January 31, 2014

goals and progress

at some point soon after our honeymoon i made a list of goals for our first year. it wasn't so much a goal list as a to do list, but i called them goals just the same. there were things for us as a couple, home improvement projects to tackle and budgets to be made. i revisited this list recently and it turns out i was a little over zealous in my assumptions of what we'd accomplish in the house department during our first year. and by 'a little' i actually mean 'a lot'. but i must say we redeemed ourselves in the money management category where we made great strides and met a lot of goals, big and small. i'm not gonna lie...i think dave would be proud.

so for this second year of marriage i made another list, and i think i did a better job of making this year's goals realistically attainable. there are still some us goals [create some of our own traditions, go on two fancy dates, take a trip together], and we made some goals that have to do with others [basically a list of people we want to be sure to encourage and/or spend time with], obviously house projects made the list [have the floors refinished, paint the master bedroom, add closet shelving] and there's a general section as well [order our wedding album, do a 'week in the life' photo project, take walks]...just to name a few.

and the best news is we've already checked two things off the list and it's only the end of january! last week we finally pulled the trigger on a big home improvement project we've been talking about for a year [and by 'we finally pulled the trigger' i mean i was finally ready to hand over the cash] and had our wood floors refinished. i guess technically we can only check one and a half things off the list, because they haven't been back for the downstairs yet, but the upstairs looks great!


now to move all the furniture back upstairs because our living room currently looks like this...


the other item we scratched off the list is our wedding album, which was ordered on our first anniversary because i thought that seemed fun. that and the fact that i needed a good six to nine months of agonizing over it before i actually clicked the order button. but it's on the way and it's going to be fabulous.

January 26, 2014

anniversary number one


it's funny how time can move so fast and so slow all at the same time. i've had lots of friends say they can't believe it's been a year since our wedding. and i hear that. but then at the exact same time my life before marriage seems like a long, long time ago. life is strange like that. but either way you look at it, we're celebrating the big number one!

so far we give marriage a hearty thumbs up. and in observation of this year of wedded bliss we cashed in a wedding gift for a weekend at the lake. we splurged on fancy cheese, played games, had dinner at baxter's, sampled our one year old cupcakes [which were disgusting], faced off in a fierce skee ball competition [which i won], watched the box set of studio sixty [if you know donald, you know how much he loved this] and capped off the weekend with our newest tradition...anniversary fried chicken.

January 11, 2014

ten years

my dad passed away ten years ago today. i got the news with a middle of the night phone call from the funeral home, not the hospital where he had been for the previous few days, nor the skilled care facility he was living in. i wasn't supposed to find out that way. the poor woman on the phone naturally assumed i already knew, she had no idea she was the one breaking the news. it wasn't the way it was supposed to be, but most of the previous year had felt like things weren't the way they were supposed to be. twenty three year olds aren't usually charged with the care of an ailing parent and faced with the decisions that brings. but life doesn't always happen the way we expect it to, in fact, it rarely ever does.

this all happened back in the days before social media, when people communicated through the ancient art of mass e-mail. i sometimes wish i had been blogging back then so i would have some sort of record of what happened during that crazy year. but it's probably just as well that i don't. maybe it's better to not remember every detail, every hard decision, every feeling of uncertainty. besides, i don't think my dad would want to be remembered for that last year of his life anyway. the lifetime of memories before that year were more important.

my dad wasn't perfect, but he was still my dad.  

today we went to the funeral of a close friend of the dyer's. their families grew up together, took vacations together and have more hilarious stories than i can keep track of. it's going to be a hard year for them. they've lost a husband, a dad and a papa bug. life doesn't always turn out the way we expect it to, and sometimes life is just really, really hard. but God is still good. of that we can be sure.

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