Happy Methuselah Day!

Last Tuesday when I arrived home from school as I entered our house, I sighed a breath of relaxation as the house was tidy and had a fresh aroma. (Some of the things on my makes me happy list!) Anyways there was two oddities: Mister and Ains were in our bedroom--and I hadn't heard a "hey babe!"--and our journal was right inside the door.

After putting my bags in their designated spots, I scooped up the journal, wondering if the two afternoon oddities were connected. I read the most recent words from Chris. A sweet note that ended with, "So we dressed up to show you how much we appreciate you. P.S. Happy 'Methuselah' Day!"

Wondering what the heck Methuselah Day was, I made my way back to the bedroom to see these two cuties!

My coordinating cuties!

I asked Mister about the meaning of the day and he in turned asked how old was Methuselah when he died?

My response of "really" wasn't accurate enough and I soon learned that just as Methuselah was alive for 969 years, Chris and I had been married for 696 days! So to celebrate--after doing a run around to get a new phone--we headed to OG to celebrate with a shared appetizer, a shared entree, and of course a shared dessert with a drink!

I may have failed at Bible Trivia, but I certainly didn't fail at marrying a man who creative loves me even when I'm unloveable!

Goal #41 "Tuesday" Night Questions

41. Answer Tuesday Night Questions consistently for 12 weeks.

One of the things that we talked about when we celebrated our 2nd Anniversary was ways to stay connected and in love for a very long time. [Good goal, eh?] Well I mentioned in my anniversary post about a blog that had some wonderful ideas. This is where Tuesday Night Questions came into play. [Tuesdays is simply what worked for us initially. It's just a coincidence that the original source used Tuesday's too.] Since Ainsley's birth, Chris hasn't worked Wednesday morn

I liked the questions that the couple asked each other and felt like they pretty much covered everything--or at least were conversation starters to cover other topics that needed to be covered. So for the last 12 weeks, Chris and I have been intentional about setting aside time to ask each other the following 4 questions:

1. How did you feel loved this past week?
2. What does your upcoming week look like?
3. How would you feel most loved & encouraged in the days ahead? [Need motivation for anything?]
4. How would you feel best pursued in sex/intimacy this week?

They aren't super profound, but they help to make sure that we're on the same page and each other's needs/wants are being met. It's also a time to show appreciation for your needs/wants being met [particularly through question #1].

One thing that came up in a recent conversation was that Mister felt like his creative love was getting a bit dusty and needed to use it a bit more. Well that he did!

Yesterday morning after all three of us slowly woke, we headed out for a walk to the park. Mister had made a scroll [scrolls have become pretty significant in our relationship] and he wanted to go there to give it to me. It was an absolutely beautiful Fall day so I was all about the walk. [There's a park about 3ish blocks from our house.] We loaded Ains in the stroller and headed out the door.

Taking in the Fall beauty and chatting away, we were about 3/4 of the way there when Chris suddenly stopped. "Uh, I lost it." The scroll that he had put in his back pocket was no longer there. We looked where we were and then headed back towards our house to find it. There wasn't great significance in being at the park when I read it, so once we found it [5 houses from our house] we just headed back home and he gave it to me there.

As you can see, the scroll was dropped pretty close to our house. Not so close to the park. :)

Mister with his/my scroll.

Sitting on the front porch, I read the words written directly from his heart to mine:

And Then There Were Three...

When we began our journeY all I was thinking abOut was the two of Us, together, forever. Ah what bliss I pictured us togetheR! I may have imaginEd the journey with kids somewhere in the mix, but it wAs mostly just the two of us walking hand-in-hand through life.

Of course, as our journey proGressed I began to entertain the amazing thought of Raising a family with you, and the joy of that prospect drEw us onto that part of the journey.

No longer is it just you And me walking through life hand-in-hand, seeing whaT kind of adventures we can get ourselves into. Now it's you and me and Ainsley, wakling hand-in-hand-on-stroller. And I love it!

I wouldn't trade it for just the two of us. Getting to see your warM tenderness with our daughter is whAt I consider pure bliss now. Seeing how you care for her as you nurse her is really aMazing! Watching you selflessly chAnge diapers, pump extra milk, take time away from teaching, give up sleep to keep her fed and clean: what a great start Ainsley is getting Because of you.

I fall more in lovE with you as I see you do these things. I am so fortunAte to be on this journey with you.

Thank you my beautiful bride and perfect mama bear!

Love,

Papa Bear

9-13-11

Notice the bolded capital letters, just like in his "asking out" scroll, they had their own message. 

We continued in meaningful, intentional conversation before heading in to pack up to go to his parents' house. We were going to be learning some basics of canning by making grape jelly! And I think Grandma & Grandpa Massie wanted to see lil' Ainsley! :)

And Then There Were Three...

This is just an example of the good that has come out of our Tuesday Night Questions. I appreciate and feel cherished when Chris expresses himself in this way and he also feels like he's tapping into various aspects of his personality by showing love in this way. [I hope that part about him makes sense. He really does enjoy it. It's not all about me! :)]

So if you aren't taking time to connect with your spouse, I highly suggest that you start now, even if you've been married for decades! I hope to keep this habit a habit for many years to help me stay best connected to my best friend.

P.S. I've hit 5,007 blog views in the history of this blog! Thanks for checking it out and reading it! I hope you [whoever you are] enjoy the glimpse into our ordinary life that we try to live out extraordinarily. I always find it fascinating, and an honor, when I see people out and about and they tell me that they read my blog. I appreciate you taking time out of your busy lives to read about ours. :)

Weekend Review: Quality Time with Chris & 3 Goals Accomplished

After spending 6 hours learning all about having a baby, I sent Mister the following text message on our 5-minute ride home:

"Your adventure, should you choose to accept it, is to pack your bags and get ready to head back out on the road. You will need to pack a bag including the following: change of clothes [nothing fancy!], swimsuit, toothbrush, flip-flops, older tennis shoes, and your pillow. Hopefully that's everything! Will you join me?!"

*I later realized that I put nothing in there about needing shorts to sleep in. Oops. Good thing our tent was secluded!*

He turned to me, smiled, and said I'll join ya!

Had this statement not be made, this weekend would've went to the toilet real quick!

Chris and I packed our bags and we were off in my preloaded car. I told him our ETA was about 40 minutes, but I didn’t really know because I’d been there maybe once and he didn’t ask many questions. [He’s much easy—better—to surprise than me! I’d been playing 20 questions the whole way!

Ten minutes into the trip: “Oh crap!"

“What’s wrong?”

“I forgot to pack something!” What’s that important “something” that I forgot… butter of course! J

As I thought a little more, I realized that I may have needed to pack a rubber mallet to drive in the tent stakes but didn’t want to ask because it would’ve given it away. [We ended up not needed a mallet.]

A quick $2.61 for butter and a bag of ice and we were back on the road.

It wasn’t until we pulled into Van Buren’s KOA that Chris knew what we were doing for the weekend! I patted myself on the back for this secret planning accomplishment! After parking, registering, realizing that everyone there hated their jobs and their kids, we were off to set up our campsite.

Later we would have to return to said hatey workers to buy wood from their empty wood storage which reiterated their passion for the job!

Campsite

 A quick tent set-up and change into our bathing suits, we were off to the swimming area. This pond likely had more chemicals and we were surprised our suits didn’t turn teal so we decided not to go under, but wading chest deep was refreshing and relaxing! They also had a big inflatable slide as well as a "spinning log", but you had to rent their life jackets to use them and it was pretty kid-infested attraction anyways. After relaxing in the water and on the "beach" we journeyed back to our campsite.

Snackin' on a pretzel after wading in the teal water.

For supper we made pizza pudgy pies. All carbon aside they were good! I think I should have taken some PAM along to help out the sticking to the iron and burning factor, but I thought butter is all we'd need. That's a downfall of trying to replicate what you did when you were 12. You don't always remember the details!

I had packed apple pie filling to make dessert pudgy pies, but because of the trickiness of preventing burning that we couldn't quite master, we stuck we the good ol' camping standard, s'mores. Toasted to perfection, they were delish! As we sat around our lil fire, Chris enjoyed a pipe or two and I decided to working on crossing another thing off my list. Borrowing his knife I went to carve my initials in a tree. It was difficult to find a tree in our little area with smooth enough bark to do this, and it ended up not being the prettiest of carvings, but I'm am amateur when it comes to vandalism so it sufficed!

Lighting his pipe, which was much more
successful than the last time he attempted.

Not beautiful, but it counts. :)

 We decided to call it a night and retreated to our tent for the evening. Isn't it amazing how the sun dictates your sleeping and waking when you don't have electricity?! I had borrowed a friend's air mattress [ours took electricity to pump and they had a battery powered one] so sleeping was quite enjoyable. [One question that Chris did ask on the way up was if we'd be sleeping on a mattress that night. I told him I was, but I didn't know about him! This confused him a bit which was perfect! Later he realized why I answered that way.] We rested well and I dreamt about being on a WWF tag-team with Hulk Hogan against his evil twin and another guy. Quite a night. :)

The next morning we rose with the sun, trekked to the mosquito infested hole in the ground toilets, and then enjoyed delicious banana nut muffins cooked over the fire from Meijers. I still have a scar on my finger from the one time I remember making breakfast while camping, so I decided to go with a safer option! After devouring these muffins, we took a little walk around the campgrounds. We were drawn to a jumping pillow [never heard of it prior to this weekend] and saw a handful of kids jumping on it. We walked over intrigued, but I assumed it was a kids only kind of thing. As the kids got off and we got closer, a lady said that she had just turned it off, but asked if we wanted to jump because she could easily turn it back on. After some debating back and forth, the next thing we knew we were kangaroos hopping all over that thing!

I didn't have my camera and don't have Chris' near
to get the pic off his, but this is pretty much
the same thing!

After jumping to our hearts calves' content, we headed back to our site. [Sidenote: As we were leaving and she turned it off again, there was a 3-year old and a 13-year old that came over to jump. "Oh, I'm sorry you can't jump. I've already turned it off!" I felt bad that she turned it back on for us but denied the ones it was likely designed for!] We played several games of Crazy 8 Countdown and then decided weren't really hungry enough to build a fire to cook lunch and both of us were more than ready not to sit in a pool of our own sweat so we would go ahead and pack everything up.

Chris won all but one game of Crazy 8 Countdown.
I let him win since this was kind of like
his birthday celebration. ;)

 After a quick tear down of our campsite and packing of the car, we were homeward bound. In the air conditioning! It felt ah-mazing! Since we returned to Lima early enough in the afternoon [church was actually just getting out as we drove by] we decided to head to the mall to check a couple things out.

On Friday, my momma-cita had asked me to pick up her eyeglasses from JCPenney's and in doing so I saw a "gazebo" [canopy] discounted up on the second floor. Chris and I had talked about wanting to make our back yard a little more livable and have plans in the works for what we want to do to it next summer, but this gazebo seemed like a good option for now! So I looked at it a bit and did some online review research when I got home. Then when our mail came Friday we received a coupon for JCPenney's for 20% off if you used your JCP Credit Card and 15% anything else. Every have a feeling that a sale was made just for you! Yeah, I was feeling that way. So this is what we were going to check out and see if Chris thought it was as much of a good deal as I did!

He agreed.

At checkout they asked if I had a JCP Credit Card, which I did from when I purchased all our bridal parties' attire there over 2 years ago, but I was pretty confident that it had since been cancelled. I am glad that it had because my re-opening it, we were able to save another 10%. We left we our new gazebo canopy saving $398 overall! Cha-ching!

It only took about an hour to set it all up and now we have our own little backyard oasis. Okay not really but we have a back patio that we will actually use! It doesn't fit perfectly this year, but after our planned renovations next year, it'll fit much better!

Back Patio Before

Back Patio After
It has a mosquito netting that can be pulled around it.

Now I have a bit more motivation to pull all the weeds back there so we'll see how that goes!

So in additional to learning quite a bit about the birthing process, having a great getaway time with Mister, and bettering our home a bit I was also able to cross 3 things off my 101 in 1001 list.

40. Plan a surprise get-away with/for Chris.

57. Carve my name initials on a tree.

60. Go camping--somewhere other than our backyard. 

The bad news is I had to start over for Goal #21 even though I was on day 11 of 14. Drats!!

A New Experience

Yesterday I embarked on an adventure that I had never done before: to mow our lawn.

Now hear me out. I have mowed grass before while living at home with my parents, not too often, but I did do it on [slim] occasion. Then obviously while living on campus, lawn care wasn't a part of my duties so there was 5 years of not needing to think about that. We've been in our house for a year now [which seems crazy in and of itself] and when it has come to pretty much anything everything outdoors, that's been "Chris' Job"! You see, I've *thought* about mowing, but it has never been more than a thought. Especially after Chris' first mow job and his comment about how much of a workout it is!

But welcome yesterday. Chris started a new additional job this week, and so while we are getting used to his new work schedules, for the next couple of weeks while I am still in school, the time we are both home during the week is a bit slim. So I want to make sure that it's quality time! Well on Sunday/Monday, Chris commented that one day this week he wanted to trim the edging and another day he wanted to mow this week. Since I got home about 4:30 after getting a new tire for my annoying lovely car, I decided that if I mowed before he got home, then that would be an extra hour that we'd get to spend together once he got off at 6pm. [Secretly I was hoping it'd take me long enough that Chris would get home while I was still working on it, and then he could finish it up!]

And so I embarked on my latest adventure. Now we don't have a large yard, but we do have to make this more of an adventure is a reel mower. Notice I didn't say real but rather a reel mower.

Our real reel mower!

I began in the backyard because I figured that way, if I did an awful job, not too many people would see it. I also started in a little corner of the yard to "practice" a bit. I later learned after Chris got home that I started in what he refers to as the most difficult part of the yard thanks to unevenness due to tree removal before we moved in! Lovely!]

As I pushed this thing back and forth multiple times through the yard, I am just being honest when I admit that I thought about paying a neighbor to use their real non-reel mower so that I could finish in half the time! But I thought Chris may not like that idea since the whole reason we have the mower we do is to be more environmentally conscience. I also had a lot several other not so positive thoughts that went through my brain as I trudged along.

"Fake it 'til you feel it!"

Each time that I had those thoughts, and even became a bit bitter [which makes no sense since there was no one to be bitter against, since I was doing it on my own free will!] I reminded myself why I was mowing in the first place: more quality time with mister! That helped keep things in perspective. That's a lesson that I have to be taught many times--because I obviously haven't learned it yet--simply by doing an attitude check, I can make life, and that tasks in it, much more enjoyable!

I finished up the backyard, and the front yard, put everything away and then waited inside for Chris to get home. As I sat inside and drank even more water, sweat began to pour out of me. I even had a mental debate with myself--which is more of a work out: spin class, a 5k, or mowing?! A little after 6 when Chris returned, he was appreciative that I mowed simply because that meant he didn't have to, although my mow-manship wasn't quite to par.

Topped with cheese of course!

After relaxing just a few minutes, we headed back out to do some trimming. Thankfully about 3/4 of the way through trimming, it began to rain so we headed inside and decided it was supper time. Chris fired up the grill and we had some delicious, ginormous turkey burgers complete with the fixins and I tried my hand at steaming a whole head of cauliflower.

So big we even had to open up two hot dog buns per turkey burger!

Both were oh so yummy, and oh so fulfilling that it made it difficult to bend over and finish up the trimming when the rain let up. I could blame it on a real baby, while Chris' only excuse was the food baby he was growing!

Overall I got a little stinky, a lotta sweaty, a little grass-rashy/itchy, and a lotta time with Mister. So I guess I could say my first and likely last mowing job at our house was a success, and a workout!! :)

500 [+ 2]

Monday marked day 500 of being married to Mister Christopher and so as I knew this day was approaching, I wanted to do something special for him. (Because as much as I don't like to admit it, the busyness of teaching and coaching sometimes quenches my creative juices and I don't love him as creatively well as I would like. Confession over.]


So as I thought and thought and thought some more about what I could do, I thought that I could make a list of 500 things I loved/appreciated/respected about him. That seemed like a great idea until I remembered how long it took me to write 100 things about him before for a gift. [Of course it took so long to actually write, it wasn't that I couldn't come up with that many things.] So I went back to thinking and this is what I came up with...


I took post-it notes and wrote '500' or in some cases '5<3<3' I even did this in bed with Chris laying right next to me. And when he asked what I was up to, 'Oh just working on stuff for tomorrow'. There's a benefit of being a teacher, I am always working on something odd so writing on post-it notes seemed normal. [And notice I didn't lie either!] The next morning I got up early didn't oversleep so that I had enough time to shower and attack the house with post-it notes... on the light switches... on the fan... on the toilet seat... on the roll of tp... on Chris' phone... on the walls... on the front door... on the fridge... in the fridge... on his car... in his work shoes... in order-taking folder... on the table... and just about anywhere else you can think of, I put them. 


I gave him his g'bye-have-a-good-day kiss and giggled as I walked out the door. In my 7 minute drive to school I also successful logged into both of our Facebook accounts and changed our statuses and wrote on each other's walls '500!'. At 8:53am I received a text 'The post it monster stopped by last night!' To which I laughed and replied 'What?!' This was similar to the Olive Garden monster breaking in and covering our fridge with OG magnets one night. 


On my way home from school I counted out 499 red Swedish fish in a big fish bowl and put one larger yellow Swedish fish in the mix and accompanied it with a fish card that said, "There may be 500 fish in the sea, but you are the only one who was created just for me!" :) The delicious fish were waiting for him when he returned from work. 


While I loved doing these two simple things for him, that was not my most favorite part of the day. My favorite part? When I got to listen to Chris grin and tell me how he told his co-workers about the post-its and how some even made comments that you don't hear stories like that everyday. Chris felt special and loved and that's imperative so I was thankful that I took the small amount of time to do something for him. 


Sometimes I wonder how couples don't take time to show each other that they love each other. Don't get me wrong, I still cherish hearing him say "I love you!" for 788 days [the number of days since our engagement when we said I love you for the first time] but sometimes I need to be reminded of it in a different way... and so does he.


Second favorite part of the day: Receiving a text message from Chris while I was at my volleyball game...

*1436* is Chris and my "shmily" [to read what that is visit my friend's blog]. 1436 represents the number of letters of each word in: I love you muchly! I found it encouraging that a couple that persevered and loved so well for so long had such a neat story and every day we are continuing in our own story. 

I hope that when we are old and wrinkly, and everyday that leads to that day, that we continue to love each other well so that others are encouraged that a true love can persevere!