Targeted.
July 11, 2009
No matter which part of the country you’re from, you must admit one thing.
Nothing is QUITE as sexy as a person who’s gotten sunburn on their back in almost a target pattern.
And I, my friends, have just such a pattern on my back.
No, no.
No bum rushing allowed.
I am a faithful woman and my love and commitment already belong to Nicholas.
You simply must control yourselves.
Never forget!!!
Frustration… and the desire for a cookie.
July 9, 2009
So, in the past few months I’ve started eating better and have hired a personal trainer.
This is quite the expense for someone who lives very paycheck to paycheck – kids don’t feed themselves, you know – and was something I contemplated for a while.
You see, I’m used to being skinny. Have always been somewhat of a small girl, even though I was curvy. Being 5′11″ helped hide the extra weight anyway and even at my heaviest, when I reached that stage where I could say that I weighed the same as I had when I had given birth, I still looked great.
Though I didn’t know it at the time.
NOW, however, I don’t look quite as great.
That’s not a Debbie Downer – it’s simply the truth. After losing weight for K’s wedding with some old fashioned, but effective, stress dieting, I had gotten to a size rarely seen in my life and looked great doing it.
But.
Because the dieting was so unhealthy I gained it back. And then some.
I gained more weight than I ever could have imagined.
In fact, I now weigh an embarrassing 70 POUNDS more than I did when K got married. And to say that I spent some of that time inert would be an understatement.
I love to exercise, always have.
But I love to do it on my own terms.
In the weight room/gym, in a place where I can get done and go grab a bite when I feel like I’m done.
I can’t run and end up 10 miles away and decide I’d like to be through, no. I want A/C and entertainment on my runs. A little electronic numerical goal to count down to.
And I’d sort of walked away from all of that.
But now I’m marrying a man that can sit in a chair and make me look like a lazy slob. He NEVER. STOPS. MOVING. Ever. He bounces and jitters and runs and racquetballs and bikes and softballs and all of these other things that make me tired just thinking about them.
And I knew that I needed to step it up and get in shape, if only to keep up with him in the grocery.
And so I hired a trainer.
An amazingly fit woman who laughs at my jokes, listens to my crap and then tells me to shut up and do the work.
It’s a perfect relationship and I can’t believe sometimes that I am paying for this torture.
Nor can I believe that with the 4 months of eating great and working out 5 days a week, that I haven’t lost a pound.
And I haven’t.
But I have lost 3 inches.
And for those of you that say that’s what matters, well. Kiss my. Um. Big toe?
because I don’t know where those 3 inches went, but they certainly aren’t the three that are helping me fit into smaller clothes.
NOTHING about my clothing size has changed.
So I’ve gotten frustrated.
And have been behaving badly.
Sneaking Mountain Dew and Lorna Doones and when I finally weighed myself yesterday after a week of this, I realized with surprise that I have lost 5 pounds this week.
Wha?
Now, I know the food isn’t good for me, and I will try to jump back on the healthy bandwagon, but it’s amazing how the first amount of self confidence boosting I have had in the past few months with regards to my body has come through two liters of Rootbeer and some junk food.
Now if I could only find a pizza or burger that would help me get rid of my double chin…
On marrying at 29…
July 9, 2009
I’ve been asked by people along the way if I regret waiting until I’m 29 to get married.
I can’t yell NO! on the internet and have it come across correctly, but understand – that was a definite yelled NO!.
The thing that is different about getting married at 29 rather than when I was younger is simply – I know myself.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to know yourself at a younger age, but I don’t have the simple belief that things will be okay in my relationship just because I don’t believe in divorce as an out. (other than the 3 A’s, which are most certainly a talk for another time.)
I know now that things aren’t black and white on this, and that being able to live with something or someone isn’t simply defined by whether or not the relationship is GOOD at the moment.
But more about the character behind the relationship and the people fighting for it.
When I was younger I believed, as most young folks do, that love would solve all my relationship’s problems… that if we were going through bad times, love would either fly in and fix our problems or we didn’t love each other enough.
I’ve spent the majority of my twenties in and out of hard times – dealing with custody issues with my daughter and her father’s family, dealing with health issues with my family, and simply learning the hard way what it means to be an adult with a child that is too close to my own age.
Making the decision to marry Nick was a hard one.
One made over years – before he ever asked the question… and more than likely before he ever THOUGHT to ask the question.
I had to know who he was when he was angry. Who he was when I had a problem with our relationship. Who he was when expressing his own problems with our relationship. Who he was when he dealt with problems outside of our relationship.
And even more than that, who I was when I was with him dealing with those things.
And I learned a lot about myself. I learned that I can be on time for a movie. I can balance my checkbook. I can make decisions that will be unpopular with him simply because I believe they are RIGHT and even if he doesn’t agree, he’ll still love me and respect me and life will go on.
I don’t feel the need to change my views or opinions to fit his notion of what he wants in his life.
He has to love me as me and I have to love him as him.
And when you consider that love is an action every bit as much as it is an emotion, you’ll realize how hard that can be.
Accepting that he’ll never view my priorities as his own is a lot harder than me realizing I won’t always view his as my own either. We rarely look at our side of the coin and I think that is the difference between 29 and 21.
Self awareness.
I’m okay with us disagreeing.
And I know the world won’t end if we argue or fight, though it’s rare when we do.
I know when he’s angry he’s going to growl – but he does that with everyone.
And he knows that when I’m angry I need to be alone or I need to be teased into laughing again and that I never hold grudges.
I feel very solid in my relationship.
Very solid in the decisions I’m making regarding my relationship.
I don’t mean that I never have doubts about spending the rest of my life being the person who makes all the doctor’s appointments – I just mean that I realize wishing he’d make some himself isn’t going to inspire him to do that.
Nor will his wishing I’d make every meal both healthy and delicious isn’t going to inspire me to throw out my grandmother’s recipe for cornbread dressing and start with something low-cal.
I love who I am right now.
I love that I no longer feel the need to compartmentalize myself to please those around me.
I love that I know what my buttons are and that I can not react when provoked.
I love that who I am on the inside very closely resembles someone I’d have respect for on the outside.
And I love that I’m marrying Nick knowing that THAT woman is the woman who said yes… not some starry-eyed version of the girl I used to be.
Heck, he proposed after one of the worst days we’ve ever had in our 4 1/2 years together – and that he did that, that THAT is when he chose to tell me he’s committed, he’s fighting for this, he loves me even during our darkest hours – THAT is the man I’m lucky enough to marry.
And knowing that brings me a peace underneath all the bridal craziness that nothing else on the planet could.
In my opinion, 29 is simply PERFECT.
Back on the meds!
July 9, 2009
OCD will once again be reigned in within a day or two, thanks to Walgreens.
OCD brings a fun aspect to wedding planning.
My dream wedding, in the beginning, would have been one at which I wrote a check to the planner and showed up on the day of and everything was done to my specifications/personality.
However, because I’m not rich, and because my boyfriend believes that it’s weird that I never wanted to plan a wedding and therefore this will be good for me, I have been working it in the wedding world with my own two hands.
But, since I got all the big stuff out of the way…
Which, let’s tangent for a bit – The big stuff seems to be the stuff that freaks most of the people out, but for me, it was the easiest!
I started with the photographer that I was dying to work with and worked from there.
Church was easy, since, well – I can’t marry Nick where HE lives in October. In Minneapolis there is snow everywhere!
But, the weather is gorgeous in Memphis at that time and so I chose my church.
So the big stuff was easy. 17 weddings helped me plan for that…
But then comes the hard part for me…
Details.
It’s not that I’m not good at details – I’m a perfectionist. I’m VERY good at details.
But I’m also a high functioning OCD nutcase. Meaning that the word ‘perfectionist’ as a description is simply being polite. Everything simply HAS to speak to me. And that means that there are so many things that has to speak to me that I’ve ended up as queen of my panic molehill with a crazy to do list.
Hopefully this refill will help me regain perspective.
Now I just have to find something to kick me in the butt and give me ENERGY!
One thing that has been inspiring me lately is all the DIY projects out there on the web.
Now, I USED to be a huge DIYer. But since I’ve been working in Finance, my energy levels have been sucked out by the inordinate amount of brain power it takes for a right brained person to operate in a left brained world.
So, this wedding has definitely inspired me to turn back to my noodle necklace roots.
But things that make the wedding OURS instead of just another ceremony – that will touch my heart on that day and in years to come. THAT is where my focus and inspiration has been lately.
Such as using wedding bells to send us off – bells that remind me of my late grandmother that I lost last March and miss every single day, that remind me of when he proposed in Loring Park last September.
The wishing wall – where people can sign in with more than just names – with words and pieces of advice that I’ll be able to read over and again.
The ‘photo booth’ with its props and sunshine love. I can’t wait to see what the people closest to me will do with them.
And today, this inspired me – a little personal touch so Nick could carry my love with him throughout the day:
from Weddingbee.com - a pocket square
Now I just have to think of something adorable and wonderful to embroider…
Along with my other varied DIY projects.
I love it.
Found Randomly on the Web.
July 8, 2009
- Toilet paper Dress
Now THAT, my friends, is a bride who had time on her hands.
I am more of a scruncher in the first place, but for you folders out there – this toilet paper wedding dress should inspire you to greatness.
If my dress takes any longer to come in, I may recruit some of you to began folding for a back-up masterpiece.
The anatomy of cold feet.
July 8, 2009
I have cold feet.
No, I don’t doubt that I want to marry Nicholas.
I just doubt.
It’s not anything that really has rhyme or reason – simply put, I’m going insane.
Cold feet begins with a slight flutter.
Something catches you off guard – a wedding planning problem that you wouldn’t normally be bothered with gives you nightmares and suddently logical reasonable women like me are having nightmares about the different shades of chocolate linens.
Actual nightmares.
Then comes in the insomnia.
Cold feet leads to nights with a notebook in hand, trying to list as many things that you still have to do as possible – which becomes an IMPOSSIBLE list to keep up with and technically the person who has cold feet is nuts for even writing it, but there is a slight chance (in her mind) she’d be attacked by her in-laws if she didn’t both complete and obsess over every detail before the wedding.
Cold feet continues into the work day.
It laughs at sites like www.apracticalwedding.com and the notion that weddings are anything near practical and wants to give a voice to all the women in the world who have ever entered this strange panic that comes when the wedding is less than 100 days away.
The simple gorgeous ceremonies online mock a woman with cold feet as she makes her way through the wedding blog hemisphere.
“See what you could have had if ONLY HE had listened?!”
The rational side that still has a whisper of a voice chimes in with “But YOU were the one that wanted a party with all the family and friends, he just combined the two…”
Then the cold footed side knocks the rational side on it’s ass and the circle begins again.
I’m not losing it – at least not technically.
I’m just entering in a world that very few bloggers tell you about when they discuss they’re wedding planning…
So many are all sunshine and roses and for the most part, it is, but wedding planning, especially when you didn’t plan on planning a wedding in the first place, is NOT for the faint of heart.
You learn more about your relationship and the ins and outs of how you’ll respond to each other as a married couple than you could ever have imagined before picking out invitations.
You learn what’s important to him (the money) and what’s important to you (getting all the family and friends together in this One Event in your lifetime that they will be innermixed…) and you both sacrifice around each other in order to make it work.
Nothing in the past 4 1/2 years, including hospital visits, car accidents, health problems, moving long distance, custody battles, family tragedies and the normal ups and downs has given me the insight that planning a wedding has.
And I’m an incredibly observant person!
So, it’s scary.
Worthwhile, yes, but scary at the same time.
Many things I can look down the road and feel warm and fuzzy about, but some things set me back a little. (WHISKER HAIRS ON MY SINK!)
All in all, I’m excited and happy about my upcoming nuptuals, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop telling the truth on the days when my feet get a little chilly and I wonder if we can buy a duplex instead of a house so the evenings when I’m a video game widow won’t bug me as much.
I’m too honest.
And today, as happy as I am, I require socks for my cold feet.
Nerves.
July 8, 2009
Everything is getting on my nerves.
And I don’t mean annoying.
I mean I’m losing my mind.
For those of you that are NOT counting, which I’m expecting is everyone on the planet EXCEPT me, I’m getting married in 95 days.
And I really need a friend in town to keep me on my to do list, because I have MANY meetings and such that I need to put together to hand out money and do the final planning before the Big Day.
And I haven’t one clue how to start.
It should be a lot easier than it seems.
After all, how much does planning a meeting actually take out of your day?
Hardly anything.
Which reminded me today, when I panicked, that I need to refill my prescription, which may be part of the problem.
OCD can only kick in so much before it stops you in your tracks.
That’s the problem.
You look around and go, “Where the H, E, double hockeysticks to do I START?!!?”
And the answer is…
I don’t know.
I need to go over the song list so that I know what fits in where and meet with the DJ again.
I need to decide upon cake flavors and meet with the cake lady.
I need to figure out what I’m going to do about the groom’s cake, though I’m leaning towards doing a smaller wedding cake and doing other smaller cakes so that there is sort of a cake TABLE… and the wedding cake won’t end up being massive and hugely expensive.
I need to meet with the photographer and hash out those details.
I need to order the bells.
I need to order invites – I need Brian to finish them.
I need to finish the girls’ stuff.
I need to pick out shoes for them and Abbey.
I need to order Abbey and Allie’s dress.
I need to make sure Brayden gets fitted for his tux in time.
I need to make sure the guys have the tux info and realize I’m picking them up and when it’s time, I need to pick them up.
I need to meet with the caterer and make ANY decisions there.
I need to meet with the florist and finalize my ideas on that – that keep changing.
If I do the many cakes idea, I need to gather cake plates. I love cake plates.
I need to finish the guest book idea.
I need to buy props for the photo booth.
I need to sweet talk someone with a camera into manning it.
I need to gather stuff to keep the kids entertained.
I need to take Brayden to shop for material for his pillow.
I need to make my reception headpiece.
I need to buy rehearsal dinner shoes.
I need to make programs… and design them to print them out.
I need to make direction cards for folks to hand out on the way out of the church.
I need to make sure Nick and I have transportation and everyone has the accomodation locations – and that people that I know will procrastinate have somewhere to stay.
I need to make sure Nick has a flight down here – missing one would be not good.
And I’m curious as to what, if anything, we’re doing for our honeymoon.
I need to order linens.
I need to find out what sort of plates/silverware the caterer uses.
I need to order alcohol.
I need to buy underwear for under my dress.
I need to order Spanx for my fat butt.
I need to do my mock up hair appointment… and get my color updated so my stylist doesn’t kill me.
Actually plan the rehearsal dinner…
Do I need to order tables and chairs because the chairs are so ugly at the rehearsal dinner place?
Do I need to order linens for the chairs?
City information packets to rooms and stuff for the out-of-towners rooms.
Book hotel room for the wedding night…
Newspaper Announcements?
Do I really have to do a unity candle?
Gotta make sure everyone gets their dresses and stuff…
Gotta pick out readings for the ceremony – don’t want to do the usual stuff, want to make it US specific…
Make sure Nick has all the insurance info and stuff so I’m immediately covered…
Schedule fittings for my gown and make sure I don’t forget them… you know, when the gown comes in…
Accessories for my gown.
Make sure that I have someone in charge at the church and at the reception so I don’t go nuts.
I need to stop going nuts too.
And make sure I keep my meds on hand.
So I stop doing this…
Krista’s on the phone with me having to listen to my nutso-ness.
Like I said, Nerves.
*ETA*
Need kraft bags for italian cookies.
Do I need a label for the bags to be cute?
Do I need to use the other half of the reception hall?
True Love poem – where to add?
Order papers for my guestbook in colors that accent.
Make garter?
Are your ears ringing?
July 6, 2009
I can almost hear them ringing…
Excitement!
July 2, 2009
I’m so excited!
Abbey’s hair piece for the wedding came in and it’s gorgeous – even in my hair. Which means it will look even better in hers!
What do you guys think?
Light dawns on darkened brain.
July 1, 2009
I’m almost giddy I’m in such a good mood.
I don’t know why, really.
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that, unlike some people in my life, I didn’t have a massage therapist pull my hair in order to massage my scalp.
I’m not sure.
But for some reason today feels like a day full of possibilities, of smiles.
And maybe that will change – but I hope not.
Good moods are few and far between – at least the ones that are for no particular reason.
I’m excited about the details of the wedding. The fun things that are being put together – the details that other folks are helping me with.
The ideas.
I love ideas.
I had no idea how much I missed creativity – how that part of me has felt dampened for so long.
Has this wedding woken me up?
I’m not sure, but I know I don’t want this side to go away again.
For too long I’ve been driven by the analytical – and anyone can tell you that that’s just not who I am.
I’m not even sure how it happened.
For a paycheck? For a roof over my head?
All good reasons, but when did that become ALL of it?
I miss the me that has a soundtrack to life.
For a while now I’ve even stopped singing on the way to work in the morning.
WHO is that person that’s stopped singing?
I don’t know.
I really don’t.
But I’m going to find the one that did sing.
I’m not sure what Nick will think of this.
Especially since I’m not sure where it’s leading me.
I’m willing to work for a paycheck in something I hate for now.
But perhaps it’s even he that has inspired me to aim higher.
He loves what he does.
And has no idea what a liberty that is.
And I’m going to find something to do that I love.
And hopefully I’ll be good at it as well… as that always helps the success part.
Does it make it easier having backup?
Of course.
People reading this are no idiots.
I couldn’t afford to do it without his support.
But I do have his support.
And I have this awakening desire in me to find ME – a person I didn’t even realize was lost.
Now.
Well.
Now I just have to figure out where to start.
