This "Adult" Thing

As a child, I always thought that becoming an adult would be a specific point and time, or what they refer to in psychology as quantitative change.  One day you're a child, the next day you're an adult.  One day you don't understand velocity, one day you do.  (I had that day.  Sort of.)  As I grow up, however, it's become apparent that this is not the case.  Over the years, I've come up with a list of things that classify one as an Adult:

Buying your own cleaning supplies
Being responsible to someone other than yourself
Taking out your trash
Having a retirement plan
Commuting
Saving money
Paying taxes
Picking out tennis shoes for fit and not look
Drinking coffee
Working full-time

You know, normal "adult stuff," none of which really looks that appealing.  As I've moved away from home, gotten my own apartment, got into serious relationships, moved farther from home, signed onto a full-time job, and been married, these little adult-life pieces have fallen into place.  It's easy to say a 17-year-old isn't an adult and a 34-year-old is, but what about the 25-year-old?  I think I'm an adult.  I do all those things above, and I'm even married and everything.  There's also good parts to being an adult, or psuedo-adult, or what have you.  I can come home as late as I want, I can eat whatever I want for dinner, I can order a drink at a restaurant, I can pay for that drink at that restaurant, and I could get a puppy.

What didn't occur to me until last weekend were the little, somewhat non-specific parts to being an adult that are great.  There's this show on National Geographic called "Rocket City Rednecks", and I'm pretty sure someone was hanging around my husband and the Best Friend's husband and got an idea for a show.  These men, literally rocket scientists at NASA in Huntsville, go to work during the week, and on the weekend, build stuff.  Like moonshine-powered rockets.  Shopping carts with motors.  A bomb-proof truck.  While watching this I realized that these guys have what is commonly known as a "hobby".  

My hobby?  Or surgery?

I've had hobbies in the past and I have hobbies now- knitting, playing video games, baking- but they've always been things that were a reward for finishing a semester or having spring break.  Ah, that 10 page paper that you spent the last three weeks on is finished?  How about an hour of video games before the next paper, go on, you deserve it.  Completed 750 hours of unpaid labor- I mean, counseling internship at a psych hospital?  How about two straight nights of sleeping for 13 hours and a half gallon of Eddy's Rocky Road?  Until now, there's never been a point when I've had so much free time.  I was in school for six years, spending every free moment cramming information into my brain, and when I wasn't, I was working one/two/three jobs.  Last summer I was job hunting and falling in love.  And last winter, I got engaged and spent the next eight months completely absorbed in wedding planning.  (See previous eight months of blogs.)  But now... what?

There are still "adult" things I have to do when I get home after work, you know, after working full-time and commuting; I go grocery shopping, fix dinner, wash dishes, do laundry.  The thing I'm learning to become accustomed to now is what to do with the other hours in the week.  It's a very odd feeling to come to the end of a day and think "What do I want to do?" and not just "What do I have to do tonight?"  I'm slowing walking through this path, checking things out, figuring out what I *want*.  Spend more time with friends?  Spend time with husband?  Bake poppy seed almond cakes?  Knit Christmas presents?  Work out?  Watch reality television?  It's especially difficult with Bobby away from home more often than not; without him there, I wander around the house like a lost puppy and wonder if it's too early to go to bed.

Is he home yet?  How about now?  Now? ... Now?

It's a good thing to get used to, this free time concept, but it's an adjustment, just like spending money on Windex and laundry detergent instead of shoes.  So tonight, I'm going to Sips-n-Strokes and get my paint on with a swirly tree, a nice Chardonnay, and my two best girls.  And tomorrow night, cooking dinner for the hubby, perhaps a movie or another two hour marathon of DVR'ed Storage Wars.  Might as well give this free time thing a shot, eh?

Adventures in Married Life: Part 2

The main reason I want to keep a blog is not really about having other people read it.  For my whole life, I've kept journals and little notebooks with thoughts and lists, and it was always because I felt that I could better clarify the things in my head if I got them out of my head.  My blog is mostly about being an electronic version of those journals in that box upstairs, but it's also nice to be able to look back on and read all that stuff that was in my head those months or years before.

Standing here, thirty-seven days a newlywed, I want to keep up with the things I'm learning as we're making our way through this; it's the counselor part of me that wants to know when and how something changed.  At the end of past relationships, I grew by these evolutionary leaps that catapulted me into a healthier understanding of what it means to be in a relationship.  At the end of my last relationship before the Bobster, I realized that my search should be about both the chemistry and the checklist.  Years ago, I learned not to forsake all the people in my life for a new person, and sometime I realized that maybe there is a thing as a wrong time-right person, but if it's always the wrong time, it's the wrong person.  And somewhere I figured out that just because you care about someone doesn't mean you have to put up with their crap all the time.

These days, I'd like to learn things without such a dramatic prologue, and I'm doing pretty good so far.  As I mentioned before, Bobby and I have different sleep patterns- I consider 8am sleeping late, he prefers 11.  Yesterday morning I woke up, poked Bobby for a while before realizing he wasn't going to get up on my schedule and we were going to miss church.  (To be fair, he is home sick today and wasn't feeling good Saturday night, so he wasn't just being sleepy.)  Hopefully when our situation is different, I'll feel better about the difference in our sleep schedule; for now, though, I only see him a few days out of the week, so I consider all time available as precious time to be spent together.  Including 8am on a Sunday morning.  So at 9am, I'm sitting on the couch alone and whiny because I feel like I'm missing out on time with him.  It then occurred to me that since he wasn't going to get up for at least another two hours, why did I have to endure a self-pitying camp-out on the couch waiting for him to stir.  I call the Bestie, we drank coffee and played at Home Depot until noon.

The lesson to be learned was one that I should have remembered from the countless long-distance relationships I've endured in times past.  Just because we don't see each other as much as we like doesn't mean we have to be THISCLOSETHEWHOLETIME when we can.  Yes, it's nice, and I really wanted Bobby and I to eat breakfast and go to church and eat lunch together on the couch; but if we don't, it's not necessarily the end of the world.  It was better for both of us that I went and did my thing while he was asleep; I was happily attentive for the rest of the day instead of clingy and grumpy (two dwarves that camp out in my closet a lot).  The best part about being married is not having to worry about who's going to be my date to that wedding or hold my hand before a medical procedure or eat that pumpkin cheesecake I'm going to learn how to make.  Bobby's going to be there, even if it doesn't necessarily feel like that right now because when I get home most days, he's not.  But I have the next 60 years to spend with him, so it's not the end of our honeymoon if I miss out on two hours.  A very wise woman who makes the best cornbread and fried green tomatoes you'll ever eat once told me that the key to life is balance, and that means balancing our quality time when we're together, too.  Just not balancing how much cornbread I eat.  Because that stuff is delicious.

Adventures in Married Life

Three days until to twenty days in.  So here we are.  We survived wedding-ing, and I am extremely pleased to say that, with the exception of very minor issues, the whole thing went off without a hitch.  By the time we got to the end of the rehearsal dinner, my only hopes were that Bobby and I both arrived and the church didn't burn down; as both wishes were executed, I was a happy bride.

Twenty days in, we are organizing ourselves into married life.  One could even call them adventures.  My favorite adventure thus far has been the things Bobby and I have discovered about each other.  You see, before our honeymoon, the most consecutive days Bobby and I had spent together was six; with the days leading up to the wedding and the honeymoon, Bobby and I have now upped that count to thirteen.  It's (just) one of the terrible things about a long-distance relationship, but I did enjoy our honeymoon all the better for it.

This view helped as well.

Bobby has discovered that I have to be fed and watered every three hours or so; he, on the other hand, can eat three square meals a day and be content.  I discovered that Bobby has an incredibly strange sleeping schedule.  He prefers going to sleep at midnight or later, waking up around 9 or 10, and napping for an hour to two around 2 or 3.  I, on the other hand, go to sleep around 10 and wake up at 7 or 7:30.  I have also learned that Bobby does actually require sunscreen despite his lovely golden skin, lest that lovely golden skin turn bright pink.  We also learned that we have different methods of approaching free time.  I prefer to plan, to list, to schedule, to arrive on time, and to control.  Bobby prefers to do.  We're still learning how to happily balance each other out.


Other small things that have been interesting:

"Husband" and "wife" are still strange terms.  We're practicing, but we seem to perpetually be uncomfortable with our labels.

I have completely and utterly enjoyed my time at home post-wedding.  Because Bobby lives in a Troy, I am alone most or all of the evening.  This week I have gone grocery shopping, learned to broil a steak, found a recipe for my favorite Taziki Friday Pasta, read my book, moved most of my closet downstairs, and taken a bubble bath.

Bobby and I are much less stressed and therefore happier; we now get to enjoy each other's company without discussing one looming topic.

Thank-you notes are a very odd thing.  I can't come up with 75 original sayings for each one, but I'm worried about people feeling unappreciated if their card says the same as someone else's; I do genuinely mean the repeated part though.  I also don't like the "little house wife" feeling I get in describing my plans for these gifts.  For example: "Bobby's favorite food is soup, and I can't wait to serve my favorite Toscana soup in this new bowl."  It's not so bad writing it once, but since most everything I received was kitchen-y, writing cooking and baking excitement 50 times makes me feel so one-dimensional.  Eh.

I love our wedding rings.

That's all the adventures in married life I have for now.  Seeing as how we'll be doing this for 60 years, expect more to come.

Three... Two... One...

I will not throw up.

I will not throw up.

I will not throw up.

Three days.

I will not throw up....

The Little Touches

It occurred to me last night that while there are a lot of things I'm doing for my wedding that have very special meaning to me/us, most people probably don't know about them.  So here they are, just in case anyone was curious. :)

1.  We took our save-the-date photos in Five Points South, a small, historic, kind of hipster area of Birmingham where we had our first date.  Behind the tree to the right of my shoulder is the restaurant, Highlands Bar and Grill, where we met.

This picture really can't be on my blog enough.

2.  On the front page of our wedding programs is a quote by Eric Dillard: "Then we sat on the edge of the world, with our feet dangling, and marveled that we had found each other."  I found this quote in a book at Starbucks while getting coffee to warm us up after our *freezing* save-the-date photoshoot.  (We were taking pictures on Saturday; on the following Sunday night, Alabama was covered in an ice storm that trapped us in the house for two days.  And I was in a knee-length dress.)  I absolutely had to have the book, titled 2: How Will You Create Something Beautiful Together?, because of that quote, and it is currently at home amongst the wedding planning.

3.  Our wedding favors are mini chocolate-chip cookies (Famous Amos cookies, to be exact).  One of the first things Bobby noticed about my Match.com profile was my reference to "finding the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe", and his first email stated that he knew that recipe, and that his mother had it.

4.  My 17-year-old sister is doing a reading during the ceremony of selected verses from Psalm 30.  This particular chapter of Psalm is incredibly meaningful to me because of the last couple verses:

You turned my wailing into dancing;
you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy,
that my heart may sing your praises and not be silent.
Lord my God, I will praise you forever.

These verses are so important to me because of the month or so directly preceding Bobby's entrance into my life.  A long journey shortly told, I gave my decisions and path for my life over to God after floundering in the dark for quite a while, and He answered that prayer with a tall, dark, and handsome.  The first word of the verse 12 is "that", implying that God answered my prayer so that I can sing to Him.  I am often overwhelmed with gratitude for not only answered prayers, but also the love that the Creator of the universe has for me, to shower me with such blessings simply because He loves me.

5.  For the small superstitious part of me, I do have all my "something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue."  My something new is a dress (duh); my something blue is the light blue beads on my shoes.

My something old is an almost-100-year-old cameo ring from my great-grandmother.  After she died, someone broke into her house and stole the majority of the vast jewelry collection she had acquired; most of it was not monetarily valuable, like precious stones or metals, but was obviously valuable to us.  What we ended up with was a sandwich baggie full of jewelry, and my grandmother gave me the cameo ring.  My something borrowed is handkerchief from the same grandmother that she carried to each of her sons' weddings.

6.  I hand-made the invitations and addressed them in my scrolling, calligraphy-esque handwriting.  Every single one of them.  Just so you all know.

7.  Our cakes are from Edgar's Bakery, *the* bakery in Birmingham in my humble opinion.  The wedding cake will be strawberry, much to the shock of most.  On one of Bobby and my first dates, we went to Edgar's, my first time, and got strawberry cupcakes that we ate and I took the rest home to my family.  I always associate Edgar's with Bobby now.

8.  The night of our wedding rehearsal will be August 12th.  On August 11th, 2010, Bobby met my parents for the first time, and that night I told him I loved him; on August 12th, 2010, I met Bobby's parents for the first time, a few days after he had told his brother and sister to be nice to their "future sister-in-law".

9.  The father-daughter dance song, "You've Got a Friend" by James Taylor, is my dad and my song that he has sung to me for as long as I can remember.

10.  The quote on the back of the wedding program is a favorite of the Best Friend Since Preschool.  Here's lookin' and you, kid. :)

And in the end

The love you take

Is equal to

The love you make

-The Beatles

I believe that's all the nit-picky somethings for now.  If I remember more, expect updates.