the dark sides

we all have our quirks and idiosyncrasies. sometimes these peculiar behaviors of ours even start to rub off on the people around us. specifically the people we live with. this happened to us.

donald has this one particular trait that seems to rub off on his roommates without fail. that would be his sleeping pattern. the one similar to that of a bat. to be fair, he has worked the evening shift faithfully for over ten years, so i can't say that i blame him for his tendency to go to bed just before the sun rises. his roommates over the years have had normal people schedules, but that doesn't seem to matter. slowly but surely, he brought them over to the dark side one by one. this usually resulted in everyone who lived with him being sleep deprived, but they also amassed a large collection of movie watching and video game playing memories...so i suppose it evens out.  

now i have never been accused of being a morning person, but before getting married i was typically in bed by eleven and sleeping in usually meant nine. not so much anymore. i won't disclose our wake up times here because it makes us sound lazy and i'm not trying to make anyone jealous. but let's just say, i've stepped over to the dark side as well.

it will come as a surprise to no one that one of my delightful qualities is my inability to spend money quickly. or you could call it my innate ability to hold onto money for as long as possible. that sounds better. either way, cash certainly does not burn a hole in my pocket. 

prior to marriage, donald was a bit of the opposite. he loves trinkets, obscure snack foods, and any random thing at walmart he thinks might get a laugh out of someone someday. he also has a soft spot for electronics, namely televisions and smart phones. so when we got married we put some of our monetary gifts into a special tv fund, just for him.

fast forward almost two years. that's right...two years, and we're still watching the old television.  to be fair, donald had his eye on a couple of options that were slightly out of our current price range, so he used the first year to add a little bit more to the tv fund. but then, nothing. he googled. he browsed. he watched the sales. but he just couldn't pull the trigger. at this point i was actually encouraging him to just spend the money and get the tv already! in a recent television conversation he turned to me and said "i don't know how you did it. i don't know what's wrong with me. how did you turn me into you?" i just smiled. he had arrived on the dark side.

there is a glimmer of hope for him though. after giving myself a pep talk, i tagged along as donald picked out his beloved new tv and now i have a very happy husband.

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the twelve dyer days of christmas

technically speaking i think our christmas festivities stretched over ten days instead of twelve, but i'm rounding up.  we had a house full of friends and family staying with us and stopping by all week leading up to christmas and that's just how we like it.  our sleep schedules took a bit of a hit, but it was definitely worth it.  [plus we're pretty spoiled in the sleep department to begin with, so we can't really complain]  

this was also the first year for me to not be in st. louis on christmas day.  fortunately my family is flexible and we just pushed everything back twenty four hours and had 'pretend christmas'...i hardly even noticed the difference!

so to remember this week of fun and festivities, i've created our own 2014 version of the twelve dyer days of christmas...

12

the number of times i jumped up and down after we opened gifts with my mom

11

the number of interesting raytownians we encountered at dyer family bowling night

10

the number of friends who came over to visit...plus four more via skype

9

the number of meinhardt's playing and singing at the annual sing-a-long

[including the brand new baby ava]

8 

the number of succotash games we played

7

the number of overnight guests that stayed with us

6

the pounds of potatoes mashed in the church kitchen for the cockrell christmas eve

5

the number of $5 bills frozen in to a block of ice for carson's christmas gift

4

the number of songs i sang in the lakeland christmas eve choir

3

the number of happy hosts [i'm counting dag]

2

the strings of lights glowing in the living room

1

magical week of christmas festivities

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the first year

my dear friend joy got married last weekend. i somewhat randomly joined a bible study she was in over ten years ago and we are still studying together today. since she was the first friend to get married after me, i started thinking about what i wanted to share with her as she begins her marriage.  

i thought back to the cards and advice that were given to us and remembered that the ones that stuck out in my mind the most were the handful that warned us not to be surprised if our first year of marriage was hard. at the time i wasn't sure if that would apply to us or not, but i suppose it was kind of freeing to know that if things started feeling hard, that was okay.  

as we went through that year i remember thinking from time to time, this is really good, but this is hard. i couldn't quite make sense of how it could be both at the same time, and i couldn't figure out how to articulate the ways it was hard. we didn't really have any rough patches that first year [though donald may argue that my back injury was on the rough side], but there were definitely times that it was hard.

it was hard to always be trying to figure out 'our' new way of doing everything. money was different. groceries were different. sleeping schedules were different. every. thing. was. different. one day, probably about six months in, i actually sat down to make a list of the things in my life that were the same and/or different from the same time the previous year. the different list seemed to never end. i had a new marital status, a new home, new furniture, a new neighborhood, a new cell phone company, a new roommate, a new dog, a new grocery store, a new bank, a new budget and a new job. the same list was short. it was my car. i had the same car. it was the only thing that hadn't changed.

now i obviously still had the same friends and family [though i had new additions to the latter] and all these changes weren't bad, they were just numerous. but now we've settled in. everything doesn't feel new and different all the time. we've figured out our new normal.

i'm thankful i was able to celebrate joy's joyous day with her and for the chance to pass a little encouragement onto her as she and steve begin their first year as husband and wife.

shelly . joy . beth

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