Year One.

I could not ask for a better person to share forever with. Happy Anniversary to us.

DearBff,

You are such a breath of fresh air.....even if its only getting together for a few hours after work. That's the beauty of our friendship, the amount of time spent together doesn't matter, as long as it happens from time to time. Don't get me wrong here....there are days where I wish I wouldn't have relocated almost an hour away, but I was never set on staying in our hometown, and we really are only a phone call/45 minute drive away.

Don't let people who are drama-filled and negative pull you down, but perhaps remind them its their life and they can choose to either deal with things and move on or dwell and be miserable.

Did you ever think we'd both be married in 2010? It's crazy to think about, but I wouldn't have it any other way!

Until next time, keep on livin, l-i-v-i-n!

ps-I'm sure everyone and both the mothers have began asking about babies, I'm cool with whenever, since you know I love me some other-people's-babies :)

Lack of Words.

I don't have many words lately. Shocking I know.

I feel like I babble on and on too often about where I am going, and what's wrong and blah blah blah and I needed a break from all that self-reflection; some time to just be. It is not an easy task for someone who is constantly doing something, even if the something is worrying about x, y and z.

It seems to be working for the most part. I've been walking in the evenings after work, so I have someplace to go, something to be doing, something productive. I made it out 5 out of 7 days last week and I'm shooting for 6 this week.

Our one year wedding anniversary is coming up at the end of the month. I am hoping we can keep up good spending habits until then to go to a nice dinner at a local seafood place to honor our Florida honeymoon we took last year. Originally we had planned on going back for that week, but life happened and now we are going in February. I'm excited we'll be getting away from cold Ohio for a week, even if its still approximately 200 days away. Time seems to slip away much faster with each passing year of my life, so 200 days doesn't seem like such a long time anymore.

I feel like I almost have my head on straight again for the first time in a while and it is nice.

Words on Weddings.

Tomorrow is the opening day for my 2010 Wedding Season. It will be the first wedding I"ve attended since we got hitched back in August. Before I was married (and actually before I even met my husband) I discovered weddings make me cry. At least, when I know the people well, which is the case of EVERY wedding I have this year. I really hope I can keep my shit together at Bff's wedding in May, since you know, I'm the Matron (uggggghhhh I really don't like that word) of Honor and blubbering like a baby as the vows are being said would probably be mortifying. I'm thinking some respectful, joyous tears would be perfect, but we'll see how that goes.

I didn't cry nearly as much as anticipated at my own wedding. My eyes were dry as a bone when my husband and I did our pre-ceremony pictures (whereas he was quite surprisingly weeping...it was so endearing), I had one moment walking down the aisle, and a bit of a moment during my vows, but nothing major. I save those for other people's weddings I guess. Oh and once we were in Florida, the night after the wedding and I got on Facebook (we are nerds and don't leave home without our MacBook) and forgot I had changed my name on their the night of the wedding, I burst into tears, happy-yet-sad, exhausted tears.

Now, to make the husband dance with me or not tomorrow...that is the question :)

Ghosts.

I've only had one real heartbreak in my life. Then I dated a bunch of losers for short time spans, then I quit dating all together, then I met my husband. It's pretty cut and dry when it comes to my relationship past.

I always take pride in how relatively good our relationship has been and continues to be. No, it isn't perfect, but we really try to keep it on the good side of things. We haven't had a huge fight since we got married and to date we've only had a handful of serious arguments. We get along well.

Since things have been serious, I have had the same quasi-reoccurring dream. It is never the exact same situation, it usually varies as to what is going on with our lives at that given time, but it always ends with Husband telling me he's not happy and this is not working and he's leaving. It is always completely from left field and there is no discussion about things. Sometimes I realize it's a dream and sometimes I don't. Either way, it always leaves me with a very bad taste in my mouth when I wake up.

This is exactly how my one heartbreak went, many years ago, when I was a mere 19 years old. It sucked, but I recovered. I never really thought it scarred me all that much because with time I gained wisdom and often joke about how I don't even know what I was thinking dating him in the first place, let alone getting so in over my head about him. I guess I should give the break up more credit, since it's still haunting me, periodocially through really vivid, awful my-husband-is-leaving-me-for-no-reason dreams.

I had a very, very busy weekend, with my bff's Bridal Shower on Saturday and my sister's Baby Shower on Sunday. I found out this morning I slept walked last night, which I've only done once or twice in my whole life, I was very tired to say the least. When I woke up, I decided it was a good idea to sleep a bit longer and come into work around 10 or 11. It's Spring Break and my head boss is out for the week, so not a big deal. Husband left about 8:30, coming in and saying goodbye with a kiss and then I snuggled up with the kitty and went back to sleep.

When I woke up at 9, I was crying hysterically and truly thought my husband had moved out, since you know, he wasn't in bed with me which he usually is when I go to work on time, which I had completely forgotten I called in late to work. It was awful. The dream was so vivid, and it took place in our apartment, with him talking about things that have been going on in our lives as the reasons he had already found an apartment to rent in the town where he works and his parents and sister were there to help him move....it was bad.

Now I can't get it out of my head...thus the annoying re-telling that just occurred. My silver lining is I got to listen to the BBC Newshour on NPR on the way into work....oh and its really quiet around here as well.

Over?

What happened in February 2010? Did all the snow we received somehow speed up the space-time continuum or something? It seems like things went by really fast. March is so busy for me. Every weekend is a social commitment or a work one, or like the 13th, both when I am working in the morning, getting my hair (an extremely much needed)cut then helping a friend move.

The following weekend is my bridal shower/baby shower extravaganza in my hometown. I'm co-hostessing the bridal on Saturday and the baby on Sunday. Only I would have my best friend and my best (ie: only) sister getting married and birthing the first grandchild of our family in a one week time span in May. Hopefully little Miss Audrey (the favorite name thus far) takes after her mommy, uncle an aunt and comes two weeks early. My sister keeps telling me since she's high-risk (diabetic and 35, which is the starting point of "advanced maternal age" there's a term to make older mommies feel awesome!) it will be a c-section and scheduled, yay for modern medicine. Whenever she arrives, I will be there. I have a niece and nephews from marrying into them, but I was never around a lot for the itty bitty baby parts of them, plus my sister has wanted a baby for a long time, so I'm very excited for them as well.

It's going to be crazy, but I am looking forward to having so much going on again. Being busy doesn't leave time for me to dwell upon how unsatisfied I am with work/career related things. I'm stuck since I want to go back to school, to do something fulfilling and way different than what I do now, but I can't figure out how to pay for it. More student loans are not an option. So I'm trying not to dwell upon things while slowly jumping through the admission hoops in vain hope that once I'm interviewed/accepted I can get them to grant me a tuition scholarship. In a perfect world, right?

***
It stays light out a little bit later every night, and soon it will be consistently warm enough for me to walk in the evenings, something I think about doing every day, but the snow and cold temperatures keep me from. I don't think I've pined for Spring so hard in my entire life. The amount of time the snow has hung around this year compared to the last few seems never-ending so I think that may have something to do with things.

In total random news: I've been married 6 months. Craziness!

Married life.

Growing up in the good Catholic family that was mine, my parents stayed together (although there were many times I feared they'd divorce, due to Dad liking the sauce a bit too much, but that's a whole other fish to fry). This created a vision of "married" in my little developing psyche that my grown up marriage doesn't coincide with at all.

A bit of history:

My parents had already been married 12 years when I was born and were 35 with a 10 year old and a 3 year old. They were tired. Dad worked long hours and Mom bounced from part-time jobs that included Midnights and weekends for years. They did what was expected. They got married (at an older than average age for their time period: married in 1972 when they were both 24) and started a family. Somehow they raised us right and there were no babies out of wedlock or major let downs: both my sister and I graduated college and my brother is a Sergeant in the U.S. Army.

Fast forward to now. Married for five and a half months. I don't want children and we have Husbands 7 year old (and estranged 3 1/2 year old) to make up a very different kind of family. I still don't feel how kid version of myself imagined things would feel, mostly because I don't think you can fathom what adulthood feels like in general. More so, because I'm living a different experience than I watched as a youngster.

We have good days and bad days, like any couple. To this day, whenever we have a disagreement/argument (whatever you want to call it), it is the only emotional situation where I feel like I could hurl (everything else almost always triggers emo-eating). When things are bad, it only makes me want to fix things, learn from it and move on. When things are good, they are really good, like, I almost want to slap myself because I wonder how I lucked out and found someone so made for me. It's slightly nauseating.

Step-parenting, at its worst, feels like attempting to walk on egg shells that have been strewn across a semi-frozen lake (to me at least) but most of the time it isn't like that. Most of the time its nice to be important to someone other than Husband on a regular basis and to take pride in her accomplishments. She is a great kid, and that makes things so easy. Whenever Little One comes back into the picture, who knows how things will ensue.

I still don't know about babies. I love them, and my sister is having one in May which I couldn't be more excited for, but I just don't know if I want to share my husband any more than I already do. Call me selfish and weird, but its the damn truth. Plus the whole shaping of an individual's psyche freaks me out. Add in the expectation of child-rearing once married (why? we aren't farmers and over-population is sort of a problem these days) and I just don't feel the need to procreate.

I never had a relationship that lasted more than 6 months before I met my husband. I feel like I could spend the rest of our lives enjoying that (along with our kitty and maybe a dog, if we ever get a house) and investing our time and energy in each other, and his kids he already has.

I know, I know, I can hear you saying, "you will just wake up one day and want a baby of your own" and maybe I will, but for now, I'm going to spoil my niece that is coming in May, focus on my marriage and help raise my step-kids, and I'm perfectly okay with that.

Dress at last.

I just remembered I promised photos of my bought-ten-days-before-the-wedding-off-the-rack wedding dress. So here we go:

Trying to not drag my train all over the place....and I just realized I didn't get one good picture of it. Oh well.

My new lil family.

Old-school hometown girls.

Happy Friday everyone.

Married.

August 29, 2009 was the perfect August day. It was sunny with no humidity and I think the temperature might have reached 75 degrees. I woke up suddenly at 7am and jumped out of bed with the perfect words to fix the beginning of my vows,
"So if you haven't heard, today's our wedding day...." it went perfectly with the rest.

Things went wrong, as they always do.... we never took our after ceremony walk like I wanted to, the pizza pans I bought for the buffet were too small, and we forgot to get cake cutters and serving things but those aren't the things I remember when I think about the day.

I think about his face when we saw each other for the first time in the courtyard before guests arrived, with our families peeking out the windows and hearing their collective "awwwwww" when Luke got choked up.

I remember my dad and I standing in the atrium waiting to walk in, as some of my oldest friends were arriving a bit late and as they pass my dad leans over and says, "so-and-so really put on some weight!" and I had to shush him.

I think about pulling my new husband into the auditorium because a song I really loved was on and even though neither of us really likes dancing (we cut our "first dance" off after about 45 seconds) we swayed as I rested my head on his shoulder. All I could think in that moment was:

This is it. We did it. It's our wedding.

It was amazing.