Changes | Marriage Confessions Changes | Laugh. Fight. Stay Married.

Christmas in my family is legendary. My mom famously starts shopping in, like, February and finishes by Memorial Day. We don’t do a whole lot of random presents throughout the year (well, we didn’t before there were grandkids in the picture…), so Christmas is the big blow out.

It’s really not that we are into the material side of Christmas. If you took all our presents away, we’d be just as happy to go to church together, eat a big dinner, and sit around watching old movies.

The amount of presents my family exchanges isn’t about value. It’s about thoughtfulness. When I open presents from my mom that she found in some tiny little shop somewhere, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside because in that instance, my mom was thinking about me. I was on her mind. And that’s worth more than the actual present to me.

This year, my sister has crossed over to my mother’s side on the Christmas front. I had an inkling this might happen. She’s been a pretty thoughtful gift giver for the past few years, just like my mom. She gives monogrammed gifts, which is a sure sign of pre-planning at the holidays. And then, last year she gave Bean a few gifts she “picked up for him” while she was on vacation in Hilton Head. I knew then that she was turning into my mother. Thinking of other people while you’re on vacation was a tell-tale sign.

Sure enough, this year Ginny started Christmas shopping incredibly early and when I called her last week, she had Christmas music playing in the background while she wrapped her presents.

It’s a sickness, ya’ll. Christmatitis. My family can’t help themselves.

(My mom’s going to kill me for posting that last picture…)

The thing is, though, I don’t give gifts like the rest of my family. For one thing, our money is really tight. Both my mom and my sister buy little gifts over the course of several months and I know that makes more sense, but, quite honestly, our budget has been so tight for the past couple years that even spending an extra $20 or $30 a paycheck on something that’s wasn’t for the kids or for daily needs made me cringe a bit. We had our budgeting and saving down to the penny and even spreading Christmas buying out over several months would have been a stretch.

This year, though, as our money seems to be settling down and we’re getting into a nice routine of saving/spending/planning, I’ve tried to buy little presents along the way. Every paycheck, I buy two or three presents (usually online because it’s cheaper and a lot easier than taking the kids shopping with me) and, you know, it’s actually been going pretty good. I’ve put a nice dent in my Christmas shopping already and we haven’t broken the bank.

Another thing I did this year was that in the summer, I started this note on my iPhone notepad for Christmas ideas. I made a note for each family member and then any time I happened to think of a particularly great gift for someone (those thoughts always come to me in the most random places and times!), I’d make the note on my phone. By the time I was ready to Christmas shop, I just had to weed through my random lists and decide what I was going to get everyone and what gifts I’d save for birthdays or other occasions.

Even with these little changes in my gift giving this year, though, I can tell that I’m still not on the same level as my mom and sister. I’m just not going to be able to give people 7 or 8 gifts apiece at Christmas (except the kids – they get 90% of mine and Chris’s Christmas presents). Money is certainly a factor, but so is the fact that we have small kids and so our giving ratio is distorted a bit by Santa Claus. Mostly though, my gift giving style is different because it’s just the way I am. I may not give many gifts to each person, but the ones I do give are intentional and unique to that person.

(That’s mine and Chris’s first Christmas tree, by the way. Isn’t he cute?)

The great thing about family is that I could wrap up paper clips and they’d think it was the greatest, most special gift in the whole world, simply because I gave it to them. But the fact is that I have my own little family now and just because OUR Christmas doesn’t look exactly like the Christmases I had growing up doesn’t mean it’s any less special or any less memorable. For a long time, I felt like if I couldn’t replicate Christmas at my parent’s house, then I wasn’t doing Christmas right. But, as I raise my own family I’m learning that you can’t really do Christmas wrong. We’ll celebrate some traditions from my childhood and some traditions from Chris’s childhood. But along the way, some things might change. Christmas might look a little different at my house than at my parent’s or sister’s. And that’s okay because one day, my kids will sit with their own little families and, if I’m really, really, lucky, they’ll look back and remember how special their mom made Christmas for them.

20 comments | posted in Changes, Childhood, Family, holidays, Marriage Confessions | tags: Christmas, Christmas traditions

It’s been tough to find things to blog about lately. The kids are always easy to blog about because I think they get more awesome-er every day. But my own life and marriage are a little boring at the current moment. Getting up, going to work, coming home, dinnertime, bath time, bedtime does not an interesting blog make.

I like to have things going on. I like to be busy and have a full calendar. I work better that way. Going, going, going. It keeps life interesting, doesn’t it? It certainly keeps my blog life interesting, I guess. For the past few years, my life has been truly bloggerific. We bought our first house, had our first baby, moved across the country, faced unemployment, dealt with depression, had a surprise pregnancy, changed careers, moved (twice since our arrival in Florida!), and then bought our new house. I mean, things were JUMPIN’.

But in the last month or so, things have really slowed down. And, though it doesn’t make for great blog fodder, I have to say that it has been a really nice change in pace.

The other day, my mom and I were talking about things finally settling down for me and Chris and our conversation took a natural turn towards gratitude. We talked about how only after you’ve gone through really rough times do you really become thankful for the calm. It’s the same thing with money, too. We certainly aren’t rolling in it, but after going through that year of having hardly anything, I have learned to appreciate simple things, like having money to pay for groceries.

“Do you know how excited I am that every week I get to spend $100 on groceries?!?!” I shrieked to my mom, laughing. “I pull my debit card out every week and beam standing in line at the grocery store because I can buy my family groceries, dammit! And that’s a fabulous feeling.”

So, life right now is insanely boring. But because I have experienced the opposite of boring for the last two years, I am so grateful for the boring.

25 comments | posted in Around the House, Changes, Family, Marriage, Marriage Confessions | tags: Family, life, Money

Last week, Chris and I got into a big fight. We argue from time to time, like most couples, but we don’t really do the knock-down-drag-out fighting very often. And this was one of those times. It was one of those all-consuming fights that covers a range of things we’d both been mad about for a couple weeks. I call those housekeeping fights. It’s like spring cleaning. Sometimes, you just need to crawl up into those dark, cobwebby corners of your marriage and throw some windows open to air things out a bit, you know? And so, we did.

There were two main issues that kept coming up in this fight. First, having two small children is rough right now. We love our babies, but the fact that teething, potty training, and Terrible Two’s are all happening at the same time has us a little frazzled at the moment. At Bean’s age, he demands a LOT of attention right now. It’s not that he’s walking around being bad or throwing temper tantrums (though that is certainly part of this phase), it’s more that he’s testing limits and pushing boundaries out of curiosity, which is fine and healthy, but it’s important that Chris and I are consistent and firm in our responses and that takes a lot of our time and attention. Gracie also has her own needs, too. She’s five months old now (my ovaries just wept…) and she’s awake almost all day, which means she needs to be engaged and stimulated and encouraged a lot – as a baby should be. She’s at this wonderful age where she’s exploring new things and enjoying a lot more, but babies need a lot of attention and Gracie Girl is no exception.

Learning to balance our time between Bean and Gracie right now is exhausting enough, but add to that that I have gone back to work, that the kids are getting used to our new routine of daycare, that we just moved into a new house that needs a lot of work, and that we’d both like to have at least a LITTLE time to breathe in the course of a day and it doesn’t leave much time for Chris and I to connect. Our days don’t end until around 10:30 and by then, we’re tired and grumpy. The last thing we want to do is talk…or…um…not talk…

The other issue that kept coming up in our housekeeping fight was that in what little down time Chris and I have had in the past month, we’ve been spending apart, which is something we’re not used to. I’ve had commitments and meetings and deadlines that have taken me out of the house a little more than usual and Chris has used some of his down time to work on projects around the house that took him outside and away from me and the kids. In short, we were just spread a little thin and that frustration led to a lot of anger from each of us. We had started keeping score in our parenting routines. Each time I did something that he didn’t do, I tallied it up in my head. And any time he did something that I didn’t do, he tallied it up in his head. And so when we had our knock-down-drag-out, we let the tally marks fly.

But the truth is that you can’t tally up parenting or marriage. You just can’t do it. It doesn’t break down evenly. Just because I cook dinner doesn’t mean that I get to sit on the couch after bedtime while Chris does the dishes by himself in the kitchen. I could get up and, like, help. And just because Chris does Bean’s bath time doesn’t mean he is excused from folding a load of laundry. The thing about a family is that kids don’t care who’s more tired or who did the last chore. They have needs and they need them met. And what am I going to do? Refuse to give Gracie a bath because it’s not my turn?

To get us to a better place, Chris and I decided to cancel all our plans this weekend and for the next week. We are intentionally doing nothing so that we can reset our family clock. We’re retreating into our new, sweet little home and regrouping. We spent this weekend doing things like taking family trips to Home Depot and grocery shopping together (which was a disaster, by the way, but it’s the effort that counts, right?). We sat on the couch and watched football and played on the floor with Bean and Gracie. We put the kids to bed together and we helped each other with household chores. And then, after the kids had gone to bed, Chris and I cooked dinner together and talked about things like work and plans for the house and why we thought we’d been off kilter lately. We came up with a new game plan for discipline for Bean and we laughed about Gracie’s ability to inhale baby food like she was drinking it up with a straw. And when we felt things getting tense (like in aisle three of the grocery store), we took deep breathes, gave each other long, inappropriate kisses in public while Bean tugged on our legs, and started again.

I receive emails and notes a lot from readers asking me for marriage advice and I am always hesitant to give it. The past month is the reason why. Because if I know anything about marriage it is that it is fluid. It’s moving. It’s always changing, always growing, sometimes taking a couple steps backwards, sometimes taking a step or two forward. Just when I think I have it figured out, I learn something else. To try and pin it down is like trying to pin a cloud. But if I was really pressed to give sometime marriage advice, it would be this:

Take care of your marriage. Plant it in the good, rich soil of faith. Feed it compassion, patience, and grace. Don’t forget to trim off parts when they begin to weather or be afraid to prune it back a bit when it seems to be growing a bit out of control. Remember that seasons will come and go and that the needs of your marriage might change with those seasons. And then water it with love. Good, old fashioned, deep from the heart love.

Blooming where you are planted begins inside your marriage.

34 comments | posted in Changes, Fights, Husbands, Marriage, Marriage Confessions, Operation BWYP, Understanding Chris, Understanding Katie | tags: Communication, love, Marriage, Relationships

During one of the busiest points of grad school at Yale for Chris, he came home one night to find a hearty, home cooked meal: Chinese take out. We ate at our tiny kitchen table together while he told me about how stressful grad school was, about how he wasn’t sure he could make it through, and about how sometimes he just wanted to give up. I sat with him, listening, holding his hand, and trying to find the right words to help him through, but in the end, it was a fortune cookie that said what I didn’t know yet. Chris opened his cookie to find the words, “You are almost there,” printed in red ink. That night, he took that fortune cookie and put it on our bathroom mirror as a daily reminder to him that he was one day closer to his goal.

When Chris graduated from Yale almost a year later, he took a job in New York and I kept my job in Connecticut and we bought a house halfway in between. It was our first home and we were, as my Grandma says, tickled pink.

It wasn’t too long after that move that I started itching for a baby. And it wasn’t too long after that itch that I became pregnant with Bean Man. I think I have sufficiently proven throughout this blog that I am a terrible pregnant woman. I complain. I moan. I pick fights. I swell. I cry. I complain some more. Often during those long nine months, Chris would point to that fortune, now taped to the bathroom mirror in our new house, and say to me, “You’re almost there, Pookey!” And we would laugh and hug and kiss and think about how close my due date was coming.

Before we knew it, Bean Man was in our lives and we had never been happier. Couldn’t imagine being any happier, really. Everything was wonderful.

Except…

Except I started missing my family like crazy. Every minor milestone Bean experienced in his first nine months of life made me wince a bit on the inside because there was no family around to share in that excitement with us. And so, after a few months of talking it over, thinking it through, and turning it over in prayer, we made the decision to move back to Florida to be closer to both mine and Chris’s families. As we packed our house in Connecticut, I cried and Chris quickly wiped a tear from his own eye as he took down his tattered fortune slip from our bathroom mirror and placed it inside his wallet.

“We’re going home,” he said to me. “We’re almost there.”

When we pulled into the tiny rental house that we had rented sight unseen from Connecticut, my heart broke. It was the first time I thought that we had made a huge mistake. I remember as our friends and family helped us unload our moving truck, I ducked behind a small shed in the backyard and cried my eyes out for about two minutes. What had we done? What had we given up? What were we thinking? But, I pulled myself together and reminded myself that this was a six month rental and that, very soon, we would be in a house all our own. When Chris taped that fortune to our bathroom mirror that night, I smiled and felt my spirits lift a bit. This was just a pit stop. We were almost there.

After several months of an unsuccessful job search, I found myself unemployed, uninsured, and, as luck would have it, pregnant again. I thought life couldn’t possibly get any worse. And then that horrid little rental house was broken into and I learned that things can ALWAYS get worse. As we packed up our house the morning after the home invasion, Chris and I picked up pictures out of broken frames thrown around our house, wedding China scattered throughout the dining room, and baby toys covered in the clam chowder the burglars had poured all over everything. We hastily threw everything into moving boxes and hauled all that we owned almost two hours away to my parents house where we would recoup and look for a better place to live. Just as we pulled out of the driveway of that terrible place, Chris stopped the car and ran back inside. He came out carrying his fortune, torn from the third bathroom mirror it had known in three years.

“Things will get better,” Chris told me. “We’re almost there.”

At my parent’s house, all of our things were kept in boxes and stored in the house wherever there was room, which meant every room was full of boxes and things and junk. It was a mess and I felt like we were camping. I was pregnant and nauseous, but we were safe and healthy and Bean didn’t seem to know anything was amiss, and that was what mattered to me. But at night, after we were in bed, Chris and I would lay close to each other and whisper all our worries and all our disappointments into the night until we were too tired to think anymore. And then we would hold hands and drift off to unrestful sleep, where I would dream over and over again that someone had broken into our house and taken my son. The only light during that time for us was that I finally found a job. I became a middle school teacher and with my salary, we were able to move into a beautiful rental home in a better part of town.

As we unpacked our things and pinched ourselves at all the space we now had, Chris once again taped his fortune to the bathroom mirror. This house was wonderful and the answer to so many of our prayers, but it wasn’t home yet. We were certainly closer though.

We were almost there.

In March, Gracie was born and our family was complete. She brought sleepless nights, colic, and so much darn sunshine with her that I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t able to be happy. Why I couldn’t let go of the fear of someone taking my children from me. Why I couldn’t get out of bed in the afternoons. Why I couldn’t do stupid tasks like paying our bills without bursting into tears. Depression was a slow, smooth, all-consuming abductor to me and before I knew what was happening, it tainted everything around me. In those lowest moments, Chris would hold me and whisper into my ear that this was almost over. I was almost done. And if I could just push through for a little bit longer, we would get there. And we would get there together.

Today, as I cleaned out our bathroom in that beautiful rental house, I was just about to turn out the light and leave when something caught my eye. There in the corner of the bathroom mirror was Chris’s fortune.

At different points in our marriage, there has been a variety of places. We’ve graduated from graduate school, bought a home, had a baby, moved back across the country, face unemployment, cleaned up a home invasion, found new career paths, had another baby, moved again, and bought another house. We’ve arrived places only to find that the finish line has been pushed back further and we were once again on journey together.

I guess that’s part of marriage. Part of life, really. Always looking ahead, always planning for the future, always working to get there.

But as we pulled out of the driveway of that beautiful rental home who protected us from any more hardship, giving us time to lick our wounds from the past year and get back on our feet once again, I pulled that fortune out of my wallet where I had placed it for safe keeping. I showed it to Chris and we laughed for a nostalgic moment about all the places and milestones that fortune had wisely foreseen in our lives.

“Well, we made it,” Chris said. “We’re there.”

I squeezed his hand and smiled. Yes, we were.

78 comments | posted in Changes, Depression, Family, Flashbacks, Florida, Marriage, Marriage Confessions, Moving | tags: life, Marriage, Moving