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

Roses are red

Violets are blue

Remember that night

We went out for fondu?

It was the night before our wedding

And we were needing a break

From all of the demands

A bride and groom must take.

So, the night before our vows

We snuck away from our crew

And had a quiet dinner

Just me and just you.

We talked about our lives

That were about to begin.

We laughed and we planned

And we kissed and we grinned.

That night as we dreamed

as only young lovers can do

I had no way of knowing

How blessed I would be to have you.

Our life hasn’t always been perfect.

Sometimes the storms raged against our shores.

But you stood there beside me

No matter how hard it poured.

And when times were good,

Well, you made them better.

Life was sweeter and brighter

When we were together.

If I could go back

To that fondu dinner for two,

I’d tell my young self

To stop planning what to do.

Because after all these years

There’s one thing I know.

We could never have planned

How deeply our love would grow.

So, roses are red,

And poison ivy gives me hives,

I’m so glad you’ll be my Valentine

For the rest of our lives.

26 comments | posted in Changes, Childhood, Flashbacks, holidays, Marriage Confessions | tags: love, Marriage, Relationships, Valentine's Day

Last Friday, we packed up the car once again and drove seven hours to Pensacola, Florida, where Chris and I grew up. My parents moved away after my sister and I graduated from high school, but Chris’s family is still there. It’s nice to have a tie back to my hometown like that, otherwise, I don’t think I’d have any reason to go back.

When we go to Pensacola, we stay with Chris’s mom, Jackie, and her boyfriend/partner/male companion/humorist, Charles. Their house has two spare bedrooms and so Chris and I sleep in one of them with Gracie in a pack ‘n play, while Bean sleeps on a lowered trundle in the second bedroom. Jackie has Cars 2 sheets and blankets on Bean’s bed and so he thinks he has died and gone to heaven with Mater and Finn. It has been so nice to stay with her in the past couple years since we have had the kids. Jackie makes sure that we have everything we need here, so that we don’t have to bring much when we come (well, relatively speaking…). She always has diapers and formula and Bean’s favorite foods on hand, plus she has all the necessary equipment that two little kids require: booster seats for the dining room, toys for the living room, a cushy kneeling pad for next to the kids’ bathtub. She just makes it easy to visit and we always have a nice time with her and Charles.

Christmas is especially nice. There are stockings and lights and and Elf on the Shelf. And, this year, there was Gracie the Giraffe for my Gracie the Puffalump.

It’s touching me…

Christmas morning was a lot of fun this year! Unfortunately, I didn’t get one picture of the action. Bean is an illusive photography subject these days. He’s quick. He’s impatient. He’s been known to make silly faces at inopportune times. Which means, I basically just documented GRACIE’S Christmas…

Gracie had a GREAT first Christmas! She was happy and awfully active. We couldn’t get her to sit in one place for long.

Clearly.

We spent Christmas day visiting family, which, again, I failed to document. (Bad blogger.) We’ve spent the next few days just hanging around with Jackie and Charles. And eating. Eating lots of food. Lots and lots of food. We went to a diner for lunch yesterday and Gracie Girl went crazy for her scrambled egg. She ate the whole thing and then spent the next half hour squealing and playing with her Grandmomma.

We’re going to be here through the rest of this week and, though we’re having a great time, I’m ready to be back home soon. Christmas is a marathon for our family and I’m so glad that we are in the cool down now. I’m ready to pack up our Christmas tree and put away our stockings. I’m ready to get all these new toys and goodies home and to spend some time sitting on my couch, reading my new Kindle. Mostly though, I’m just ready to stop blogging about Christmas!!!!!

10 comments | posted in Family, Florida, holidays, Marriage Confessions | tags: Christmas, Family

Hi, imaginary friends! I took a little break from blogging last week in preparation for Christmas and to spend some much needed down time with my family, especially my wee ones. I wish I could show you pictures of exciting adventures we had while I have been gone, but the truth is that we mostly sat around in Christmas pajamas, eating popcorn, wrapping Christmas presents, and watching “The Christmas Story” over and over again.

(“My father wove a tapestry of obscenities that still hangs over Lake Michigan even today…”)

On Wednesday night, though, the action began. We knew we’d be traveling on Christmas Day and dear old Santa didn’t want to have to haul Christmas presents across the state to Grandmomma’s house, so he decided to come on Thursday morning instead. I was a little worried because it was our first “Christmas” at home with no one but the four of us. I was afraid it’d be boring. But Wednesday night after the kids went to bed, Chris and I had the most fun ever helping Santa put out his presents. We spent two hours putting together the train set Bean was getting. I’ll do a review on the presents the kids got later when I get back home next week, but let me just tell you that this train set is pretty darn awesome and a heck of a deal for $50. Santa’s elves really outdid themselves.

Gracie Girl’s big gift was a poor man’s ball bit. Santa brought a bag of 50 plastic balls and we threw them into Gracie’s pack ‘n play. I worried that this might be a flaky gift, but it ended up being amazing!!!

Even Bean loved it on Christmas Day!

Christmas morning, I was up at something ridiculous, like, 5:00 because I was so excited. I ate cold leftover potato casserole from the night before straight out of the pan until I heard Gracie moving around up there around 6:00. That was fair game to me, so I ran upstairs and woke everyone up. Christmas was here!

Christmas morning in our own home with just our little family was better than I ever even imagined. We spent the first hour just playing with Santa’s toys. Over the next two hours, we slowly opened presents, played with toys, tried on new clothes, opened stockings, and ate biscuits together while The Carpenters Christmas album crooned in the background. If Norman Rockwell had been there, he would have painted us.

I have the Brown Family Official Christmas Photographs on our real camera. These are just the ones from my iPhone while we’re traveling, but, just like Christmas Day, sometimes the most casual images tell the best stories. And seeing my two wee ones smiling and laughing on Christmas morning with my honey bear lovey sweetie pie sitting across the couch from me told the whole story perfectly. No need for big gifts or lots of food or a house full of people. It was simply perfect just the way it was.

*****
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13 comments | posted in Family, holidays, Marriage Confessions | tags: Christmas

This past weekend we went to Atlanta to have Christmas with my side of the family at my sister’s house. My sister and John Michael have the cutest little condo in downtown Atlanta. It is just what you would picture for a successful, young couple to have. And Ginny has decorated it perfectly. When we got there, it was beautiful in its Christmas glory, with their huge Christmas tree front and center.

Twenty minutes into our visit and we had destroyed their house.

I blame my mom and dad. They went above and beyond for all of our Christmas presents this year (like every year!). It was really incredible! My favorite gift, though, was a Kindle! They gave one to me, my sister, and my Grandma. We all love to read and so that was the perfect present. Although, they also got me a label maker for my classroom, which I will geek out on as soon as I get back to school. I’ve already labeled everything my kids own in the 24 hours that we’ve been home.

Gracie got her first baby doll, too…

…which she promptly ate.

And Bean got an awesome Thomas the Train set. Thomas chugs around the track and there’s even a crane that lifts boxes onto the freight part of the train. Bean quickly figured out that the freight thingy could also carry Lightning McQueen and, suddenly, it was like two cartoon worlds collided. Bean was mesmerized.

We spent Saturday afternoon opening presents and spending time together. It was really nice and I actually enjoyed it almost more than Christmas morning itself because we stopped to chat or eat between rounds of opening presents. It just seemed a lot less frantic than Christmas mornings can be and it was nice to be able to pause and enjoy each other even more than the presents.

Although, some of the presents were pretty awesome…

On Sunday morning, we laid around and had a slow-moving morning, with breakfast on the couch in our jammies. Bean must have been in the Christmas spirit because he shared his bagel with Gracie. And Bean doesn’t share food, like, at ALL. It was a Christmas miracle.

Later that morning, my Grandma came over (she’s been staying at my Aunt and Uncle’s house in Atlanta this week) and we opened presents with her, too.

Later, we all got dressed and went to the late church service at my sister’s church. I figure, I have about a year where I can dress Gracie in things like this before she starts protesting. I plan to take full advantage.

After church, the guys went to play golf with some of my dad’s old golfing buddies from when we used to live in Atlanta and my mom, sister, and I took the kids to two of the most Atlanta places you can go…

The Varsity is an Atlanta icon. They serve hot dogs and hamburgers, french fries and onion rings, Coke-a-Cola (of course) and their famous Frosted Orange, which are like orange frosties. Delicious! And we partook of it all! Even Gracie ate French fries!

After The Varsity, we headed to Lenox Mall to ride The Pink Pig.

Now, if you aren’t from Atlanta or even the South, this is going to sound very strange. The Pink Pig has been around since the late 1950s. It began as a little train ride at Christmas that went through Rich’s department store (back when Rich’s was still around). It hung from the ceiling and went through a pink winter wonderland inside the store and then it went outside to the roof top and you rode through an outdoor winter wonderland. My mom used to take me and my sister every year.

This is the original Pink Pig train that I rode when I was little.

Now, they have that on display and they’ve upgraded (or downgraded, if you ask me) to little trolley-like trams that take you through a tent in the Lenox Mall parking lot that is set up like a pink Christmas village. We waited in line for 45 minutes to ride a 2 minute train, but it was totally worth it. And I’m so glad it was my mom who got to take the kids for their first time because she’s the one who used to take me.

Later Sunday night, we met up with the guys at my Aunt Joan and Uncle Tim’s house to see them and my two cousins. My cousin, Abby, graduated this weekend from the University of Georgia (which I will forgive her for) and my cousin, Jake, is in his sophomore year at West Point. They definitely got all the brains in our family.

We don’t get to see my aunt and uncle very often, so it’s always nice to spend some time with them. Their house is beautiful and my Aunt Joan is one of the best hostesses. You can call her about an hour before you show up on her doorstep and she’ll still have a huge spread out for you to eat. I don’t know how she does it.

My Grandma is staying with them through Christmas and so she was there while we opened presents with Joan and Tim’s family. It was a lot of fun and I can’t wait to show pictures of this beautiful butterfly mobile they got Gracie. Bean got, among other things, this stretchy, slimy frog, which he keeps trying to feed his sister.

I actually have a pretty small family, but you’d never know it. I know I never knew it when I was growing up because the small little family that I do have is filled with the love and kindness of hundreds of family members. I think family is the same as Christmas. It doesn’t matter what day you celebrate or what kind of family you have to celebrate with, it is what you make it. And this weekend we made it pretty darn awesome.

24 comments | posted in Childhood, Family, Fun Things, holidays, Marriage Confessions, Operation BWYP, Vacation | tags: Atlanta, Christmas, Family, Macy's Pink Pig, The Varsity