Stress does all kinds of things to a person.
Some people get moody. Some people can’t sleep. Some people get extremely agitated or annoyed at the smallest things. And some people, like Miss Cotton Candy, seem to do all of those things at the same time!
Yeah, lots of laughs…for those of you reading this post from many miles of safe distance away…
For those of you closer to me, there is a big apology coming your way! Especially to my fiancé. How he puts up with me on some days is nothing short of a miracle. Truly.
I mean, as if the biggest project of my career isn’t enough for me to handle right now, I decided that this would be the PERFECT time to move! Yep. That’s like asking for a dose of insanity to go with the big helping of craziness that’s already on your plate. I don’t know WHAT I was thinking. Honestly. I mean, it’s one thing to be an over-achiever, and another thing completely to do something this insane. It’s just that the timing was off. Really. Maybe if I tell myself that, I’ll start to believe it!
My lease is up at the end of the month. And I didn’t really want to wait until the last minute to move the big items. We (my fiancé and I) got my daughter’s bed and dresser moved last week, along with her bookshelf and a load of her toys. So we basically moved into his house, without officially moving out of my apartment. Over time, I’ve accumulated enough clothes and things at his house to not need to go back and forth between houses. So the main thing was getting my daughter’s room set up.
Now, the bedroom that she took over used to be where the doggies sleep. And when I say doggies, don’t get it in your head that these are cute little puppies, or tiny little dogs. Although they are cute, they are also large dogs. One is a lab and something else really big mix, and the other is an American pit bull. (Not the crazy half in-bred mix that always goes nuts, but the registered breed of pits) Anyway, our two dogs slept on this old mattress in the spare room and had been sleeping there for about a year. And now that you can picture how large these dogs are, you can probably imagine that the room needed a little sprucing up before it could be my daughter’s room.
So one good wall scrubbing, a couple of coats of paint and many carpet shampoos later, the room looks great. I still need to touch up the corners with the pale lavender paint color that we picked out, but it looks like a new room. We got her bed and dresser moved in, got her TV set up, and she’s sleeping in there like a champ.
So that just leaves all the rest of my furniture to get moved. And the rest of my junk all packed up and moved over. Since we have the kiddos every other weekend, we decided that waiting until the last weekend in January was cutting the deadline too close for comfort on moving the furniture. That meant that it all needed to move this weekend. The weekend after the week from hell at work. Go live with our new system, came, went and kicked my butt in the process! 65 hours of work later, and I was pooped! After sleeping until 1:30pm on Saturday, it seemed smarter to wait until Sunday to get stuff moved, so Saturday was spent doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. Man – it was NICE!
But Sunday came all too quickly, and the grueling work of moving out of a third-story apartment. Luckily for me, the guys did the heavy work, and I hauled the smaller things that I had packed and ready to go. Unluckily for me, there’s still at least one more truck load of stuff at the apartment. But the big stuff is gone, which is good.
But man, I got to tell you. I HURT today. I can’t imagine how fiancé and mover friend feel, since they did the heavy lifting, but I hurt all over. And I have NO desire to unpack any of the boxes that are cramming up the house…but I have to unpack the boxes since I need the boxes to repack the stuff left at my apartment. Lucky for me, I have 20 more days to get that done! And you KNOW I’m gonna wait until the last minute…
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
The Night of the Engagement - Part II
(Sorry for the delay…things have been CRAZY with work – I clocked 65 hours last week…)
Continued from prior post…
He let me pick the restaurant, and we ate a good meal with a margarita at Chuy’s in South Austin. We walked back to the truck and when he opened the truck door for me, there was a huge box on my seat. We had talked about this gift earlier in the day, but I had thought that I had won the argument about the early Xmas present. Apparently I didn’t win.
After MUCH grumbling from yours truly, I proceeded to open the present. I tried to get into the truck and sit on the seat while holding the present on my lap. That wouldn’t work for my fiancé, he insisted that I use the seat as a table and stand with my back to him while opening the present. Looking back, with the knowledge of hindsight, I see that he needed my back to him to do what he was doing. So yeah, I open the present and it’s a camera printer that I had seen as Best Buy and wanted. YEA! I go to get into the truck – it was COLD outside! No, not yet. “Open it up and see if anything’s missing.” Because we were right there by Best Buy and could return it if anything was missing. Which prompted me to make the argument of how would I know if anything was missing since I didn’t have one. Yeah, call it the night for me to be difficult. I know. Believe me, I know. Anyway, back to the story.
So I open up the box, and being the true smart ass that I am, I pull out the cds and cables and say “yep, looks like it’s all here to me!” It was really cold and I just wanted to get inside again. My fiancé literally had to encourage me to take the printer out of the box to see how big it was. That’s when I saw the pictures. On the top of the printer, my fiancé had taped some pictures. The top one was a picture of my daughter that said “Will you” and underneath was a picture of his son holding a sign that said “Marry him?” Beneath that picture was a photo of my fiancé kneeling down beside his truck with the ring in the box holding it up to me. Shocked and surprised, I quickly turned around to look at my fiancé and completely looked over him. He was kneeling on the ground, just like in the picture, holding the ring up to me. He asked me in person this time, and I started crying.
And of course I said yes. Tearfully, joyfully and completely touched at the trouble that he had gone through to make the most perfect proposal to me. He apologized to me for not doing anything extravagant, but I was overwhelmed with the thoughtfulness of his proposal. To include our children, without having them actually there was the sweetest thing that he could have done. It was the best proposal that I could have ever imagine or dreamt up on my own. In fact, it was WAY better than anything that I could have dreamt up. It was perfect.
Now, it might not be perfect for everyone. But it was perfect for me. And that’s just one of the many reasons why I love him as much as I do. He takes the time to know me. To understand me. And he still wants to know more. He wants to do more for me each and every day. I’ve got to be the luckiest girl ever…
I’ve got the man of my dreams, and the marriage proposal that melted my heart…what more could a girl ask for? Not a thing. Not one single thing.
Continued from prior post…
He let me pick the restaurant, and we ate a good meal with a margarita at Chuy’s in South Austin. We walked back to the truck and when he opened the truck door for me, there was a huge box on my seat. We had talked about this gift earlier in the day, but I had thought that I had won the argument about the early Xmas present. Apparently I didn’t win.
After MUCH grumbling from yours truly, I proceeded to open the present. I tried to get into the truck and sit on the seat while holding the present on my lap. That wouldn’t work for my fiancé, he insisted that I use the seat as a table and stand with my back to him while opening the present. Looking back, with the knowledge of hindsight, I see that he needed my back to him to do what he was doing. So yeah, I open the present and it’s a camera printer that I had seen as Best Buy and wanted. YEA! I go to get into the truck – it was COLD outside! No, not yet. “Open it up and see if anything’s missing.” Because we were right there by Best Buy and could return it if anything was missing. Which prompted me to make the argument of how would I know if anything was missing since I didn’t have one. Yeah, call it the night for me to be difficult. I know. Believe me, I know. Anyway, back to the story.
So I open up the box, and being the true smart ass that I am, I pull out the cds and cables and say “yep, looks like it’s all here to me!” It was really cold and I just wanted to get inside again. My fiancé literally had to encourage me to take the printer out of the box to see how big it was. That’s when I saw the pictures. On the top of the printer, my fiancé had taped some pictures. The top one was a picture of my daughter that said “Will you” and underneath was a picture of his son holding a sign that said “Marry him?” Beneath that picture was a photo of my fiancé kneeling down beside his truck with the ring in the box holding it up to me. Shocked and surprised, I quickly turned around to look at my fiancé and completely looked over him. He was kneeling on the ground, just like in the picture, holding the ring up to me. He asked me in person this time, and I started crying.
And of course I said yes. Tearfully, joyfully and completely touched at the trouble that he had gone through to make the most perfect proposal to me. He apologized to me for not doing anything extravagant, but I was overwhelmed with the thoughtfulness of his proposal. To include our children, without having them actually there was the sweetest thing that he could have done. It was the best proposal that I could have ever imagine or dreamt up on my own. In fact, it was WAY better than anything that I could have dreamt up. It was perfect.
Now, it might not be perfect for everyone. But it was perfect for me. And that’s just one of the many reasons why I love him as much as I do. He takes the time to know me. To understand me. And he still wants to know more. He wants to do more for me each and every day. I’ve got to be the luckiest girl ever…
I’ve got the man of my dreams, and the marriage proposal that melted my heart…what more could a girl ask for? Not a thing. Not one single thing.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
The Night of the Engagement - Part I
So from the get-go we knew that the kids wanted to be involved in the asking of the all-important question. They had been bugging us for months about getting married, and they knew that we were talking about it. They knew that we had taken the time to go ring shopping, so they knew that it was going to happen sometime soon.
And they wanted in on the action. Bad. They begged and pleaded to be there when he asked me to marry him. We love our kids. A lot. And we understand that there are times when you have your kids around. The night that you ask a girl to marry you is not one of those time. That doesn’t mean that we don’t love our kids. It just means that we also understand that there are times that you DON’T want your kids around!
But it was important to my fiancé that they be involved somehow. He took that knowledge and made a whole, extravagant proposal night that melted my heart. If he hadn’t already owned it lock, stock and barrel, he would have after what he did to propose to me. Let me tell you the story and see if you agree…
The night that he asked me to marry him started off as a date night. You see, I’ve been working a lot on the new software system that our company is installing at the beginning of the year. And when I say that I’ve been working a lot, I know that you might be thinking of a few late nights and maybe a weekend or two. Not so in this case. I’ve been traveling a minimum of three days a week since last May. I work two days a week in Austin, and three days a week in Dallas. Sometimes I drive, sometimes I fly. No matter what, when I’m in Austin, I have my daughter and when I don’t have my daughter, I’m in Dallas. That’s how our life has been for the past seven months. To keep our sanity and romance alive, we started doing date nights a while back. Nights without the kids, where we go out to eat and maybe see a movie. A night away just for the two of us.
So the first week of December, we only had one night with me being in town and without the kids. It was December 4th. And my fiancé asked me if I wanted to do a date night on that night a few days earlier. Now, I have to say that between the end of September and this time, we had picked out a ring, and I knew that he was trying to tie down the details of how/when/where to buy it at and all, but he had led me on a merry chase of having trouble getting the ring. This is all to tell you that I didn’t really suspect anything on our date night on 12/4.
We had been in training for the new computer system all morning. We got out of training just before lunch and decided to have a date lunch before I had to work that afternoon. We went to this little pizza place on the square in San Marcos that we hadn’t been to in forever and shared a pie with a pitcher of beer. So nice!
After that relaxing lunch we did some Xmas shopping and went home. I had to work and he relaxed a bit. Before long, I was instructed to stay upstairs for a bit while he wrapped a Xmas present for me. When asked why he didn’t just wait until I wasn’t there to wrap it, he told me that it was a present for me to open that night. I argued that we weren’t opening presents early and he told me that this was something that he thought that I would want to open early, something that I could use in the next few weeks before Xmas. When I continued arguing about getting a present that night, he finally told me to suck it up and deal with it. That I was opening the present that night, even if he had to call it a date night present.
Yeah, this was just the beginning of “Sandy being Difficult Night”…stay tuned for more details.
And they wanted in on the action. Bad. They begged and pleaded to be there when he asked me to marry him. We love our kids. A lot. And we understand that there are times when you have your kids around. The night that you ask a girl to marry you is not one of those time. That doesn’t mean that we don’t love our kids. It just means that we also understand that there are times that you DON’T want your kids around!
But it was important to my fiancé that they be involved somehow. He took that knowledge and made a whole, extravagant proposal night that melted my heart. If he hadn’t already owned it lock, stock and barrel, he would have after what he did to propose to me. Let me tell you the story and see if you agree…
The night that he asked me to marry him started off as a date night. You see, I’ve been working a lot on the new software system that our company is installing at the beginning of the year. And when I say that I’ve been working a lot, I know that you might be thinking of a few late nights and maybe a weekend or two. Not so in this case. I’ve been traveling a minimum of three days a week since last May. I work two days a week in Austin, and three days a week in Dallas. Sometimes I drive, sometimes I fly. No matter what, when I’m in Austin, I have my daughter and when I don’t have my daughter, I’m in Dallas. That’s how our life has been for the past seven months. To keep our sanity and romance alive, we started doing date nights a while back. Nights without the kids, where we go out to eat and maybe see a movie. A night away just for the two of us.
So the first week of December, we only had one night with me being in town and without the kids. It was December 4th. And my fiancé asked me if I wanted to do a date night on that night a few days earlier. Now, I have to say that between the end of September and this time, we had picked out a ring, and I knew that he was trying to tie down the details of how/when/where to buy it at and all, but he had led me on a merry chase of having trouble getting the ring. This is all to tell you that I didn’t really suspect anything on our date night on 12/4.
We had been in training for the new computer system all morning. We got out of training just before lunch and decided to have a date lunch before I had to work that afternoon. We went to this little pizza place on the square in San Marcos that we hadn’t been to in forever and shared a pie with a pitcher of beer. So nice!
After that relaxing lunch we did some Xmas shopping and went home. I had to work and he relaxed a bit. Before long, I was instructed to stay upstairs for a bit while he wrapped a Xmas present for me. When asked why he didn’t just wait until I wasn’t there to wrap it, he told me that it was a present for me to open that night. I argued that we weren’t opening presents early and he told me that this was something that he thought that I would want to open early, something that I could use in the next few weeks before Xmas. When I continued arguing about getting a present that night, he finally told me to suck it up and deal with it. That I was opening the present that night, even if he had to call it a date night present.
Yeah, this was just the beginning of “Sandy being Difficult Night”…stay tuned for more details.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Dreams of wedding plans dance in my head...
From my previous post, you know that my fiancé and I were talking about merging our lives, and making plans for the future together. Yet somehow, we’d managed not to discuss how the event of marriage would take place. Or what we would want our wedding to be like.
The main reason that we had avoided this topic was because we didn’t want to jinx things with our kids. My fiancés son is older, so we knew how he felt about my daughter and I and he was really excited at the thought of us getting married and forming a new family. But he’s 5 years older than my daughter and her moods and opinions are as fast changing as mercury. There were days that she was completely cool with everything, and other days when she would act cooler towards the whole idea.
Then a few months ago, the kids started bugging us pretty hard about when we would get married. And this time, it wasn’t just his son asking, it was my daughter too. Which was VERY cool with us. It relieved a lot of stress and worry from my shoulders, and I’m sure from the shoulders of my fiancé as well. She was really excited about us getting married, and about her having an older brother and they even started asking us if we would have one more kid so that they could have a baby brother/sister. They really got into it and started questioning us about it all the time.
So it was good for me to know that she was ok with things. And once I knew that I had her approval with the plan, it was easy to start thinking about the actual marriage. Not just how we would merge our lives, but when we would take that next step. Which was really neat for me. But still, no discussion regarding weddings.
That all changed at the end of September when we all traveled to Dallas for my friend BH’s wedding. That was the weekend that changed the nature of our discussions. That was the weekend when my future step-son asked why we couldn’t just get married along with our friends since they already had the church and the preacher there! Too funny! To kids, it’s just that easy, right?!?! My fiancé and I were rolling we were laughing so hard.
But sitting through that ceremony, watching my good friend take the vows that I was now free to take, changed something in my head. I sat through that ceremony, looking around at the details and started thinking about what I wanted for my ceremony. And I did the same thing during the reception. I started taking ideas that very night. And my fiancé and I started talking about what we would want at our wedding. We talked all evening about it.
And we talked all the next day about it during our drive home. And the kids got involved. And we all got excited. From that day forward, it’s been nothing but planning our wedding. I mean, we had already worked out all the other logistics during the last few months.
Normally, people have to work out all the details of how to combine their lives AFTER they get engaged. We had been planning this out for months, so the logistics of how to move, when to move, where the extra furniture would go, and how to make the spare bedroom into my daughter’s bedroom where all already planned. Which left things wide open to start planning the wedding…every girl’s dream!
And for me, the wedding took all of my focus. For my fiancé, the engagement took up his time. While I dreamed of wedding dresses, extra special shoes, and fabulous table decorations, he dreamt about the ring and how to pop the question.
The question gets asked…next time!
The main reason that we had avoided this topic was because we didn’t want to jinx things with our kids. My fiancés son is older, so we knew how he felt about my daughter and I and he was really excited at the thought of us getting married and forming a new family. But he’s 5 years older than my daughter and her moods and opinions are as fast changing as mercury. There were days that she was completely cool with everything, and other days when she would act cooler towards the whole idea.
Then a few months ago, the kids started bugging us pretty hard about when we would get married. And this time, it wasn’t just his son asking, it was my daughter too. Which was VERY cool with us. It relieved a lot of stress and worry from my shoulders, and I’m sure from the shoulders of my fiancé as well. She was really excited about us getting married, and about her having an older brother and they even started asking us if we would have one more kid so that they could have a baby brother/sister. They really got into it and started questioning us about it all the time.
So it was good for me to know that she was ok with things. And once I knew that I had her approval with the plan, it was easy to start thinking about the actual marriage. Not just how we would merge our lives, but when we would take that next step. Which was really neat for me. But still, no discussion regarding weddings.
That all changed at the end of September when we all traveled to Dallas for my friend BH’s wedding. That was the weekend that changed the nature of our discussions. That was the weekend when my future step-son asked why we couldn’t just get married along with our friends since they already had the church and the preacher there! Too funny! To kids, it’s just that easy, right?!?! My fiancé and I were rolling we were laughing so hard.
But sitting through that ceremony, watching my good friend take the vows that I was now free to take, changed something in my head. I sat through that ceremony, looking around at the details and started thinking about what I wanted for my ceremony. And I did the same thing during the reception. I started taking ideas that very night. And my fiancé and I started talking about what we would want at our wedding. We talked all evening about it.
And we talked all the next day about it during our drive home. And the kids got involved. And we all got excited. From that day forward, it’s been nothing but planning our wedding. I mean, we had already worked out all the other logistics during the last few months.
Normally, people have to work out all the details of how to combine their lives AFTER they get engaged. We had been planning this out for months, so the logistics of how to move, when to move, where the extra furniture would go, and how to make the spare bedroom into my daughter’s bedroom where all already planned. Which left things wide open to start planning the wedding…every girl’s dream!
And for me, the wedding took all of my focus. For my fiancé, the engagement took up his time. While I dreamed of wedding dresses, extra special shoes, and fabulous table decorations, he dreamt about the ring and how to pop the question.
The question gets asked…next time!
Friday, January 2, 2009
Yes, I'll marry you, but not right now...
It all started almost a year and a half ago. My fiancé and I were on the phone one day, after we’d been dating about six months. I was driving to my daughter’s day care to pick her up from school and he was driving home. It was “date night” for my daughter and I - so my fiancé and I were enjoying a quick phone call before I spent the evening with her. During the course of the conversation, marriage came up. I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but a part of me knew that it was a semi-serious question.
I didn’t say yes. But I also didn’t say no. I said not now. We had only been dating for about six months. But there was a part of me that wanted to say yes. I knew, deep down in the bottom of my soul that this man was the one for me. That he was the man of my dreams – the one that I had spent the last thirty years looking to find. And I wanted to say yes. And I know that I would have said yes if it had just been me. I would have married him in a heartbeat.
But the reality of my world is that it wasn’t just me. I had someone else who depended on me to take care of her – to make the best choices since now all of my choices also affected her. And my reality was that I had a five year-old daughter who had spent the last year coming to terms with my divorce from her father, and she was still having struggles with seeing me date. If it had just been me, we would have gotten engaged that day. And she was doing very well with me dating my fiancé, but there were moments that you could tell that she just wasn’t sure about the whole thing.
So I said not now. But at that moment, I knew that I loved him. Not just enough to date and be with for a while, but truly, deeply loved him. I knew that I had found someone who would stay by my side each and every day, giving into the relationship just as much (if not more) than I did every day. Someone that I cared for more and more deeply as every day passed.
From that moment on, we started planning the logistics of WHEN all of this would happen. Maybe we couldn’t talk about the marriage aspect of things yet, but we could talk about our life together and how we would take care of this or that. We started to plan what each of us wanted to do with the house that he owns, how to improve it and make it better for the four of us to live in. We talked about money and finances and our personal thoughts on debt and credit and how to handle major purchases. In short, we started to merge our lives. Slowly but surely, we made plans for the future and for the day when we knew that my daughter would be as ready as we were to take the next step.
So we talked all around it, but never really talked about the actual event. By that I mean that we talked about the day that we would be married, but not about the actual day that we would get married. We talked about everything except the wedding. Most of you girls out there are wondering how we could skip over the most important part of getting married, but it just wasn’t what was on the forefront of our minds. But all of that changed this past September…stay tuned for those discussions….
I didn’t say yes. But I also didn’t say no. I said not now. We had only been dating for about six months. But there was a part of me that wanted to say yes. I knew, deep down in the bottom of my soul that this man was the one for me. That he was the man of my dreams – the one that I had spent the last thirty years looking to find. And I wanted to say yes. And I know that I would have said yes if it had just been me. I would have married him in a heartbeat.
But the reality of my world is that it wasn’t just me. I had someone else who depended on me to take care of her – to make the best choices since now all of my choices also affected her. And my reality was that I had a five year-old daughter who had spent the last year coming to terms with my divorce from her father, and she was still having struggles with seeing me date. If it had just been me, we would have gotten engaged that day. And she was doing very well with me dating my fiancé, but there were moments that you could tell that she just wasn’t sure about the whole thing.
So I said not now. But at that moment, I knew that I loved him. Not just enough to date and be with for a while, but truly, deeply loved him. I knew that I had found someone who would stay by my side each and every day, giving into the relationship just as much (if not more) than I did every day. Someone that I cared for more and more deeply as every day passed.
From that moment on, we started planning the logistics of WHEN all of this would happen. Maybe we couldn’t talk about the marriage aspect of things yet, but we could talk about our life together and how we would take care of this or that. We started to plan what each of us wanted to do with the house that he owns, how to improve it and make it better for the four of us to live in. We talked about money and finances and our personal thoughts on debt and credit and how to handle major purchases. In short, we started to merge our lives. Slowly but surely, we made plans for the future and for the day when we knew that my daughter would be as ready as we were to take the next step.
So we talked all around it, but never really talked about the actual event. By that I mean that we talked about the day that we would be married, but not about the actual day that we would get married. We talked about everything except the wedding. Most of you girls out there are wondering how we could skip over the most important part of getting married, but it just wasn’t what was on the forefront of our minds. But all of that changed this past September…stay tuned for those discussions….
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