Now we are nine

Gack! Who are those very young, refreshed, skinny, happy-looking people? It tugs at my memory, but I have a hard time placing them...

Friday was the ninth anniversary of our wedding. It's funny. When people ask how long you've been married...and about three people asked me when I mentioned our anniversary...and you say 'nine', the response is a universal shrug. What do you say about nine years? It's not ten years, you know?

Naturally, I've got a few things to say about it, even though it's a funny number.

We might not look quite so beautiful as we did on our wedding day, but I'd argue we've earned each and every wrinkle and grey hair...starting with Daddy (then, just new hubby) falling over a cliff on Kauai during our honeymoon. Thank goodness he never hit the bottom or people doubtlessly would have wondered...especially when they found out he'd lost his new wedding ring in the ocean just days earlier. "We knew there was something wrong about that girl," they'd say.

Our misadventures continued for some time after we were married. There was the brand new rental car we totaled in England. There were a couple of minor medical emergencies in Belize. The nightmarish birth of our son and the ensuing years of grief and worry, the impossibly more nightmarish arrival of our daughter and all of the developmental concerns repeated over again, with even more angst...especially for Daddy who'd witnessed her arrival as a premature infant with no heartbeat...followed far too closely by the unexpected death of Daddy's mother.

Then came the stuttering and hearing loss (Smunch) and the intermittently crossed eyes (Mam). I don't know what's in store for us next, but there are some things I'm pretty confident about.

Our nine years of married life have been far from smooth, but many of the bumps in the road just brought us closer together. At the best of times, we are the best of teams. You'll notice there are a lot of 'we's in this post and very few 'I's. It's because we've always been together. We didn't necessarily agree, but we tried to see the other's point of view. We tried hard. Sometimes we succeeded. Sometimes we were frustrated, but we're still the best of friends. And, as long as we're both here, I don't see that changing. How lucky we were to find good partners!

How lucky I am to have a guy who knows every single foible and blemish, but loves me anyway. I'm wildly undeserving.

And I remembered all these things, thanks to that lady who threw that party for us nine years ago. On a day when I was absolutely fed up with the kids and feeling like a horrible parent, she gave us the best anniversary present ever and took the kids...for dinner, for bath, for sleeping, for waking at the crack of dawn and for breakfast. Ahhh. Thanks, Mom!

It was just an evening. But it's the only evening we've had like that since we've had kids. No pressure, no time constraints. Nice dinner, a stroll around town and sleeping without waking to little people fighting or blasting PBS. Sometimes it just takes a tiny bit of that kind of time to remember what's really important...

One vacation and a wedding

It's been a while. Because we went on vacation. And now that we're back from vacation, I've got a lousy cold that has my whole head stuffed up. I'm not sure why I'm the only person in my family who gets raging colds. Everyone else is pretty much over it already. Me, I feel like my head it full of Play Doh.

Anyhoo, our vacation started with what might be considering an ill omen...the necessity to use the jumper cables on the mommymobile to get it started. Yeah, this was a driving kind of vacation, so a functioning mommymobile was pretty much a necessity. It was all packed, the kids were strapped in, Daddy had backed it into the driveway so I could do some final loading from the fridge in the garage. Then it wouldn't start. Nice.

Still, after that, and having to turn around and go home from a few blocks away to retrieve our Starbucks mugs that we left at home. (As if they're any less important than a functioning mommymobile) we were on our way. It's a long drive from here to A.K.'s house in San Diego...a good 7 hours according to Google Maps. But then, Google Maps don't know anything much about potty breaks, lunch breaks and whiney child breaks.

The drive went stunningly well, all things considered. We stopped for lunch at our favorite halfway-to-San Diego spot, a little historic site called Fort Tejon, just before starting up the Grapevine in earnest. This place would be a beautiful haven of a picnic spot if it weren't for the very loud roar of Interstate 5 right outside the gate. It was a nice, relaxing lunch. There were some deer around. They have clean toilets. Some birds had kindly dropped feathers for Mam to collect. All the important stuff.



We arrived around dinnertime and had dinner with AK, her family and my parents, who were also in San Diego because we'd all been invited to the wedding of a family friend. I'm not sure what I was thinking when I decided it would be a great idea to arrange our visit around said wedding. It was a lovely affair, but lovely affairs aren't really the place to have to entertain small children.

Fortunately, the bride's mother was thoughtful enough to set up a table with coloring supplies for the kids (ours weren't the only ones). The ceremony was short and sweet...and it really was sweet, with one of my oldest friends giving an excellent, heartfelt speech during the ceremony as the sister of the bride. And the bride, well, she might've waited 'til 34 to get married, but she looked so stunning that I even heard my hard-to-impress husband gasp just a little. Smunch made her a card at the coloring table and presented it to her at dinner.

The wedding site also plays home to a bunch of rescued barnyard animals, so the hosts put out carrots for the kids to feed the goats and pigs. Mam was enthralled. And really, there isn't anything quite like a precious little girl in her wedding-best feeding carrots to goats. Mam is so fearless that she had a similar happy experience with a rhinoceros last year. Goats were nothing.

Naturally, cake couldn't come too soon as far as the kids were concerned, but they waited impatiently without diving into the four lovely cakes displayed on a table...even with accompanying cupcakes. We did a little dancing. It's a whole lot more fun with kids than it is with a spouse. It's not like you have to pretend to be dignified or to know what you're doing. It's just a lot of wiggling and laughing.

It was a lot of work, but we had a pretty good time and at least one of the kids mercifully fell asleep on the way back to San Diego. The other wasn't far behind when we got home.

Our entire San Diego trip would make for one huge post, so I'll hit the highlights in the following posts...