The day I met Prince Charming

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Six years ago today, I met Prince Charming.

For me, he was a country boy with a slow smile and a laugh that twinkled like his blue eyes. He wore jeans and boots and a hat and had a tan from working long hours outside. He was cute, but I didn’t really look at him like that then.

I was too busy worrying about trying to wear the 3 1/2 inch spike heels that looked like Cinderella Slippers for the first time. I wasn’t looking for love. Neither was he.

But somewhere down the road between then and now, well…love surprised us.

Six years later, and here we are. It’s been an adventure. It’s been beautiful. It’s been hard. So much has changed, and yet some things never change.

He still wears jeans and boots and a hat, and he looks awfully good in them too. He still makes me laugh, and we’re still best friends.

We live about 3000 miles away from where we thought we’d live. We’re going to be parents very soon for the first time. I’m in awe of this.

It hasn’t all been easy days and roses these past six years. Love & Marriage aren’t meant to be just easy. But I wouldn’t change it. I wouldn’t want to have it any other way.

I love you, Country Prince Charming. You are my dream come true. I’m so glad I met you six years ago today, walking down the aisle together…

{some day, I’ll finish telling the rest of the story…}

we shouldn’t have made it

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We shouldn’t have made it.

Our little savings inevitably ran out long before work showed up. We had pinched pennies in every way I could think of. We’d done without a lot. We’d lived on next to nothing. But one day, there was just nothing left. Scott and I looked at each other and one of us finally said it. “We’re not going to make it this time, are we?”

This was the moment we’d been dreading all along. This was the day that we had nothing left to draw on.

perspective

 

{Read the rest on Kindred Grace…}

then I closed my eyes

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I was sitting in the Denver airport waiting to board an Atlanta bound flight the last time I went to visit my parents.  Too tired to read, I began a favorite pastime of mine in busy places: people watching.

A cute young couple sat down a seat or two down from me, obviously in love and happy to be together, even if it was in a crowded, noisy airport waiting for a long flight home. She had a pretty ring on her engagement finger. He looked at her with proud eyes. It made me smile. 

She bought gummy worms from a vending machine. He said he didn’t want any, but started eating them anyway.

Our gate attendant started calling something over the intercom, muffled by people arriving  and departing.  She asked what the attendant had said. He mumbled a reply over a mouth full of gummy worms. She said “What? I couldn’t quite hear you.”

He looked down at the almost-empty bag of gummy worms in his hand and said, a bit more loudly to combat the hustling noise of the airport: “She said: stop eating your fiancee’s gummy worms!”

Only, at that precise moment, it got unusually quiet at our gate. Quiet enough that his voice was loud and clear across that section of the terminal. A lot of heads turned their way. He sheepishly looked around and tossed the bag back to her and began to studiously examine his backpack’s every detail. She laughed at him.

I laughed too and realized they reminded me of two people I love. I just couldn’t figure out why.

Then I closed my eyes and listened.

If I hadn’t known better, those voices might have fooled me. The expression and the way they talked made my heart start for a moment. With my eyes closed, I could almost believe that the two sitting down two seats from me were my brother and sister in law–the ones who shared our home and who make me laugh  when I see them. As long as I closed my eyes, I could almost forget that the two sitting a few seats away were strangers. What I heard was familiar and sweet.

We boarded our (late as usual) fight, and they were behind me some few dozen seats. I didn’t see them when we landed and didn’t have time to think about it any more until I got home.

That’s when I decided maybe I’d landed on something good. Maybe I need to just take time to close my eyes and listen and let my ears awake memories. Maybe there’s more to simple, every day kind of life and love than what we see. Maybe we can hear it, too.

Reading Challenge 2013: checkpoint #5

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My answer when asked what I have been reading lately? It’s a bit of a drawn out “Ummm….” of uncertainty.

I have been reading. But it has been more snippets and bits than anything substantial. I did pretty much finish off The Christian Mama’s Guide to Pregnancy.

I won’t do an official review but I’ll just take a moment to say that while it was lighthearted and funny sometimes, it was a lot of stuff I really couldn’t relate to or didn’t really fit with my personal experience or view of pregnancy.

One thing I did appreciate was the fact that she made a point to talk about how not loving pregnancy does not equal not loving your child! It doesn’t mean  you should mope and complain for the nine months you are pregnant. But if you don’t enjoy it that much, that’s okay. I think that’s something that more than one mama to be has felt guilt over!

I made progress on a couple of other books, and I got a couple new ones in the mail to review before summer’s over.

But May didn’t end up being about reading. I definitely didn’t finish two books in May and am a tiny bit “off schedule” now, according to my little widget. May ended up being about other things.

  • We got a tiny bit of a garden in. (Finally!) It rained and washed out a good swatch of it.
  • We reached the 30 week milestone of growing our baby girl. On a shopping trip, we found a crib set on clearance for more than 80% off of what we’d picked out. It isn’t exactly the same, but at that deal, we couldn’t pass it up. So…we put her crib together to celebrate.
  • We replanted the washed out portion of the garden. It rained again. I dug a ditch in the pouring rain, determined that it would not wash out this time. It didn’t!
  • My mom has been in town watching my brother’s kids. I’ve been spending time with her taking them to the park.
  • I caught a cold from the kids.
  • I had another midwife’s appointment in which I had to do the Gestational Diabetes test and get a shot to keep my negative blood type from potentially attacking the baby’s. My arm hurts.

I am excited about a couple of the books I have in my to-read pile, and am hoping to finish at least one of the books I started this month. I think I’m going to mix it up and read something light and fluffy next. I just can’t decide what!

Now it is your turn: What did you read last month?

Barefoot & Pregnant

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The first time I heard someone say something about “Barefoot and Pregnant”, it wasn’t a good thing. The tone was derogatory and the person insinuated that pregnancy and bare feet were a sign of little education and no sophistication. It bothered me a little. After all, there’s nothing uneducated about bare feet, is there?

This weekend, I reached the 30 week milestone in this journey of growing our little one and I think I know what “barefoot & pregnant” is really suppose to mean.

I’ve had an easy pregnancy.  But as if the third trimester sent out some silent cue, my feet swelled a little in the heat of the day and for the first time in my life, I knew for sure what those “Charlie Horses” my dad was always talking about felt like.

I was walking the other evening when I realized that even my chacos felt a bit too snug. I walked the rest of the miles barefoot. Yesterday, I mowed the lawn barefooted and then worked in the garden without putting anything on my feet.

As much as I love my chacos, being barefoot feels good right now.

So I might be a little bit of a hippy, deep down in my heart, but that’s not why I’m using shoes even less often than usual.

And I’ve concluded that barefoot and pregnant has nothing to do with being low class and unsophisticated after all.

There are times in life when necessity overrides fashion and comfort is more important than sophistication.

Third trimester and summer heat have decided it: barefoot & pregnant really is best sometimes.

I can’t say I’m complaining.

planting again

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It has been raining since January. Not literally, but more often than not. March came with more rain, but I hoped it would stop by April. That’s when we plant our garden. Its what I look forward to all year.

But April came…and went. The air stayed cool, and the ground just never dried up. It kept raining. And raining. The garden plot stayed in a perpetual state of mud. There was no hope of digging it with a shovel, let alone tilling it for planting.

May came. I’d hoped that surely with the dawn of May that we’d have those nice, hot southern days to make the mud go away. But instead it rained some more.

It felt like the hope of having melons and tomatoes was slipping through our fingers. Last year by May, we’d had beans a few inches tall. Corn was already growing strong. Squash was leafing out nicely. And there were lots of flowers on our tomato plants. It felt like someone had put the pause button on the seasons. I was antsy.

Then we decided on Plan B. The flower beds right next to the house seemed to dry up more quickly. We grabbed shovels and rake and dug deep. We spent an hour at the local hardware store browsing vegetable starts—the ones that we didn’t have in my seed stash. We came home with six tomato plants, a few Brussels sprouts and some Chinese cabbage. We planted those along the back wall of the house. I tucked cucumber and miniature cantaloupe seeds into the dirt under the edge of the raised porch. The summer squash would grace the front of the house. Our perimeter garden was born. I couldn’t wait for the seedlings to sprout!

But then it rained again. It rained so much that it turned the base of the tomato plants into miniature lakes. The tomatoes were fine—they were big enough to handle the rain. But the squash? It drowned the squash seeds before they had a chance to sprout properly. It kept raining and I decided to get smart. I planted again. In pots on my porch where the rain couldn’t get to them.

Then the rain stopped. Last Thursday we decided it was now or never. The top 1/4th of our garden plot was just about dry enough to till. The rest was still soggy mud. But we tilled what we could and planted beans, okra and corn. It felt good and we couldn’t wait for our long awaited garden to grow.

This weekend, it rained again. It poured down on our already 15 inches ahead of normal rainfall another 5 inches. This time it did it all in the space of a few hours. The ditches filled with water. It made a little river on our lawn. It flashed across the newly planted garden.

When the buckets of rain stopped, I went out to survey the damage. Several feet of garden washed away. It was a mess.

But there’s always a silver lining. Somehow, in the course of one day before the rain, the beans and okra had both already sprouted. Most of them held their ground. The tomato plants I’d put out there were just inches to the side of the main flooded area and were fine. The corn didn’t wash out.

The beans and okra? I made a “mistake” early this spring when I ordered seeds. Somehow I ordered pounds of each one instead of packages. I have more than enough to plant again. And again if I need to.

It is a little crazy how much rain we’ve gotten this year. It is a little crazy how long it has taken us to get our garden in. But thanks to my “mistake”, and thanks to these hot, humid days post storm, those seeds are shooting up already. Not all is lost. Late is better than never. Maybe we’ll have some produce this year after all.

five minute friday: a song

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My name is Beautiful Song. It is wrapped around my life. Tangled into every piece of it. A Beautiful Song. That’s me.

My name is Beautiful Song, and I can’t even sing that well. But there is more to beauty and song than lyrics and notes. There is the song of every day living. The lyrics of ordinary days, and good days and the days that try to break you. The music of contentment and joy. The melody of Hope and Courage.

Some days, not much about life feels beautiful. Some days, I just don’t feel like singing a song, let alone living one. Courage doesn’t come naturally, and I hit wrong notes along the way.

But on the roughest days, something whispers in my ear not to forget who I am. Not to forget that my life is meant to be a beautiful song out of bitterness. It is meant to be a melody that brings joy and comfort to the people around me. It is meant to speak hope and courage on dark days. It is meant sing out that today might not be beautiful, but that the morning is coming. Just keep holding on.

It is just the meaning of my name. It isn’t one I’ve always lived well. But it has always given me something to aspire to. To be a Beautiful Song out of Bitterness. If that is all that God grants that I do in this life, I think I will have lived it well.

written for five minute friday

I thought I’d never be a mom

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There was a day when I thought I’d never be a mom. Most days, I could laugh and love life. My life was beautiful. It was more than I had hoped for, even when it was hard. Those days I felt brave when I thought about it. And there was always that hope that someday, maybe things would be different. Hope makes it easier to be brave.

But there were other days. Days when we barely made the rent, and another birthday came and went without any sign of better times. It was harder to be brave then. Hope felt like it flickered sometimes in the cold of reality.

Then there was The Day. The day that I stopped dreaming of motherhood. I gulped back tears and wrote that happiness was not dependent upon children, but that it didn’t make it any easier to accept the fact that I would probably never have my own. That day I let myself grieve the death of a dream. It was the one time I wrote about it. And then, I tried to go on. I tried to embrace what I had, not what I didn’t. I’m not saying it was easy, but it was what I needed to do.

I felt guilty. Guilty for not grieving more, and guilty for grieving at all. Guilty because I didn’t have the same kinds of heartaches as friends who faced years of infertility, and yet I still couldn’t hope to be a mother either. It’s funny how your mind can twist everything into guilt.

Sunday is Mother’s Day. I don’t really celebrate it, but it always makes me think of that day that I thought I’d never be a mom. It reminds me of how raw and real the hoping and the waiting is, no matter what the reasons and the circumstances that create those empty arms.

I’d never imagined that I’d be writing this. Not this here in a public place. It was too personal and deep for me to feel safe tossing out into the sea of the internet.

But more than anything, I never thought that I’d be writing this while a tiny little girl kicks and wiggles and makes my belly move. Our baby. Our own baby.

I get tears in my eyes when I feel her move, because one day not so long ago I thought I’d never get to be a mom.

Quick & Easy: Burrito Shell Pizza

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We love our pizza around here. Loaded with veggies and just enough sauce? It’s a perfect way to round out a day. But, cooking pizza from scratch can take a long time. Ordering out isn’t always an option with our budget. And I don’t always think ahead well enough to have pre-made crusts on hand for when we really want it right now. So I started making a little short cut pizza using burrito shells. We could have our pizza within minutes, and hardly heat up the house on a hot day. I’d say it was a win for us.

photo (5)

What You Need

  • Burrito Shells
  • Pasta Sauce
  • Diced veggies of choice (we will put just about anything on ours!)
  • Cheese of Choice
  • Oil
  • Herbs

What You Do

  1. Brush shells with olive oil and sprinkle garlic salt and dried oregano (or italian seasoning) on them. Put them in the oven to warm up.
  2. Spread pasta sauce on the shell.
  3. Top with your favorite veggies. We go for just about anything we have on hand: spinach, broccoli bits, asparagus, peppers, mushrooms, olives, onions and fresh tomato slices. But you can just use what you like in a pizza! Return to oven to let the veggies get tender.
  4. After the veggies are just about perfect, top with cheese of your choice. We’ve used soy cheese, nut based cheese or even crumbled, seasoned tofu as vegetarian options.
  5. Slide it onto your plate and enjoy your personal sized pizza

Notes

If you’re in a real hurry, you can start cooking the veggies in a pan on the top of the stove. This will cut down the time that they need to be in the oven and also can help keep the shell from getting too crispy!

I want to write

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I started this blog in when I was 19.  I had no clue what I was doing. I hardly knew how to use the computer. We hadn’t had one when I was growing up. I really didn’t even know what a blog was suppose to be. Back then, there weren’t any rules posted anywhere about how to blog, or what to blog about. You just started writing.

I’d written on a place called LiveJournal for a year. I would continue to write on LiveJournal, but this space? It was where I eventually began to write for the love of writing, and not for anything or anyone else.

I made connections. I read blogs of others who lived lives as similar and dissimilar to mine as you could get. I made heart friends. We laughed over funny things that happened during our weeks. We squealed about new rings and weddings and babies. We just wrote ordinary words. That’s all. Just ordinary words about ordinary days.

I blogged because I wanted to. Now, I blog because I think I have to.

Somewhere in the last ten years, I got caught up in the technicalities and the formalities and the dos and the don’ts of blogging. Some of it was good stuff. But a lot of it dragged me down. I struggled to write like I use to. I felt like hiding out in a corner and the never ending list of stuff I “had to do” to be a real blogger overwhelmed me. Sometimes I wondered why I even kept up. It was that love affair with writing that kept me coming back. I had to write.

With the entering of a new season in our lives, I’ve been taking stock of a lot of things I’ve done, did or do. I’ve carved out things that simply don’t matter, held on tighter to things that did. I’ve let go of some dreams, and felt others I thought were long gone revive again. But I couldn’t let go of blogging and I couldn’t enjoy it.

Then someone came out and said it. They said what I couldn’t figure out how to say. It smacked me right between the eyes. It hit me hard enough that the flickering light bulb that just couldn’t quite get going burst into full light. I knew exactly where the joy had gone from my blogging experience. I knew exactly why what I wrote felt dry sometimes. I knew exactly what was missing and what I wanted out of this blog. I wanted to go back to the simple days of simple stories. I wanted to just write again.

But they said it all so much better than I could have put into words. And I knew this was what I wanted to do.

I wanted to write about growing our baby girl. I wanted to write about how pregnancy wasn’t anything like I expected. I wanted to write about how the farmer’s market made me dream again, and how there’s a lizard that lives under our door.

I work with bloggers and small business owners as a Virtual Assistant. I see a lot of business and a lot of good content. I love my job. But when I read blogs, I miss the old, simple posts of a different blogging era. Just simple, ordinary things that made me feel connected.

If you are a blogger, you need to read Ashleigh’s post.

Maybe you don’t blog for the same reasons that I started. That’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with blogging for something other than the stories.

But if maybe, just maybe, you’re feeling burnt out and confused about what happened to the joy you got out of blogging back in the day, this could be your light bulb revival moment too.

I don’t really know exactly what the light bulb moment means. But I’m hopeful that it will lead to all good things. I want to write again.