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

I am thankful for the home that we live in and for the lives that we will build here.

I am thankful for a job that makes me smile every day and for the middle schoolers who allow me to be part of their world for a little while.

I am thankful for a church that teaches about the power of prayer, the importance of family, and the strength of faith.

I am thankful for friendships that make me a better person.

I am thankful for the readers who come back here every day to journey with me, without judgment, expectations, or demands.

I am thankful for just enough money in the bank each month.

I am thankful for family who send funny emails, inappropriate texts, and who are worth everything we’ve been through to live close to them again.

I am thankful for an incredibly smart, energetic, innovative, and funny two-year-old son who reminds me every single day that life is just good.

I am thankful for the beautiful smiles, nighttime cuddles, and incredible happiness that my seven-month-old daughter brings into my life.

I am thankful for the person who kisses me every morning, says he loves me every night, and stands beside me every day.

I have a lot to be thankful for this year, but above all of those things, I think I am most thankful for the trials and tribulations in our lives because, through those experiences, I have learned to be thankful for everything else.

Wishing you and your family all the blessings of thankfulness,
Katie, Chris, Michael, and Gracie

17 comments | posted in Faith, Family, Florida, holidays, Jobs and Careers, Marriage, Marriage Confessions, Money, Moving, Operation BWYP, Understanding Katie | tags: Family, life, thanksgiving

Tomorrow will be a great day.

No. Tomorrow will be a FANTASTIC DAY.

Because tomorrow, these boys will be in my house.

I’ve missed them in my house. I’ve missed them at my kitchen table. I’ve missed them making plans to show up at our house on a Friday, but then showing up on Thursday night…or afternoon…or morning… I’ve missed them on my back deck after dinner, drinking beer, and talking about nothing until the wee small hours of the morning. I’ve missed them stealing my camera and taking pictures like this…

Or this…

Chris and Justin have been best friends for seventeen years. And, though they lead very different lives now, they are still like brothers.

Which in turn makes him like my brother. Which in turn make him like my sister’s brother, too. Which in turn makes him like family.

More specifically, like that drunk family member that always shows up, drinks your beer, hits on your friends, and then goes home. He’s that family member.

And then there’s Gary.

Gary is the kind of friend everyone should have. He makes no demands of you, expects nothing from you, and will be there in a split second when you ask. And sometimes, even when you don’t ask. I think he has helped us move, like, five hundred thousand times. Roughly. He’s one of the kindest people I’ve ever met.

When we moved away from Connecticut, leaving our entire group of old friends behind was the hardest part. They were such fixtures in our lives and in our home. They shared every milestone with us.

And we miss them now.

But tomorrow? They’ll be here. In our kitchen again. Sitting on our back porch. Eating our food. Drinking our beer. And wine. And whiskey.

And that is why tomorrow is going to be a great day.

18 comments | posted in Childhood, Friendship, Marriage Confessions, Moving | tags: Friendship, Moving

It’s no secret that I had a rough time adjusting to our move back to Florida from Connecticut. But if you were to ask me now how I am doing, I would be able to tell you with 100% confidence that I feel like I am home. I feel like I have planted roots here and I’m happy to grow now. I have done bloomed where I done been planted.

Except for one thing.

Autumn.

(sigh)

I just cannot get my head around autumn in Florida. It’s hot here. I mean, like, 90-plus degrees every day. A few weeks ago we had a “cold spell” and the temperatures dropped into the 80′s. But, it’s Florida. That just sort of comes with the territory. What is freaking me out is that everyone keeps talking about how much they love fall and I want to take them by the shoulders and shake them, shouting, “HOW WOULD YOU KNOW?!?!?”

I miss the sweaters and the hot cider and the apple orchards and the pumpkins and the oversized cardigans. I miss the smell of wood burning fireplaces and the flannel pajamas and the leaves changing colors. It just doesn’t feel like fall without those things.

So, this weekend, I decided to fake it. Our house during autumn in Connecticut was one of my favorite places. It was warm and cozy and felt like home. In our new house, I want to feel those same things.

I had Chris help me dig through the mess of unpacked moving boxes in our garage and we pulled out all my fall decorations. I hug my first wreath on our new front door and felt a little warmer inside.

I took the autumn garland that used to go on our fireplace mantle in Connecticut and strung it up along our banister.

I took our backdoor wreath and hung it on the door going out to our garage, which I love because it is scented so our entry way smells like cinnamon now.

I put out my favorite fall decoration on the ledge going down the stairs from our living room. Now, I have a constant reminder to be thankful.

And then I went to Walmart and bought $4.00 apple cinnamon candles and $3.00 bags of scented pine cones to make my house smell as warm and cozy and it now feels.

I think I’ll always miss fall in Connecticut and I’m so glad I had the opportunity to live there and experience it. Everywhere you live should have some special significance in your life even after you leave, don’t you think? But my home is now in hot, sunny Florida where we have to light candles that smell like fall and buy fake fall foliage to adorn our banisters. Is it the same as before? Not at all. But fall is just a season and I still love it.

Fake cinnamon candles, plastic pumpkins, and all.

*****

Be sure to check out my review page today for a chance to win a 31 Gifts giveaway!

38 comments | posted in Around the House, Florida, holidays, Marriage Confessions, Moving, Operation BWYP | tags: fall, home decor, life, Moving

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