Tag Archives: Love

Love is All You Need

Posted on May 16, 2012 | 5 comments

This morning  Lucy and I were solving the world’s problems from our post in the bedroom.  We had returned to bed for some cuddles after Em left for school.  “It’s been a few days since you posted. Mike Month is lagging…” MQD observed as he readied himself to leave for work.

I thought for a moment before I replied.  We’d had a sweet morning and I didn’t want my tendency towards smartassery to spoil the moment. “There is nothing more boring than a happily married woman.”

I’m at a loss.  I’d planned to wax poetically about our wedding all month, but I fear I will nauseate my devoted readers.  It seems the vulgar and the emotional scab picking are most appreciated (and I will refrain from pointing out what that says about you, you dirtballs.)  I’m not interested  in sharing the down and dirty of my marital life  and my marriage is too new to have scabs.

So here I sit.  Compelled to finish out my month of wedding anniversary celebration and yet there are only so many ways to say “Look!  Hot damn, I am a happy girl!!!” before it begins to fall flat.

“There is nothing more boring than a happily married woman,” I said.  “Even my father has noted that ye olde blog has been lackluster.”  I continued on, making excuses about how difficult it has been to write about my marriage this month, my self proclaimed “month long declaration of love.”

Without missing a beat MQD smirked and said “Your life is one long declaration of love.”  He looked down at Lucy wiggling away on the bed and said “It’s true. Your mommy spends all day telling everyone how much she loves them.”

He’s right.  I yelled “I love you!” out the front door enough times this morning at Emily while she waited for the bus that once she actually yelled back “I KNOW!”  I have told Lucy that I love her no fewer than a hundred times today.  It’s what I do.

I just don’t think you can tell a person that you love them too many times.  I also don’t think it is ever an inappropriate time for a quick game of ass-grab but that is another story entirely.  Rest assured that Mike Month may be lagging but it’s not for a lack of love.

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Posted in Nonsense, Parenting

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Diamonds on the inside…

Posted on May 8, 2012 | 1 comment

Some times when MQD and I climb in to bed and I can feel a distance between us I ask him a simple question.  “Tell me three things you love about me,” I will say, my voice cracks and I speak in to his chest because it embarrasses me to need to hear it out loud.

My asking the question sends the message “I need to feel closer to you right now, I am feeling far away, insecure, I am beating myself up over nothing.”

His answers always bring me back to what is real.  Sometimes the answers are humorous, sometimes they are sentimental, sometimes they are predictable but occasionally they take me by surprise.

“I love how sensitive you are.”  I won’t ever forget the night that was his first answer. I had always assumed that my hypersensitivity, my mid-day phone calls in tears because I “am so in love with you” or because I “am so lucky,” I thought these were things MQD tolerated, not something he loved about me.

What you see isn’t always what you get.  I don’t apologize anymore when what’s on the inside shows.   Neither should you.

 

 

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Posted in Family, Nonsense, Wedding Planning

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Adventure

Posted on May 8, 2012 | Leave a comment

Some days are easier than others. Sometimes I am not sure I know how to be a wife or a mother or a friend. And those are the days you take my hand. I’d follow you anywhere.

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Posted in Bad Mood, Parenting

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Balance

Posted on May 4, 2012 | 1 comment

I love this picture, taken moments after we were married.

I don’t know if a perfect union exists.  But I know that MQD and I are pretty damn close to perfect.  We balance one another out in a million ways.  Perhaps the most poignant of these ways is in the way we express our love for one another and in turn, the way we each need to be loved.

Underneath everything I think people are who they were as a little kid.  I am a little girl that wonders if people respect me as a person and see through pretty, little Kelly.  Mike is a boy that perhaps wonders if he is more than whip-smart. We are so different, the two of us. And yet, we are the same. Each of us a person that is confident in how we are perceived in one arena, maybe not so confident in another.

In this picture I see those two little kids.  I think that quiet boy is the dreamiest boy in the class, absolutely the cutest boy I’ve ever seen.  That boy is unimpressed with my showy confidence, instead admiring a strength and smarts I did not even know I posses.

I adore him.  And he respects me.  And you can see it all over our faces in this moment.

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Posted in Family

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Laughter is the Best Medicine

Posted on May 1, 2012 | 2 comments

I’ve mentioned before that I love Reader’s Digest.  I learned  an awful lot from Reader’s Digest and there are things I read there that I believe now to be gospel.  It really is “all in a day’s work,” I suppose. And in my heart of hearts I believe that laughter is the best medicine.  It’ll cure what ails you.

I love the picture above.  MQD makes me laugh each and every day and roughly 95% of the time he doesn’t even mean to.

An ordinary exchange.  Married couple is sitting on the couch watching a television show.  Wife waits until a commercial and then while the husband is fast forwarding she strikes up a conversation.

“How do you feel about wallpaper?” I asked him the other night.

“I don’t have a problem with wallpaper. I mean no one in my family was killed by wallpaper.”

Keep me laughing, Mike.  And you’ll keep me.  

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Posted in Family

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Hope…

Posted on April 30, 2012 | 6 comments

Here’s to tradition!  We ate a slice from the top of our wedding cake tonight.  I hope our marriage holds up better than a vanilla cake with cannoli filling.  But then again we should probably not put our marriage in the back of the freezer for a year.

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Posted in Parenting

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Easy like Sunday Morning

Posted on April 15, 2012 | 5 comments

20120415-080841.jpgSunday morning in my rocking chair. Baby girl has fallen back asleep on my chest. Big girl is outside playing and I can hear her laughing. My sweet husband has fallen back to sleep after his morning snuggles with his little lady.

There is nowhere I’d rather be. Absolutely nowhere.

Sometimes I write because I want to remember a specific moment. And sometimes I sit down to write because I feel so much that I know something real might come out if I let it. Right now? Tapping letters on my phone, looking around me to find a picture to describe this moment. There is nothing. No words, no image to capture a moment Iike this.

That’s all I’ve got this morning. Me. And Lucy. And the quiet of the morning broken up by the laughter of my first favorite girl. This is it. If this is as good as it gets I’ll take it.

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Posted in Family, Parenting

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January 13th

Posted on January 12, 2012 | 7 comments

January 13th is a Friday this year, as I am sure you are well aware.  For some this is a day filled with superstition.  Friday or not, I can’t help but grin from ear to ear on January 13th each year.

In January of 2005 babies were the furthest thing from my mind.  In fact I spent the better part of at least three or four nights a week with two older gentleman.  One had been around at least a couple hundred years the other was in his early 80s.  Jim Beam.  And Ralph.  I was tending bar in the evenings and working at The Outer Banks Hospital in the dietary office during the day.  Ralph was my favorite customer both places.  Jim Beam was his drink of choice.  My days were fulfilling and my nights were long and hazy but I had youth on my side and managed to pull it off.

I hadn’t been trying to get pregnant… but I wasn’t doing anything to prevent it.  I’d been married for several  years and I was 29 years old.  It would happen when it was time.

On January 13th I woke up a little before five am, as was my norm.  And I peed on a stick.  Not a usual occurrence.  Positive.  I woke up Jeremy, he said not to tell anyone.  That we needed to be sure.  We’d wait a little while, we’d test again.

And I went to to work.

It was shortly after 9 am when I caved.  I burst in to my boss’ office, closed the door and told my secret.  Even though it wasn’t totally necessary to do so I had the luxury of a blood test at my disposal and by 10:30 that morning I had called my husband and my parents and spilled the beans.  I was pregnant.

January 13th.  I don’t think I will have a baby with a birthday on January 13th.  But that’s okay. Because I became a mother on January 13th, 2005.  And I never looked back.

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Posted in Family, Parenting, Pregnancy

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Love & Marriage

Posted on January 10, 2012 | 11 comments

Love and marriage… go together like assorted maxi pads and M&Ms?  Somehow I don’t think that is what Frank Sinatra had in mind when he said “horse and carriage.”

But that about sums it up as far as I am concerned.

The other night I stood in the hallway between our bedroom and our living room.  Our beautiful new king sized bed in our lovely bedroom called my name.  But my husband, sitting on our new couch in our new living room… he looked pretty cute, too.  We are still newlyweds, afterall.  The siren’s call of our bed won me over so I inquired “Will you come and sit with me for a minute?   I’ll be asleep in five minutes.”

He rose from the couch and went to get me a glass of water.  Grabbed my Tums off the kitchen counter as he returned, placing them both next to my side of the bed.  He climbed in to bed next to me and began to laugh.  “You know we have only been married for nine months?”

Without even thinking how it might be received I blurted out “It seems like SO much longer than that.”

He smiled and said “Well, I am glad you feel that way, too…”

It has been a whirlwind of a year.  Last winter we were finalizing wedding plans.  And a year later we are in our new house, married, our daughter climbing on to the school bus at the base of our driveway every morning, waiting on the birth of our baby.

If your life has to resemble a Talking Heads song better “Once in a Lifetime”  (And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife and you may ask yourself— Well…How did I get here?) than “Life During Wartime” (This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, This ain’t no fooling around, No time for dancing or lovey dovey, I ain’t got time for that now!!!)

So, what does this have to do with maxipads and M&Ms?

The other evening I tucked Em in to bed and snuck back downstairs.  In to the medicine cabinet in our bedroom I went.

There was a time in my life when the master bedroom medicine cabinet was a treasure trove of good times.  Need to sleep?  Wake up?  Get happy?  Chill out? Get psyched?  I gotcha.

And now this.  I paused as I opened the door and snapped the picture above.  And then I listened for little feet before I snagged the bag of M&Ms that MQD had hidden for me.  Had to make sure that no one would bust me ripping the bag open.  There in my medicine cabinet is everything I need to feel great. Big maxi pads, small maxipads, lanolin for sore nipples, breast pads for leaky boobs, my favorite face soap… and a bag of peanut  M&Ms.

It’s no secret I am not exactly feeling great lately.  I am DONE being pregnant.  Finished.  Ready to trade the low throbbing all day pelvic bone pain for the pains of labor. Ready to hold this baby in my arms, instead of between my thighs (or at least that is how it feels, so help me every time I get up I feel like a baby is sure to fall out and hit the floor, if only it were that easy.)

But this morning… this morning I felt great.  Super.  Awesome.  Like today is gonna be cool. It might even be okay if I stay pregnant through the next TWO or even THREE days… because the M&Ms… they are multiplying. I don’t think it is magic. I think it is Love & Marriage.

 

Love & Marriage

I love you, MQD.  It has been one hell of a ride, these last nine months.  We laughed when we started looking at real estate that we were out of minds to get married,  have a baby and buy a house all in one year.  But give us a few more days… and we’ll have made it.  Relatively unscathed.  I know I am no picnic.  And I know it might have felt more like Wartime than Once in a Lifetime at times… but the best days are still ahead of us, sweetheart.  Hang in there, we got this.  And keep stocking the medicine cabinet. xxoo

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Posted in Family, Parenting, Pregnancy

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A couple of misfits…

Posted on December 19, 2011 | 4 comments

The holidays are about family. They can be a time of forgiveness.  Of letting go of the past and coming together to share a meal and a laugh and company.

In every family there is a Bumble.  In 1964’s Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer christmas tv special  Bumble is the antagonist.  To “bumble” by definition is to proceed in a clumsy fashion, to botch or bungle, make a mess of things.

This weekend I thought a lot about how much I hope our Bumble can come around like Bumble the Abominable Snowman. At the end of Rudolph Bumble is smiling a toothless grin and places the star on the top of the Christmas tree in ChristmasTown.  He may not be beloved by the whole town but at least he has stopped wreaking havoc.

For years now our Bumble has referred to the island he calls home as the “Island for Misfit Toys.” It seemed appropriate to post this ornament this morning as he heads back out of town.

Family weekends can be messy for any family.  There was a moment this weekend when I wondered just how much more I had in me.  How much love, how much forgiveness.   In that moment  I looked down and Emily was just standing there.  She took my hand and smiled and said “Here.  I have this fortune, it’s yours.”

And in to my hand she placed a slip of paper.

“Love, like war, is easy to start and nearly impossible to end.”

If that’s true, it might be your saving grace.  Tighten up, Jer.  You got this.  Merry Christmas, Bumble.

They look alike when they first wake up.

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Posted in Family, Parenting

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