Funnel & I hired a professional photographer, Ian Holmes, to take photos of us walking around and enjoying beautiful Paris.  I am so glad we did.  We got to see areas of the city we wouldn’t have found on our own, and Ian so wonderfully captured us as a couple during our romantic walk through Paris.   I know these pictures will be cherished by our children and grandchildren one day.

* All photos by Ian Holmes (www.ianholmes.net)

Up next: Paris through our eyes.

{ The Olympics }  Funnel & I have been glued to the TV.  I am generally not a big tv-watcher, but I think the olympics are one of the only times it is acceptable (and should be encouraged) to be a couch potato.  I’m not even going to watch LOST tonight. 

{ Europe }  We are less than three months away from our trip and judging from how my life has been lately, I think it’s going to come up really quickly.   So far, we’ve sent away for our passports (mine’s already been rejected once due to the crappy washed-out picture I got taken at Walgreens), we’ve booked a really great photographer to do a shoot of us in Paris, and found a travel agent to help us book hotels and our rail passes.   Someone asked in an earlier post where we are going… our tentative itinerary is: Paris, Nice / Monaco, Venice, somewhere in Tuscany (trying to work that one out with the travel agent) and Rome.  

{ Lifetime To-Do List }  When I was younger, I decided to make a lifetime to-do list.  When I started it, I decided it would have 100 things on it, and it did.    But the problem was that I was too concerned with coming up with 100 things, and not concerned enough with making goals that were meaningful to me.   In fact, I can’t even tell you anything that was on that list.  So I am starting over, and only adding things when something really strikes me.  So far, I have two things on my list.  The first is to go to the olympics.  Every olympics that I can remember, I’ve always thought, one day I want to go and see this live.  I remember knowing people who went to the Salt Lake City olympics and I was so jealous.   This is an expensive goal, but I think we can swing it someday.  Especially the next time the games are held in the states.  My second goal is to win a food challenge.  I know that sounds rediculous and not serious enough to be on a lifetime-to-do list, but I don’t care.  Funnel & I have started watching this show called “Man vs. Food” and the host, Adam, goes all over the country visiting the best restaurants in each city, and each show ends with some kind of food challenge.  The food challenge he does for the Columbus episode is at a little place called The Ohio Deli.  There’s a sandwich there called “The Dagwood” and it is the size of my head.  Funnel and I have split it a couple of times.  For my birthday, I think, I am going to attempt to eat the whole thing myself.  If I do, I get my picture on their wall of fame.  

{ Sad & Happy } I have felt so conflicted this week.  One of my best friends from college got engaged to a guy who is absolutely perfect for her.  Happy.  A good friend of the Frederick family passed away after a fight with breast cancer, leaving her husband and son.  Sad.  Our friends from church met their precious three-year-old son for the first time yesterday in Ethipoia and will be bringing him home soon.  Happy.  This family, that I’ve been following through my mother-in-law, are having so many roadblocks to their being re-united, on top of their child dying of cancer.  Sad.  And so much more that I can’t write about on here.  What a crazy world we live in, where one person can be having the best day of their life and at the exact same time, another’s world has been torn apart. 

{ This } “We’ll never be as young as we are tonight.”

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

- – - Erica Jong

(( it’s beginning to look a lot like Valentine’s Day! ))

“a few years ago, my father shared with me some wisdom about relationships. he said (in essence): ‘your relationship is not about that big fight you had yesterday, or your wedding day. it’s about all the other days. it’s about the day-to-day rituals, the patterns of behavior and the consistent, general attitude you have towards one another. love is not about those really good days or those really cranky days. it’s about everything in between: the way you talk about your day, the favors you do for each other without even thinking about it, and the last words you speak to each other before falling asleep at night.’ “

I like that.  I think every couple has the wonderfully happy “movie moments”  and the times of crisis, but I think that person is right – it’s about how you treat each other day to day.  In fact, the vows we exchanged on our wedding day even said, “I promise to love you in the midst of the everydayness and the specialness of life”.  

I love our “everydayness”.

Today, Funnel and I have been married for three years.  At this time, on this day, in 2006, vows had been said, rings had been given, photos had been taken, and our reception had just begun.   What a happy day.  I remember feeling wonderfully free and giddy and so deeply happy.  I loved that I was his wife, that I was his Mrs, that we now shared a last name and a home.   

For months after, I loved seeing our names printed together on envelopes that came in the mail.   I loved saying the word “husband” when I talked about him.   I would sometimes catch a glimpse of his ring, from the corner of my eye, and it would almost surprise me to see it there.  I fell in love with his morning hair, and ever-growing tee shirt collection and preference for 2% milk.

And after three years, not much has changed.

I hesitate to make comments anymore on marriage, because I have a pretty limited scope: I’ve only been married to one guy for three years, and that hardly makes me any kind of expert.   I really can’t even relate to other married couples because we all are so different anyway.  

But  based on my own experience: Marriage is wonderful.  It is challenging and sometimes hard, but the rewards are immeasurable. 

The other day, I was looking for something in one of our spare closets and happened upon our two shoeboxes full of memories.  When we were dating, we each started one seperately, and filled them with cards and letters and polariods and mix CDs.   They are so full now that we probably need to transfer them to something else.  But I had such a great time that evening reminiscing over our love story (which is my favorite love story… I’d take it over Noah and Ally’s any day.) 

My best tip for couples is not to forget your love story.  Revisiting those days, whether it is reading my old journals, or going through our shoeboxes, or even just talking with Funnel about when we met, never fails to make me feel renewed and happy and blessed.  I can’t imagine anything that we couldn’t get through together. 

So tonight I am feeling incredibly blessed and thankful that, somehow in this crazy world, I have found my counterpart, my best friend, my true love.

I was just reflecting on the two and a half years that Funnel and I have spent in this little apartment on John Steven Way.  I came here a month before our wedding, and Funnel moved in when we returned from our honeymoon.  What an exciting time – living together for the first time.  Coming to know each other more fully than we ever could have thought.  It was like those wonderful, much-anticipated sleepovers I had as a little girl, but this time it never had to end.  Best friends, together, all the time.

I am so excited for our next step in our life together and for our new house, but how can I not be a little sad to leave this place?  Our first home together.  Most of the memories I have of our first years of marriage took place between these walls.  Our apartment has seen a lot of love and laughter.  Some “movie moments”.  Some tears and heartache.

I will admit that I am tearing up a little writing this.  It reminds me a little bit of May 6th, 2006.  Funnel’s graduation day (and 24th birthday) and the day we moved him home from Cedarville, where he went to university.  At that time, we were engaged and looking forward to getting married in a few months.  The ride home, a constant stream of tears fell down my face.  It was bittersweet.  Funnel graduating meant that we were closer to getting married, but at the same time, a little piece of my heart felt broken because I would miss that place, where so much of our love story had played out.  I knew we could visit, but it wouldn’t be quite the same.

I am feeling very sentimental and nostalgic tonight.  It seems like the older I get, the more things really move me, and the more I find myself in tears.  Happy tears, sad tears. 

I found this quote a while ago by Brian Andreas, and I really connected with it: “She said she usually cried at least once each day not because she was sad, but because the world was so beautiful & life was so short.”

Yes, so beautiful.  And gauging by how quickly things seem to be going these past few years, so short.

 
((top two taken by me, bottom one taken by funnel.  on a walk in the schoolyard across the street)).

We’re on to month two of 2009, and I am still feeling good about this year.  I hope saying that doesn’t jinx me, but I really feel hopeful about what’s to come.  Like we are (or maybe I am) am on the brink of something important.  Besides that, I’m making good on resolutions promises I have made to myself.  I feel like maybe I am doing the best that I have in a long time with my attitude about challenging things in my life.  I don’t worry as much.  I’m not as emotional as I usually am.  We’ve started going to a new church which I love, and I am whole-heartedly seeking God for the first time in a while.

Meanwhile, in the back of my head, I am keenly aware of what people I know and care about are going through.  In my small woman’s bible study alone, one woman has terminal cancer with just a few weeks to live and another’s baby has been diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia.  These two families have been weighing on my heart, and on my day-to-day moments and interactions with others.  I have started thinking about the people driving in the vehicles next to me on their way to work, or the old man standing in front of me in line at the post office.  I wonder what’s on their hearts, what losses they are dealing with, what life had dealt them, what is getting them through their day.  I tend to forget that while life goes marching on for me, I encounter strangers everyday bearing invisible pain and invisible burdens and they are wondering why it goes marching on when they are hurting so much. 

There is a lot to think about and pray about these days.

I hope you all had a lovely Valentine’s Day.  We had more of a Valentine’s weekend.  Thursday night we stayed over at Fort Rapids, a really fun indoor water park and I had the best time!  It was 82 degrees in there.. need I say more?  We got a romance package that included champagne & chocolate covered strawberries, room-service breakfast, a room with a jaccuzi tub, and two-day passes to the water park.  Funnel & I had so much fun goofing off, going down all the slides, playing basketball in the pools, chilling in the hot-tub, floating in the lazy river.  On actual Valentine’s Day, we got a heart-shaped pizza and watched Titanic. Sunday, I cooked a romantic dinner.  We kind of drew it out, but it was nice.  Valentine’s Day should come more often, maybe quarterly.

A few photos from Fort Rapids:

((champagne…yum.))

 
((our breakfast in bed. Mine is on the right.))

 
((our jacuzzi tub.))

 
((Funnel in a funnel. When will that ever happen again? this slide was so much fun!))

 
((the lazy river and the kid’s area.))

((you can’t see most of the water slides because they go outside the building.))

 
((me and the mister.))

Well, time to get some dinner started.  Auf Weidersehn!