Wedding Sappiness!

I'm sitting at my desk, listening to the rain pour down outside, looking again at the photos I took this weekend.  Sunday, Kirk and I went to a wedding in New Jersey.  I used to babysit for the groom and have known him almost his whole life.  Watching him get married was a somewhat surreal experience.

We shared our table at the reception with my mom and her boyfriend, our friends Erica and Mitch, and their daughters, Whitney and Bailey.  I used to babysit for Whitney and Bailey, too. Erica, my mom, and Judy, the mother of the groom, are the original Wild Women in my life.  I was lucky enough to be initiated as a Wild Woman myself a few years back.  Now, Bailey and Whitney, along with their younger sister Annie, have joined the ranks as well.

This is my chosen family.  Will's, too.  They are Funny Auntie Judy and Uncle John and Auntie Erica and Uncle Mitch.  Let's not even get started on how he feels about Whitney. 

Judy and her husband John live in Rochester, NY these days.  Erica, Mitch, and the girls are in the DC area.  We don't see them nearly as much as I wish we did, and the time we spend together flies by like nothing at all.  I cherish those moments and hold them close to my heart.

Thanks, Judy, for including us in Charles and Sarah's beautiful day.  I am so lucky to have you--all of you--in my life.

I admit it.  Weddings make me sappy.  In the best sort of way.  They make me look at Kirk and want to marry him all over again, which is a good thing, 11 years down the line.  They remind me of the promises we made when we stood in Charles and Sarah's place, and make me happy to realize that we've done pretty well with each other.  They make me look forward to our future, and they help me celebrate our "middle."

I'm glad I married him.  I'm awfully glad he married me.  We fit, I think.  Even when one of us is literally broken, like I've been these past few months.  He's picked up what I've dropped with grace and composure and compassion, and I am so thankful for that.

Onward and upward.  May we all live happily ever after.

What I did today (7/18/2013)

So it doesn't appear that any of the things I planned to do today are going to come to fruition.  What am I doing instead?

• I washed the back door from top to bottom after I opened it to let Will in and realized it was ridiculously filthy!
• I vacuumed the loose paint chips (probably all lead paint) off the floor that came off while I was washing the door.  
• Then, while the vacuum was there, I vacuumed the ceiling, which is a peeling mess and desperately needs some attention. 
• I chose potential paint colors (pending agreement from Kirk) for the teensy hallway just inside the back door.  It's one of those spots in the house that looks terrible and would give us HUGE bang for our buck if we painted it, but we've gotten so used to it in the past ten years that we stopped seeing how awful it looked.  
• I cleaned out the linen/vacuum closet in the dining room, removing anything that isn't either dining room or vacuum related.
• I added more stuff to the ever-growing yard sale pile that is taking over the dining room table.  And the floor in front of the radiator.  I think we should set a yard sale date!
• I weeded (almost) all of the non-functional raised bed in the yard.  There are three strawberry plants that came back from last year (one good sized one and two that are rather anemic, none of which will have a strawberry survive the deer), one volunteer squash plant, one tiny volunteer tomato, and something that my friend Heather says isn't a weed but I can't remember what she said it is.  My mom's boyfriend thinks we could dry it and smoke it.  I'm not certain he's wrong, but I'm certainly not the expert on the subject. 

Why didn't the original to-do list happen?  Because Will is busy playing with the kid who recently moved into the neighborhood.  Play time always always ALWAYS trumps errands in this house!

Now, we're off to the grocery store with a stop at Friendly's for some dinner first.  Why Friendly's?  1.  Coupon.  2.  Ice Cream.  3.  Air Conditioning.  4.  No need to cook or clean up.  5.  Kirk's having dinner with his boss.

Stay cool, Pony Boy!

This has been a year of change.

Since I posted that brief and rather depressing entry in January, I've done a lot of soul searching and talking with Kirk and number crunching and more soul searching and agonizing and overthinking and decision making and more talking with Kirk and a little more soul searching, and in April I finally gave my notice at work.

We have a kid who faces big challenges, many of them different from those other kids his age face.  He needs me more.  Work needed someone more, too.  I couldn't be more of me in both places, so something had to give.  More and more, it was my sanity, and that was no good.  Work can replace someone.  My child can't.  So...I took a deep breath, wrote up my letter of resignation, and gave my notice with an end date two months out, allowing enough time to find and train my replacement.

About two weeks later, early in the morning of April 22, I had an accident on our trampoline that left my left leg/knee with a complete tear of the ACL and the MCL, damage to both the medial and lateral meniscus (menisci?), and fractures of the patellar pole and the tibial plateau.  I spent the next six weeks on the couch, getting up to pee and (eventually) go to physical therapy. 

Today, I am walking with a brace and preparing for ACL reconstruction surgery in October.  In the meantime, Will and I are hanging out for the summer while he gets to just be a kid, not get shuffled off to camps and programs he dreads so that I can go to work to earn enough money to pay for the camps and programs he dreads.

Given the accident, things have not gone quite the way I expected.  I never went back to work, save the one day I went in to clean out my desk and eat cake.  My project list, the one I made during all that soul searching and discussing with Kirk, has been pushed forward, given my limited mobility and summer sidekick.  It also grew, given the six weeks I had to watch HGTV and DIY until I wanted to knock down walls and create an open floorplan (not gonna happen in this house; hello, structural supports!).  But regardless of that, and of the fact that there is a gigantic learning curve involved in shifting to being home full-time after, well, truthfully, never doing it before.  I don't count when Will was a newborn and my life was dedicated to either feeding the baby or waiting to feed the baby 100% of the time, and then, once he was 12 weeks old, I went back to work for at least a few hours each week. 

I told Kirk I'd given myself a new job title:  I am our household's Domestic Engineer.  The pay isn't so great, but the benefits are out of this world.  I look forward to enjoying the fruits of my labor.  You know, once I can walk without feeling like Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein. "What hump?..."

Here's to living, not just existing!

Right now, we are not living.

We are just going through the motions.

Boy, that sucks.