Family of Four

We’re not the greatest at sticking to plans and timelines. At one point, we’d said we might never get married. (Obviously that didn’t happen.) Last November, we resigned the lease on our 2-bedroom townhouse that we loved. (Three months later, Derek got a job out of state.) In September 2016, we said we’d start looking at potentially adopting a dog. (We picked up our German Shepherd-Husky mix, Dakota, less than a week later.)

Dakota Belle

And don’t ya know, we managed to do it again!

We both love dogs and are committed to #adoptdontshop. Over the past few years, I’ve ended up following a number of animal shelters and rescue organizations on Facebook, and I have a bad habit of sending my husband links to photos of adoptable dogs… about once a week. He’s told me to stop, but it’s a hard habit to break!

I’m used to showing him photos and immediately seeing him roll his eyes and half-jokingly tell me that it’s dangerous to look at those when we aren’t ready for a second dog.

Until the week after our wedding, when I showed him a little golden adoptable pup and he responded “Okay, let’s get him.” I was flabbergasted, confused and anxious, but also thrilled so we promptly filled out the application online. Figured we were unlikely to really hear anything.

24 hours later, the shelter checked our references.

Three days later, they came for a home visit.

Four days later, we picked up our new baby, eight-week-old Charlie.

Charlie Boy

And so, eight days after officially becoming husband and wife, we added a fourth member to our little family. Dakota became a big sister (she’s amazing at it) and we started having to guard every sock and shoelace from razor-sharp puppy teeth.

We adopted Dakota when she was already 18 months old. So we’ve never really done the puppy-raising experience, other than when living in our parents’ homes. And prior to Dakota, I’d never lived with a dog that weighed more than 15 pounds. (My family are little dog people. His family are big dog people. We ended up somewhere in the middle with mixed breeds that end up around 50 pounds… Okay, those are still big dogs and I LOVE them.)

We’re now six weeks into being married and five weeks into having two fur-babies. There have been frustrations (Charlie likes to poop under our bed) and surprises (will his ears stand up or won’t they?) and adorableness (his favorite place to sleep is completely hidden under the covers). All in all, we wouldn’t change a thing.

Training a puppy is 10x easier with an older dog who can show him the ropes. We say sit, she sits, he… well, for the first few weeks, he bounced around, yipped and tried to climb on top of her. But now he sits when she sits!

And having Charlie has been incredibly good for Dakota. We don’t know much about the first eight weeks of Charlie’s life, but we know a fair amount about the first 18 months of Dakota’s. She was definitely loved, but the people who loved her had no idea how to care for her. As a result, she’s jumpy and scared of new things, hesitant about being touched too much, and always on alert. She looked at us like we’d lost our minds when we brought Charlie home. But she has grown to be the best big sister a puppy could ask for. She is gentle and patient. His puppy barks never annoy her, no matter how shrill they get. She drops to the ground so he can reach her when they play. She slows her run so be can almost keep up. And just now, she let him curl up at her belly and use her shoulder for a pillow. For the briefest of moments, she even rested her head on his.

If you’d known our girl a year ago when we adopted her, you’d never have thought those moments would be possible. Being a big sis is showing her mellow side.

It also makes me very excited for just how wonderful a big sister she will be to human babies in a few years.

Unless, you know, we screw up that timeline too.

Registry Reflections

Gift registeries are a lot less dumb than I thought they were going to be.

I’m typically very uncomfortable being the center of attention and receiving gifts. (You should see me at my birthday. It’s painful.) So a large of me was tempted to tell friends and family, “Don’t buy us anything!” But obviously, most people would not have listened to us, my mother-in-law would have lectcured us, and we would have regretted it later.

It’s probably stereotypical, but I wasn’t sure we really NEEDED anything from a registry. My husband and I have been living together for nearly three years. We’ve combined our belongings, gathered hand-me-downs from friends and family, and purchased the things we truly needed along the way. We’ve expanded from a one-bedroom apartment to a two-bedroom townhouse to the three-bedroom house that we’ve lived in since March.

But once we started really talking about the idea of a registry, we got pretty excited about it. Though there weren’t a lot of basics that we absolutely had to have, we embraced the opportunity to upgrade the things we already owned. Out went the 10-year-old bowls I bought in college; in came the brand new Fiestaware to coordinate with the color we hope to paint our kitchen later this year. Goodbye using mix-matched beach towels each morning; hello oversized fluffy white bath towels from Bed Bath & Beyond!

(A coworker gave me an awesome tip for purchasing new towels and bed linens: Don’t go for colors or patterns. Regardless if the color scheme of your bathroom or bathroom, purchase white towels and sheets. When you wash them, throw in a splash of bleach and they’ll look like-new without worrying about the colors fading. I especially appreciated this when our 3-month-old puppy peed on our bed earlier this week and I wanted to make sure we didn’t end up with a lovely yellow stain on our brand new sheets.)

So it’s been a lot of fun getting to incorporate newer, nicer items into our home since the wedding. We didn’t have a huge registry list; we didn’t ask for fine china or items for a fancy dinner party. We kept it simple. A quilt for the bed. Towels and sheets. Everyday dishes. A fruit bowl. Baking trays. New DISHWASHER-SAFE pots and pans. (Seriously, being able to throw the spaghetti sauce pan in the dishwasher — life changing.)

We did indulge ourselves a bit and put on some items we weren’t sure anyone would actually buy us (but they did!), like:

• A Craftsmen drill and handsaw
• A Memory Foam dog bed
• A KitchenAid stand mixer

When I say we were shocked when we received these items… I started jumping up-and-down and screaming when the KitchenAid arrived at the house. Growing up, that was always one of those things my Mom and I talked about wanting “someday”; the same way we talked about wanting a new minivan or a membership to the gym that had a pool. Those were dreams that seemed just barely within reach, but were always just outside of our reality. To actually have it sitting in kitchen, in the first home that my husband and I have owned ourselves? Wow. Just wow.

Sorry. I started a bit of an emotional tangent there. (I’ll save that for therapy on Monday.) Suffice it to say, while I hate the idea that gifts are viewed as an expectation surrounding weddings and I would be perfectly content if no one had given us anything, it’s also a lot of fun to get new things and sometimes it’s really  special to see that people care enough — and are generous enough — to gift even the things on the pipe-dream list.

Now, I’m going to go make cookies with my KitchenAid mixer.

…

No, that’s not a joke. I’m pre-heating the oven already.

Update: MOB Dress

So if you didn’t read it already, go check out my thoughts on mother of the bride dress shopping in my post Say Yes To Your Mother’s Dress.

Unfortunately, none of those three dresses hanging in the back of my closet hit a home run when Mom arrived in town the week of the wedding. One was badly constructed and unflattering, so it was immediately voted out of the running. The other two each had a lot going for them. One — an open shoulder red cocktail dress — my mom actually felt really good in and decided to keep for later, but didn’t feel that it was quite right for the wedding. (She was especially excited about that dress after my fiance commented “Wow” when she walked into the living room.) The other dress — a dark purple sleeveless dress with gold embellishments and a sheer wrap, which had been my top pick all along — was a size too big but otherwise looked great on her… but she just didn’t feel right in it. It ended up being an “if nothing else is an option, it’ll do” choice.

[I should note that a friend of hers told her that “When you try on your your dress, you’ll just know.” Not really the most helpful set of expectations. I think she was really disappointed when she didn’t feel immediately wowed in any of the three. I was honestly worried that she might never feel that magic moment no matter how long we tried on dresses, because I’m not exactly sure that’s ever a real thing. Maybe that makes me a pessimist.]

So we decided to do some last minute shopping! The two dresses she semi-liked were both from DressBarn.com, so we decided to drop into the DressBarn store 10 minutes from my house.

First let me say: I LOVE DressBarn. My weight has fluctuated in a 50 pound range in the past 10 years and discovering DressBarn after I graduated college was amazing. I’ve slipped between their Misses section and Plus section without feeling bad about myself or like I was restricted in my fashion choices, and I’ve always had great experiences with their customer service. Yes, their salespeople convince me to spend more money than I intended (which is their job), but they also convince me that I’m worth spending money on (which is something I’ve long struggled to believe).

Anyway, I was actually really excited to introduce my mom to DressBarn and hoped her experience would be as successful as mine have been.

And low and behold… We found THE dress!

It was the last one we grabbed off the rack as she headed to the dressing room and, as soon as she put it on, I think we both knew. (So maybe that magic moment can exist?) She tried on several others after it, just to be sure, but eventually she came back to this one. The purple color, the flirty hemline, the light jacket. She even got to go down a size! (If you’ve ever struggled with your weight or body image, you know how exciting that can be!)

We also found a necklace to coordinate beautifully, and it turned out that one of the pair of comfortable sandals she’d brought from home went with it too! On our wedding day, she looked so beautiful and at ease and just like herself. It made my heart happy.

I’m a worrier and a fixer by nature; I’ve learned that over the past few years. I obsess on things that aren’t going quite right and try to create plans to make them all better, to make everyone happier. That’s why there were three MOB dresses hanging in my closet for three weeks.

But this didn’t end up being about solutions or plans or budgets. What we needed was time and to be together and to focus on her. We couldn’t figure out all that long distance. So yes, the Mother of the Bride’s dress got purchased 48 hours before the wedding. But who cares? We did it together and she was happy. Nothing more beautiful than that.

 

Reality Check

Apparently starting a blog a month before your wedding isn’t the smartest idea. At least, not if you hope to update it regularly. It’s almost like there’s something else eating up large portions of your time.

I thought a blog would be a good outlet and help me process the final stages of the wedding planning process. It was. It would have been. It still can be.

But in making travel arrangements, crafting party favors, compiling reception playlists, confirming cupcake orders, AND starting the first two courses for my masters degree, somehow the thoughts never made it from inside my brain to my computer keyboard. Oh well. What’s done is done.

And what’s done is our wedding! It was glorious. It was perfect. It was a mess. It was everything we wanted to it to be. A month later, I’m still reflecting, dreaming, processing and beaming. So I’m going to keep writing. Some of what I write will still be about the wedding process, as least for a while. Some will be about post-wedding married life. (Not a lot changed other than my husband having to get used to wearing a ring and me struggling to write my own name.) Some will be about our little family, which expanded unexpectedly about a week after the wedding. (More to come on that.) I’m sure some of my grad school excitement/stress will filter in as well.

Basically: I’m still a bride. (When exactly do you stop being a bride?) And I’m still fighting my way through anxiety and everything that comes along with that. (Speaking of which, did I take my meds today?) So heck… I don’t see that anything needs to change!

Bullsh*t

Wedding traditions are bullsh*t.

Okay, let me take a slight step back and try to not be quite so opinionated. I respect the concept of traditions, I swear I do. Some of them are beautiful, meaningful and very important to certain people and families. I will happily encourage and support traditions that are carried on because they matter and are valued by the bride, groom and their families.

The bullsh*t traditions are the ones that are passed along just because they are traditions. And of course this varies from family to family… For some brides, being walked down the aisle by their dad and having a father-daughter dance have great symbolism and are representative of their relationships with their father figure. For others of us, those are pieces of the wedding that are expected but have little emotional meaning and may in fact reinforce sexist stereotypes that we actively fight against.

Please don’t get me wrong. I love my father. I idolized him as a child and loved spending time with him. As I’ve grown up, our relationship has become a lot more complicated. He’s not perfect. I’m not perfect. We butt heads on a lot of things, and there are traits I’ve picked up from him that I’m not proud of. And I still love him and can’t imagine getting married without him there.

But our relationship is not symbolized by him walking me down the aisle and passing my hand to another man. Nor is it represented by a one-on-one slow dance to a sappy song.

1. I was raised by two parents. I am just as much my mother’s child as I am my father’s. I do not understand why there is no mother-daughter tradition associated with most Anglo-Saxon weddings. My mother is the one who carried me for nine months and gave birth to me. She stayed home and chose to education me herself when life was unpredictable and unstable. She picked up a minimum wage job when I was in high school to make sure we had medical insurance. She modeled for me what a strong, intelligent woman looks like. Where is her recognition on this day?
2. My fiance and I are two independent adults. I am thirty years old. I haven’t lived with my parents for more than two months at a time in the past 11 years. I live 600 miles away from them. I’ve had seven homes since college that I found and moved into by myself. I pay my own student loans, car loan and now mortgage. My fiance and I have lived together for nearly three years, adopted a dog together and are renovating a home together. I am my own person. I do not need my parents to hand me, my heart or my body over to my fiance. (If you want to get down to it, that’s what walking down the aisle is historically about.) We made the adult choice to be together a while back, and we have been living it out every day since. We are legally joining as one family on our wedding day, but we’ve building our family bit by bit all along.
3. I haven’t danced with my dad since I was 8 years old. I have very sweet and fond memories of standing on the toes of his black and white Converse as we danced around the middle of the kitchen floor. But I’m pretty sure I can’t do that anymore without injuring him, and I’m not actually sure what it’s going to be like to dance with him again after 20 years.

All that said, we are doing a Father-Daughter dance. And a Mother-Son dance. Because they matter to our parents. I don’t completely understand, but I accept and try to respect, and if it’s important to them, then fine. I would rather try to find alternative ways to include and honor our families on that day — ways that fit us and our parents better. But I’m picking and choosing battles, and I’m not sure I’m ready to fight that one. My mother is already unhappy that my dad isn’t walking me down the aisle. My dad doesn’t seem to care at all. I’m very content and at peace walking by myself. My fiance doesn’t care as long as I get down the aisle in a reasonable amount of time.

Now on to continue the struggle to balance our style and preferences with those of our loved ones…

Say Yes To Your Mother’s Dress

No one tells you that shopping for the Mother of the Bride’s outfit might be just as stressful – or more stressful – than finding the Bride’s outfit. (And yet, every recent/soon-to-be bride that I’ve asked has experienced that same thing.)

We’re all familiar with the societal expectations and pressures that weigh on a bride. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, watch any wedding-themed chick flick or TLC show and you’ll soon understand. Tiny waist, perfect dress, cascading hair, crash diets, blown budgets… you name it.

But it’s not that much different for the MOB. Movies and television may not explicitly review the expectations for the older generation at a wedding, but she still feels them. She still wants to feel all those same things that her daughter is told to want — that every woman is taught to want — beauty, youth, fashion, wealth, health. She wants to look back at formal family portraits and be proud of what she sees too. And our Taylor Swift/Kim Kardashian/supermodel-obsessed culture doesn’t spend much time teaching us that grey hair and laugh lines and love handles and wisdom and love are beautiful.

So helping my mom find a dress that makes her feel proud and lovely, AND that doesn’t destroy an already tight bank account, overheat a post-menopausal body, or add more stress and chaos to a life already filled with bills and doctors appointments and memory slips? While living more than 600 miles away? Yeaaaah. Like I said, no one makes that TV show.

But to me, it’s incredibly important. Thus far, I’ve spent about 10 times as much time searching for Mom’s dress as I did for my own. (The search for my dress is another story for another time.) I’ve now got three knee-length MOB dresses hanging in our spare bedroom, waiting for her to arrive the week of the wedding and get to try them on. Fingers crossed one of them fits the bill and makes her see how beautiful I know she’ll be when she’s smiling and happy and dancing at my wedding!

Love ya, Mom!

Please don’t assume I’m stressed.

I pity the next person who says to me “I hope the stress isn’t getting too bad” or “So just how stressed are you?” or “Have you hit the stressful part yet?” or any further variation on the theme that — as an upcoming bride — I must, nay, SHOULD be stressed out of my mind. I’ve been blown away by how often I’ve heard this sentiment and each time, I’m shocked. I was even told by one individual, when I assured them that neither myself nor my fiance were all that stressed, that I should “just wait.”

Does everyone assume that planning your nuptials must cause one to pull out their metaphorical hair? Is that what modern weddings have been boiled down to?? (That and Say Yes To The Dress, but I’ll hold those comments for later.)

Of course, there are those who ask “Are you so happy/excited?” and “Are you having fun planning the wedding?” Bless those souls. Those are the people I WANT to talk to about my wedding. Those who light up and ask me about the details, not to judge how much I might still have to do, but because they genuinely enjoy hearing about the happiness.

With 33 days until our wedding, am I stressed? Of course. I’m stressed about the leak in the basement, and the mortgage payment due tomorrow, and our dog’s ear infection, and starting grad school in the fall, and paying for grad school in the fall, and my parents’ health, and the chest x-ray my fiance had yesterday. That’s called life. Having anxiety just means that if it’s possible to stress about it, I probably am. (I seriously hope that won’t always be the case.) But planning the day that I get to marry my best friend — cliche, I know — is far from being the biggest stress-inducer in my life.

So please, say congratulations, ask me how I’m feeling, quiz me about the details of our reception if you’d like — but don’t imply that it’s mandatory I be stressed.