{"id":692,"date":"2009-12-19T21:34:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-20T02:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/saturday-december-19-2009-2\/"},"modified":"2009-12-19T21:34:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-20T02:34:00","slug":"saturday-december-19-2009-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/saturday-december-19-2009-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Saturday December 19, 2009"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Christmas is getting closer.
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Today Adam’s chain said seven more days (that’s because the last chain says Merry Christmas). I am loving December this year. It’s so relaxed and fun compared to last Christmas when David had surgery and Goldi had puppies and Liam was a baby. The best part of it all is that there is a lot more down time for just us … our little family. I can hardly believe I’m saying that because I am usually all about the big get-togethers and the parties. But with two children (one of whom needs all his food thought through and prepared and transported along), it’s downright nice to stay home. Plus, whenever it gets cold, I don’t feel like venturing further then the doorway to shake my head at the thermometer. I’ll regain normalcy next Spring (we hope).
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More time for us meant that David and I spent a night out. This should have been perfection in a basket for several reasons. One, it had been almost two years since we were out for the night (aside from our spur of the moment night when we went to his grandpa’s funeral). Two, our babysitter is one of my good friends, the boys adore her, and she is fantastic with kids. I did not worry once. Three, well, dates are just always supposed to be perfect. Wake up and smell reality. Did you know that when you have been married for seven years and you have two kids (one who is old enough to listen intently to e.v.e.r.y word you say and one who never seems to shut down) that it is possible to get into a very bad rut of not being connected emotionally and not even realize it? And then something outside of us happened that totally unstrung me Friday night and made a lot of old emotional hurts re-surface (Yes, I have issues like that) and turned me into the kind of melancholy I don’t like and then the old battle we’ve battled for seven years came up AGAIN and we still didn’t have answers. And to top it off, I still think that even though the Double Tree is very nice, there is something very un-romantic about practically being in the Sam’s Club parking lot.
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We had fun some of the time. I guess that’s the good thing about being married seven years. You can sort of, kind of lay it aside some of the time. In other words, I’ve learned to waffle box at least a little. But really, it was pretty disheartening. Especially because this hasn’t happened to us for so long. I was immature and mad for a couple of days until Wednesday afternoon when the dam kind of broke loose inside of me as I was holding Liam (he’s been sick again and can’t sleep lying down or at least he’s doing a good job of fooling me into believing that) and talking to God about the whole mess. David and I talked it out later that night and the next and it feels so incredibly wonderful to be on the same page again. I was talking to a friend of mine who has been through more struggle in her marriage in the last year then I want to imagine in a lifetime. We were talking about girls who are dating and how they think they have these huge struggles that seem so minute to us and how they have to stop everything right now and talk for four hours until everything gets hashed out. “She has no idea and I don’t know how in the world to prepare her,” my friend said. It’s true. But I still maintain that they don’t want to know how awful it can be because no one would get married. The same way that they cannot possibly understand how wonderful it can be either. And there is just no way possible to describe to someone what it is like to try to throw yourself passionately into your marriage when you are in the middle of raising kids either. Life’s like that, I guess.<\/p>\n

Mostly I’m just glad to have things hashed out and feel all wibbly wobbly in love again. David said he thinks it’s good I get mad sometimes because it makes him think. He does say THE strangest things. width=”15″ border=”0″ \/>\"December_0338\"<\/a> \"December_0304\"<\/a> \"December_0305\"<\/a>
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Virginia got plastered with snow. And more snow. And more snow. In fact, it snowed for twenty-seven hours straight unless it stopped to catch a breath during the night and I didn’t find out. I still don’t like cold weather; but this is amazing! We are literally snowed in. It’s pretty drifty which makes it difficult to get an accurate measurement but around 2 this afternoon we had approximately twenty inches and it still snowed for hours after that! <\/p>\n

Last night, even after it actually started snowing, I had a hard time believing we’d actually get this much snow. Snow forecasts in Virginia are often a hoax. They say 3-6″ and we get maybe 1-2. But when it accumulated so quickly I dropped the disbelief. Adam and David kept checking the weather radar hopefully.
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We kept the outside lights on for a long time just to watch it.
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This morning we woke up to the stuff dreams are made of. At least, if your dreams include snow. The best part of it all was that it was still snowing! That’s the other thing about Virginia. If it snows enough to cover the ground, it seems to often happen at night when you can’t watch the world turn white. Adam was beyond enthralled. Liam, well, excited wouldn’t be the key word here. He wasn’t about to be left out; but he can hardly walk in his snow suit inside the house, much less in snow. Plus, he hated his mittens. He found his niche underneath the deck where the snow had only accumulated to about two inches.
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Yep, that’s a lot of snow.
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My petty grievance with xanga remains. When I upload forty photos to the photo blog and I make sure the “show in photo blog” icon is checked, I would appreciate if those photos would actually show up in the photo blog. I checked out the xanga help and two things are apparent. I am not the only one having this problem. The help people are not answering. Anyone out there with solutions? I can manually go in and change each photo’s status; but it’s terribly time consuming.
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One of the good things that happened on our date was that we had time to brainstorm about parenting. It feels as though Adam has entered another stage of childhood and somehow we haven’t caught up. I think I know why a lot of five year olds are ready for school! It feels as though he is suddenly so BIG and so when he just tumbles all over me without warning because he wants attention, it hurts! I mean, forty pounds is a lot of weight to throw around. Or if he leans against me suddenly, it throws me off balance. It’s obvious to both of us that he would be a happier child if his life were intellectually and physically more challenging. He’s always been a demanding child; but in the last three months he’s become much, much more so. To combat at least some of the boredom we decided to come up with a more structured game plan for our evenings instead of just letting it happen. One of the first nights, I suggested we pull out my scrapbooking supplies and make cards. To be honest, I think we were both dreading this a little. But Adam was impressed and in about twenty minutes I surprised myself realizing we were having a lot of fun! The generic idea of cards turned into a Christmas card theme and before long there were cards for everyone. At this rate, we might put Hallmark out of business. (cough, cough)
\"Dec<\/a> \"Dec<\/a> \"Dec<\/a> \"Dec<\/a>
But someone tell me, why did I have this idea that sometimes parents get to sit on the sofa and read a magazine while their kids play with toys? Adam is absolutely convinced that life in the evening is completely boring unless he does what his daddy does or his daddy does what he does. There is no middle ground. Sometimes I’m about ready to resort to the timer. How do you guys get your children to think playing independently is fun? <\/p>\n

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Christmas is getting closer. Today Adam’s chain said seven more days (that’s because the last chain says Merry Christmas). I am loving December this year. It’s so relaxed and fun… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p39ynQ-ba","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}