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These little wonders

I love Saturday mornings when the kids are due for their hair cuts. Every four weeks, I drive Nathan and Liam to Cookie Cutters, and every eight weeks, Kara joins us. I love the 20-minute drive to the strip mall, nursing a thermos of coffee, listening to happy chatter from the backseat and catching random lyrics from She and Him, Laurie Berkner or the Lumineers, depending on how well I've planned ahead. At the end of our route, we have to pass through the tunnel of a train bridge, and even while it's just a tiny dot in front of us, Kara and Nathan go out of their minds trying to find an engine on the tracks.

For 15 minutes, they sit on tractors, race cars and swivel chairs watching Nick Jr. while gold and brown strands fall from their heads to the floor. Scissor cuts, because Nathan has the perfect boy mop and Liam please don't give me a heart attack he's the only baybee I have left. But we do pull out "the buzzers" for the boys, to clean up around their ears and neck. Liam takes it like a champ, but since the age of two, Nathan has struggled. The combination of sound and sensation is just too much for him, and he turns into a puddle of giggly nervousness the minute the switch is turned on. Oftentimes I have to hold his head so the hair stylist doesn't nick his skin. I used to be supremely embarrassed about this, until suddenly I wasn't. I learn valuable lessons every day as a mother, but by far the most precious is patience.

Once the grooming is done, everyone is free to zip down slides and ask for balloons and it isn't long before we're back in the car, looking for trains. Such a simple outing - it rarely lasts longer than an hour - but when I reflect on the pace of a happy life, these mornings are examples of perfection.

On November 2, Luke achieved a bucket-list accomplishment: completing a marathon before he turned 40. My father-in-law graciously watched the kids so I could gallivant around town unencumbered, catching Luke at various milestones along the route. We froze together outside the corral, waiting for the race to begin, and when the time came for him to join the other runners, I cried like a baby. The emotions I felt for him that morning rivaled those of our wedding day.

Once Luke was off, I was, too. In addition to cheering him on at the start, I caught him between miles 2 and 3 at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument downtown, mile 18 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the finish line near the state capitol.

What a time it was - a mixture of awe in my husband, pride in our city and thankfulness to be part of such a big moment in so many people's lives. Luke started training for this race in July, and because of my work schedule, 95% of his weekday runs happened at five in the morning. He ran when he didn't want to, took breaks to treat injuries, and worried more than once that he just wasn't ready. This entry from Zoot about the power of a goal race explains it better than I can at this late hour, but this quote nails it:

Crossing a finish line is about so much more than the race itself, it’s about battling the demons that tried to keep you from starting in the first place.

Still battling lots of demons in my quest for simplicity, and it feels like I fail more times than I win. But I think of those quiet Cookie Cutter mornings where drudgery and joy intersect, and I keep trying. I'm not sure when I decided that children's haircuts were synonymous with the meaning of life, but I promise not to wait another three months to tell you more.

One for the "First World Problems" File

Game on! Today I begin the third of an 8-week training program to run the B&O Express 5K in September - my first race since fall 2010. Registration's done and everything! I'm following Hal Higdon like I did for the Mini a couple years ago, mainly because his novice program measures distance instead of time and the thought of switching my pace at the bark of a sports watch is about as appealing as watching paint dry.

I'm going after this thing, no excuses.

In an effort to strike that elusive balance of family, work and self, I'm attempting again to score the majority of my runs in the morning, even during the work week, which thankfully is much easier in July when the sun shines at 6 a.m. It also helps that Luke is running, too, and on the cusp of starting training for his first half. It's nice to swap notes and offer encouragement knowing your passion comes from a shared place.

It's also refreshing to rediscover something that brings me joy on such a grand scale. I read an article a few weeks ago on the importance of leisure and the dangers of the busy trap that made an impact on me. Some of my favorite lines:

"The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it." 

"More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary."

(Luckily, businesswoman is considered an actual vocation in Sally, Huckle and Lowly's world, though I doubt a more detailed description would rank any higher on the legitimacy scale than those "What my mom thinks I do" memes on Facebook)

"I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn’t work harder and say everything I had to say, but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd. Life is too short to be busy."

Amen, Tim Kreider.

For the most part, Luke and I do a good job of prioritizing our lives. We're selective with RSVPs and intentional about giving the kids plenty of unstructured time to play Legos, build block towers and narrate stories with their artwork (no lie). This is also true from a financial standpoint: low mortgage, zero car debt, no cable or landline. We certainly have room to grow (Emergency Fund, is it me you're looking for?), but we're on the right track.

When it comes to the "little moments," though, I personally am terrible with letting distractions get in the way of spending time on things that matter. I can waste an hour on Facebook while Liam has no baby book. I can click through my blogroll (still no reader, Jen!) but let my own site collect dust. I check work e-mail when I shouldn't. I watch TV instead of going to sleep.

I often let my long-term goals take a backseat to busyness that, in the end, doesn't amount to anything.

This week was somewhat of a new start. I followed my training schedule, gave a reference for a friend, assembled two care packages, caught up on some reading, and had lunch with Luke and the kids at work. That's what I want to do more of. Those are the moments that make a happy life. There are no prizes for Quickest Responder on Outlook or Most Scrubs Episodes Watched. 

I want to send more care packages. I want to finish a book in the same season I started it. I want to copy favorite quotes into a two-dollar notebook and scrapbook (GASP) and help others outside of just writing a check.

It's not that I never do any of these things (I even have a commonplace book for quotes, remember?); it's about rearranging my life so I can do them more.

I also want to make more time for God.

One of the reasons Luke and I love our church is that the pastors deliver amazing sermons. Today, Pastor Ted talked about communicating with God - how to know when He's speaking to you and how receptive you are to hearing what he has to say. This is something I struggle with. While I love talking out ideas and scenarios with family and friends, I'm very independent and usually pretty confident that I can figure out my own path. I'm good at thanking God for the blessings in my life, but I suck at welcoming guidance. 

On one of my early runs last week - it couldn't have been later than 6:15 - I passed the retention pond next to my trail that joins several of the nicer subdivisions in my neighborhood. By chance I noticed one of the teenagers who lives on my block sitting on a bench in front of the pond. Usually I see him after work riding his skateboard or walking with his friends, but that morning he was alone, quiet, just staring at the water.

That image came back to me at random points throughout the day and again after today's sermon. It reminded me that I need more stillness in my life so I can hear voices other than my own. I need to be open to guidance.

That's a life worth choosing.

One day you might see this on our minivan

Since Liam was born, several of you have jokingly pointed out my need for an updated blog banner. Well, I submitted a request to Luke, Artist Slash Illustrator Extraordinaire, and despite being somewhat preoccupied with coparenting a newborn and two toddlers, he still took the time to hook me up with something awesome, yo.

And also, finally, one husband. Much obliged, dear.

Are you following my fan page on Facebook? If not, here's a friendly reminder that I update that page each time I post a new blog entry, so that you don't have to refresh my URL twenty times a day, waiting with baited breath for the latest 411 on all things Frema. You're welcome! Plus, one time I asked for advice on which kind of nursing cover to buy and received some great feedback, so who knows? I may call upon your collective wisdom once again. Surely you don't want to miss out on all the sharing.

You can also subscribe via e-mail, if you are still barbaric enough to maintain such a thing.

Actual content-based entry coming soon. 

Ghost of Vacations Past: Part I

It should not be shocking to anyone that life changes drastically once you have kids, so much of my reality as a mother to young children is not that daunting to me. I'm okay changing or nixing evening plans to be present for Kara's and Nathan's bedtime (as a working mom who misses the bulk of daytime hours, this is insanely important to me). At our house, 6:30 a.m. wake-ups are to be expected, so I try not to gripe about it too much (though when my sister Ryan complained on Facebook over the weekend that her dogs wouldn't let her sleep past nine, I admit to dying a little inside). And Luke and I have accepted that with little family nearby and no discretionary money in our budget to hire a baby-sitter, date nights must be few and far between. We know many of these issues will iron themselves out over the next few years and that we just have to be patient until then.

One of the biggest parts of my pre-parenthood life that I DO miss, though? Vacationing.

A few weeks ago I was dusting some picture frames and came across a photo taken during a whitewater rafting trip back in 2003, and I realized that the majority of Luke's and my travels took place before I started blogging. Which means they are not documented here. Which means I spent more than two hours one night in late February sorting through photo albums and scanning low-res images onto my computer in the hopes that one day I would tell you all about them. And today is that day! Aren't you lucky?

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WHITEWATER RAFTING, HICO, WEST VIRGINIA (2002-2004)

Growing up, vacations were not a priority for my family, mainly because there wasn't enough money but also because my parents have never been comfortable sleeping away from home. So once I was on my own and able to make more strategic decisions as to how to spend my paycheck, I learned that I wanted to make travelling a bigger part of my life. My first trip came about in 2002 during my first year working for Saint Joe, when I was able to attend a whitewater rafting trip hosted by our alumni association so that I could cover it for the college's quarterly magazine. Since my expenses were paid for by Saint Joe, I was technically on the clock, and thus one could argue that this trip doesn't count as a vacation, but prior to this my only experience with whitewater was the clear stuff drizzling out of my shower nozzle, so, dudes. It totally counts.

We left for Hico, West Virginia, on the Friday before Labor Day and reached our hotel by dinnertime. Early the next day, we were bound for the New River, where the waves ranged in classification from 2 through 5 (2 being tame, 5 being more challenging). We spent a day and a half on the river total and were home late on Sunday.

And IT WAS AWESOME.

I'm not a strong swimmer, and I've never had fantasies about snorkeling or scuba-diving or any other activity that requires carting around a tank of oxygen to enjoy, but man, did I love rafting. This river was relatively calm, so it was a great introduction to the sport, and there were plenty of peaceful moments where I remember leaning back, holding onto my paddle, and thinking, I could sit like this forever. I got along great with all the alumni who attended, and we bonded over lunches of hot dogs and hamburgers grilled along the river's edge, and I never cared that my hair looked like crap. Again, AWESOME.

 

Here I am with my raftmates "surfing" a righteous pocket of whitewater on the New River. Clearly, I had not yet joined Weight Watchers.

I had so much fun that the following year, when our alumni director planned a second whitewater trip for Labor Day weekend, I couldn't say no. I paid my own way this time, though my boss chipped in a hundred bucks from her own pocket since she knew I would write another piece for the magazine, and I even sprung for my sister Samantha, a senior there at the time, to come with me. Luke has always been an outdoorsman at heart, and it didn't take any convincing to get him to join us.

We went back to West Virginia and used the same adventure company as before, but this time we spent our time wrestling the Lower Gauley. As you can see in the below picture (which was obviously taken by the rafting company), it was a little more challenging than the New River.

 

When rafting, the guides stress the importance of everyone doing their fair share of paddling if you want to stay afloat when hitting the more aggressive waves. This was the biggest wave we encountered on our entire trip, yet Samantha completely ignored the rules in favor of diving to the middle of the raft to keep from falling out. This picture hangs in my stairway and it is one of my favorites to this day.

With all that fun, though, it was such a rough Saturday that we skipped the half-day allotted for rafting on Sunday and stayed behind to walk the grounds of the drop-off site.

 

My sister was preparing to graduate, so I loved being able to have this time with her.

 

Meanwhile, after two years of dating, Luke and I had settled into a pretty nice rhythm. By this point we had gone on several overnights to various state parks in the area, but this was our first time doing anything Big. The whole time we were there, we couldn't stop ourselves from talking about coming back.

 

Last but not least, I was enjoying a healthier, lighter me, thanks to losing 17 pounds through Weight Watchers.

 

The Three Whitewater Musketeers.

Luke and I did go rafting one last time in 2004, again with Saint Joe, again on the Lower Gauley, again taking a pass on Sunday rafting to recover from the day before, our "recovery" involving a pretty steep hike round-trip to access a spot on the Gauley where most rafters and canoers get into trouble (aka flip over). Coincidentally, that was also the last year Saint Joe sponsored the trip, but in 2005 I had moved to Indianapolis, so I wouldn't have had the time or money to attend, anyway. Luke and I still talk about when we can go rafting again. What an amazing time.

LUKE'S 30TH BIRTHDAY SURPRISE, ANGOLA, INDIANA (2004)

I haven't been part of many surprise events, but the one I did orchestrate turned out to be one of the best vacations I've ever had. I was a new 24 with a steady paycheck and willingness to do something extra special for Luke's thirtieth birthday which, as many of you know, falls on Valentine's Day, so advance planning was critical to making the day a success.

His birthday fell on a Saturday that year, so on Friday morning I had a single rose in a vase delivered to his work, with instructions to go home, pack a bag filled with warm clothes and at least one nice outfit, and be outside his apartment by 10:30 a.m. Of course, weeks prior I had cleared this with his boss so that he wouldn't be surprised by Luke's cutting the day short.

We drove about three and a half hours from Rensselaer to Angola, Indiana, eventually parking in front of the Tulip Tree Inn.

 

Forgive the shit-poor film quality, as this picture was taken with a (gasp!) manual camera, and the prints didn't come out all that great to begin with, so scanning them in makes them look even worse.

Our room was adorable, so quaint and pretty, and while we had to share a bathroom with another couple down the hall, it was so, so worth it for the atmosphere.

 

That night we grabbed pizza in town and prepared for our big Saturday, which involved enjoying the toboggan run at Pokagon State Park. I had been tobogganing once as a kid and loved it, and Luke and I had talked about doing something like that several times in the past. The line was insanely long, so we only took a single run, but man, was it fun.

 

Afterwards, we had lunch at the park's inn and spent the afternoon hiking the trails.

The recent snowfall made for some tricky moments on stairs, but overall it was a wonderful few hours spent walking, talking, and indulging our playful side.

I included these photos in a do-it-yourself snowglobe as part of my Christmas present to Luke that year, but now it sits on my dresser among stacks of paperwork and unmated socks. Again, these are two of my favorite pictures ever, because of the memories they invoke.

After our hike, we drove back into town and walked some more of the downtown area, and eventually stopped for a break of hot chocolate (me) and coffee (him).

Another hour of talking and laughing. Our whole day was a conversation that I didn't want to end.

That night, we had dinner at The Hatchery, which was described by the owner of the Tulip Tree Inn as the nicest restaurant in town. My planning foresight involved making reservations on the same day I booked our room, more than a month before, and still we waited over an hour for a table, but again, so worth it. I don't remember what I had - probably steak and some form of potato - but Luke still raves about the bolognese sauce he had with his pasta dish. Our waiter was kind enough to snap our picture with my crappy camera.

After dinner we went back to our room and enjoyed some red wine. The following day, we drove to his parents' house in Merrillville, where his mom, dad, and brother were expecting us, and sang a hearty round of "Happy Birthday" around a cake made by Luke's mom while the birthday boy blew out his candles.

It was an absolutely perfect weekend, and another trip that gets talked about all the time.

I can't believe that was SEVEN YEARS AGO. What babies we were in our relationship, with so much ahead of us to navigate, and even more to learn about each other. And yet still, perfect.

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There are a couple more trips I have in mind to address in a future part two, but that involves digging through even more photo albums, so that may take awhile. If you want to read about some of our more recent adventures, though, check out:

Niagara Falls Honeymoon 2006 (couple of actual pictures here)
Indiana Dunes Camping Trip 2006
Mackinac Island Babymoon 2007
New Buffalo, Michigan Anniversary Weekend 2009

Banner time!

Seeing as I am now 22 weeks pregnant and therefore no longer in any shape to be running downhill with two toddlers and a laptop on my person, it was time to spruce up the ole blog banner. Fortunately, once again, Luke happily came to my rescue. Having free design services under your very own roof is nothing to sneeze at, people.

For those of you following via feed reader, here is the latest look:

 

I keep telling my husband to add his mugface somewhere so that I don't appear to be an unwed mother with poor access to birth control, but my pleas fall on deaf ears. One day I may have no choice but to Photoshop in a picture of Joshua Jackson, just to appear respectable.

The sacrifices I am willing to make for my children, I swear.

Anyway, as if this news weren't exciting enough, I have finally created a Facebook fan page for this website! It was my big project for the week, and it took me two tries to get it right, because the first time around I done got myself confused by all the options Facebook offered when it came to categorizing pages, so I went with "Writer/People," because hello! I am a writer. Am also person! That's two for two right there. And immediately I was so pleased with myself that I shot off invites to anyone on my Friends list that I thought would give a damn, and it was only when I attempted to finetune my profile that I realized maybe I had made the wrong choice. But for some reason unbeknownst to me, Facebook doesn't allow you to recategorize a page; you either resign yourself to being inappropriately labeled or delete the page and start over. With two days in and only nine likes, I figured it was safe to scrap my early effort and start fresh.

Mission accomplished.

I'm not really sure what I'll do with this page yet; I will definitely add links to my posts as they're published here, so if you are on Facebook a lot and don't like having to jump around to access content you like, this is a pretty sweet deal for you, isn't it? I may also post random thoughts and questions as they come to me just to spice things up. At this point, I'm also open to suggestions, so if you have any, fire away.

Next big project: deciding on an ad network. Right now I only know of a couple: BlogHer and Google. So if you have experiences with or opinions on either one, let me know that, too.

That's what she said

"I swear I didn't pull it that hard" was the opening I received upon taking in the broken car door handle in Luke's hand, severed from the Cobalt on Tuesday during his ninety-minute quest to free my car from several layers of ice.

"The door handle begs to differ," I said.

 

It's hard to be mad about it when he was doing such a kind thing for me, braving freezing temperatures to spare his eighteen-weeks-pregnant wife from all that time outside. Plus, it was the passenger-side door, and since normally only one person is in the Cobalt at a time, it's not a big deal in the long run. Luke is hopeful that he can superglue the handle back on once the weather is warmer; meanwhile, I worry we are one step away from using engine hoods from different vehicle models and garbage bags from under the kitchen sink as substitutes for legimate car repairs. At least superglue is budget-friendly!

This was just one of several winter-weather troubles experienced by my husband during Indy's two-day, house-bound Iceapalooza.

 

RIP, ice scraper number one.

 

...And to your cheap, good-for-nothing brother, ice scraper number two.

He also took a decent fall yesterday while completing his training run for the Mini-Marathon, attempting to hike the slope leading from our trail to our backyard, which he is still paying for today by way of cuts on his nose and lip and various aches and pains. He nearly scared the bejeezus out of me when he came back into the house.

 

Thankfully, Monday's weather was uneventful, so the four of us were able to enjoy a lovely afternoon at a nearby park to celebrate Nathan's birthday. More on that (plus his video!) soon.

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In our on-going effort to live within our means, pay off our credit card, AND have something leftover for savings, Luke and I are constantly reassesing our priorities and searching for less expensive ways to accommodate the non-negotiables. One such item that I have been consistently moving over to the next pay period for myself is a haircut. The salon I usually go to is affiliated with Aveda and charges $29 for a wash and cut. For someone who spent the better part of her teens and early twenties fighting with stylists from walk-in places like Fantastic Sam's over the best way to hack my curls, this price has never phased me because the service is top-notch and I am usually satisfied with the results. Plus, even when I was in Chicago getting the best cuts of my life (I still miss you, Brenda), the most I paid for a cut was $35. Again, so worth it to me for the service and expertise.

Unfortunately, our current budget disagrees. Either I can keep putting it off until I can afford my regular place, every day growing one step closer to resembling the cavemen in those Geico commercials, or resign myself to searching for cheaper, possibly less-experienced pastures. As evidenced by the photo below, I think it's obvious there's really just one option.

 

Look! With the proper backdrop and everything!

Action must be taken, and soon. Therefore, sometime between now and next weekend, which is when we'll travel north to attend baby Rosemary's baptism, I will cross my fingers, say a prayer, and brave the chair at Great Clips. I will be sure to keep the cut simple; right now, my hair is actually a little too "fringe-y" for my taste, and the layers are out of wack from postponing all these weeks, so a clean-up is definitely in order. The long-term goal is to grow it out to shoulder-length by summer; before that, though, I need a cut that will be more conducive to less upkeep. My hope is to replicate a style I had in 2006 during my pre-engagement/newlywed period, as pictured here:

 

Not drastically different from how I wear it now, just a little fuller at the top without the tails framing my face. That shouldn't be hard for even a new stylist to handle, right? I wouldn't think so. But then, I also thought all stylists knew how to do a blow-out with a round brush. Apparently, that is not the case.

Wish me luck, friends.

(Also: SOB, I miss that outfit. And my hair color! And the money and the basically care-free existence we had back then! Naive fools, both of you!) 

How number three came to be

I guess I can archive these past few years of drama regarding to three or not to three in my Waste of Time file, huh?

Thank you all so much for the congratulations and well wishes on this pregnancy. It's been a surreal few weeks around here, that's for sure.

For those interested, a timeline:

October 10
Let me preface this by saying the entire fall season has been a blur of activity for my young little family. Weddings, bachelorette parties, middle-of-the-night births, work trips, guy weekends - all of them took place one after the other, at least two and a half hours away from home. I worked one Friday in September and was out of the office six days in October (mixture of work and personal). We have certainly enjoyed celebrating these happy events and good times with our loved ones, but all that travel produced a constant undercurrent of fatigue among the adults in our house. Which does not exactly lay the groundwork for, ahem, proper romantic relations.

This particular weekend began with my returning from a corporate-related field visit to Clarksburg, West Virginia, at 10:30 p.m. that Friday, resulting from a 15-minute delay of my initial flight that caused me to miss my connecting flight, and of course the next couple of flights back home were either full or became full after passengers other than myself were rescued from Airport Hell via standby lottery. I missed Kara and Nathan's bedtime when I should have been home for their mid-afternoon snack. It was a long day.

The following morning, Luke and his brother drove to Sandusky, Ohio, to hang out at Cedar Point Amusement Park until Sunday afternoon. I had a wonderful time playing with my kids, but hot damn, I missed mah husband.

So that night, after the children were asleep and the dishes were washed and Facebook appropriately monitored, Luke and I cracked open a bottle of wine we had purchased more than two months ago and settled in for a quiet, relaxing evening. An evening that just so happened to end with me asking, "You do know what could have just happened, right?"

Luke nodded, shrugging his shoulders. Obviously the wine had lowered his inhibitions. (Not that I was complaining.)

Quickly I did the math regarding my September visit from Aunt Flo and measured it against the average length of my cycles (32-34 days), and as we turned out the lights I confidently summarized, "Well, my last cycle was before Gina's wedding, so it should be here any day now. I'm sure we're probably safe."

Only the longer I thought about it, the less confident I felt. Since Luke and I have consisently used protection since Nathan was born, I don't make a conscious effort to track my cycles; i.e., there were no helpful Xs on the calendar for me to verify this now-critical piece of information. Then I remembered that, in fact, I had NOT gotten my period before the wedding, but after, vividly recalling my thankfulness to Flo on the morning of September 19 for staying away from my two-hundred-plus-dollar bridesmaid dress. 

I eventually changed my stance and told Luke, who could barely keep his eyes in his sockets by this point, "If we had been TRYING to have a baby, we couldn't have picked a better time."

Obviously, that was not the case with Luke's urology consult (November 3) (which has since been cancelled) (of course).

Meanwhile, the opening scene from Look Who's Talking was being re-enacted in my uterus.

October 11 - October 20
For almost two weeks we were stuck in The Land of Not Knowing, hashing out next steps if it turned out I was pregnant, and me preparing myself for the news that I wasn't, because I so, so wanted another baby and I knew this was my only chance to realize this dream. We have been so cautious for so long that it was a miracle this random fluke even happened at all. We were not trying, and would not be trying. It was now or never.

I looked for cosmic signs that another pregnancy was meant to be, like our recent financial overhaul and the last-minute decision not to sell our carseat. The brand-new, twice-used Ergo carrier sitting in Nathan's closet begging to hold a child who wouldn't scream and flail about angrily because "I wanna walk, Mommy." Also, our track record for accidentally conceiving children.

Then again, we were living a wonderful life with the family we had right now, and it was so much easier for us to get around, and I didn't miss night feedings or nursing anxiety or c-section recovery or taking almost a year to resume my pre-pregnancy weight. We had exciting plans for the future. Financial security was in sight. I was going to visit another continent, even, to help Molly get her precious baby next year. And one day, we would be foster parents, and possibly even obtain our third child that way. Another baby would be like taking two steps back, right? Life is good, I told myself. I will be okay.

October 21
That week I confided in several people about my maybe baby, with varied responses. That Thursday afternoon, I finally told my coworkers, and because a number of us have been experiencing random bouts of baby fever since the summer, they were super-excited; to the point that they eventually convinced me to run to the pharmacy and take a First Response during lunch.

I only took it because I was sure it would be negative. Even if I were pregnant, it was too soon to tell. Wasn't it?

"I'm not even late yet," I warned them as I headed to the bathroom. "It's only Day 32."

On a related note, did you know that a home pregnancy test can now be accurate as early as six days before your missed period? When Nathan was conceived, they were only at five. Slowpokes!

Two minutes later, I was running downstairs with two pink lines and one shaky left hand.

They were all so surprised I didn't call Luke the minute I got the positive, but I knew the news had to be shared in person. So I left work a few minutes early and cornered Luke in the kitchen once I was home. He was at the sink, washing dishes.

"I told the girls at work today about maybe being pregnant," I said, hand in purse searching for my precious evidence. "They were so happy, they wanted me to take a test."

"Did you tell them it was too early?" he asked, his own hands submersed in dishwater.

"That's what I said, but they told me that now you can get a positive reading from a drugstore test six days before you miss your period!"

"Yeah? So do you want to--" He stopped short after turning around, slowly taking in the white stick held snugly between my fingers. His eyes grew wide.

"Oooh."

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Baby number three was definitely not part of our current life plan. Many adjustments will have to be made. Like, no more Africa next year (which I am so, so sad about, but Molly has been great), and a major vehicle upgrade, and money for prenatal visits and hospital bills and maternity leave. I will have to prepare myself to once again dance with nursing and hopefully, finally, make it my bitch. Plus, navigate all the insecurities that go along with mothering a brand-new person AS WELL AS adjust to being outnumbered by an army of children under the age of four.

And yet, just try to wipe this silly grin off my face. Just try.

On living honestly

This morning, Luke and I registered Kara for preschool.

Well, technically, not preschool. It's categorized as a children's ministry program, offered through a nearby church. Four hours a day, one day a week. The program isn't accredited with fancy acronyms, and the staff members don't have teaching licenses, but there will be free play and music and snack time and show-and-tell and take-home bulletins once a month. Plus, we'll have to get her a backpack and lunchbox. So for a two-year-old girl who's been hanging out at home with her dad and her baby brother almost her entire life, it's close enough.

It's plenty close for her parents, too.

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In an effort to get a better handle on our finances, Luke and I are trying something new at home. Suze Orman calls it the back-to-cash movement. I like to think of it as our new reality.

The new reality is this: Gone are the days where we put everything on the credit card and pay for it at the end of thirty days (which, near the end, wasn't working out so well, anyway). Good-bye to Excel spreadsheets that were intended to help us budget on a monthly basis rather than per-paycheck. From now on, if we want to buy something, we are going to the bank, making a withdrawal from the ATM, and paying for it in cash. There will be occasional exceptions, of course, like purchases online or the occasional Redbox rental, but ninety-five percent of the time, them's the rules.

We started on October 1. Six days in so far, and doing well.

 

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Luke and I have been talking a lot about what we want to accomplish in the short term--realistic goals we can achieve in the next six to twelve months. In the short term, we want more social networking opportunities for Kara and Nathan (not the Facebook and Twitter kind), to give them a chance to explore interests outside the confines of our living room, interacting with adults who are not us. We want to enjoy financial freedom and not have to itemize every single penny of a paycheck two months in advance in order to afford concert tickets or Christmas presents or a random date night. We want to formally close the baby chapter of our lives by New Year's and put our house on the market come spring. And I want to volunteer.

However, we're also in agreement on what we don't want. For example, we are not quite ready to enroll Nathan in any sort of program that takes him out of our care. He can have a few more months of home time with Luke and Kara, and enjoy the precious one-on-one time he's about to score with his dad, and at least blow out the candles on his second birthday cake before we re-evaluate our position. Also, we are not ready for Luke to go back to work, even if we could put another salary to good use ($1,600 worth of car repairs on the Outlander, I'm looking at you). We appreciate and depend on the benefits of being a one-income family: the extra bonding time for Luke and the kids, the flexibility of managing only one work schedule, the ability for me to concentrate on my corporate to-dos as needed instead of tossing my laptop into a bag the minute the clock turns five. We wouldn't be any worse for the wear for having those issues, but they would most definitely complicate things, and we have all the uncertainty we can handle right now, thankyouverymuch.

We've talked about me picking up some freelance work or Luke taking a part-time job with night and weekend hours to bring more money through the door, but honestly, right now we are content to just buckle down and do the best we can with what we have today. There is enough to pay the bills and buy the organic yogurt we like and travel north and even score dinner out once and a while. We are beefing up our short-term savings and still making regular deposits into our health savings account for medical expenses. We don't need a second mortgage, and we aren't defaulting on Sallie Mae. In every area that counts, we are fine. And believe me, we are thankful.

But still, we are making hard choices, like back in August when we discontinued satellite. This month, we stopped all contributions to my 401(k), an account that's been funded every two weeks rain or shine for the last five years AND saw generous matches from my employer, to make room in the budget for Kara's tutition. I am disappointed over this and understand there may be long-term ramifications come our golden years, but I do not regret it. Luke and I have been preparing for the future since before we even married. We're proud of the money we've accrued for retirement already. But right now, it is time to plan for now.

 

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In a conversation with Molly earlier this fall, she used the phrase "living honestly," and it has stuck with me ever since. Because that's what it feels like we're doing now: living a life that reflects our priorities and our resources, and sorting out the white noise that only gets in the way. For the first time in a long time, we're putting our money where our mouth is. What's that worth to you? I ask about almost everything now, from wedding RSVPs to a bag of Gummi Bears to preschool. What are you willing to sacrifice to make this happen?

Our short term is paving the way for the long term, a reality in which we are mortgage-free and in a position to entertain housing options that bring us closer to our loved ones, who I am missing more than ever these days. A reality that has both of us in careers that we love and best align with our strengths and passions. A reality that includes another child, obtained in a non-traditional way. It will take baby steps, but we will get there. I know it in my bones.

 

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As Kara and Nathan grow older, I become more aware of all the ways we can screw them up. I know, I know, they're only babies, all they need is love, blah blah blah, but even at this young age, we are setting the bar for how they will realize their potential. Take Kara's "school," for example. She'll be three in December, and is intellectually capable, I think, of handling a (slightly) more rigorous curriculum than the one we are placing her in; kids younger than her do this all the time in daycare, yes? But that benefit of school is not important to Luke and me right now, and as a result, her experience will be missing that formalized educational component. We'll revisit our feelings next year, obviously, but for now that's where we stand. 

We are also setting the bar for ourselves, I suppose, in regards to what Kara and Nathan can expect from us as parents. We did what we felt was necessary to get Kara into school, but we didn't even consider placing her more than one day a week (baby steps, remember?) or research more expensive options like the Goddard School or Montessori. We already know that retirement savings will always trump a 529. Many parents have different opinions on this, and that's okay. But as much as Luke and I want to give the kids the very best of ourselves, we are going to make ourselves a priority, too, and not apologize for that to anyone.

 

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I have come to learn that as a mother, I enjoy the toddler years far more than the infant ones. Kara's humor and sass are shining through these days, the product of two wise-cracking parents, to be sure, and builds upon both by relying on her razor-sharp memory. One day while we were eating dinner, she thought it a good idea to let milk dribble out of her mouth. She laughed as the milk traveled down her chin, and I hid a smile as I said, "Kara Leigh, please don't do that, that's not funny," and she replied, "Well, maybe a little funny," a phrase Luke uttered in passing the day before. (Thank you, dear.)

Meanwhile, Nathan speaks in full sentences and punctuates the majority of them with a question mark. "What's that noise, Mommy?  Want to build Mrs. Potato? Where's the moon, Mommy? Is that a oak leaf, Mommy? Want to read Turtle, Turtle, Watch Out? Should Momma hooold you?" And so on with the inquisitiveness. He is so curious, so observant, so willing to sit back and watch the action unfold. That is, when he's not bouncing off the couch, roaring like Michael Jackson circa "Scream," or body slamming his torso into the nearest gate.

They both have insatiable appetites for reading, which has been further enhanced by the recent discovery of our local library. At first I was worried they wouldn't get the concept of borrowing books, afraid they would pout and fuss when it came time to return them, but they totally get it, and now live for the next chance to play with the trains and scramble through the catepillar tunnel featured in the kids' room.

Our new reality is that our toddlers are becoming full-blown children. And man, do we just want to do right by them, and ourselves, too.

 

And things we're all too young to know

My oldest friend Gina, whom I've known since kindergarten, got married on Saturday. I was a member of the wedding party, and as I watched her walk down the aisle with her dad, tears sprang into my eyes, because she looked so beautiful in her dress, and her father so proud to have her on his arm. And when she met her husband-to-be at the altar, the soft way he looked at her made me cry some more. They've been together about ten years, but I truly believe that a couple's wedding day is the beginning of a whole new life. I am so excited for them to begin this journey.

Of course I got to thinking about my own marriage, which turns five years old in May.

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In the year following our wedding, I listened to a handful of husbands and wives in Blogland talk about how difficult marriage can be, and it's not that I didn't believe them, but...I didn't believe them. At least, it didn't seem applicable to us. Luke and I dated for five years before we tied the knot and lived together months before, and in those years and months we experienced a lot of drama over a Mary Poppins carpetbag full of issues: relating to each other physically and emotionally, establishing our relationship as an independent unit, setting priorities for the future. We trudged through painful conversations about sex and child-rearing and religion. We (eventually) learned to celebrate the best and accept the worst in ourselves and each other, and to aim to improve where we could. And once we (finally) got engaged, we embraced the sentiment of marriage with our whole hearts, banishing the word "divorce" from our vocabulary. "Always remember what brought you here," our pastor told us over burgers and fries at Joe's Crab Shack, two months before the wedding, and we promised to do just that.

In my opinion, the most difficult part was the getting there. Now that we weren't laboring over our intentions as a couple, now that we knew the general shape of our life path, there would be no stopping us.

It was with this unwavering mindset that we said "I do."

 

On our wedding day, May 12, 2006. How lovely we were, and utterly clueless, too.

Today, our marriage is almost equal the length of our courtship, but the highs and lows on our marital grid have delivered much stronger punches. We began with two full-time jobs, one sweet freelance gig, and only a teeny one-bedroom apartment to maintain, with no debt save for my college loans, and flexibility up the wazoo. We were making plans to move back to Chicago, travel across the world, add to our family, and phase me out of the workforce to fulfill my dream of being a stay-at-home mom.

It's easy to be idealistic when you have money in the bank and there is nobody to tend to but yourselves. It's easy to move into the future when everything is going according to plan.

By our first anniversary, I was pregnant with Kara, and we quickly learned that our neat and tidy life map simply wasn't sustainable. Luke didn't bring in enough money at his non-profit for me to stay home, but my job could support all three of us, so the day after his thirty-fourth birthday he bid farewell to office life and I prepared to wear the clothes of a working mother. I went through a lot of ugly feelings then: sadness over anticipated time lost with my daughter and any future children we would have, resentment over taking on a role I didn't want, fear of the unknown, and just plain anger because goddammit, I did not sign up for this.

Then, not six months after my c-section, I was pregnant with Nathan. Oh my goodness, what a blessing, and whoa, motherfucker, what have we gotten ourselves into.

So we whittled away the remainder of our nest egg preparing for our second life detour. Purchased a house to make room for another baby, investing in a down payment and closing fees and new carpet and paint. Bought a second set of nursery furniture, a different type of breast pump, more baby clothes. Accepted federal stimulus money we will have to repay in half-grand increments over the next fifteen years to afford a 2003 Outlander plagued with nail polish stains and a questionable smell that lingers almost two years after the sale. To offset the loss of all that cash, we pieced together a maternity leave comprising paid FMLA time from my company and ten vacation days, eight weeks total, even though I'd be recovering from another c-section, even though I'd be tangled up with an infant and a toddler. We anticipated the hospital bill that was sure to come from having an HSA baby at the start of the year instead of the end and were not disappointed.

Then Nathan was born, and we were over-the-moon happy to welcome him into our lives, and yet almost as frustrated, learning to deal with a newborn that was so drastically different from our first: he spit up all the time, cried for hours a day, and was overall hard to console until he was old enough to crawl. My stomach collapsed into itself from all the baby-making and lack of exercise, and it totally sucked the joy out of getting dressed for almost a year, which of course had an effect on my self-esteem, which doesn't exactly help you put your best foot forward in your most intimate relationship. We couldn't figure out an after-work routine that got the kids fed, bathed, and story-timed AND our kitchen cleaned before 10 p.m. until embarrassingly recently. Sometimes I still can't manage to put in a full day at work and still make it home for dinner.

A lot's happened in the last five years that's called us to re-examine our life plans and reshape our priorities. We are still trudging through painful conversations.

But we are making it.

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As husband and wife, Luke and I wear many hats. Sometimes it takes all of our energy to be parents and housekeepers and worker bees, and sometimes they are so in sync that we find 30 minutes in the day to spend as lovers. We don't have "Date Night" enough. Sometimes conversation is like a song and sometimes it just takes one misplaced sigh to throw the entire day off-track. Sometimes we huddle close in bed and sometimes our backs are turned. We apologize a lot, almost as often as we say "I love you." There are times when the cheap shot wins out over being the bigger person. We don't always make the effort to understand.

We have born witness to the most physically humbling moments of our lives. From his end, Luke has seen the slicing of my abdomen, the production of milk from my breasts, and postpartum blood in my underwear. There were entire months when my fingers resembled sausages, my legs tree trunks, my face a balloon. He's privy to birth marks and blackheads and cellulite and more loose skin than even Buffalo Bill would know what to do with. It's a miracle he found me attractive enough to conceive two children.

Money has played a bigger force in our marriage than I ever thought possible. We started out practically debt free, and now there are times when we're robbing Peter to pay Paul. To pull or not to pull out of my 401(k)? Do we have enough life insurance? How can we increase our income in a way that keeps our family arrangement and sanity intact? Will it always feel like we're catching up? When can we finally start getting ahead? And the kicker is that in this economy, we're actually doing well.

Sometimes it's hard to live up to our promises from 2006 and remember what brought us here. It is an active choice to be made every day. Many times we make the wrong choice.

But we are making it. Despite the hard times, somehow, we thrive.

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On the series finale of Scrubs (the Zach Braff finale, not the clunky Med School spin-off), they play a song near the end called, "The Book of Love." The Scrubs version is sung by Peter Gabriel, but at the time we downloaded it the only available file was the original, by The Magnetic Fields. Anyway, it's been years since I posted lyrics in an entry - so cheesy - but I can't help myself this time, because the words so simply capture the monotony of love, as well as the joy.

The book of love is long and boring
No one can lift the damn thing
It's full of charts and facts and figures
And instructions for dancing but

I...
I love it when you read to me and
You...
You can read me anything

The book of love has music in it
In fact that's where music comes from
Some of it is just transcendental
Some of it is just really dumb but

I...
I love it when you sing to me and
You...
You can sing me anything

The book of love is long and boring
And written very long ago
It's full of flowers and heart-shaped boxes
And things we're all too young to know but

I...
I love it when you give me things and
You...
You ought to give me wedding rings
I...
I love it when you give me things and
You...
You ought to give me wedding rings

 

 

New goal: to be as fit as my blog avatar

Over the last several years, I've painstakingly designed a handful of banners for this blog.

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2006 - 2008: I'm Not an Idiot But I Play One Online

 

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2008-2010: Ramblings From a Self-Proclaimed Yada Yada Yada...ist

 

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2010: "Run if You Can, Walk if You Have To, Crawl if You Must, Just Never Give Up" (Dean Karnazes quote)

 

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But it only recently dawned on me that for the past five years I've been shacking up with a seasoned illustrator who not only drew a kick-ass comic strip during college but also fashioned one hell of a pirate ship for his own site last year. Surely he could drum up something equally appropriate for his wife, yes? I mean, the imagery ideas, they were drying up, people. I half-considered resorting to one of my earlier experimental favorites just to rid my template of the cookie-cutter design.

Luckily for all of us, he did not disappoint.

 

It's fitting that the new banner and corresponding color scheme goes live in the midst of what I can only refer to as a blog revival. New life is circulating through the veins of my words, my links, and my images, and it's nice to have a design that better reflects my blogging enthusiam (albeit still somewhat sporadic) and renewed interest in making life happen. Thanks, honey.

Because sharing is caring, as is more frequent posting

Okay, so apparently even the mere thought of writing cohesive paragraphs for the Internet is enough to keep me from updating, so in an effort to get back on track, may I present--bullet points! Also known as The Lazy Blogger's Best Friend.

• Jillian Michaels must have read my last entry wherein I complained about my first yoga experience and then took note of Jen's recommendation to give power yoga a try, because two days ago she released a new DVD called Yoga Meltdown, based on "quickly flowing yoga sequences to burn mega calories," which sounds like just the thing to convert me. I still do the Shred every once and a while on my "Stretch and Strengthen" training days, and I've recently revisited her Banish Fat, Boost Metabolism workout for cross-training purposes, AND the average overall review on Amazon is pretty high, so while I'm still wary of the practice, I trust her enough to shell out $11.49 plus shipping. I know it's early, but has anyone tried this yet? If so, what did you think?
• Speaking of banishing fat, I'm only three pounds away from the weight listed on my driver's license. Go, body, go, quit making a liar out of me.
• Did you know that writing references letters to help your very good friends achieve their dream of overseas adoption is really hard work? Even when they are wonderful people and you just know they've got this thing in the bag. Really, really hard.
• Lost. OMG. Crazy momma Claire! Jack's sideways son! Evil incarnate Sayid! Mind = blown!
• I can't seem to keep my hands off my kids these days: hugging their torsos, smooching their cheeks, nuzzling their necks. Each new skill they acquire makes me more aware that their babyness will not last forever. Kara will not always moan piteously to "try Mommy and Daddy's bed?" when she wakes up in the middle of the night; Nathan won't always insist on sitting on my lap while I eat my dinner. And at the end of a long day, they will not always wait at the kitchen gate for me to come home from work. As excited as I am to increase our mobility and explore new activities as a family and SLEEP THROUGH THE DAMN NIGHT, ALREADY, part of me is sad, hating that the days where they would sleep for hours on my chest are gone. This is what gets to me the most about not having more children, I think: the idea of never experiencing those early weeks of sleep-deprived euphoria again: the moment they are placed in your arms for the first time; the way their body wraps around you like a blanket. Commenter dcmama on Amalah's Bounce Back post on family size summed it up perfectly when she asked, "How do I know that I'm not just missing being pregnant and hoping for a less awful first few months with a baby?" Nathan's pregnancy was such a surprise, and the first year dealing with two babies was so hard. SO HARD. Surely it's not always that difficult; surely I would have an easier time with baby number three if numbers one and two were more self-sufficient. What if, what if.
• I guess that last bullet point could have been an entry in and of itself.

Now let's move on to my second BFF - Pictures With Commentary:

 

This is Kara. Kara is my daughter, a little girl who's made pee-pee in the potty several times in the last seven days and who gets a kick of riding around the living room on Mommy or Daddy's back. She also continues to soak up language and manipulate common words and phrases to sound utterly adorable; if you have something she wants (usually related to food: peanuts, raisins, pretzels, etc.), she'll come up to you and ask, "What do you you say?" instead of actually saying the thing we've coached her to say ("Please"). And no, that second "you" isn't a typo. I don't know, either.

This is Nathan. Nathan is my son, a baby-toddler more commonly known around these parts as Buddy, Little Boobah, Freaky-deak, and Crazyhead, a whirlwind spit-fire who enjoyed his handful of experiences with snow and sledding much more than his sister, except after one unfortunate face plant mid-ride in the backyard. (Here is tangible evidence that I've been attempting an entry for almost two weeks, because not only has all our snow melted, but this Saturday we should see temperatures elevate to the fifties. Better late than never?)

Nathan is still mostly on baby food at this point, not because we enjoy paying for pre-packaged jars of beef and vegetable dinners but because he still has a hard time digesting large amounts of their non-mashed alternatives. He can handle things like bread and pizza and tuna cassarole in small amounts, but anything more than that sends his digestive tract into a tailspin. Luke fed him eggs yesterday and five minutes hadn't even passed before Nathan vomited. This isn't the first time he's reacted to table food this way, so instead of pushing him to play catch up with his sister's milestones, we are allowing him to progress at his own pace. Isn't that nice of us!

This is Luke. Luke is my husband, a grown man who was insanely excited to take a second stab at devouring "The Big Ugly" at Bub's Burgers and Ice Cream, an Indy-area franchise. Patrons who finish the one-pound burger (one pound! fully cooked!) earn the honor of getting their picture on the wall. Being an avid Man vs. Food fan, Luke wanted his picture on that wall, so finish it he did, future stomach pains be damned. Adam would have been so proud.

 

The romantic outing took place two Saturdays ago while leaving the kids with a sitter, the niece of my old boss who currently interns in my department. Now that our formula days are over, we have a little money to play with in our budget, so Luke's and my goal is to have a couple of dates each month to recharge our battery away from diapers and graham crackers and Nick, Jr. Our next one is tonight, and the plan is to hit someplace in downtown Indy that doesn't sport high chairs. What can I say? We are simple folk.

Okay, now YOUR turn. What's going on with you all lately? It's like we never talk anymore.

P.S. Remind me to tell you about last month's playdate with Katy where I locked a sleeping Kara in the car. Because that was so much fun!

That's the Jingle Bell Run

When I checked the weather last Friday night and learned Saturday's high would be a respectable 41 degrees, I breathed a sigh of relief. I've run outside in the high to mid-thirties but never in below-freezing temperatures. Seeing as I'm still relying on baggy maternity pants and ratty cotton tee-shirts for training, my wardrobe isn't exactly prepared to handle frostbite-inducing conditions.

So of course I woke up that morning to a whopping 19 degrees. Oh, well. At least it was sunny.

What to say about my second 5K? Luke, Katy, and I participated in the Jingle Bell 5K Run/Walk for Arthritis, and it was awesome. There were close to two thousand people poised at the start line, most of us donning a Santa hat, reindeer antlers, or similar holiday gear. One of my coworkers dressed up as an elf, and we even saw a gal sporting a Christmas tree bodysuit. 'Tis the season!

This 5K was a big deal for the Frema-Useless Clutter household; I was hoping to improve my time from September's Corporate Challenge event, and Luke was marking his official reintroduction to running in general. He used to do it faithfully in college and slowly let it drop off once he graduated, but my company's support of local racing events by paying registration fees for employees and a plus-one had inspired him to pick it up again. This one wasn't originally part of our 2009 line-up, but work will sponsor any race as long as at least five employees are willing to sign up; I learned about the race through a local race event manager, and it only took a week to get 17 coworkers on board. I thought it would have been harder, convincing people to get outside on a frigid December day, but either we're all super ambitious or very, very stupid.

So anyway, Luke and I signed up, and Katy signed up, and as you would expect, it was extremely cold. I was especially thankful for my Santa hat and its ability to provide some much-needed head warmth.

 

Freezing my ass off in the "10-Minute Mile" group.

The race itself was awesome. I had no problems ditching my iPod to chat it up with Luke and Katy, and the time on the course went by pretty quickly. However, my fears about not training hard enough on my trail runs came to life around mile two, at which point Katy sprinted ahead and my legs took on the weight of frozen cement. Luke was keeping my pace and graciously gave me permission to catch up to her. "It's okay, I'll be fine," he assured me, but I just shook my head and willed my feet to keep moving. I couldn't have gone faster even if I wanted to. 

Out of the three of us, I was the last to cross the finish line, gloves off, fleece around my waist, and Santa hat in hand, physically drained but focused on my husband, pushing my body to catch up to him.

At first I was disappointed in myself--I thought that after consistently running a minimum of three miles at least twice a week, I should have been able to keep a faster pace or, at the very least, maintain the pace that I did without feeling like my lungs were going to explode. Luckily, though, Luke had the good sense to glance at the digital clock overhead as he finished, and when he reported a time under 33 minutes my spirits lifted immediately. We may have separated near the end, but he'd stayed in my line of sight the whole time. I couldn't have been more than 30 seconds behind him.

Thankfully, I was right. Official times were posted that afternoon, and despite my less than graceful performance, I shaved a good three minutes off my September time, finishing 33:05:02, and I am damn proud of it. (For more stats, check out my new Races page, where I plan to keep a complete record of my racing history.)

A snapshot of our course courtesy of Luke's cell phone.

Training for the Mini-Marathon starts next month, and there's still a lot to do. I need to pick a training program and find the best training log for measuring my progress. I want some better work-out gear. I would love to get a watch that tracks distance and counts laps. I need to plan how and when and how my gym training is going to take place. Thankfully, I've got few more weeks to iron these details out, so until then, I will continue to research my options. 

I'll also remain grateful for Luke's support and involvement. Running has turned out to be a fun way to feed the non-parenting aspect of our relationship as we help each other clock as much training time as our schedules allow, look for races to run, and share stories about thoughts and dreams born on the trail. Sometimes it's hard to justify spending time on individual hobbies once the kids are in bed because that's the only time we have during the week to be with each other, so we need activities like this that kill several birds with one stone, activities that foster alone time and address personal health and keep our marriage healthy, too. It's a tall order, but Luke is 6'4". I like tall.

 

Luke and Bree plus three?

Now that the kids are a little older and every second of the day isn't solely focused on survival, Luke and I are finally in a place to start putting the finishing touches on our home. We made the move last October, and yet we still have walls that are bare, pictures that are outdated or missing altogether (didn't we give birth to a son in January?), knick knacks that need staging, files that need organizing, boxes that need sorting through.... You get the picture. As a result, we're now re-evaluating the usefulness and/or necessity of every piece of furniture, every stitch of clothing, every picture, file, and knick knack that we have, the goal being to keep only those things that bring us the greatest joy, meet our basic needs, and make our lives a little easier so we can spend less time picking up after ourselves and more time doing. Yesterday, I gave an armful of clothes, five pairs of shoes, and several old duffel bags to Goodwill, and looking at all the new space in my closet was not unlike going on a first date that involves dinner and second base. Not that I could recite the technical definition of second base, mind you, but in my head, it's some pretty good stuff.

Anyway, when I received word that my Parents job was ending, another goal was thrown into the mix: make a little money. In this economy, it's all about the Benjamins, y'all, one man's trash is another man's treasure, and I've got my mind on my money and my money on my mind. (If you can think of other personal finance cliches, knock yourself out. Bonus points for those born from early nineties rap.)

ANYWAY. Enter the baby clothes.

As Kara (rapidly) outgrew each stage of (her precious, adorable) clothing, everything was laundered and folded and blessed and placed neatly into Tuperware bins to use for the next baby. Items ranged from onesies she practically lived in to a three-month winter suit she wore maybe once on a stroller ride with Daddy to a newborn coming-home outfit she never wore at all because as it turns out, eleven-pound infants were not built to wear such tiny things.

 

Another Parents.com gem taken about ten days after Kara was born, just in time for our annual Christmas card. In case you're wondering, the sleeper and the Santa hat both made the cut.

Since Nathan's closet is smaller, we've been going through his things every couple of sizes, but except for one major purging before we moved into the house, Kara's things were left relatively untouched. As she is our first precious baybeee, it was emotional for the both of us, going through those bins, and there were tears and heartfelt talks over what we wanted to hold onto and what we were okay offering to the world (for cash), and as I sniffled sadly into the sleeve of my shirt and lamented the possibility of never being in this exact stage again, I wailed for the zillionth time, "Do you really think we're done?"

My husband blew me away by replying that he really wasn't sure. However, he added, "I think we're sad for different reasons."

"What do you mean?" I said, recovering from my latest Ugly Cry.

"I'm sad about Kara never being this little again, not about not doing this again."

 

Kara at eight months, watching me leave for work on a random weekday morning. I can't remember if we kept these pjs or not. I hope so.

The topic of more children was revisited Saturday morning, after I reorganized Kara's closet to store our bassinet, which until today had been residing in our master bedroom, serving as a drying rack and/or storage unit, take your pick, and isn't THAT exactly what you want in your line of vision as you get ready to...well, you know.

As I refolded the few baby blankets we decided to hold onto and placed them on the bassinet's mattress, I asked Luke again, "Do you still think you're okay not having another baby?"

And he sighed, because hot damn, is he married to a woman with a one-track mind or what, but once again, he conceded, "Maybe not. I don't know. I don't mean to leave you hanging, but I really don't know," adding, "...but probably."

The conversation rarely ends here. There's been a lot of talk about other ways to add to our family; the door is currently open to either adoption or foster parenting, though Luke isn't ready to do any soul-searching on either one. Which is totally understandable, seeing as our oldest isn't even potty-trained and our youngest can't stand on his own two feet without assistance. Why do I keep pushing for an answer to a question that doesn't need an answer right now? Why can't I just be happy with the family we have and let the future work itself out?

 

Me at 40 weeks with Kara. If a third pregnancy isn't in the cards, I certainly won't miss looking like an item of interest on a whale expedition.

I'll tell you why. Because I don't want to worry about contraception for the entire length of my thirties. Because I don't want to drag out my child-birthing years with large age gaps between a second and third child. Because I know Luke wants to go back to work someday. Because I know we would want a parent at home with any kids younger than school age. Because we have other plans for our life, plans that don't include changing diapers, washing bottles, or rocking babies to sleep at two o'clock in the morning, and I want to know when those plans might possibly become a reality.

When it comes to physically producing another baby, Luke is very, very hesitant, not just because he's quite happy with the two we already have, the two who are extremely close in age and who try his patience on a daily basis, but he's also concerned about what a third pregnancy might mean for me. I developed pre-eclampsia with Nathan, and in hindsight, I think I probably had it with Kara, on a low enough scale that the doctors just missed it. If that's actually the case, I got it the second time around a little earlier, so who knows when it would rear its ugly head with number three. Plus, you know, gestation, so tiring, so draining, and recovery from a third c-section? I don't even want to think about it. Breastfeeding/pumping/weaning again? I DON'T EVEN WANT TO THINK ABOUT IT. It's just been in the last few months that I've finally started feeling like myself again. It started with the 30 Day Shred back in May and has climaxed these last couple of weeks as I build on my training for my upcoming 5K. I am 29 years old. I want to look and feel 29. I don't think that's unreasonable.

But then I think about never getting a positive pregnancy test again, never seeing a baby of mine on an ultrasound again, never feeling kicks and flutters inside my belly again, never having the most perfect human being I've ever seen in my life be removed from my uterus again, and I am filled with sadness. I remember being in recovery with Nathan a couple of hours after he was born, resting in bed, holding him in my arms, nuzzling his cheek and kissing his head, and telling Molly, "I understand why some women have eight babies." And I did understand. Those moments of getting to know him were worth every ounce of discomfort, every minute of confusion. I knew it with Kara and confirmed it with my son.

 

Nathan at eight or nine weeks, I think, donning a sleeper that Luke wore when he was a baby. I don't care if we get our next child at eight YEARS old, he/she is wearing this sleeper, damn it, family traditions and all that.

In the event, though, that we did close the pregnancy chapter of our lives and expand our clan using alternative methods, I think adoption or foster parenting would be a wonderful fit for Luke and me and the kids. I've always been drawn to the idea of taking in a child who needs a loving home; when I was in middle school, I told all my friends that I would never give birth to a baby, not ever, because there were too many children already in the world who didn't have anybody to love them. I spent half my junior year thinking about becoming a nun because I adored the sisters at my high school so much, so obviously lil' Frema's decision-making processes were a little extreme back then, but I still agree there are too many children who need parents and love and education and quality medical care, and Luke and I have such a good life to offer another child that I can't imagine not doing it. Though I can imagine not doing it, because of the oodles of money you have to shell out and the hoops you have to jump through and the fact that patience has never been my strong suit and it's already spread thin with two kids. A third might very well push me over the edge, however he/she gets here.

Nothing is set in stone either way, and like I said, Luke really isn't up for talking about this in-depth right now, but so far it seems like we might lean more towards foster parenting with an open option to adopt. I attribute my feelings to reading The Pinballs in fifth grade. What? It was a really, really good book.

 

Nathan around four months, probably, because he's still in his swing. Actually, it's Molly's swing, but whatever, we're all family around here.

Finally, I haven't written off going along with Luke's initial thought of just being happy with the two beautiful children we have. There's something to be said for leaving these early years in the past and enjoying the new experiences that come along with getting older. Luke and I have loved watching Kara come into her own, increasing her vocabulary, showing interest in potty training, delighting in chapter books, going down kiddie slides at the park. And Nathan is in one of my favorite baby stages--he can transport himself to any area he wants and entertain himself for longer periods of time, he's smiling and laughing and snuggling and kissing (read: sucking on your knee). And while he's once again taken to waking up at night, we can still count on getting in a respectable block of sleep. His newborn days were hard, so very hard, and it took us completely by surprise because Kara was such an easy-going baby, no gas problems, no screaming for hours a day despite being nestled safely in our arms. Who knows how a third child would rock our world?

We also have big plans for retirement savings and 529 plans and traveling the world and being charitable, and all of that takes money. The bigger our family, the smaller our financial nest egg will be for all of these areas.

 

This is a recent, non-Parents shot of Kara and Nathan oohing and aahing over the Lost A Sock family's shiny, red fire truck. It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, bestowing my mad mothering skills only upon them.

The hardest thing about this decision is that there's no right or wrong answer. All of the reasons I've given for having another child are just as valid as the reasons for being done. In the end, it's not really about money for your golden years or nursing difficulties or your personal reserves, it's about what you feel called to do in your heart. All I can do right now is think and pray and continue to share my feelings with Luke and also SHUT UP ALREADY, because holy hell, the last thing we need as we work this out is pressure. Sometimes the best action plan isn't to search for answers, it's to let them come.

More honest than I planned on being about family size

Seeing as my return to work is a little more than a week away, I'm pushing really hard to get a few things done around the house that there hasn't been time for until now. One of those things is to remove all the maternity clothing from my closet, a task I began this afternoon while miracle of miracles, both kids were down for a nap.

As I took things off of hangers and folded them into neat little piles, separating capris from jeans and sweaters from tees, a small shudder ran through my body as I realized I never wanted to wear those clothes again. I'm OK with never being pregnant again.

But I won't be doing Essure.

I think the idea of this procedure is a great thing. I like that you can do it in an office visit with minimal anesthesia. And I LOVE that it would be free, free, free because I have a health savings account and my personal deductible has been met for the year (thanks, son). I'm not keen on the whole "metal clogging your reproductive parts" aspect of it, but I think I could've gotten over that. My biggest hang-up is how final it is. At least the big V is reversible.

Luke and I are kind of at an impasse right now. He is positive he doesn't want more children and is totally on board with getting The Snip. I'm pretty sure I don't want more but not a hundred percent—if Luke did want a third, I wouldn't be a hard sell, so long as we could wait until the two kids we have now were capable of peeing in something other than a diaper. The easiest solution would be for me to get an IUD or go on the Pill or use some other form of contraception that would allow us to revisit the issue in a few years, but I'm not comfortable with the way hormonal birth control works or could potentially work. Maybe that's not politically correct to say, but I'm just not. I could look into a diaphragm, cervical cap, or female condom, but seeing as I turn up my nose at even using a tampon, I have trouble putting my eggs in those baskets (no pun intended) (OK, a little intended). Before we got pregnant with Kara, I was following a fertility awareness method that worked pretty well, but now that we know how much my uterus loves to grow babies, Luke doesn't trust it anymore. If we put off sterilization, then our only other option is to subscribe to condom use long-term—certainly a viable option, but not ideal. That also allows a bigger window of opportunity for a surprise number three.

The original goal of this post was to say that I've decided against Essure. Now, though, I think the bigger issue is what to do when you and your partner aren't completely on the same page when it comes to family size. Luke and I are mostly on the same page, and the truth of the matter is, that will have to be enough. We already have with two beautiful, healthy children when some people go their whole lives wishing and praying for even one; to get all riled up about not having a third seems absolutely ridiculous. It's certainly not worth my marriage. Plus, even though the idea of not having any more children makes me terribly sad, I think I would always be sad no matter when we stopped. It's an incredible gift, the ability to give life, and I don't know that I would ever pump my fist in the air and dance for joy over being done with the baby-making part of my existence.

So, I'm not sure when it will happen, but at some point, Luke will most likely go in for The Snip. That way, if he's hit by a bus and Kiefer Sutherland wants to tone down his bad-boy image with a modern rendition of The Brady Bunch, my uterus will be ready and waiting. Just in case.

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Excerpted from Parental Discretion Advised, originally published on Parents.com. Copyright 2009 by Meredith Corporation. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Raise your hand if you’re Essure

Today I celebrated St. Patrick's Day with corned beef and cabbage and my six-week post-partum check-up, where the doctor cleared me for vacuuming, heavy lifting, and doing the nasty and at my request outlined my options for permanent birth control. Luck of the Irish, indeed!

"To three or not to three" has been a hot topic of conversation since the day I came home from the hospital. Seriously. Because I am not an easy, breezy, let's-wait-and-see type of gal. I am a planner. I want to know if I should hold onto my maternity clothes or ship them off to Goodwill. If we need to keep the bouncy seat and the swing and the bassinet and the numerous Tupperware bins of the cutest baby clothing you ever did see or offer them to a family in need. If we're shopping for condoms or scheduling The Snip. If we're done having children, I told Luke, then I want to do something about it now so I can come to terms with closing the BABIES BABIES BABIES chapter of our life and focus on the future.

Luke has always been pretty consistent in his "two is enough" stance. He just turned 35, and if he stays home with the kids until Nathan starts kindergarten (not set in stone, but it's what we're aiming for right now), he won't rejoin the work force until he's 40; a third baby would force him to put off his career even further, and he's not comfortable with that. He's also excited to get to a place where the kids are a little older and we're not sinking money into diapers, formula, and baby wipes.

As for me, I used to be squarely in the "two is good, but three is even better!" camp. The oldest of five, I can appreciate a chaotic household rife with sibling rivalry and sleepless nights, and I was afraid that "just two" would be too tame, too quiet. I figured a third child would add a little zing to our family dynamic, and I talked and talked and talked about it to Luke until he agreed to think about it, and at one point during my pregnancy with Nathan I sort of won him over, and then Nathan was born, and just like that, I lost him. And that's OK. While I think I could do this one more time in another few years, I'm also insanely in love with the family I have now. I'm no longer worried about things being too quiet (two screaming babies will do that to you). I no longer feel like anyone will be missing from our dinner table if we stop at two, even if the very thought of parting with Kara's and Nathan's old sleepers makes me want to Ugly Cry.

Where was I? Birth control. Right.

I always (half) joke with Luke that since they had to cut me open twice to deliver our babies, he could certainly do his part by spending some time with a local urologist. But then I learned about a procedure for women that offers permanent sterilization and can be performed during an office visit in under an hour. It's called Essure, and it involves going through your cervix to insert metal coils into your fallopian tubes and taking a confirmation test three months later to verify that the coils were inserted successfully. It's less invasive than having your tubes tied, but unlike a vasectomy, it's not reversible. The procedure is relatively new—around five years old, I think—so it's not very common right now, but my doctor said there's been a surge of interest at her practice in the last year. I'm seriously thinking about doing this because it all sounds simple enough. I'm not interested in taking any form of hormonal birth control, so if for some reason Luke and I decided to put off doing anything permanent, we would just use condoms until we were ready.

Have any of you undergone Essure? If so, what did you think?

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Excerpted from Parental Discretion Advised, originally published on Parents.com. Copyright 2009 by Meredith Corporation. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Plus one for the "Love and Marriage" category

Not sure where this relationship meme originated--I think Dooce or Facebook--and the rest of the Internet got over this weeks ago, but it's been so BABIES BABIES BABIES around here that I thought it couldn't hurt to change things up a bit.

What are your middle names?
Mine is Elizabeth; Luke's is Byron (thus revealing the inspiration for Nathan's middle name).

How long have you been together?
Together almost nine eight years (whoops, sleep deprivation equals shit-poor counting skills), married almost three.

How long did you know each other before you started dating?
A few months. In December 2000, I was a junior in college preparing for a semester-long internship with the town's only daily newspaper; the managing editor was out of the office when I arrived for a meet-and-greet, so Luke was assigned the task of giving me the job specifics. Despite already being in a serious relationship, I was instantly smitten. The bachelor auction took place the following April, and the rest is history. (Readers not familiar with my penchant for buying romantic affections can read all about it here.)

Who asked whom out?
Do you mean like boyfriend-girlfriend? There wasn't ever an official moment, but after the auction, we were seeing each other all the time, and then I went back to Chicago for the summer (the summer before my senior year, to be exact), and we were talking on the phone and e-mailing each other and swapping fun packages in the mail. My second weekend home, Luke drove from Rensselaer to visit me in Chicago, and we went to Navy Pier for dinner and afterwards walked along the strip. I was working there at the time, at a place called Popcorn Palace (all about the class, here, people), and I brought him by to meet my coworkers. Since we hadn't talked about our status yet, I was afraid to be presumptuous, so I introduced him as my friend. Once we were alone, I explained this to him in case he was insulted, but he wasn't. Instead, he grabbed my hand and said, "But when I talk about you to my friends, I'm going to call you my girlfriend."

(Are you melting? I am, just typing this.)

How old are each of you?
I'm 29; Luke is 35.

Whose siblings do you see the most?
It's probably about even. Even though Luke's brother lives in Indy with his family, we probably see them just as much as we do my siblings who live in Chicago, which is every couple of months or so.

Which situation is the hardest on you as a couple?
Raising our children without the benefit of family or even friends close by. The last time Luke and I were out together without one or more children attached to our limbs was May 2008, during a weekend up north when we left Kara with Luke's parents and went out to dinner to celebrate our second wedding anniversary, a mere weeks before learning about our surprise second pregnancy. Technically, we were also alone when we drove to the hospital for Nathan's birth; if not for the c-section and the doctor's instructions to fast after midnight, I would have insisted we go out for breakfast, just to make the most of the occasion.

(Edited to add: I stand corrected; Luke reminded me that his brother watched Kara in August so he and I could attend an awards dinner for work. But still, not the most exciting way to spend a child-free evening.)

Luke and I didn't grow up in Indianapolis; this year will be our fourth in the area, and we haven't been very good about making an effort to meet other people. When we first got here, we spent a lot of time with one of Luke's friends and his then-fiancee, but they broke up a couple of months before the wedding. I tried staying in touch with the fiancee since we got along so well, but it was just too awkward, listening to each party badmouth the other and trying to determine who was right and who was overreacting, and I didn't want my relationship with her to sour Luke's relationship with his friend. Bummer situation all the way around.

Since then, we've pretty much kept to ourselves, which means our sole baby-sitting resource to date consists of Luke's brother and his wife, and they have their own busy lives, so we only call on them when we have specific plans; we haven't felt comfortable asking them to watch Kara (and now Nathan) just so we can go to a movie. Neither one of us wants to leave our kids with people we don't know, so that rules out a baby-sitting service. There are a couple of people at work around my age who have expressed an interest in helping out with childcare for date-night purposes, so I'm going to explore that more aggressively once I'm back; if those leads don't pan out, I'm not sure what we'll do. We really miss our couple time, not to mention hanging out with human beings who won't demand an umpteenth reading of Horton Hears a Who (Kara's latest literary obsession).

Did you go to the same school?
No. Luke earned a bachelor's degree from Purdue University in West Lafayette; I went to Saint Joseph's College
in Rensselaer for my undergrad and DePaul University in Chicago for my master's. Luke likes to talk about our kids going to school there someday and isn't a fan of small-school settings--not enough culture, limited curriculum, blah blah blah--but whose college sent congratulatory baby bibs for each one of our kids? That's right, so in your face, Boilermaker. 

Are you from the same home town?
No. I'm from the south side of Chicago, while Luke grew up in Merrillville, Indiana, about forty-five minutes away.

Who is smarter?
Hmmm. Luke can digest information quickly and easily, while I can find a new question to ask about movies I've seen eight million times (see: the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy). He also has more going for him in the common sense department. I would cateogorize myself more as a book-smart type of gal. But I also have a knack for organization and problem-solving. Those totally count as smart-people traits, right?

Who is the most sensitive?
I have cried over sharp glances, a sink full of dishes, and the last ten minutes of Terminator 2. So, totally Luke.

Where do you eat out most as a couple?
I can only answer this if by "as a couple" you mean "with our children," even though our restaurant choices would be the same either way. Our favorite place for the last year or so has been Red Robin. (Again, all about the class.)

Where is the furthest you two have traveled together as a couple?
As a couple, Philadelphia to visit Luke's friends. However, while working for Saint Joe's publications department (I was there three years after I graduated), I wrote a story about the college's Habit for Humanity chapter for our alumni publication, and the school paid for me to join the group on their annual spring break trip in 2004 to San Antonio, Texas. It was a pretty easy-going group, and the trip was open to non-members, so Luke came along, and we all had a blast together. To this day, Luke talks about wanting to become involved with Habitat. Hopefully we can soon get to a place in our lives where long-term volunteer commitments are possible.

Who has the craziest exes?
One of my exes stole a pack of Pokemon cards from my work. (Yes, he was over eighteen.) So probably me. But I mean that in the nicest way possible. (I really do.)

Who has the worst temper?
Me, hands down. I can count on one hand the number of times Luke has raised his voice to me or even been sarcastic in a mean-spirited way, while one sideways glance is enough to set me off.

Who does the cooking?
Ha! Have you seen my "Adventures in the Kitchen" archives? Luke Luke Luke.

Who is the neat-freak?
Oh, this is me. Luke is great about domestic maintenance overall--washing dishes, doing laundry, major chores like that--but for me, the devil is in the details. I'm the one who takes care of splotches on the stove, water puddles around the sink, dust on picture frames and book cases, and so on and so on.

Who is the most stubborn?
Also me. After receiving shoddy service from our flooring company right before moving into our house, I was the one charged with calling the manager and demanding a big, fat discount for our troubles. We were on the phone for thirty minutes, because the manager had a canned answer for everything, but I matched him point-for-point and wouldn't hang up until he had shaved half a grand off our bill. What can I say? I will not be ignored!

Who hogs the bed?
Neither of us, I don't think.

Who wakes up earlier?
It depends. Luke is the one who gets up with Kara every morning, so he wakes up when she does, usually between six and six-thirty. If I'm feeling ambitious about getting to work by seven, though, I'll get up as early as five-fifteen.

Where was your first date?
Our first official date took place the Wednesday after the bachelor auction at the Rensselaer Pizza Hut. (Don't judge; in a town of 5,000 people, it was either that or the China Garden.) We split a pepperoni pizza and breadsticks; later, I learned that Luke doesn't care for pepperoni, but he knew all about my finicky eating habits by then and was afraid to suggest anything else. Plus, he wanted to make sure we ordered something I would actually like.

Who is more jealous?
Me. When we first got together and shared our dating history, it was hard not to obsess over Luke's last serious relationship, as he and the girl were an item for years and even lived together for a short time; meanwhile, my ex-boyfriends were living with their mothers and bumming money for cigarettes. I couldn't stop thinking about all the living Luke had done before he met me and how mature that living had been, and how now he was with a girl who was barely 21, still in college, living in a dorm room. I felt more secure after graduation, when I was working full-time for Saint Joe, but the pay was peanuts, so I was still living on campus and eating in the school cafeteria as a means of saving money. It wasn't until I moved off campus and rented a house in town with a friend that I felt adult enough to be with him.

How long did it take to get serious?
Not long. The bachelor auction took place at the end of April; we exchanged "I love yous" in May. 

Who eats more?
Me. Food is my weakness; I use it to self-medicate when I'm feeling sad/tired/emotionally drained. Since I've been on maternity leave, there have been several instances of me polishing off an entire bag of Hostess Donettes in a single day (but not a single sitting, jeez Louise, I do have some limits). Meanwhile, Luke is down twenty pounds since moving to Indianapolis. It's a good thing he's the stay-at-home parent instead of me; otherwise, I could end up a stunt double for the mom in What's Eating Gilbert Grape?

Who does the laundry?
Luke, though occasionally I help with the folding.

Who’s better with the computer?
Luke. I can create simple Word documents, crop images in Photoshop, and check my e-mail. He manages all routine maintenance.

Who drives when you are together?
Luke, especially since having children. He won't admit to this, but I think he's afraid I'll kill them. I wonder why?

(Anyone else wondering why Luke is still with me? Clearly I have nothing to offer but cellulite and stretch marks.)

(Also, I see that evil glint in your eye. Hands off, bitches. Me and the babies, we need him.)

 

Closer to Free

Geez, where have I been? You would think I have a full-time job and a family to tend to. Hmmm.

I'm working on a post about my high school reunion, but today is Luke's and my second wedding anniversary, so it's only right that I take some time to talk about marriage after two years in the trenches.

In the weeks and months before my wedding, I was a nervous wreck. I loved Luke and wanted to be with him, but I was also afraid. Afraid of having to negotiate who I was (long-time readers will remember how conflicted I was over changing my denomination), afraid of being a selfish wife, afraid that my ambitious nature would eventually clash with Luke's tendency to go with the flow. But second-guessing is a part of who I am. I keep one foot in the moment and the other on the fence, always looking for the first sign of trouble, searching for a sign that something is not meant to be.

But on May 12, 2006, standing in front of our pastor as the wind wrapped around our gazebo like a blanket, surrounded by family and friends, I believed our love was enough. I believed our future would be more than worth any hardships that came our way.

And there have been a few, the most significant one thus far being our decision to keep me at work and Luke at home. On paper, it was the best way to achieve all the goals we had for our family, but in my heart, I struggled. The weekend before I went back, there was a lump in my throat that would not go away, a proverbial devil on my shoulder that told me to be angry with Luke for not doing everything in his power to "let me" be a stay-at-home mom, to resent him for positioning me as Breadwinner, a title I never wanted.

I knew marriage would be hard, but only in the broadest sense. For the first time, Hard was tangible.

But I swallowed my tears and bit my tongue and became the person my family needed me to be. It wasn't easy, but here we are, two and a half months later, and there is a rhythm to our life that I never thought possible. Now I am completely sure it was meant to be this way, couldn't work any other way, and both our marriage and our daughter are better for it. It was only after saying good-bye to my preconceived notions of Wife and Mother and letting the good of our family take the lead that I found a level of fulfillment that couldn't have been achieved otherwise.

In the media and in our personal lives, relationships solidify and dissolve like snowflakes that stick to the pavement until the sun melts them away. And now, just two years into marriage, it's easier to understand why. I can't count how many times I've given Luke the cold shoulder over a perceived injustice, content to bask in self-righteousness, only to hang my head in front of him the next morning--unable to meet his eyes, tears running down my face--and stumble through an apology.

It's frustrating to rank second in the interest of the whole. It's embarrassing to say "I'm sorry." It's much easier to scrap the whole thing and start over with someone new.   

At our wedding, I thought love would be the glue that held our marriage together, but now I know it's commitment. Love is easy. People break up all the time and talk about how they still love their exes. Every person has traits worth falling for. But to accept their shortcomings? Forgive when they hurt you without keeping score and STILL be in love? Nothing is more difficult.

Or more rewarding.

When I was senior in college, in a class that placed my faith-based coursework in a wider context, my professor said something that really resonated with me. He said that with each choice you make, you become more free.

On the surface, it seems contradictory--when accepting one path, you inevitably say good-bye to another--but it's through the process of decision making that we open ourselves to advancement. My life with Luke is proof of that, because prior to our wedding, we were in a constant state of flux: should we say "I love you," should we move in together, should we tie the knot. Once we did that last thing, a brand-new set of choices lay before us, more sophisticated than those we contemplated before, but not as fundamental. Suddenly we were concerned with how to manage our careers, where we wanted to live, and when to expand our family.

These days, our jobs are chosen, for now. Housing will soon sort itself out. And we have the most beautiful baby I've ever seen. Now it's time to sort through the details, like saving for college and building retirement and bringing more children into the mix. I don't have to worry about whether or not we'll make it. The alternative is no longer an option.

Happy anniversary, honey.

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Visit Parental Discretion Advised to read about Kara's upcoming foray into cereal, my new parenting mantra, and the details of a very special Walgreens trip. You won't be disappointed.

As told by Luke, as played by Steve Martin

This is what happens when you engage in marital relations on day 30 of your cycle without protection, assuming Aunt Flo is just around the corner but realizing two weeks later she is still nowhere to be found.

Scene: Chevy Cobalt, Walgreens parking lot, Northwest Indiana

Bree: So…. Do you want to run in, or should I?

Luke: I don't know.
 
Bree: I should go. I'm the one who's going to pee on the stick, I should be the one to buy it.

Luke: No, I'll do it; you’re already back there with Kara. I'll just be a few minutes.

Bree: Remember, First Response or EPT, and make sure it's a bonus pack.

Luke: OK.

Luke enters Walgreens; stands in entranceway, searching for appropriate aisle. Picture furrowed brows and much head scratching.

Sales Clerk 1: Sir, is there something I can help you find?

Luke: I'm looking for a…

(Still grappling with the possibility of having two children less than a year and a half apart, his mind blanks on the correct terminology needed to verbalize his request)

…birth detection kit?

Sales Clerk 1: Do you mean a prophylactic?

Luke: No! The opposite of that!

Enter Sales Clerk 2.

Sales Clerk 2: Sir, are you talking about birth control?

Luke: No, no! It's too late for that!

Sales Clerk 2: Ooh! You want a pregnancy test!

Luke: Nods frantically, fights urge to smack forehead a la "I could've had a V-8!"

In the end, a First Response bonus pack was indeed purchased, and by Mother's Day morning, both tested negative. But this evening, when toasting to two years of marriage, we used sparkling grape juice instead of wine.

Anytime now, Aunt Flo. Anytime.

-------

Excerpted from Parental Discretion Advised, originally published on Parents.com. Copyright 2008 by Meredith Corporation. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Eavesdropping

You guys! You'll never guess what I heard the other day...

Scene: How should I know, I'm only three months old; Momma and Daddy staring at a big black box while Momma crazily waves a hand in front of my face:

Momma: Hey, look! Twelve Angry Men is in town! You know I did that play in high school? I was the guard.

Daddy: We can go, if you want.

Momma: That would be fun. Oh, yay! I haven't seen a play in forever.

Daddy: We'll have to get a sitter, you know.

Momma: Huh?

Daddy: You know, for Kara. You can't bring a baby to a play.

Momma: Oh. Right. Nevermind.

Daddy: Did you forget we have a child?

Momma: No?

Daddy: ....

Mommy! I am the love of your life! How could you blank on my smashing good looks?

It's a wonderful life

All is well.

Since my last entry, an incredible sense of calm and well being has covered Luke and me like a blanket, which has made these last couple of days the best ones since Kara's birth. I'll tell you about it soon enough, but for now, all I want to do is revel in how blessed we are and how thankful I am for everything God has given us.

Most of the members of my family have been too sick to make the trip to Indy, so it was extra special that my sister Ryan drove in from Chicago to spend Christmas with us. Newly married and desperately missing her army husband, who's currently in Germany awaiting February deployment to Iraq, a little baby fix was just what she needed to get through the holiday.

As for my own spouse, I can't tell you how mesmerizing it is to watch him with our daughter. He's so gentle with Kara, so enamored with her, and I honestly don't know what I've done to deserve such unconditional love and support. This last week has been the most exhilerating and terrifying one of my life, and he's been right by my side the entire time, holding me when I cry and telling me what a good job I'm doing when he's not washing bottles, refilling my water glass, and reminding me to take my pain meds. I couldn't ask for a better life partner or a more loving father for my baby.

I look at these two people and wonder how I ever lived without them.

Merry Christmas.

The title of my next post will be original, I swear.

Yes, I cried. Do you think I'm made of stone?

Don't worry, this post isn't in lieu of TLF, but I just had to share the beautiful surprise I received this morning at work.

This isn't the first time Luke's sent me flowers in a corporate setting, but it is the first time I've gotten them here, and I was completely floored. Aren't they pretty? They are so, so pretty.

I am one lucky woman. Thank you, honey!

He agreed to buy the biscuits, but the baby had to beg.

Luke: <3
Frema: <3 <3
Luke: Hi, honey.
Will you be late today?
Frema: Hell no. I'll be out by 5:00.
Luke: OK. We're having steak for dinner.
Frema: Yum. And biscuits?
The baby likes the biscuits.
Luke: We don't have any biscuits.
Frema: :(
Poor little baby, with no biscuits to eat.
Luke: Poor baby.
Frema: There, there, sweet baby. Don't cry.
Maybe Daddy will pick up biscuits when he drops off his dry cleaning after work.
Luke: Maybe if Mommy wants biscuits she should ask for them.
Frema: Maybe if Daddy cared about his wife and daughter he'd buy the freaking biscuits.
Luke: Maybe you should stop talking in third person.
Frema: Your mom posts in the third person!
Luke: My mom posts in the first person.
Frema: You make my heart hurt.

Don't Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out

Scene: The Frema-Useless Clutter household. Luke is cooking dinner while Frema runs a vaccuum through the apartment for the first time since February.

Frema: Thanks for not minding that I stayed late at work today. Come five o'clock tomorrow, all I want to do is get home, make my spinach dip, and pass out in a gas-induced coma on the couch.

Luke: Do you want to watch Stranger Than Fiction? Then you can go to Blockbuster tomorrow and exchange the mailer for another movie while I'm in Michigan.

Frema: Nope, I've got the third season of Sex and the City, the first season of Murder, She Wrote, and the entire My So-Called Life series. My time is better spent on shows you won't touch with a ten-foot pole.

Wraps up vacccuum cord, proceeds to Windex the bathroom mirror

Frema: I can't wait to sit back and relax!

Luke: Do I ever force you to do anything?

Frema: No, no, I'm just excited about having some quality Frema time. You know, to do Frema things. By myself.

Luke:

Frema [hastily]: It's not that I enjoy it when you're away, but I still need to make the most of it.

Pause

Frema: You know I'm going to miss you, right?

Luke: Whatever.

Say A Little Prayer For Luke, Because He's Subjected to My Nonsensical Ramblings Every Single Day

Only thirty days into 2007 and already I can cross one of my New Year's resolutions off the list.

Luke and I, we'll not be paying off the car.

All this time I've been focused on eliminating the three-hundred-and-thirty-dollar monthly Cobalt payment from our vast array of bills, convinced that doing so would put us in a better position to buy a house. Financial advisors often encourage buyers to whittle down their consumer debt before applying for a mortgage, and if we could just "make do" in our one-bedroom apartment until next summer, the two of us could not only own our car outright, we'd also accumulate about ten percent for a down payment on a modest starter home. If we extended our lease to September 2008, maybe fifteen. As far as the whole baby thing (BAAAYBEEES), well, if the good Lord blessed us with one before we dug our heels into the confusing world of real estate, we vowed to make it work until our lease was up because it'd only be for a few months and Leigh wouldn't notice how cramped we were until she was ready to walk, but we wouldn't be in the apartment long enough for her to start walking because Hello! Our plan was to be in a house by then. So no worries.

(This "new" plan has, in reality, been in place since we got married, and yet I'm still inspired to rehash it once every three weeks or so, punching various numbers into my calculator and pestering Luke for his thoughts on what we can do save more more money, stressing how important it will be for us to choose a home that can be maintained on his income because that's what will enable me to stay at home with Leigh (or Lucy. Or Jillian. Or Nathan, because legend has it some women give birth to boys). And because Luke is used to my love for Rehashing Important Issues We've Already Covered In Excruciating Detail, he slips into his Devil's Advocate gear and reminds me of our salary differences and how difficult it might be to make ends meet with me out of the work force, all the while supporting our common goal to care for a child without forking over wads of dough to a daycare facility. Apparently we save all our fancy dance moves for the choreography of thought-provoking conversation.)

In order to get ready for the upcoming buying frenzy, we find ourselves drawn to the bookstore every few days, perusing the shelves for advice on how to select a home and how to pay for it without defaulting on my student loans. And every few days, we walk away empty-handed because I remember we still have my sister-in-law's copy of Home Buying for Dummies and Suze Orman's Money Book for the Young, Fabulous & Broke, both of which have a wealth of practical information, and also because spending money on financial-planning books may not be the most sound financial plan. Anyway, while reflecting on some of Suze's gems, I recalled a scenario she described in which a young woman had several thousand dollars worth of credit card debt at an interest rate of twelve percent and a savings account that yielded an annual return of point-three percent at best. Why, Suze asked, why oh why was this girl socking away money at such a low rate when she could be using it to pay off the high-interest cards? "Use your head, girlfriend!" she said, wagging a literal finger as demonstrated by her flagrant use of exclamatory sentences.

And that's when it hit me: I was that young woman.

I don't know if I've ever shared this with you people before, but I have very good credit. When I bought the Cobalt in 2005, I scored a two-percent interest rate. Two percent! Over the life of my loan, I'll have shelled out fewer than four hundred dollars in interest to GMAC. Another tidbit you may not be aware of: the interest rate on mortgages? They are not two percent at all. In fact, they are the opposite of two percent, which is Frema-speak for triple. What the hell am I thinking, rushing to pay off a car three years early in order to save a few hundred smackers when we could be funneling that money towards a house, the cost of which will most likely pay for a bachelor's degree at a private college? Also, where did I get the lame-brained idea that we'd have any money to save once a baby enters the picture, especially since we plan to live on one income? My thought process was so faulty you'd swear I spent my free time drinking gasoline and then inhaling the fumes leaking from my ass.

Our new, "foulproof" plan: use our savings to get into a house sometime this year. Our lease ends in June, but if we need to, we can extend it for another three or even six months to make sure we're really ready. Once we're in the house, we can start saving to pay off the car. This plan allows us to properly situate ourselves as homeowners before the introduction of any offspring (BAAAYBEEES) into our family, which we both like. Not that there's anything wrong with apartment living. We love our little unit and have everything we need, but we'd have to make some major changes to accommodate the cohabitation of another person, even if that person's activity level will be limited to producing smelly bowel movements and sucking on my boob (God willing).

Now that we've got the financial logistics straightend out, we can devote our time and energy into my new favorite topic: Who Gets To Stay Home With The BAAAYBEEES?

It's no secret to the Internet that I want to stay home with my children, at least until they're in school. And even then, the idea of being That Mom, the mom who bakes cupcakes for snack time and volunteers for field trips and has dinner sitting on the table at five-thirty every night, stamps a smile on my heart, so I guess I just want to stay home. I have career aspirations, too, but I'm more than willing to put them on hold while Luke and I are in the early stages of building our family.

However, it's also no secret that by some divine twist of fate, I currently make more money than Luke, so much so that if our roles were reversed--that is, if I had Luke's job and he had mine--the question of whether or not we could afford to keep me at home wouldn't be an issue. We'd do without cable for another few years, and our dinners out would be reduced to an occasional extra-crispy chicken bucket from KFC, but it'd be managable.

In previous discussions regarding our previous plan, I would sometimes casually suggest that Luke consider being the at-home parent, and we'd both laugh, and he'd reply that he wasn't sure how he'd feel about taking a break from the traditional nine-to-five work force, and I'd breathe a sigh of relief because that meant it was OK to resign ourselves to a life of (temporary) poverty. If Luke didn't want to be a stay-at-home dad, I would never make him. But I still didn't want to pay for daycare.

That was all before this past Sunday, when Luke and I were out for breakfast and we let our collective gaze wander over to the table across from us, where a blond-haired, blue-eyed little boy who couldn't have been more than eight months old was blowing raspberries with Gerber's latest fruit-and-meat concoction, and Luke said, "Maybe I could be a stay-at-home dad after all. It would make better financial sense."

At that point, my head started to shake and my eyes bulged out of their sockets, but not before they reduced Luke to a pile of ashes with the deadliest, most evil If Looks Could Kill staredown in the history of the universe.

After I stopped banging my head into the restaurant's coat rack in an effort to permanently erase his comment from my memory, I let myself process the information so we could give the matter some serious thought. When I think about having to redefine the image I've made for myself as a mother, I want to grab Luke by the collar and plead with him to work two jobs so I can bring that picture to life. But when I think about what's truly important to me--the ability to enable our children's parents to serve as their primary caregivers--and I realize that THAT dream can still come true, I start breathing again well enough to remember this family is not all about me. And Luke is going to be such a wonderful father. Our children would be truly blessed to be able to spend so much time with him.

Right now, it's too soon to make any definite decisions. Individually we'll keep doing our thing, career-wise, and revisit the issue once we have a baby to stay home with and I get a chance to see how I hold up after a three-month maternity leave.

Yesterday in a Google chat with Molly, I joked that I've gone from being a Catholic singleton with SAHM potential to a Protestant working mom. It's a good thing Luke can cook or this whole "challenging myself to be a more open-minded person" thing would be such a waste of time.

Football and Churches and Ducks, Oh My!

First things first: Did anyone watch either one of the two AFC games yesterday? Because oh my God, the Midwest is having a collective heart attack: for the first time ever, the Chicago Bears and Indianapolis Colts will face off in Miami at this year's Superbowl. While I'd never describe myself as a football fan---it took me twenty minutes to figure out what the hell AFC even stands for--but as a Chi-town native and current Hoosier resident, the anticipation over "the battle of I-65" has inspired me to save both the front page and sports page of today's paper in order to document this historic moment for my future offspring. Next thing you know I'll be wearing team jerseys and chugging copious amounts of Miller Light from a plastic hat. And I don't even drink beer.

It was a good weekend. I did file my work samples into three-ring binders and plastic sleeves and tossed out two garbage bags worth of trash and dusted and vaccuumed and almost orgasmed from the cleanliness of it all. On Saturday night, Luke and I rented Little Miss Sunshine and Snakes On A Plane. One of those movies had us guffawing and crying and celebrating the acting chops of one very talented Office actor. The other also induced tears, but for vastly different reasons. I'll let you determine which is which.

We also went to church.

Since the start of the New Year, I've been thinking a lot about how it's time for us to start searching for a parish of our own, one that provides a strong foundation for the core Christian beliefs we both share. With the Frema-Useless Clutter household currently subscribing to a complicated mixture of Methodism and Catholicism, our research revealed we might both feel most comfortable in the Episcopalian faith. We visited an Episcopal church together last spring and had a good experience with the Mass, though I was intimidated by the grand scale of the architecture. This time around, we chose a church in a neighboring town a little closer to home, on a Sunday when the streets were filled with snow and the plow trucks were nowhere in sight, but we made it, and our appearance was received in a manner similar to Howie Mandel at the Golden Globes, which is to say very, very well, or at least it would have been if I'd been stalking the red carpet.

Because of the snow, there were only a handful of parishoners in attendance, so we basically stuck out like sore, spiritually lost thumbs. We were bombarded with outstretched hands during the offering of peace and personally encouraged to take communion from one of the ushers. At the end of Mass, one of the priests invited us to have coffee and doughnuts in the church's kitchen, an invitation we originally planned to decline, so overwhelmed were we with all the warm welcoming, but the song in her voice was like an imaginary hand gently guiding our footsteps to the room where lukewarm Folgers and supermarket pastries awaited consumption, and soon we were visiting with other families, making small talk about the weather and how we found ourselves in Indianapolis.

All that to say we really liked the parish and plan on visiting again, though we still might check out a few other churches before commiting ourselves to any one place. I could feel those old feelings of sadness bubbling up inside of me again as I sat next to Luke in the pew, just like last time, at the idea of saying good-bye to the faith I'd grown in for so much of my life, and once again I reminded myself that the God I talked to and prayed to and wept with and thanked in the Catholic church was the same one waiting for me in this new Episcopal one, and I wasn't saying good-bye to Him, just worshipping with a new group of people who really weren't as different as I thought they'd be. At least, not in the ways that mattered.

After church, Luke and I went for breakfast and did some shopping. When we finally came home, we noticed this sight in the pond across from our unit:

We didn't think much of it until Luke peered out the window a couple of hours later and saw that the goose was still there, perched in the exact same spot. Figuring the poor thing must be stuck, we marched outside and tossed some stale bread crumbs his way, hoping the promise of food would provide ample motivation to free himself. When that didn't do the trick, Luke hurried upstairs to grab a broom with the intention of breaking through the ice with the handle. Before he could pierce the surface, though,the goose must've questioned the validity of our plan, because he made a clean break for the sky, leaving behind chunks of Market Pantry whole wheat bread as a tribute to his courageousness.

Since we still had three or four pieces of bread left, we circled the pond looking for other feathered friends with which to share our feast, partly against my better judgement. The ducks and I, we have a history, you see.

It started out calmly enough, with the whole flock keeping a respectable distance in the pond, perfectly content to eat crumb after crumb in the water, until they decided they needed to experience their snack up close and personal.

The farther away I walked, the braver they became. Which made me quite nervous. I hastily abandoned a half-piece of bread in the snow, hoping to distract them, but it only left them hungry for more.

I thought walking in the street would instill some fear, surely put them in their place. It didn't, those brazen bastards.

At that point, after many pictures were taken to document my fear, Luke (finally) came to my rescue. Thank God.

 

He makes it look so easy, doesn't he? Not scary at all!

And then the ducks blew him kisses of gratitude, and I began to feel a little silly.

But not TOO silly. After all, I did see Snakes On A Plane. For all we know, the ducks are just biding their time.

We Go Together Like A Horse And Carriage

Sent at 10:17 AM on Tuesday

Frema: Are you thinking of foods I hate?
Luke: Seafood, of all kinds. Cheese on sandwiches, but not on burgers.
Macaroni and cheese. Eggs.
Frema: Didn't you see the list I sent you?
Luke: No.
Frema: Those are already on the list.
Luke: I didn't get the list.
Frema: I'm looking at the copy in my Sent folder. I'll send it again.
Luke: OK
Frema: Did you get it?
Luke: When have you had Indian food? Or Thai food?
Frema: I haven't.
Luke: You liked the Japanese food you had at House of Kobe.
Frema: But I like beef.
Luke: You also liked the soup, and there are many noodles dishes you'd like, too. You just wouldn't like sushi. There's also a lot of Chinese food you'd like, too.
Frema: Well, what about stuff you know I don't like?
Luke: There are Chinese dishes not far off from the stirfry I make.
Since when don't you like burritos?
Frema: Have you ever seen me eat a burrito?
Luke: No. But they're pretty much closed tacos.
Frema: With beans!
Luke: Burritos don't have to have beans.
Frema: Then why can't I just have a taco?
Luke: I've had a lot of burritos with no beans.
Burritos are less mess, being rolled and all.
Frema: I can fold my taco.
Luke: They can have just about anything inside and still be a burrito.
They don't necessarily have beans to be a burrito.
But you wouldn't like a bean burrito.
Frema: OK.
Luke: Quiche.
Frema: Can you just answer my original question?
Luke: You wouldn't like quiche.
Frema: Oooh! Or any sort of pot pie.
Luke: But pot pies can be good if made right. They're pretty much stew in a crust.
Frema: But I don't want the crust.
Can I post this conversation on my blog?
Luke: Your mom posts this conversation!
Frema: I'll take that as a yes.

I've Got A Food Attitude

For as long as I can remember, I've always been a picky eater. If a food possesses a smell, texture, or physical appearance that's not to my liking, it's blackballed from my palette and never thought of again. When I was a kid, this posed a lot of problems for my mother, who cooked the majority of our meals, because she often wanted to prepare something that wasn't chicken, spaghetti, tacos, or pizza, and I didn't want to eat anything other than chicken, spaghetti, tacos (on flour tortillas only), or pizza. There were a couple of times where her "You're not leaving until you eat that!" directive meant me sitting at the kitchen table for hours, staring at yellow paint and wooden panels, the antique knick-knacks perched on top of the cabinets, or updated school pictures fastened to the refrigerator because I was too stubborn to take even one bite of her refried beans and she was too stubborn to let a nine-year-old kid break her spirit. One morning she threatened bodily harm if I didn't just EAT THE DAMN SCRAMBLED EGGS, so eat them I did. And then promptly threw up.

We didn't struggle a lot over food after that.

As an adult, I've continued to sustain my body on a limited menu. I still love chicken, spaghetti, tacos (actually, most forms of beef), and pizza and eat 'em at least once a week. I love barbeque ribs and ham and bacon and cheeseburgers and potatoes in any form (read: french fries). I enjoy whole kernel corn, green beans, onions (required for Outback's Bloomin' Onion), sugarsnap peas, cheese, and various types of fruit. Dessert items rock my socks off.

The following foods will only find themselves on my plate if I'm dead:

• Seafood of any kind
• Eggs (Ah, memories)
• Macaroni and cheese (The smell is unlike anything I've ever experienced)
• Macaroni noodles (You know, because of the mac and cheese thing) and other "thick" pasta shapes
• Oatmeal (Tasty to-go bars don't count)
• Sauces with a non-tomato base
• Beans (Unless they're in chili, and even then I pick them out)
• Whole mushrooms (Chopped up on pizza is acceptable)
• Tuna (Except in tuna cassarole)
• Salami
• Burritos
• French toast
• Avocados
• Salad (Because I hate lettuce)
• Sour cream
• Mayonnaise (Except in my spinach dip receipe)
• Custard
• Cranberries
• Cottage cheese
• Tapioca (Thanks for reminding me, Bdogg!)
• Quiche
• Tiramisu
• Any sort of pot pie
• Omelets
• Indian food (Too afraid to try it)
• Most Chinese food (Though I do enjoy orange chicken)
• Most Japanese food (Unless it's beef fried rice, and I still pick out the egg chunks)
• Select meat-and-cheese combinations (Shredded cheese on tacos is delish; sausage-and-cheese croissants inspire my gagging reflex; meats with cheese stuffed inside of them are also gross. Cheese does not make everything better, people!)

I'm sure there are others, and there are a few exceptions, but them's the biggies. Any dishes outside of my love/hate radar are tolerable, I suppose, but why bother with them when I can get my taste on with something I one-hundred-percent enjoy?

My contentedness with not trying anything new never bothered anyone until I started dating, and it didn't bother ME until I started dating Luke. Our relationship has always embraced a liberal dining-out policy, meaning an oil change is reason enough to flock to the nearest Applebee's, so this topic comes up all the time. I usually go for American grill or Italian-style restaurants, while he's interested in trying out the little Thai place across the street from Wal-Mart. If I suggest a place, it's usually to satisfy a specific craving. Outback equals Bloomin' Onion. Ted's Montana Grill (my new favorite place) means a bison cheeseburger and fries. Don Pablo's? Steak quesadillas. (Another instance where I sanction the marriage of meat and cheese.) I'll go anywhere you want, but you can bet your mother's life I'll ask for a burger, ribs, or chicken strips, and that's after I guilt you into ordering the dip.

For Luke's sake, sometimes I want to throw caution to the wind and just try a crab leg already. I know he'd take greater pleasure in our meals out if I took a more open-minded approach towards food. He also gets sick of my wrinkled nose and "Oooh, I don't like that, how can you eat that?" comments every time he takes a bite of something that didn't originate from a cow.

But what if I don't like the crab leg? Am I going to shell out eleven ninety-five for another platter? Stare at my entree forlornly until it's time to pay the bill? My daredevilism could very well come back to bite me in the ass.

This evening, Luke and I are going to the Cheesecake Factory for my birthday. (Twenty-seven, thank you for asking!) It will actually be the culmination of a series of food-centric events held in the honor of my departure from my mother's uterus; the shenanigans started on Sunday, when we went to Ted's for dinner, and tonight Luke's making tacos, after which we'll visit the Factory for their to-die-for cheesecake. (I refused to try cheesecake until college because I thought it was literally a blend of cheese and cake. Like, American cheese. If that's not reason enough to loosen up, the only reason my passion for spinach dip exists is Luke's hankering for it on our first date and my unwillingness to rock the boat.) Our first visit was in December, when I feasted upon their brownie sundae concoction, a miracle because they also have banana cheesecake, and usually when I'm ordering a dessert I always go for the banana option. On that night, though, I could SEE the sigh in Luke's eyes as we considered our options, and I thought, "Oh, what the hell."

Because I subscribe to a strict "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy, I think I want the brownie sundae again. Or the banana. Or maybe I'll ask the Internets for their opinion.

Here is a link to the Factory's menu. While I wish I could say I'll go with the majority vote, I'll probably just do whatever I want. Nonetheless, feel free to de-lurk and offer a suggestion. I promise to think about it really, really hard.

Edited to add: I just re-read this entry and realized I listed my age as twenty-eight years old. I am only twenty-seven. Apparently "counting correctly" isn't on my list of ways to celebrate my birthday.

Romantic Comedy My Ass

A few weeks ago, Luke and I rented The Break-Up. And to my surprise, it was actually about a break-up. Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn played a couple who'd been together for a couple of years, bought a townhouse, and communicated so badly they were ready to call it quits.

The movie sat with me for a couple of days in an uncomfortable sort of way, like I'd just removed my glass from the adjoining wall of my neighbor's bedroom, listening to intimate conversations not meant for a stranger's ear drums. I've always been bothered by couples who argue in public, because those arguments are just that--intimate. They provoke frustrations and anger, assign hurt and blame, raise every doubt you've ever had to the surface. It's a miracle anyone ever makes it to the altar.

Luke and I are married six months today, and I think a lot about what it takes to make a relationship work. Who could blame me? Not a day goes by that somebody isn't breaking up, in Hollywood, at work, even in my own circle of friends. Each pairing starts out in faith, with hope, in love, and yet they allow one of those emotions to die in its sleep.

I think a lot of it is due to laziness, simply because it's so easy to be selfish. I've exnayed walks in the park to catch up on soap operas; frowned upon one of Luke's video game purchases after spending a hundred dollars on new clothes; ditched Victoria's Secret lingerie for the comfortable fabric of an oversized tee shirt. I'll let the entire evening pass in a quiet stew, answer "Nothing" when he asks what's wrong, only to unveil my anger at the exact moment he wants to turn off the lights for bed. I'm often guilty of neglecting and disrespecting the very union I swore to God in front of family and friends I'd put above everything else.

But God understands I'm not perfect, and so does Luke. He sees past my shortcomings in the same way I overlook his (most of the time--I'm still not a fan of the water puddles that form around the bathroom sink after he washes his face). In this first year of marriage, I believe we're learning how to see the forest for the trees, realizing no matter how bad a situation might seem in the moment, it'll only count for a small part of our life together, and each bad spot has to be approached with the confidence that it's going to get better. No more peeking over the fence for greener pastures, no more entertaining the "what ifs." On our wedding day, we promised not to give up on each other, and that means having the guts to answer tough questions, to rise above the monotony of the day-to-day, to cop to all of your hang-ups and admit you can't always be right. I'm sure many people who get married are incompatible from the very beginning but are too proud to admit it until later, while others could've made it but were too intimidated by all the work they'd have to do to fix their problems.

In The Break-Up, I'm not sure what kind of couple Gary and Brooke were, but I know it broke my heart to watch them fight, because their issues were so real, because they never took a step back to examine the big picture. What was probably a good thing ultimately failed because they were each too concerned with proving their point. Which they did.

But at a pretty steep price.

But the very next day, you gave it away.

While driving from Chicago to Merrillville tonight, Luke and I decided to search for the radio station Lost A Sock advertised as already succumbing to the seduction of St. Nick-inspired holiday merriment. Three tracks in, on came Wham!'s "Last Christmas," one of my favorite seasonal songs of all time.

"Maybe I'll add it to my playlist for the "Hello? Is It My Cheesy Love Song CD You're Looking For?" Internet Swap."

"What are you talking about? This isn't a love song."

"Are you kidding me? Anything relating to the loss or celebration of the warm and fuzzies is more than worthy of the coveted ballad label. When I was a kid, I'd keep this song on repeat for hours."

"My condolences to your childhood."

Bringing Stupid Back

After more than a week of soup, spaghetti, and take out, yesterday I decided to prepare an actual meal. "Pork and vegetables" was originally slated for last Monday, and since the main ingredients had already been purchased, pork and vegetables it was.

With a few dishes under my belt, the whole cooking thing is becoming much more enjoyable, thus making it easier to navigate through each step. It took just twenty minutes to cut the potatoes, slice the carrots, and "wedge" the onions, and according to my Pillsbury cookbook, the whole sensuous ensemble would be ready in the same amount of time it would take to recap the AMC episode of the day. Just stick the meat thermometer into the thickest part of the meat to verify it cooked all the way through, and the triumph of another successful dinner would be mine.

True to Pillsbury's word, the time went off just as Zach and Dixie's murder trial came to fruition. Hurriedly I ran to the stove, eager to show off my mad housewifery skillz to a husband who graciously launders ninety-eight percent of our clothes, and became dismayed to find the face of the meat thermometer glued to the top of the oven. "Oh, well, at least the meat is done!"

"What do you mean, 'At least the meat is done?'" Luke jumped up from his seat on the couch in time to see me extract a now-ruined thermometer from the pork's caboose. "You're not supposed to cook that with the food!"

"But the book said to stick it in the thickest part of the meat!"

"Yes. AFTER it's done cooking!"

"Then why did they include it at the beginning of the directions?"

Luke: Bangs head against wall, wonders if this incident provides sufficient grounds for divorce.

Frema: Doesn't blame him.

In Which I Learn My Hairdresser Is A Racist And My Brain Isn't Worth The Paper My English Degree's Printed On

Or, I'm Not So Sure The Second One Comes Off As Well In Print

Scene 1. The Salon That Must Not Be Named Because I Don't Care to be Sued, Thursday.

After weeks of split ends, Frema chances a second visit to Magda for a simple trim. (There's also about two months and three inches' worth of outgrowth, but Frema will continue to ignorance its existence until her bank account is sufficiently funded to handle emergencies unrelated to car insurance.)

Magda: So, do you live around here?

Frema: Yes. My husband and I like this area so much we'd like to buy a house here. We've even started neighborhood-shopping.

Magda: Well, it's a great place to live, except one thing. The schools in this township are horrible.

Frema: Really? I hadn't heard that.

Magda: Oh, yes. The kids get good grades and all, but there's a lot of blacks.

Frema (eyes widening): Excuse me?

Magda: This area used to be primarily white until about fifteen or twenty years ago, when blacks and Mexicans started moving in.

Frema: Well, that doesn't sound like a good reason not to send my kids here. (Notices shears poised above her tender, Hispanic scalp and chuckles nervously). I'm from Chicago. I actually enjoy diversity.

Magda: Good for you, hon!

Frema: Head explodes.

Scene 2. Frema-Useless Clutter Apartment, Sunday.

After several hours of AMC recaps, the VCR is turned off to reveal a news report about this plane crash.

Broadcaster: Forty-nine people were killed, including a couple that was married only the night before.

Frema: Oh my God, that's horrible!

Broadcaster: Yes, isn't it? In other news, Indianapolis saw more rain than it would've liked this past weekend...

Frema: Well, that was a crappy sēgue.

Luke: What?

Frema: A sēgue. You know, a transition?

Luke: You mean segway.

Frema: No, sēgue, with a long "e" sound. People on the Internet use it when they're going from one topic to another.

Luke: The hell?

Frema: Do I need to spell it out for you? (Spells it out for him.) There is no "way" in that word.

Luke: Starts to laugh while he makes a run for the dictionary. Minutes later, Frema stares in disbelief at the pronounciation key.

Frema: Well, shit, what do you know.

Luke: You really thought there was a long "e"?

Frema: I even said it that way on the phone once. Just last week, in fact.

Luke: Clutches sides, gasps for breath.

Frema: I'm an asshole.

Mr. Wife

Exciting things are happening in the Frema-Useless Clutter household as Luke prepares to go back to work full time and we begin to contemplate a day-to-day schedule that accounts for the two of us plugging away for The Man from eight to five.

While I couldn't be happier about the benefits this will bring to Luke's confidence and our quality of life, I'm also a little nervous, because for the past eleven months, I've enjoyed immensely the benefits of a stay-at-home husband, whose duties have included but not been limited to packing my lunch, cooking my dinner, washing my clothes, and rubbing my feet while I'm sprawled on the couch, one wrist fastened to my forehead in an effort to acurately portray an individual trapped in the throes of corporate agony, the other balancing a bowl of ice cream on her belly while simultaneously grabbing at the VCR remote just out of reach on the coffee table, because forty-five minutes of soap opera folly is the only way to convince me to go towards the light.

What? Isn't every husband's turn-on enabling his wife to watch AMC in her sweatpants while licking melted dairy off her chin?

On Wednesday, major changes to my Paris Hilton way of life are sure to take place. And I'm glad. Since starting my job last summer, I've been struggling with how to make the best use of my time. Working in Rensselaer, I lived a stone's throw from the college and stamped my proverbial time card at 4:30, which meant I could get home in enough time to savor the last twenty minutes of 90210 on SoapNet. Now I have an extra half-hour tacked on to my work day, and with it a half-hour commute involving highways and traffic and alternate routes, and if I leave at 5:00 on the dot, I can expect to walk through the door at 5:30, but sometimes I'll stick around to wrap up some e-mail or tweak the layout of our quarterly client newsletter and suddenly it's 6:15. Then I get home and it's time for bed. There simply aren't enough hours in the day to stimulate my brain, clean the grout in the bathtub, and make the world a better place to live in by explaining to Luke just how it came to be that Erica Kane's thirty-five-year-old abortion procedure produced a healthy baby boy.

Maybe the retiring of Luke's SAHH status is just the motivation I need to re-evaluate my time-management skills. For the first time since he moved here last September we'll have the "normal" schedule I've dreamed of, and I intend to make the most of it. First order of business? Adding some much-needed time to my afternoon. Because my responsibilities aren't directly related to or influenced by production, my boss couldn't care less about how I log my hours, so the plan is to start my work day at 7:30 and leave by 4:30, thus arriving home at 5:00 and having six hours of unadulterated leisure in which to occupy myself as I see fit. Seeing as I normally crawl out of bed at a quarter to seven and am pertetually fifteen minutes late to work, this will prove a bit of a challenge, but I made it on Friday without any problems, and even though this morning wasn't as successful, I was still turning on my computer by 7:45, which is close enough to 7:30, so there you go.

One pitfall I'm noticing already: Getting up an hour earlier means I'm hungry an hour earlier, so for the last two work days I've been eating lunch at 10:30. I'm assuming this is generally frowned upon.

Because Enough With The Damn Shoes Already

I don't know what why, but ever since the wedding, I've had a hard time maintaining any semblance of consistency with this blog. I went from hourly posts in the days leading up to Luke's and my nuptials to semi-weekly paragraphs about whether or not to converse with coworkers when I pee. I love to write here. I want to write here. For some reason, though, it's hard to sit in front of the computer screen and arrange words in a way that best represent what I'm feeling. Thanks for continuing to bear with me.

So it's been one week. A lot has happened in just one week. For example, last Friday the two of us embarked on a three-day, two-night camping trip to Indiana Dunes State Park, part of the state's national lakeshore, with Samantha and Dan, where we hiked, smored, swam, and slept. Well, they slept. That first night I spotted two Daddy Long Legs at the foot of our sleeping bag and thought I would pass out from the fear that one of them would crawl into my mouth if I dared to shut my eyes. The next morning, I woke to find a spider tangled in my blanket. I actually shouted "Eeek!" loud enough to pull a few chuckles from the campers next to our site.

That night, I was so paranoid about letting in more of God's creatures that I refused to leave the tent, even to use the Port-A-Potty twenty feet away. The pain in my bladder was so strong that it thankfully knocked me out into uncomfortable slumber.

(On a side note, while everyone ELSE was snoozing away, I did manage to devour eighty pages of Not Without My Daughter, a paperback my sister likes to make out with every couple of years or so and I'm assuming keeps stashed in her Buick Park Avenue in case she's ever stuck in traffic as a passenger in her own car. I ended up taking the book home and finishing it by Monday night.)

In other "me" happenings, I've been reading a lot again, as evidenced by my devouring a four-hundred-and-twenty page book in the span of two days. I've read all the Christopher Pike books I found at the half-priced bookstore, a Sweet Valley High Christmas special, and on a lighter note, some thoughtful religious debate. Two Mondays ago I delved into another nonfiction piece, Morgan Spurlock's Don't Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America, penned by the guy who digested one month's worth of "McFood" and lived to bring his tale to the big screen. The timing seemed about right, considering my latest attempts at healthy living, and when I checked out the book at the local library, I was feeling pretty confident about all things nuitritional.

Today I'm in the midst of chapter ten and pretty much want to throw up. A delightful excerpt follows:

Beef factories are models of waste-not want-not efficiency. Filthy, disgusting, and disease-ridden, maybe, but terribly efficient. Very little of one of these cows is discarded. Leftover bits and pieces are scooped up, ground together, and fed back to the cows. And then those cows are ground up and fed to you.

Other fun facts about the dangers of current American eating habits:

• By 1996, boys and girls consumed twice as much soda as milk. As of September 2004, nine million American kids between the ages of six and eighteen were obese.
• Obesity-related illnesses will kill around 400,000 Americans this year--almost the same as smoking.
• Diet and obesity have been linked to increased risk for breast, colon, endometrial, esophageal, and kidney cancer.

Read this book. It'll change your life. At the very least, you'll glean new insights into the case of the old woman who won a mega-bucks lawsuit against the Golden Arches by claiming her coffee was too hot. (Turns out it really was!)

Finally, I suppose there's one more piece of news you ought to know about. A piece of news that is about to change our lives. A piece of news that will eventually mean savings and houses and babies and maybe even a new Web site.

Luke has a new job. He starts next Wednesday.

He's not disclosing much detail on his own blog, so I'm going to respect his wishes and keep the jobspeak to a minimum. Know it's a very good job, full time, in his field, with room for advancement, and he actually had TWO positions to choose from because he's just that good. And this opportunity couldn't have come at a better time, as we were literally *thisclose* to charging next month's car insurance renewal to our Visa card.

It's been a long time coming, and he so deserves this. I'm so thankful God thinks we deserve this. Or maybe we don't. Maybe it's like what Lost A Sock said when revealing her own husband's new career move, "When your prayers begin to be answered you know that you must be damn lucky, because there are lots and lots of people with the same prayers and the same work ethic. And you have to keep yourself in check, and go above and beyond your norm to pay it forward, because experiencing good times comes with the responsibility of sharing."

Whether due to grace, grunt work, or chance, we're more than willing to share.

Who Could Ask For Anything More?

Because of my recent raise at work, Luke's and my life has become relatively more comfortable. An extra hundred smackers every two weeks is nothing to sneeze over, and we decided to celebrate with dinner at the Outback on June 30. And Cheeseburger in Paradise on the ninth. And Bahama Breeze on the fourteenth. And Bub's Burgers the next afternoon. And Steak 'n Shake on Sunday night. Plus spontaneous trips to Barnes and Noble and Sephora (more on that next time). And as of yesterday, a Two-Adult Household YMCA membership. When balancing our checkbook last night, I was shocked to realize how much money we'd spent on pretty much nothing (except for the Y, and the Sephora purchase really was a necessity, but I'll get to that another day. One topic at a time, people!)

It was about a year and a half ago that I became more aware of money and the fact that frequent shopping sprees at New York and Company weren't going to pay off my car loan or release me from the thirty-year shackles Sallie Mae has cuffed to my ankles. Luke and I were talking about the future more often, and it suddenly hit me that houses and babies and family vacations all came with a price tag, and I was finally at the stage in my life where I needed to start making the proper financial accommodations. I was working at Saint Joe at the time making under thirty thousand a year, in all honesty a pretty good salary considering rent was under three hundred a month and my loans were content earning interest in the Land of Deferment until I graduated from DePaul. So I continued to live it up, financing a 2005 Chevy Cobalt after last year's (first) car accident and the subsequent totaling of my beloved Cavalier; by the end of my tenure at the college, I still hadn't saved a penny, as there were no match options for retirement-minded employees under twenty-five and I wasn't confident enough to select funds for a Roth IRA.

Moving to Indianapolis proved to be the push I needed to shape up my finances--a little. For one thing, my rent was almost three times higher and the cable bill jumped up a whopping twenty bucks. For the good of my grocery bill, I canceled the latter at the end of the trial run and learned a good lesson about separating needs from wants. I finally opened up a 401(k). Things were a little tight, but by that time Luke and I had agreed to live together in sin and assumed we'd experience only a couple of months of downtime until he secured full-time work in the city. Once he landed his job, we said, life would finally begin.

(That rumble in the sky you just heard was God laughing his @$$ off.)

September is fast approaching, and with it comes Luke's one-year anniversary of quitting his job at the Rensselaer Republican to come and be with me. With it I'm reminded of how much Luke and I have learned about ourselves, our relationship, and our heart's desire. It's a fascinating process, to whittle away the material fluff and figure out what you really need to make it in this world. We didn't talk about it on the Internet, but at the beginning of the year, Luke interviewed for a reporting position with a small weekly paper on the outskirts of Indianapolis. Because we'd learned how to live on my income from the lab and occasional checks from his temping gigs, we knew any job he accepted would make a huge impact on our lives. We'd bank all of his checks to cover a twenty-percent down payment on a house. Replace his '93 Lumina with a car that featured a fully functioning driver's-side door. Baby-make to our heart's content. I was barefoot and pregnant and living in a two-story brownstone before he was even offered the job.

But then he was offered the job, with a starting salary so low you'd think THEY thought he'd mistaken them for McDonald's. Factor in an hour round-trip commute on a car already on its last legs for a position he wasn't crazy about to begin with, and we found ourselves questioning just how badly we needed that money.

Luke thought about taking it. I could see it in his eyes that he was restless, that he hated temping, that he wanted to feel useful, even though I felt like I was the one taking advantage of him and his willingness to cook and launder and run errands in addition to conducting a job search, an involved activity in and of itself. In the end, though, he didn't, and every time we get down about not having a house and not being as ready for kids as we thought we were, I remember that our current situation is not a result of Luke's inability to find a job. Rather, it stems from a passionate belief that we don't have to settle for someone else's estimate of our self worth. It's OK to say thanks but no thanks, to set our standards high and hold out until they're met, because life is about more than driving a nice car and living in the suburbs and being debt-free. It's about being able to sleep at night knowing you made choices that honor your dignity as a human being. We wanted that money to enrich our life, but we didn't need it. We needed a roof over our heads, adequate health insurance, retirement and medical savings accounts (nothing screams "I love you" like "Please take care of Mommy and Daddy because we're old and sick and broke"), and one car that doesn't require major repair; we needed to get married to seal our commitment and take care of each other the way God intended. With a little planning and a lot of grace, we made all of those things happen. When Luke received his Anthem card in the mail last month after going ten months without any coverage at all, I felt like the last pieces of our foundation were finally cemented into place. We have nice clothes and good food and a little bit of savings and the means to get into better physical health. We have our family. Most importantly, we have each other, and I truly am so thankful to share each day of my life with this man I can at long last call my husband. Everything else will come in good time.

Meanwhile, if we choose to honor our dignity every once and a while with a Bloomin' Onion, ain't nothin' wrong with that. What do you think the insurance is for?

In Which God Swaps My Dreams For A Baby With Free Quesadillas And I Accept With Open Arms

Things Frema Has Done Today

1. Splashed around in the pool
2. Enjoyed a refreshing walk at the nearby park
3. Caught up on three episodes of AMC
4. Indulged in a complimentary lunch from Don Pablo's that actually started out as a complimentary dinner

Yeah, you read that right. Yesterday Luke and I decided to have a gloriously greasy "last-hurrah" meal out on the town in order to celebrate having the necessary funds to pop for a joint membership at the local YMCA, which we haven't done yet but will on Monday, but yesterday was when we had our tour and saw the plethora of fitness classes and machines available and there was much excitement about getting back into shape so I could stop crying about how much fuller my face looks in the picture I took for my EOM bio. I mean, we. Whatever.

Anyway, Don Pablo's. Because Luke loves Mexican food and I knew some chains offer spinach dip as cup or bowl options, and it wouldn't really count as an appetizer because cups only cost $3.79.

We arrived at the restaurant around seven and knew to expect a wait. So we sat on one of the benches near the entrance and watched hungry people harass the poor hostess, one of whom would approach her every six minutes to peer over her shoulder, showering her with man breath and spittle, to ask "How's Cal lookin'?" in such a gruff tone of voice you knew he had to be a smoker. The third time that happened took place directly before she announced our table was ready, and we took great pleasure in tossing back possible answers on behalf of the poor hostess, answers like, "Cal's lookin' to get a foot up his @$$ if he doesn't step out of my happy place!" It took all my restraint not to high-five Luke as we were seated in a booth on the outskirts of the dining area.

Two eventful things happened during the course of the evening. The first was that we got a free dinner as a result of the waitress's perception that we waited too long for our food, which, it wasn't that long, seeing as it was Friday and all, but we're not the type of people to squash an opportunity for a fellow human being to pay it forward. (Or turn down a free thirty-dollar meal.)The second was when, in all the excitement and possibly Luke's irritation that he didn't order that margarita after all, he stepped on the heel of my flip-flop and broke the strap. That's three dollars my mother will never see again. We were able to temporarily repair them with medical tape obtained from my car's first aid kit. (I knew it was good for something!)

He said he was sorry, but he didn't help his case any by admitting to his hatred for the damn things, so the jury's still out. I told him a trip to Payless may be the only way to make things right.

Apparently our good karma is sticking around for the entire weekend, as we have plans for tonight and tomorrow with friends of ours (OK, Luke's friends, but I'm working it!) to do things. In the same city we live in. That don't involve the highway or toll fees. This is the life.

In other words, I'm feeling much better.

All Talk

Because after the big ole stink I made about wanting to wait to start our family, I thought I was pregnant this week. I was crampy. Gassy (and there's been no spinach dip in almost a month!). I've gone to bed the last couple of nights with painful headaches, and there have been fleeting signs of nausea, and there was that one time last month....

I thought I was pregnant and I was excited.

So we bought another pee stick, despite Aunt Flo's visit two weeks ago and the fact that I have a very recent negative already under my belt. This one produced a second negative result, which reduced me to crying just like the baby we don't have.

Luckily, Luke knew immediately how to remedy the situation:

"Want some ice cream?"

Proof enough he's the smartest man in the world.

Thirty Days in the Marital Office

During the first weeks following Luke's and my wedding, I felt like a fraud thinking of us as husband and wife; our marriage was too new, too innocent, to be valid. Just like Jello has to sit in the fridge for a few hours before it'll assume its permanent shape, so must our relationship undergo the same process.

While I wait for time to mold our union into something less liquid-y, I think a lot about what it means to be a good wife. As a person, I thought my scorecard was pretty good: close family and friends, good job, nice car, strong belief in God, desire to make babies and improve the state of the universe. As a girlfriend, well, I patted myself on the back for that, too, taking pride in my salary for sustaining our livelihood and my unconventional attitude for letting it happen. I thought bringing home the bacon meant I was an equal contributor to our household. It was as if Ward Cleaver had staked his claim on the new millenium.

Since we've been married, I've been reading a lot of books, including one called Lies at the Altar: The Truth About Great Marriages, written by Oprah's new Dr. Phil, Robin Smith. The book uses a financial checks and balances metaphor to drive home the idea that just like a savings account, a marriage won't survive if you withdraw more than you deposit. It then challenged readers to transcribe one week's worth of their marital credit history.

My deposit? "Stayed up late to view wedding photos." Cuz, you know, I'm the breadwinner and need my beauty sleep. But even that doesn't really count, because a credit is described as something one spouse does for the other without complaint, and there may have been a "But I'm so tiiiiired" whine involved.

My withdrawals? "Didn't cook dinner." "Didn't do laundry." "Asked Luke to run boxes over to Goodwill." "Asked Luke to run to the post office for stamps." "Asked Luke for a foot massage."

Looks like Fifth Third isn't the only one who gets to harp on my @$$ for insufficient funds.

I think about how lucky I am to have Luke in my life and it hurts to breathe. Every morning he gets up to pack up my lunch. He begins his e-mails with "Hi, sweetie," and ends them with "I hope you're having a great day." He'll make a Wal-Mart run at 11:30 on a Thursday night because I forgot to buy contact solution on my way home from work. He never complains that the only dishes I make involve spinach and cheese, and when we go to sleep, he holds me as close as I'll allow, which usually isn't much, as my limbs have a mind of their own and need to be free in the event an urgent head scratch or toe stretch is required. He tells me often how proud he is to be my husband, and then I recall responses to simple requests like rubbing his temples to alleviate a headache and I'm embarassed. I can't rattle off the characteristics that comprise the perfect Eve to Luke's Adam, but I know what he's worth, and I fail to make par. My husband deserves better than eye rolls and sighs that imply my "allowing" him play Nintento DS before bed provides sufficient grounds for sainthood.

It's a good thing we'll be together the rest of our lives. I already have a lot to make up for.

Series Premiere

An Easter First

I didn't go home.

Originally that was the idea, even though Luke and I hadn't figured out how it was going to work, because this was also the first time we've been together for Easter. Before he moved in, our roles in each other's lives during the holidays were constantly being negotiated. The first year we dated, I was a senior in college, and I remember us saying our good-byes as I prepared to leave town for my week-long Thanksgiving break. There he was, holding me, telling me he loved me, and then suddenly wishing me a wonderful gobble gobble with my folks back home. I remember standing with my arms around his shoulders, trying to blink my tears away before he had a chance to see they even existed. I was hurt because I'd assumed we'd be together, even if only for part of the day. Same thing that winter. It was Christmas Eve morning and I was moping at the kitchen table, trudging through the first Harry Potter and not feeling particularly impressed (anyone else agree that one kinda dragged?) when Luke called to talk about his activities for the next couple of days. Only after my shrill "Aren't we going to SEE each other?" was any kind of game plan established. The early days of a relationship are so hard, when you're with someone but have no real claim on his time. You've made a commitment, but it's delicate, one with lots of love but no track record, one that has yet to prove itself worthy of superseding all others.

As we became more serious it became more important to work our relationship in on major calendar boxes, but it was still difficult, as my roots were in Chicago, and his in Merrillville, a good forty-five minutes away. Plus, I worked for a Catholic college that was very generous with its vacation schedule, which included "soft" holidays like the Friday after Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, Good Friday AND Easter Monday (and I left why exactly?). Luke was a reporter and thus had to be at work more times than not, so while he could get away for an afternoon with his parents, anything more than that wasn't doable. I often left family functions early to see him in Indiana and then drive back to enjoy the last few hours of the day with him at his apartment.

Once he moved in with me, everything changed. Holidays were no longer about fitting into a greater familial whole; rather, it was about re-evaluating whether or not our individual traditions were conducive to the new life we were making for ourselves. This year, we were all gung-ho about making the drive up north for Easter, even though Luke was tired from working nights and I was tired from going to bed at twelve-thirty because he was working nights. By Thursday night, we were both ready to drop and decided it might be better to simply stay put. It's a big step for any couple, to say what you have in each other is all that's necessary for a successful holiday. I'm proud we were brave enough to make it.

But the weekend wasn't family-free. My sister Ryan and her boyfriend, Jason, stopped in on their way to Chicago and slept over to avoid the rain and hail that seemed to remain about ten miles ahead of them. They also brought along some special guests.

Meet Bunny, Whose Official Name Is Sox But Is Only Referred To As Such. Ryan fell in love with him as he was hopping around her apartment but tried to tell my mother, who was afraid of catching Rabies or other stray-animal diseases, that she rescued him from Bloomington's National Wildlife Society. On Friday night she explained that she attempted to pass him off to a local animal shelter but was informed Bunny had been away from his mother too long to survive on his own. She's taken that as her free ticket to indulge him in carrots, lettuce, and Cheerios.

Spades, our second non-human houseguest, is Jason's dog and was actually adopted three days before he was scheduled to be euthanized. As you can tell from this picture, he's a frisky fella, and fond of the biting, but neither Jason nor his wrist seemed to mind. I also feared he might be fond of Sox, but Spades was content munching on the pepperoni slices from our late-night pizza.

Saturday and today passed by in a sort of peaceful blur. There was breakfast at my favorite pancake house, a trip to the zoo, two mediocre movies (the latter redeemed only slightly by the two glasses of wine), a walk on our favorite Indy trail, and an Easter service at a nearby Episcopal church, which laid the foundation for another first: receiving communion outside the perameters of Catholicism. Standing in line waiting to partake, I felt like a virgin all over again, only it wasn't my sexual innocence I was losing. It was something less tangible, less able to be defined as right or wrong. I knew Protestants invited all baptized Christians to take the Eucharist and Catholicism restricted it to those baptized within its church. But what about "away games"? Were Catholics allowed to participate with other churches? And did these rules even apply to me, a heathen who dared to think salvation could exist for a Catholic in the walls of an Anglican church? Was my soul clean enough to receive the host at all?

The closer we got to the altar, the harder it was to keep my legs from shaking. But I couldn't turn back. I can't explain it any better except to say this was the only way to validate my recent choices and revelations regarding spirituality. How could I say all denominations were equal in the eyes of God but refuse an invitation to his table because I was afraid of being chastized by a religion I didn't fully embrace?

I'm glad I did it. I cried from the minute I left the altar to the moment my knees bent to pray, but I'm still glad. It freed me in a way my Idiots' Guide to Christianity never could. For the first time, I was taking my relationship with God into my own hands.

I may not have gone home, but in that moment, home came to me.

They Don't Cover This In Pre-Marital Counseling

I don't know what Luke and I were thinking, dedicating so much time to piddly matters like our family's religion when there were clearly deeper, more life-altering subjects bubbling just below the surface. I discovered this last night, while perusing through our DJ's song list and realizing my future husband was serious when he said there would be no "U Can't Touch This" at our wedding reception.

Before we even started dating, we knew our musical tastes weren't a hundred percent compatible. He liked They Might Be Giants and Beth Orton, while my CD collection suffered from chronic Boy Bandism--NKOTB, Hi-Five, N'Sync, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees; you know, the essentials--with recurring bouts of Cheesy Pop and Early Nineties Rap, the kind of rap my sixth-grade friends jammed to while their parents were at work, the kind of rap that earned me a week's grounding when it was found pulsating through my boombox. What can I say? George and Lyn were not big fans of directives like "Let me lick you up and down 'til you say Stop."

Anyway, now that I'm old enough to control the dial on my CD player, I often find myself drawn to stations that highlight tunes from my early years, banned and non-banned alike. And this has naturally influenced the types of songs I consider DJ-friendly. I mean really, people, who wouldn't want to Ride The Train and be Dangerous on the Dance Floor while ingesting large quantities of alcohol and very scrumptious cake?

Apparently Luke, who is of the mindset that our reception should feature mostly contemporary music, even though "My Humps" is the only current song he knows, and THAT is only because I have a passionate love for it that defies all logic, reason, and hatred for the phrase "lovely lady lumps" (though Fergie does deserve props for her mad use of alliteration, and YES, Samantha, that is the same Stacy from Kids, Incorporated). He thinks "The Perculator" is just a coffee attachment, and if that's not good enough reason to sport a paper bag over my head with the words "I Don't Know This Man" when we're out in public, he's actually banned the playing of "YMCA," only the biggest dance staple to feature homosexual, role-playing, culturally diverse men in the UNIVERSE. Next thing you know he'll be telling me that "The Macarena" wasn't a movement at all but in fact a presidential conspiracy to encourage the shocking and gratuitous use of The Elbow. You know, because elbows are needed for the bending of the arm, a motion that plays a critical part in getting one's hands from the head to the hips.

Is there any hope for us? Also, what songs get your feet moving?

Booked. Also, Slightly Less Freaked. I Think.

Two rooms at this hotel for the Sunday and Monday night after the wedding, with additional plans to stay over in Michigan that Saturday and Tuesday, to break the eight-hour drive up a little. Today I received permission from my boss to take a week-and-a-half break from work beginning with the Wednesday before the wedding, which allows me some time to sort through last-minute reception details and also have one week where Luke and I can simply enjoy our new married status. As I look at the calendar, I realize by this time in May I'll have been Mrs. Useless Clutter for almost two weeks. Wow.

And I'm feeling good. We've been doing a lot of reading on different Christian denominations, attempting to pinpoint our non-negotiables. It's harder than you think. For example, Catholicism believes in the Assumption of the Blessed Mother--that her physical body was transported into Heaven in addition to her soul. It teaches she was a virgin throughout her life, despite being a married woman. There are prayers for Mary, special devotions and stories about her appearing to St. Bernadette of Lourdes, the children of Fatima, and other faithful Catholics around the world.

However, in the Protestant tradition, Mary is regarded simply as another saint in the communion of saints. The "foremost of saints," according to this Web site, but Luke didn't learn the Hail Mary. He never prayed the Rosary. For him, there was no Assumption, no perpetual virginity on her behalf, because there is no basis for either one in scripture. And if there's no basis for this in scripture, why is the church teaching it? Where did these ideas come from? Church officials? Those who saw her? While we're asking questions, do I truly believe these miracles took place? If I do, how could I not raise my children in Catholicism, if it turns out no other denomination of Christianity supports them? And if I don't, how could I not leave the church?

I'm working ideas out even as I type this, so obviously I don't have any answers. For the first time in my life, I'm taking the time to question my beliefs and how they came to be regarded as truths by the Catholic church. Can you believe I got through parochial high school and college without knowing the whole perpetual virgin thing? I may not have given anything up for Lent, but I don't think it's a coincidence my religious exploration is taking place during the same time Jesus was dealing with some difficult issues of his own.

And throughout all of these hard questions, questions that might lead to answers that surprise us both, Luke still wants to be my husband. Despite my recent tendency to subject our relationship to the unforgiving glow of the pre-marital microscope, he's not once doubted his decision to make a commitment to me that will last the rest of our lives. "Are you sure you want to marry me?" I say after filling our apartment with post-sloppy joe flatulence. "Are you sure you want to marry me?" flys out of my mouth after sharing that I can't really consider other religions before I've thoroughly investigated my own. But no matter how many times I ask the question, no matter how many ways I ask, his answer is always the same. Yes. Yes. Yes. Words can't express how grateful I am that he continues to have such faith, in himself, in me, in us.

Even more earth-shattering than my personal spiritual journey is that we were able to enjoy drinks, steak, and ribs on Saturday night courtesy of Vibes Music, which shelled out EIGHTY DOLLARS for two stacks' worth of used CDs, the titles of which escape me now. I can, however, tell you what they *didn't* take: The Best of Piano by Candlelight Volume 2. Jamiroquai's Synkronized. Lenny Kravitz's Five. The Spice Girls' appropriately titled disc, Spice. Thus, I'll spend at least part of this week hunting down alternative sources through which my questionable musical taste can be savored by the masses.

Lastly, in regards to the SVH contest: forget about another quiz sure to stump friends and family alike, because I just took the damn thing again as "Frema" and only scored an 80. Apparently when I made the quiz last March I was still high on Spider-Man 2 and thought Toby Maguire had more sex appeal than Kiefer Sutherland; now I'm seriously wondering where my brains were at because who doesn't agree Kiefer Sutherland and his urgent scratchy voice are the hottest things ever to grace the Earth? If I had a list like this, he'd be number one, hands-down. If I had one. Which I don't, Luke. Just saying.

ANYWAY, the contest. Let's try this: Why don't you tell me about an important lesson you learned from Francine Pascal's endearing-yet-often-simplified-and-over-the-top series? Like, I just reread Forbidden Love, where Maria and Michael get engaged even though they're not supposed to be dating because of some Romeo and Juliet type feud their parents are involved in. They have to do this project for history class where they pretend to be married for two weeks and manage a budget and deal with problems facing their imaginary children. Michael learns that Maria doesn't want to be a housewife and Maria learns that Michael is comfortable using "belt therapy" to correct their son's juvenile delinquency. In the end, they break up, the families reunite, and Maria ends up dating Winston Egbert.

The lesson? Who cares? I still can't get over Sweet Valley High sanctioning the teaching of marriage and family values in history class. But you'll do a much better job than me. To the best answer, the spoils.

There Are Various Possible Titles For This Post

So Far Nine People Are Coming To The Wedding, Not Counting Me, Luke, the Pastor, His Parents, My Parents, Our Brothers And Sisters, Their Significant Others, The Bridesmaids, The Groomsmen, The Flower Girl And Her Mother, Who Also Happens To Be My Aunt And One Of My Favorite People, And Random Strangers Because We're Holding It At A Public Park

What Happens When Luke Works Nights

The Wakefields Made Me Do It

But first, a word on my hiatus. Things have been shakin' in the Frema/Useless Clutter household. In a nutshell, the freak-outs, they're getting worse. A couple of weeks ago a discussion about blogs turned into a discussion about Dooce, the Internet's most well-known blogger, which turned into a discussion about marriage, which turned into a discussion about clinical depression, which turned into a discussion about whether or not clinically depressed individuals should bear children, which turned into me crying actual tears because Luke will surely want to divorce me when I am diagnosed with clinical depression.

Last Wednesday I came home sobbing because my recent submission to this Web site led to frantic searches on the Internet about interfaith marriages and a train of thought that concluded Luke and I can't get married because he doesn't make the Sign of the Cross or believe in Purgatory. I'm not even sure that I believe in Purgatory, but one can only assume my old Catholic-school uniforms will prove equivalent to a "Get Out of Hell Free" card on Judgment Day.

When confessing all of these tidbits and more to Lost A Sock during a four-hour Steak-N-Shake marathon on Friday night, she shook her head in amazement and said, "What does Luke do when you say all these things to him?"

What does he do? He listens until I'm done, says something Calming and Insightful about God loving all people, not just Catholics, reminds me that we'll work it all out, and sighs, "I wish you would talk to me first before you get yourself so upset." And then he rewards my honesty with a trip to Wendy's, which is probably the best reason to marry anyone.

This weekend, though, was not about the freak-outs. It was about receiving the first RSVPs for our wedding. Watching our pastor and his new wife exchange vows in front of God and an entire congregation. Holding two babies two days in a row and kissing a nose that was only three days old. (Congratulations new Auntie Brooke and second-time Grandma Betty!) Looking through pictures with my mother and thinking about how brave my parents were to make such adult decisions before they were even old enough to drink. Digging out boxes from the basement to find the cases to my CDs, a dusty but necessary action in order to sell them for cash. Along the way I stumbled upon collections of books gathered during high school and college, the majority of which I'd obtained from a former English professor who would leave old books outside the door to his office, free for the taking for those interested in owning their very own copy of The Left-Hander’s Guide to Life. So I decided to sell them, too. My mother was slightly suspicious, as if a lack of funds had possibly forced us out of our apartment and onto the nearest highway exit ramp panhandling for change. "You guys are OK, right?" she asked. "You have food and everything?"

She would've been reassured tonight, as I used the $22.25 earned from selling my literary treasures and twelve dollars of my state tax refund to purchase a pair of old-school Nancy Drew hardcovers, two Christopher Pike books, three Choose Your Own Adventures, and sixty-nine installments of Sweet Valley High.

In my defense, Luke began temping again on Monday night and it's been very lonely and the Sweet Valley High books were only a quarter a piece. Plus, I want to share them with my own little girls, because any daughters of mine and maybe even sons will be required to know who the Wakefield twins are, which one is older, and what their dress size is, because these three facts are drilled into your brain by page five of every book in the series. Plus plus, their characters never engaged in premarital sex, used the Lord's name in vain, or subjected themselves to illegal drug activity—well, except one character. Regina Morrow, the deaf girl who dated flirtatious playboy Bruce Patman and was a kind and loving person until she found out Bruce was dating Jessica's best friend Amy behind her back. Blinded by Heartbreak and Betrayal, she attended a party where she was introduced to cocaine, had a rare adverse reaction to the drug and actually DIED. Then SVH had a memorial service where Elizabeth gave a Deep and Moving speech about Regina's life, and her parents took the day off work and the twins' older brother came home from college to talk about Why Drugs Are Bad but also The Importance Of Communicating With Your Parents If You Ever Feel That Drugs Are The Only Answer To Your Problems. If you're interested in sharing these lessons with your own children, you owe it to them and yourself to read Number 40: On the Edge and Number 41: Outcast.

To top things off, I said "Screw frugality!" and spent four ninety-five on a personal pan cheese pizza and five breadsticks from Pizza Hut.

Three fast-food splurges in a seven-day period. My doctor and my bank account must be so proud.

The. Freakin'. End.

So Worth The Onions

I once broke up with someone the day after Valentine's Day. As a sophomore in high school, I dated Jon for one month and sixteen days, our courtship initiated on New Year's Eve while sitting on the stoop of my front porch. On February 15, we were hanging out in my room, and miracle of miracles, I was even allowed to shut the door. This was huge, as my parents preferred my dates to consist of me and my suitor playing Mortal Kombat on the Sega in the living room with my seven-year-old brother. I think they were just so happy I had attracted a boy who not only had a GPA higher than 1.7 but also intended to pursue medical school that the possibility of grandchildren conceived out of wedlock wasn't such a bad idea. With my track record, it wouldn't have been unreasonable to assume he was my last chance to cinch a connection to any man who dared to finish high school.

When it came to boyfriends, I had a few strengths. I knew how to make out, maintain awkward silences for as long as thirty minutes in order to avoid conflict (both on the phone and in person, how talented was I?), and pretend not to notice that joint sticking out the pocket of your flannel hoodie. Hell, I did it for five years. However, these strengths did not apply to transitional men, because life was too short, I wasn't that good an actress, and besides, Nick, The Boyfriend Who Went For Three Weeks Without Calling, was totally going to come crawling back to me sans hoodie and drug-free.

Anyway, we're in my room, me making small talk, him making a pencil sketch of fall trees in bloom as he was both a doctor-in-training and aspiring artist, and we fall into the topic of some bet we' recently settled. What the bet was about, I have not a clue; maybe we were gambling on whether or not Mel Gibson's scraggly mane in Braveheart was real or if Ross and Rachel were in fact each other's lobster. I only remember that the winner had the power make the loser do whatever he/she wanted, and I was the loser. Jon decides that he wants me to kiss the person of my choice. I decide that Jon has devised a clever way to propose our first kiss; also, that I have no interest in exploring a first of any kind with him.

"Can I pick the dog?" I ask.

Of course, this leads to The Talk, how it's not him, it's me, I'm in a Bad Place, blah blah blah. The poor guy was on the verge of tears, which back then I thought, "Soooo lame." If only he'd been a pot-smoking, comic-book reading, high-school dropout. Then I would've put him on a pedestal.

Stupid girl. Also, bitch.

Ten years later, my actions are much more appropriate for the occasion, only now it's less about Valentine's Day and more about it being Luke's birthday. Not only did I surprise him with some kick-@$$ presents, I also cooked a chicken fajita dinner ALL BY MYSELF, because I'm domestic like that, and bought a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup ice cream cake from Dairy Queen. Note to self: buying food is much, much easier. It's also less likely to smudge your mascara.

However, Luke had a kick-@$$ surprise of his own, which I discovered at work when pulling out the Care Bears fruit snacks from my lunch bag. It was a Charlie Brown Valentine's Day card with an inscription that read, "I love you so much, Frema, and I can't wait until the next Valentine's Day because we'll be married for that one."

I almost cried, which is really saying something, because you know me. I never cry.

Stick to the Funny, Frema

What? I get nineteen comments about bridesmaids dresses but only three when I bare the depths of my premarital soul? Are you people made of stone?

Anyway, on Sunday night I didn't go to sleep until almost one-thirty in the morning, so by lunchtime yesterday I was seriously weighing the pros and cons of pulling a George Costanza and stealing a nap underneath my desk, which would have been easy to do because my the leg room is equal to the size of a one-bedroom apartment and my cubicle is tucked away in a dark and ominous corner where no employees dare to venture except when perhaps they need a letter of appeal to an insurance company or something. When I came home, I fell into bed, and then Luke fell into bed, and three and a half hours later we woke up ONLY because my sister called to say she didn't have time to talk. (Yes, you read that right.) So, not only did we miss the first half of 24, we were also about to miss our eagerly anticipated grocery-shopping window, unless we were willing to make a mad dash to the car before the sleep fully left our eyes and run through the aisles like crazed contestants on Supermarket Sweep while we heard, "Your Super Target is closing in ten minutes. Please bring your Super Target purchases to the front" over the loudspeakers, which we were not, because at the moment our VCR isn't a fan of recording sound and there's only so much Jack Bauer I can do without before my brain melts into the couch.

For dinner, we split a package of beef-flavored Ramen soup and Care Bears fruit snacks and tried to get on with our lives, but twenty minutes later Luke was like, "But I'm so huuuuungry," and truthfully so was I, because I normally get the whole pack of Ramen, so then I was like, "We can go to Wal-Mart," but neither of us were huuuuungry enough to leave the apartment, and besides, we HATE our Wal-Mart, where the clientele consists of men with rosaries tattooed on their neck and women who stash extra wads of Kleenex in their shirt collar. I told him he could've made a grilled cheese with the last hot dog bun, but he passed and had a bowl of Cheerios instead.

Now, what do you have to say about THAT?

Wedding Forecast: Pensive

A surprisingly productive two days took place in Merrillville this weekend. In addition to making another hefty deposit on our hall, Luke and I finally, finally booked a DJ and selected a hotel for our wedding night, two chores that had elevated themselves to the current bane of our existence. For the first time in a while, I'm allowing myself to get excited about this wedding.

I'm also feeling reflective. On the drive back to Indianapolis, the two of us talked about how the life-changing nature of an upcoming marriage shakes up all sorts of thoughts and questions you previously assumed you'd buried. As a person who spent so much of her earlier years looking for acceptance, I now find myself taking to the mirror under the pretense that my eyes actually belong to someone else, to people who, for better or worse, influenced my core.

I think about the two major relationships I was a part of before I met Luke and wonder how they're doing, if they think of me, what they might think if they knew I was about to take a husband. I remember entering into each one with levels of infatuation that almost swallowed me whole, believing that this time I'd finally met someone who understood and appreciated my countless little complications and wanted to be involved in all aspects of my life, not just the part that liked to go out with his friends on Saturday nights. Each time I thought, "This is it, now I'm happy," and just like that, I'd see signs that this person was just another alteration in my romantic wardrobe, like a pretty suit that seems to fit at the store but clings too tightly to your stomach once you've brought it home.

In the last one, I knew months beforehand that I'd have to break up with him. I also knew I didn't have strength to do it without "just cause," so I carried on in this probationary manner until one day he almost left for work without kissing me good-bye. I can see myself laying in bed, holding on to the covers, watching him put on his shoes, locate his wallet, grab his jacket in silence, even though he knew I'd been up for the last half hour. It wasn't until his hand was on the doorknob that his head popped back in a kneejerk "Shit!" reaction and he walked over to give me a peck on the lips. And then I watched him go, already starting to cry, because for some reason, that was It, The Last Straw, because I knew with every fiber of my being that I should have been acknowledged before the bottoms of his heels had settled into his Nikes, not after, and certainly not as an afterthought.

I think about the girlfriends I have and wonder which ones are sincerely happy for me, which ones think I'm crazy, and which ones can't believe that I'm doing it first. I wonder if some of them think I'm desperate to get married because I'm planning a wedding with someone who's still looking for a job.

I think about my parents and wonder if they're as ready as they think they are to receive grandchildren from their oldest daughter, a girl who still enjoys chocolate milk and needs twenty bucks from time to time.

I think about a male friend of mine, someone who served as my biggest crush and confidant through all of high school and most of college, and wonder if he ever realizes that countless sexual encounters can never compare to the affection found in one back rub.

I think about the girl I was ten years ago, who wrotes pages of journal entries about how confused she was, how lonely she was, how sad she felt knowing that her whole day depended on just one phone call, and it's been three weeks, why the hell won't you act like a man and call me, you son of a bitch, and wonder if there's a way to let her know that she doesn't have be angry anymore; that everything turned out just fine.

Because it did.

A Girl Can Dream, Can't She?

In the last two weeks, major changes have taken place within my company's managerial structure, changes resulting in unfortunate repercussions on my own position. Because I've learned from the experiences of others, I won't discuss it further, but that made it all the nicer when on Wednesday night, Luke and I took advantage of an engagement-inspired gift certificate to a snazzy restaurant downtown. We dined on appetizers, entrees, and desserts, and in between courses tried to talk about what we thought our life as a married couple will be like. I say "tried" because stuffing one's mouth with free bread and butter can put a damper on meaningful conversation.

However, I did a lot of thinking later, and it emphasized just how excited I am to get past this wedding planning and finally say "I do" to a man more wonderful than I ever could have imagined for myself in front of the people I love most. The moment our lips lock in our first post-marital kiss, we'll officially be a family.

Then it's on to the good stuff.

We'll spend a blissful three days at Niagara Falls and come home to find that my witty Web site has reached the eyes of a youthful, savvy agent with a keen eye for good grammar and an even better understanding of the human condition. She'll (of course such a person would have to be a woman) look beyond my smallish reading audience and realize that when placed on a platform for all the world to see, I will touch the hearts of millions. Millions!

With a twenty-thousand dollar tax-free book advance check nestled safely in my pocket, I will go back to my cubicle only to rescue my Wal-Mart floor lamp, grossly-out-of-date-for-Valentine's-Day Christmas tree, and framed picture of Luke in a sandhole at the beach. We'll use the advance to pay off our credit cards and the balance on my Cobalt, and with the last five bucks, we'll buy one of those "Get three cherries and win a million dollars!" cards, and oh my goodness, what are the odds, look, we've won! After paying off my student loans using only rolls of pennies (just to spite them, the money-hungry bastards), we will be completely debt-free and Luke will open the coffee shop he's always wanted while I stay at home and have a baby every year of my life until I'm forty-two.

But until then, lunch is over. Back to work.

26th Birthday Suspense

But not about my wedding dress, even though I don't have one yet, even though I had plans to get one this past weekend. Apparently, I'm an idiot to think I can have dibs on a dressing room without making an appointment. New date: January 14th. I will break down and get thee to a reputable salon before then, because when people you haven't met offer to dye your roots themselves, something's got to be done. Maybe the whole scheduling debacle was a sign from God that my hair deserves some TLC before I start squeezing into white dresses.

Also, there are no longer any surprises about my ISF fees from the bank. Apparently, I'm also an idiot who forgets to record transactions in my register. On Saturday night, after checking a voice message from one of the tellers, I went through the last three statements online and discovered about a hundred dollars' worth of missing receipts, receipts I remember vividly and just assumed I had accounted for. Debit cards and Frema do not mix as well as she previously thought. (Quick shout-out to bank branches with Sunday hours who post deposits that same day. I love you, Yolanda!)

However, there is an air of mystery surrounding today, because at 10:00 a.m., Luke will begin an interview with one of the area's weekly newspapers. His qualifications would sooo kick this position's @$$. Send positive vibes his way. And mine, because, apparently, it's my birthday.

A Rusted Root

In the 1989 love ballad "Sacrifice" by Sir Elton John, the appeal of the extramarital affair to a married man is discussed and discarded in fewer than four minutes. Though Sir Elton admits that "temptation's strong," he argues avoiding a booty call isn't really a sacrifice, because a hot night of passion has less to offer the human spirit than a loving, respectful bond between two consensual adults. I think. In a nutshell.

But when a twenty-five-year-old-soon-to-be-married woman and her fiance decide to cut back on living expenses in order to pay for their spring wedding in cash, and said woman does her part by not having her hair trimmed or recolored for almost three months, surely even he would agree on its significance. Why isn't anyone singing about THAT?

Luke and I strengthen our money-management muscles a little bit every day. Sometimes it's turning down a matinee because that ten bucks could contribute to the deposit for the DJ. On other occasions, it's refusing an offer to go roller-skating with your sisters, even though one of us LOVES roller-skating and still has visions of making it around the rink with one of their legs gracefully floating in the air like Nancy Kerrigan except on a hardwood floor. And even sometimes when somebody is preparing to celebrate her twenty-sixth birthday on MONDAY, JANUARY 9, DON'T FORGET TO SEND WELL WISHES, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, and desires nothing more than to partake in spinach-and-artichoke dip and babyback ribs, to hell with high cholesterol!, at the local Ruby Tuesday, that someone is still adamant about enforcing the "No eating out" rule. We are redefining the definition of restraint.

The hair, though, is not on board. Instead of being on its best behavior during this time of financial conservatism, it is unruly, beastly even, and my dark brown roots are dangerously close to eyebrow level. Roots, people! So much root that I should make my own Lifetime drama called Roots, which would be much rootier than that one movie with Oprah Winfrey. Behold the catastrophe that is my head:

Painful even for you, isn't it?

This has become a constant source of unhappiness for me, as I was used to keeping hair appointments every six weeks and firmly believe a good hair day can overpower a breakout, bad outfit, and if you're REALLY on a roll, the imposition of Aunt Flo. Now I frequently feel the need to justify why my Cute Working Girl facade is in shambles and why product can no longer keep The Curl from becoming The Afro Poof, or even worse, The Flat Yet Still Slightly Poofy Afro Poof. Pretty soon I'll be handing out business cards with a pre-emtive apology to all those forced to be within ten feet of its presence.

In the grand scheme of things, I realize and acknowledge that these problems are small. Last night, when I was holding Molly's newborn son in my arms for the first time, I knew that cable television and pretty hair were just two on a long list of items I'd gladly give up to experience the Heaven of being a mother and taking care of a family.

And P.S.: In case it's not evident by the tie-dye, clothing was the third thing to go.

The Best of 2005, The Worst of 2005

When I was a teenager, every December 31st I compiled a list of highlights from the last twelve months. The list featured top songs, favorite reads, and significant milestones I'd experienced relating to school, love, friendships, and personal goals. This year's tally won't include Ace of Base, Ann M. Martin, or my first French, but no one said life was fair.

School
I graduated college for the second (and possibly last) time of my life. This is still weird for me, as the Intellectual part of myself still has longings for textbooks, classrooms, and blue-book final exams. But I'm the first family member to hold a master's degree, and I can suffix "MA" after my last name. Some people with fewer diplomas listed on their resume wrongly believe this makes me smarter. It doesn't. I'm just more in debt than they are.

I also have mixed feelings about pursuing my writing degree immediately after wrapping up undergrad. When I first began talks with my current boss about taking a job with the lab, he stressed that his interest in me had less to do with my credentials and more about the job experience I'd gained in my position at Saint Joe. Knowing this three and a half years ago would have saved me forty thousand dollars in loans, a couple of hundred bucks in ink cartridges, and precious VHS tape that can never be recovered. I'd have an extra five hundred smackers each month for paying off my car. Financing my wedding. Purchasing my first house. There are hard compromises to make when taking on such a huge financial commitment.

But I also have a sense of accomplishment for managing my time so efficiently (or at least enough to get by). I have something tangible that helps me to hold my own in the presence of older peers who think they can treat me like a little girl on her first day of kindergarten. And did I mention I can add a suffix after my last name? Total coolness.

Love
I moved away from my boyfriend. I moved in with my boyfriend. I became engaged to my boyfriend. Wee for me!

I also learned it's not the end of the world to make decisions loved ones don't agree with. Living In Sin was not on my original list of things to do this year, nor was it an unfulfilled dream held by Mom and Dad on my behalf, but it turned out to be the best decision Luke and I could have made. That doesn't mean I think every couple and/or Mary Beth in Cincinnati and/or even you should do it. But I do think it's OK that it worked out for me.

Friendships
A tricky subject, as the majority of my relationships are maintained long-distance, and I haven't had an "everyday" gal pal for a long time. I miss that. There are certain things you can only do with a girlfriend. Eat ice cream in your sweatpants while watching Father of the Bride. Crochet blankets you'll never finish. Have your dinner covered by the restaurant's bus boys. You know, real bonding moments that weave together your very souls. In that respect, I truly feel a loss.

However, I've had wonderful, wonderful conversations courtesy of SBC, and I've been introduced to a number of fabulous individuals through the Internet. I've laughed and cried for women I may never meet in person, and I've seen new layers of those I've known for years. Amen for the world of personal publishing!

Personal Goals
On the surface, I've done great things. There was the landing a new job with great pay and even greater potential. Publishing an article about pee in a national magazine. Affording Prada (read: Pra.da.!) glasses, for cripe's sake. And yet, I'm still not passionate about what I do. It's the same problem I had at Saint Joe. I loved elements of my job, but I didn't love my job. I envy people like Samantha and Number Twelve, who make their living in fields perfectly suited for them. I sure as hell don't love sitting through weekly production meetings, filling out requisition forms, and hauling my @$$ out the door at ten to eight every morning. I'm also not crazy about being in a work environment for six months without making one real friend. Surely a change is in order. I just don't know what that change should be.

But I'll figure out. After all, I did survive scary car accidents, several bouts of Baby Fever, and countless incidents of sporting food on my person. That has to count for something.

Anyway, may your 2006 be filled with wine, spinach dip, a great support system, and endless good cheer. And possibly even suffixes.

'Tis the Season

At one point or another, several of the sites I read have mentioned a lack of excitement for Christmas 2005. Decorating trees, sending out cards, shopping for presents.... It's a lot of work, and not always a lot of fun. However, this year, I find myself enjoying the season more than in years past. Luke and I decorated our little tree right after Thanksgiving. There's been Christmas music and egg nog and mugs of hot chocolate, and for once, a season of gifts paid in full with cash, not because we're rolling in the money but because we were able to achieve a happy medium between extravagent and just plain crappy. We watched A Charlie Brown Christmas. We've been to the zoo to witness the facility aglow with lights, and we've been next door to check out the train exhibit at the gardens. For the most part, I feel that we've thoroughly taken advantage of what the holiday season has to offer. Things feel good. The two of us are good. I'm in a good place.

However, for all of my spirit and cheer, there are some holiday musts I have yet to check off. For example, for the last two years I've watched A Very Brady Christmas while wrapping my presents, because I usually wrap presents alone and nobody will watch the movie with me, so it's an easy way to kill two birds with one stone. This year, Luke and I did this together, and he wanted to watch Pirates of the Carribean. I'm sure many would argue his was the better choice, but really, at what other time is it appropriate to get excited about seeing the Brady clan sing their way through Mike's unfortunate accident at the construction site on 34th Street? It's also fun to watch how the family still treats Alice like a servant, even though the year is 1987 and she's old enough to collect Social Security and Medicaid. Sure, they say she's not their housekeeper anymore, but when she goes to pick up the "kids" at the airport, who carries their luggage? Alice. Who gets hugs and kisses? Not Alice, that's for damn sure!

Maybe it's best I continue to keep this viewing experience private.

Other traditions I've neglected this year:

- My annual It's a Wonderful Life viewing, complete with my own rendition of "Buffalo gal, won't you come out tonight, won't you come out tonight, won't you come out tonight...." (Does anybody know the name to that song?) Up until I was about twelve, this movie was on every cable station and ran every hour and half until Christmas Day. Then NBC bought the rights and became so stingy that now it's only on twice a year on undisclosed days and times.

...OK, maybe that's it. I suppose there are worse things in life then putting off your favorite holiday movies, and because I own both, it's not too late to fill up on the self-imposed required dosage. All in all, I'm counting myself lucky.

And you should, too, for whatever reason. Merry Christmas to you and yours.