Those people, up there, in that photo? They’re my family: my mom, dad and younger brother (who just graduated from college and is not supposed to be grown up yet if you ask me! Where does the time go?). They’re some of my favorite people – the ones I go to with my big questions, the ones I seek advice from and want to have fun with. Honestly, sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t want to hang out with them quite as much as I do, but I just can’t help it. They’re fun, what can I say?!
This post, however, is really about someone who didn’t quite make the cut on getting into that photo (okay, it’s only because he had to be a responsible, working adult while I ran off to New York City for three days to watch a graduation ceremony. Otherwise he’d be right there…
As I’m guessing all of you know, this past weekend a little holiday called “Mother’s Day” rolled around. And, although that holiday has come and gone, it remains the topic of my conversation this week – mostly because, although Mother’s Day is always noted in my family with cards and flowers and oftentimes other goodies, this year that one day really got me thinking.
I think it started with wedding photos. Or maybe with a brief conversation that my mother and I had regarding my younger brother’s upcoming wedding – a conversation where we looked back at last year as I was planning my wedding and laughed about several things that there was absolutely no way we were laughing about at the time.
If I’m being honest, wedding planning has its challenges. And I think that those challenges are different for everybody, and I think that one of the…
It happens out of the blue. You come home from work, you pick up your mail and when you go to sort through it in the kitchen that evening, there they are: a stack of wedding invitations. Carefully addressed, carefully planned, carefully packaged and now sitting on your counter, clever and beautiful and oh-so inviting.
They’re calling your name with opportunities to celebrate with old friends and new friends and cousins and an acquaintance or two. And you want to go to all of them, but you don’t know if you can make it happen. Who knew that being a guest was so hard?
Last summer I was on the flip side of this particular coin. Shayne and I were planning our wedding and watching our guest list and collecting RSVP cards and then, as the day itself drew closer and closer, making phone calls and sending emails to…
Planning a wedding can be expensive.
In fact, planning a wedding can be downright overwhelmingly expensive. The wedding industry certainly has it down: the cost of venues, food, photographers (not to mention dresses, florists and the bar tab!) can be terrifyingly high.
I remember, when we were first looking at caterers for our wedding, getting a quote that literally sent me straight into tears, convinced that there was no way Shayne and I could afford to have at wedding at all, let alone feed the people that showed up. Well, we could maybe offer them carrot sticks and glasses of water. Maybe.
But along the way I learned that it (thank goodness) doesn’t have to be stressful or overwhelming and that (thank goodness x2) there are ways to cut corners without looking or feeling like you’re losing any part of your dream wedding. Unfortunately I don’t have any magical…
Hello, Delightfully Engaged! I hope you’re all happily in the midst of planning your weddings (looking at dresses, floral arrangements and dessert tables to your hearts’ content) and enjoying the fact that spring (and all the tulips!) is in full bloom and summer is just around the corner.
Conveniently, spring happens to be a tidy lead-up to what I wanted to talk to you about today. See, when I think “spring,” I tend to think of three things: flowers, rainstorms and…baseball. I’m sorry, it can’t be helped. This, however, is fortunate because it just so happens that the only thing that pops into my husband’s mind when he thinks about spring is baseball. If we didn’t have this overlap…I’m pretty sure our relationship would not have survived the first pitch of spring training.
Anyway, I’m digressing. What I really wanted to talk about today – ask about, really –…
Last Friday, Shayne and I went on a date.
This is notable, mostly because it was our first official, out-to-eat date in, oh, maybe like three months. Or four. We’ve been busy enough that it all kind of runs together. Like the fact that we’ve been married for almost nine months. Wait, what?!
See? It all runs together.
Anyway, back to the date! Now, even though I’ve already said that it was our first date in months, I don’t want you to misunderstand. We do spend a lot of intentional, planned-out time together (hiking, having home dinner-and-movie nights, taking small trips), but we rarely sit down and say, “Hey, let’s go out to eat. And hold hands and talk about things and have fun.”
It just isn’t a huge part of our vocabulary, the date-night thing.
Which is a travesty, because Friday night was so much fun.
Seriously. It…
Spring is definitely in the air. Warmer weather, longer days and tulips for sale at every grocery store I’ve been to…not to mention last weekend’s Easter holiday, which is generally a day filled with pastel colors, fresh flowers and hunting for bright plastic eggs.
We spent our holiday weekend almost entirely with family (my side, to be a little more precise). There was lots of food, lots of conversation and, somehow, an even greater amount of eggs. Shayne and I headed up the egg dyeing committee, which meant that there were eggs to be bought, hard-boiled, set out, decorated and dried…which I always remember as being the easiest thing in the world. But the last time I dyed Easter eggs I was probably still in middle school and didn’t have the pleasure of cleaning up after everyone (and hoping that none of us managed to spill vinegar and food…
Making home feel like home can be a long, involved, process. It can take weeks, months (maybe longer – I haven’t gotten that far yet). The name came quickly for me: calling the place Shayne and I live “home” happened easily, a habit by the end of the first month. But making the inside of that place fit the name we were giving it has certainly taken considerably longer!
We’ve been collecting things slowly, accumulating a lamp here, a stack of teacups there, a bookshelf or two…an entertainment center.
And we’ve discovered along the way that one of the things we enjoy most about making home “home” is when we can fill it with things that we’ve built with our own two hands: a coat rack, another lamp and, this weekend with some elbow grease and a couple of basketball games on TV in the background, a headboard for…
Is it, in the great world of relationship dynamics, possible that, when you’re married or engaged, spending time apart is a good thing?
You may laugh at me now.
Because I really do know the answer (which is, by the way, yes). But I’ve always been one of those people who was never very good at that. Don’t get me wrong. I love my girlfriends (which is a term I’ve always considered to be reserved for use solely by aunts and my mother’s friends but am now learning is very useful in my own generation as well). Love them. They’re the ones I shop with, eat chocolate things with, discuss the merits of vegetarian cookbooks with and who – it must be admitted that I would never have discovered this one on my own – introduced me to the wonders of the pedicure.
It’s just that meeting Shayne kind…
It is officially three months (plus, of course, several days) past New Year’s, and I’m glad I didn’t make any resolutions. Why? Because I have a sneaking suspicion I wouldn’t have kept them. New Year’s resolutions and I have that kind of a relationship: made and broken before you can blink. I stopped making them a few years ago when I realized that all I was doing was setting myself up for failure – and then making a habit out of it.
Bad news, that stuff.
Instead, these days, I make goals.
Don’t laugh – because I know that resolutions and goals are kind of, more or less, really the same thing. But somehow, in the tangle of things that make up the way my mind works, they are very different.
Honestly, it’s probably all about how I approach them. Goals always end up written down on a list,…
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