And So It Begins...Somewhere in the Middle

When people ask me how many children I have, I always answer the same way, "Four.  I have a three-month-old son, a six-year-old son, an eight-year-old daughter, and a 41-year-old husband."  Sometimes I think the 41-year-old competes with the others for the title of Least Mature.  So the very first thing I have to say as I begin this blog is that I absolutely ADORE my family.  I am so in love with my husband and kids and I would not trade one minute (or one of these stories I'm about to tell) for anything.  These four people have caused me no small amount of frustration, difficulty, exhaustion, and pain...but it is all competely worth it!  That being said, let me tell you why I am writing this today.

For many years, I have been calling friends and family when I have reached the end of my rope with one these four precious people and I have told them the horror story of the day that has most recently pushed me to the edge of sanity.  I am almost always met with "LOL".  Or "Too cute". Or "They crack me up!"  So at some point in my relationship with others, many of them have said to me, "you should write a book about your family."  Well, I'm not ambitious enough to start that book but I was on Facebook last night and I followed a friend's link that led me to a blog and I got the idea to start a blog about these stories.  This may not be interesting to others who don't know my family but it may be a way for you to get to know them and share in a little of my "pain".  There may be other moms out there that have some of the same problems with their kids that might feel better knowing they are not the only ones raising these adorable little monsters that make you want to pull someone's hair out.  Or maybe nobody wants to read it at all, but it might be therapeutic for me to write it down.

So let me back up and tell you about the beginning.  I should have realized from the start that my husband was going to be trouble.  There were warning signs, as there usually are.  So for any women who are dating, if you see any of these signs, it might be time to run.  And run fast.

I met my husband in a bar.  I know, the number one thing mothers everywhere tell their daughters is that you are not going to meet a nice man in a bar.  We are also told not to judge and wouldn't judging him for being in a bar be stereotyping?  Anyway, we started dating.  We lived in separate towns so it was a couple of months before I visited his apartment.  Wow.  The main thing that I noticed (and should have paid more attention to) were the piles.  Piles of stuff everywhere.  To this day I am haunted by the man wanting to make piles instead of actually putting things AWAY.  PTSD is a very real thing.  I have horrible flashbacks to his apartment whenever he starts to stack things together in a corner instead of putting them in thier homes. There were piles of books, piles of clothes, piles of empty pizza boxes and two liter bottles.  At least there was no beer can pyramid.  Now everybody knows not to expect too much from a single man living by himself but I think I should have realized at that point that there was an issue.  Love really must be blind, or stupid.  Later in our relationship (much too late) I would remind myself of these piles as I snuck into the bathroom while he was in the shower to replace the dirty socks on the floor with clean ones so he wouldn't wear them yet another day.  I think before we moved in together he must have lived solely on Dominoes and Burger King.  The delivery people knew him by name.  But I still ignored what was right in front of me. 

Then there was the trip to New York.  Ed is from New York and we had been living in Kansas.  One of his three childhood best friends, Bill, was getting married and Ed wanted me to come with him to meet his friends and family.  I was very excited to get to go to New York and meet them so of course I went.  We drove there.  Not as in we drove all day and got a hotel room overnight, we drove straight through from Topeka to New York City all in one trip.  We stopped at a couple of rest stops or McDonald's to sleep an hour or two at a time.  This is craziness.  These kinds of 24-hour road trips should be reserved for college kids who don't know any better.  But we got there eventually, exhausted and stinky.  We stayed with the wedding party in the hotel the first night and more friends were coming the next day.  This is how I met Chris.  Chris is one of Ed's best friends and he is a SUPER person.  I did not expect him first thing in the morning.  He too had driven overnight but from Virginia.  Again, this driving pattern was something I should have noted as evidence of the insanity of life with Ed but, bygones...  Ed had left the hotel room and used the latch to prop the door open.  I had just gotten out of the shower and was wrapped in a towel with the bathroom door cracked so the steam could get out.  I think you see where this is going.  Fourtunately, I still had the towel on while I brushed my teeth when Chris threw open the door and greeted me with "HELLLLOOOO!".  I'm still not sure who was more surprised.  Not the way you expect to meet your boyfriend's friends.  Again, warning signs.

The wedding went well and in fact I caught the bouquet and Ed caught the garter.  It was a match made by his friends!  I think Bill, Chris, and Doreen were all plotting to get Ed married off.  I should pay them back for that some day.  That night most of us (excluding the bride and groom of course!) were in hotel playing the game "Categories".  It's a drinking game where everyone has to give an answer that fits in a certain category.  The current category was "Birth Control" and we had been around the room a couple of times already.  It was back to me and I was out of ideas so to be cute I said, "knowing Ed as a kid."  Being in a room full of his close friends, this was the best answer of the night.  And Ed being gracious (and also out of ideas) just drank.  I had gained the "friend approval" that is so important to long term relationships but what I didn't realize was that Earnest Hemmingway could not have foreshadowed better.  If I had known then what I was in for when I did have children with Ed...  Many people still wonder if either of us would have found someone else that would put up with us.  To this day, I am so thankful to be able to add Chris, Doreen, Bill and their families to my list of friends.  They are amazing people!  And they all still call me because they know Ed doesn't answer his phone...

We returned to Kansas after 10 days in New York with little to mention.  Although he did threaten to leave me in Ohio after a disagreement at Applebees.  We had been joking about him leaving me in Ohio the whole trip and that if we made it through Ohio, all would be good.  Then we stopped at Applebees to eat on the trip back home and he swears I picked a fight.  I have no idea what we argued about but I do remember we were about 2 miles away from the border.  We almost made it out of Ohio.  Warning signs.  Later that year he got a job in North Carolina and asked me to go with him.  So I did.  And then there was North Carolina. 

It was the first time I had ever been away from my family and because I was in graduate school I had to transfer to NC State in Raleigh and his job was 2 hours away in New Bern so I really didn't live with him either.  It was a difficult time in our relationship but it was also when we got engaged.  He had talked about getting married but he wanted to ask me in the perfect way.  He wanted to have the ring that his grandmother had left him, he wanted to plan it out and he wanted me to be surprised and cry when I said yes.  It didn't quite work out that way, not at all.  We tell everyone that we got engaged on Valentine's Day after he took me to an ethnic restaraunt and we watched a foreign film and a musical.  It WAS Valentine's Day but it wasn't as sweet as it sounds.  The ethnic restaraunt was Taco Bell.  We were sitting there after buying a couple of movies at Best Buy and we had a great conversation when we finished lunch.  He looked at me and said, "Will you marry me?"  I had been hoping for this kind of spontaneous inquiry because all that planning usually goes wrong and I'm one of those impulsive people who prefers spur of the moment, emotional decisions.  But I knew he wanted "the Plan".  I thought he was teasing so I said, "Not right now."  He had been serious but wanted to save face so he played along and laughed it off.  So now both of us were crushed, and extemely mad!, but didn't want the other to know.  So we went back to my apartment to watch our two new movies.  They really were a foreign film (complete with subtitles) and a musical--Jackie Chan's "Drunken Master" and "Moulin Rouge".  We watched in silence the rest of the evening until finally breaking into a huge fight which ended after midnight with him saying "But I really meant, Will you marry me!" and then me, "of course I will, stupid!" through lots of tears and the all snot that comes with them.  So we actually got engaged on February 15th.  Details.

So we started planning our wedding for August 23rd.  We had both graduated from Kansas State University and are huge football fans (our first real date was to watch the Super Bowl together) so we wanted to get married at the chapel on campus.  There was a preseason game in Kansas City that day so we arranged to have the game projected on the wall at our reception.  Since we only had six months to plan, we started right away getting everything in order.  Then in April we were having lunch together one day and made a crazy impulsive decision.  (Now, some of our friends and family who may decide to read this PLEASE don't be offended if you have not heard this before.  There are only a VERY few people who have been told.)  We wanted to have something special to share with each other so we went to the courthouse in Raleigh and got married.  And didn't tell anyone.  The only people who knew were the two of my friends that went with us to sign as witnesses.  In fact, we didn't even remember what day it was.  Later I had to look it up on the marriage license to find out what day we actually got married on!  And we continued to plan the wedding in August.  Of course we had to tell the minister so he knew why there was no marriage license to sign but that was pretty much it.  Until July. 

Being two reasonably intelligent adults you would think we would know how this happens but we were surprised to find out I was pregnant at the beginning of July.  We were packing getting ready to move and I had taken the home pregnancy test without telling Ed.  After I read the results I handed him the stick to which he replied, "Where do you want me to pack this?"  I told him it wasn't to be packed and to LOOK at it!  I think it's the only time I've ever seen Eddie speechless.  He was so excited and couldn't wait to tell our family.  At first we had decided not to tell anyone until the second trimester but we couldn't even wait until the end of the week!  So we started making phone calls.  The only reason anybody else knows about April is because he wanted them to know that we were already married before we got pregnant.  Once he saw they were so excited about the baby that  they didn't care about when we got married, we quit telling people  that we got married in April.  The wedding was great in August!  All of our friends were there, the reception was a hit, and apparently they knew about us all over Manhattan, KS because we would go into shops looking for K-State souveniers for gifts or decorations and people would ask, "Oh, are you the couple who's getting married on campus this weekend?"  It was great!  I told Ed if he made me mad I was keeping money in my pocket to pay the limo driver to take me to the game instead and one of Ed's friends offered to take me to the Bahamas if I wanted to back out at the last minute...but I didn't.  We got married and had a BLAST!  The hotel staff who were working the party next door to our reception kept sneaking over to ours because we had the game on and were having so much fun.  We had K-State jerseys made with our last name and the date (he had the number 8 for August and I had the number 23) that we wore over my dress and his tux shirt.  So much fun.

I could continue writing all day but I will have to save some for later because the 8-year-old is screaming for cookies, the six-year-old wants hot chocolate, and the baby needs a poopie diaper changed.  Did I mention that they drive me crazy?  I'm sure I will at some point.