were SOOOO selfish that you wanted to get up and get a glass of water? Change your shirt? Turn on the radio? HOW DARE YOU????

One day she will not want this and you will. One day she will not want this and you will. (This is my mantra, in case you were wondering).

Also recently we had some visitors that were not my mother but were in fact from Mike's side of the family, so obviously I wanted to have the house EXTRA clean so his family will think I'm EXTRA wonderful that not only do I have such a fabulous family but also a CLEAN and SPARKLY house! However leading up to this visit Mike was alone with the house. With the not-necessarily-dirty-but-could-use-a-good-how-do-you-do state that the house was in brings me to this: Men and women have very different ideas about what it means to have a clean house. (**this is a whisper***...cause when I say men and women what I really mean is Summer and Mike). Eh hem. The man's version of the clean house involves no sink full of dishes (yes!), no toys on obvious walking paths leading through the house (bonus!) and no leftover meal on the baby's chair (duh). The woman's version of cleaning the house is actually wiping off the counters. Picking up the amazing number of PILES of crap (books, mail, toys, etc etc etc etc etc). Laundry. Sweeping the floors. Mopping the floors. Getting the ring out of the toilet. Removing hair and unwanted body remains (ie fingernails) from the bathroom sink. Cleaning up the various piles of crap! (oh did I already say that? Well, there's a lot of those). Oh yeah and did I say wiping down the counters? Because I don't know how that one gets missed. That's the BEST PART about the picking up!

Ok ok ok maybe I'm exaggerating a bit (or maybe I should say exonerating because eh hem, he reads this blog!) but sometimes he, the man, actually gets the elbow grease off of the oven and mows the lawn and does very SEXY (oh my God so sexy) things like that. But the point of the rant is that one person's clean is another person's dirty. So there. We can all agree to disagree, right?

Anyway, right at this very moment the young child is sleeping and as all you moms know, sleep means "GO TIME". Which for me generally means write-a-blog-and-geek-out-on-facebook-for-an-hour-or-two. And how do I feel when the PRECIOUS naptime is over and I accomplished virtually nothing? Shitty. Guilty shitty, like oops I accidentally ate 4 pieces of cake kind of guilty shitty. So I'm thinking I don't want to feel that way today, and since we're only 30 minutes in to said nap, this is me signing off.

Kisses!

I married a mullet.

Oh that silly little husband of mine....

First, Mike decides to go with the full on moustache. He says a bunch of guys on his softball team are doing it and basically the whole team will be jinxed if he has to shave it. I actually forgot about it in all my hurried/franticness in getting ready for our family photo shoot...until I was driving to the shoot where I was meeting Mike. Then I remembered. I was like "Damn! Mike's got that friggen moustache!". Ergh!!

But now this!! Mike came into the living room the other day and declared that he wants to have a mullet now. A mullet. A freaking mullet. Now of course he's kidding, though he does have a tendency to resonate with mid-80's' memorabilia. I mean COME ON, Mike!

So I'm getting ready for the day and Mike just keeps looking at me with this wierd googley eyed stare. Finally I realize he's trying to get me to notice something. Finally I see what it is exactly that I'm supposed to be noticing.

Ergh!!! Truly this picture does not do the start up of his fine mullet justice. And of course this is on the day that we go to meet the family of my new friend that I made on the plane a couple weeks ago. I wanted to be like hi, this is my daughter Ellie and my husband, the Mullet. How do you do?

On another note, look at this sweet little photo I took of Ellie on our hike this morning. She's so cute. And I can tell you now she will not be sporting a childhood mullet, like I did.

Why I love my husband: a photo essay

a true test of love

The irritating beautiful thing about a marriage is mastering the art of compromise. I am a strong personality, I fully admit this. And basically I want what I want
, when I want it. And learning to yield from this and accept other people's (namely my husband's) opinions is not exactly my favorite thing to do. That said, this weekend was spent indoors, trying to make this house that feels made for midgets, feel NEW again. Answer to this dilemna? A massive, multi-room rearrange.

Rearranging is great, once finished. But getting there is a rough road. I want to do everything, and do everything now. No dilly-dallying. Get 'er done, so to speak. And I have clear visions of furniture placement that I really don't want to discuss, I just want executed. So on top of little mini squabbles and the visibly difficult time I have in stopping to listen to other's points of view (that I already have so perfectly figured out..c'mon!), rearranging also entails the in-your-face reality of how much shit you actually have. Then you and your loved one must make cases for various piles of crap. Maybe said loved one gets a little pissy that you put his Nike basketball sneakers in a Goodwill pile because you were convinced he wouldn't notice. Maybe you make a quick visit to the neighbors wearing a shawl circa 2002 so you can say you officially wore it in the last three years, and therefore not have to throw it out. Maybe there were a few bitter references (or at least thoughts) about the show "Hoarders". And on top of all that drama, we have an 8 MONTH OLD who needs oh so much attention. So one of us is baby to hip, usually me, directing traffic and inserting their very important opinions.

Rearranging is So. Much. Fun.

But I jest a bit. In spite of all of the annoyances, it is so fun to breathe new life into a stagnant space. Our house feels new again. I like being in it. And that's surely worth a weekend of hassles.

we survived the weekend.

Ok so answer me this? HOW are you supposed to properly use an air mattress with camping? I ask this because me and the fam went camping at, say 7000 feet or so, and though we thought we were well armed with our down comforter (hey, it's CAR CAMPING), we were utterly FREEZING at night. This was the first time we had used the air bed we bought, or, excuse me, air freezer. Little Ellie did just fine with her lambskin bed and snowsuit I made her wear. She peacefully lay in between mom and dad as we literally suffered through the night. We were So. Frigging. Cold. It was potentially the worst night's sleep I've ever attempted. But hey, we survived and it sure was pretty.


Soon after we get home Mike goes out to a buddy's to watch a game, comes home around 9 or so saying he didn't "feel so good". That was quickly followed by explosive diarrhea and projectile vomiting. Poor little hubby was S-I-C-K. After a fainting spell during another freakish bathroom session I decided to turn our living room into a scene from MASH. I called my good friend Jody over (another nurse) and we got him started with an IV and gave him about a liter of fluid, which I sort of had to Macgyver together with the fluids that we had between the two of us (flushes, sterile irrigation saline, etc). It's nursey lingo but point is, we brought that color back into his little white ghostlike face in no time at all. And I was quite proud of us I must say.



Notice the fluid hanging from the nail where the picture goes.

In other news the mouse remains. We set out traps with peanut butter, came home from camping and the peanut butter is mysteriously gone. But the trap remains set. This is clearly a very smart mouse so we have moved to glue traps. And truly every time I walk into the kitchen my heart sort of skips a beat as I check down at the glue bait. But that mouse seems to be gone. While I don't really like the fact that it can just come and go like that, I have to admit, in some perverse way, I do feel this wierd sort of bond with this mouse. You know, the whole cat and mouse game, like I sort of started liking it once I stopped being afraid of it. But I'm still keeping out the trap. I haven't changed that much.

dinner and a movie

Well hey guys, guess what I'm doing tonight?
I'm going on a date!

It's about time we had a little one on one time, just the two of us. You know we're all shotgun married, baby comes and rocks our world and we're like hello? Who the hell are you?

I love him, I do. But I'll just say that we need this.

A friend of mine came over today, with her little 6 week old baby, and we caught up and talked about babies and gooed and gaa'ed over our little ones and in the back of my mind I'm thinking, man, who'd of thunk I'd be here, actually enjoying this. Life is funny. In a split second it completely changes and you're forced into a new way of being meanwhile perhaps standing with your mouth open saying "but, but, wait....". Being a parent is really nothing like I thought it'd be. Except that I knew that I'd love her. And I do. So stinkin much.

So the big decision of the night is "The Hangover" or "Julie/Julia". I'm pushing for Julia but we'll see.....

This is what happens when your husband goes baby clothes shopping without you.

Sigh.

Happy Birthday to my favorite husband!

34 years ago this amazing and beautiful person was born. I couldn't love him more!

Tonight we're celebrating by going out to dinner. And yes we will have a babysitter! For a couple of hours anyway. Then I'm sure we will be more than ready to get back home to our awesome daughter, who is also a Gemini. Like her mommy and daddy! Look out world!!


Happy Birthday baby!

How to have a lovely wedding with little cost

Go to a pretty park.
Find a friend who is a pastor to marry you.

Ask someone you know to perform the music. (my mom)


Keep the wedding party very small...

But full of very wonderful people...............



Have great friends who will host your reception for you....

Make all your own decorations. Martha Stewart is very helpful here.

Make a friend who is a baker....

Write a pretty song to sing for your new husband...

But realize if you're pregnant you might have some trouble getting through it...

And most importantly, find the perfect person to marry.

I know I sure did.

I love you Mike!

the cheesiest has to be displayed SOMEWHERE!!

So for our little wedding I spent HOURS putting together this video montage thing. And you know, for so much effort, it just seemed like a darn shame for it only to have had 3 minutes of one viewing. So here it is, in all its bloggy goodness, for any (or no) blog readers to enjoy or laugh at.......

we did it.

Well folks, I'm officially off the market, a missus, a wifey, an old ball and chain.

Since I want to honor this great event with some great pictures, I will wait until I receive them to go into the details (I only have the few from my little non-pro camera). For now I'll just say that it was lovely and perfect, and simple and tasteful, and the perfect representation of who we are as a couple. Everything fell into place, just as it always does when it's meant to be. I feel blessed and happy.

Success!

After that terribly pathetic first scarf that I actually had the nerve to publish on here, I have to say that I'm pretty happy with this scarf. And thanks to Martha Stewart and a weekend tutorial from my mom, I actually knit a hat! It took me about 4 hours but I bet a super good knitter could breeze through this tutorial. And thanks mom for teaching me how to make a pom pom. Pom poms are beautiful ways to handle your decreasing deficits at the end of the hat! As you can see, Mike got a huge one.


And oh look, here's Mike again. He's reading my first ever bottle of antacids because my newest pregnancy symptom seems to be painful, searing heartburn!

But I digress.

you know I just love him

Tonight I felt like my head was going to split in two. I was nauseous and vomitous, my muscles ached, and I felt more than just sick from being pregnant. I just felt sick. When I was a kid and I used to get sick there was only one thing I ever wanted: strawberry ice cream. I don't know why. I don't ever eat it unless I'm sick. But tonight the only thing that sounded really good was strawberry ice cream. So, unasked, he puts on his shoes though it's dark and rainy, and heads to the store. And he comes back with this.

He's a keeper I tell ya.

too much to drink + hotel room = FUN