A Happy Life

When I was growing up, I always imagined myself in a big house, with lots of kids and of course a handsome husband. It's funny how things are different than what I thought, but as I approach 40 my goal is to have a happy life.

My house isn't big, but honestly I wouldn't want it much bigger because that would be more space I'd have to keep clean. Our house has enough room for the 3 of us, plus the cats, along will all of Emily's stuff (mine and Todd's too but she has more!)

My marriage is happy, even after nearly ten years. I adore Todd and he seems to be fond of me too, of course. Our family was completed many years ago with the birth of Miss Emily and we have three cats who are her furry, little siblings.

Todd mostly likes his job. Like most people, he has bad days and good. I really don't like my job but I'm able to work part-time which gives me time to do other things as well as rest when I need to. Of course, I do have chronic pain and Todd has MS. But I try and not let my pain get me too down. Plus Todd's been in remission since the initial diagnosis so he tends to ignore it.

Emily is a happy kid. She has lots of friends at school, loves learning and loves being a Girl Scout. It's a joy to be her mom and watch her grow. But I'm glad there is just one of her. One and done as far as kids go works best for us.

We don't make a ton of money but we make enough to be able to do fun things. We go to conventions, mostly Dragon Con, and Disney World. We are hoping to make it over to Italy in about five years. Todd wants to start seeing the world. I want to start visiting the Disney parks around the world, so same thing.

I suffer from depression and anxiety so some days the clouds get really dark and stormy in my head. But all in all, I have a happy life. It's something to remember on the not so good days.

Date Night!

Image: wikipedia.org

When you are married with a child, alone time can be a rarity. Luckily, Todd and I have fun with Emily in tow quite often, but we do like our occasional date nights.

This past Saturday we went down to GA to visit my aunt and uncle. We missed the holidays with me being so sick so we went down mostly to see family. We spent several hours - my cousin, Casey, and his wife, Serella, brought their kids over. Emily played with them happily - their oldest is only six months younger than Emily.

Seeing family was great, but my aunt and uncle offered to watch Emily so we could go to a movie. Todd and I left a little early so we could also go to dinner. The movie theater we picked was party of a huge mall and we misjudged the time so we had plenty of time.

The mall was great! We just had supper in the food court and then did some looking around / shopping. I may have squealed out loud when I saw they had a Disney store. They also had a Lego store and a cool Japanese store that had a lot of anime stuff.

I only bought something at the Disney Store though. I got Emily new pj's because they were having a sale. Todd also found a great Nightmare Before Christmas hoodie for me and a Sofia the First stuffed griffin for Emily in the clearance section. It was a great deal!

We took our stuff back to the car and went to the theater. We saw Kingsman which was excellent and we saw it in this fancy theater that had reclining chairs. It was an interesting experience. The chairs were very comfy and it was almost iMax like with the sound quality. The screen seemed bigger too.

It was really nice to get some one on one time with Todd outside of the house. Hopefully we'll be able to do it again soon!

Eight Years of Wedded Bliss!

Eight years ago today, I promised to love, honor and cherish my wonderful husband, Todd. We were married on a rainy day, but it never rained on me. But while we were saying our vows we could hear the pouring rain beat down on the roof the church.

We got married in the same church my parents were married in. I hope this will be a good omen since my parents were married until death parted them.

Todd and I have been through a lot in our short eight years as a married couple. Lots of illness - chronic pain for me, and recently MS for him. We've had some job issues and the recession back in 2008 was rough. But we've stayed strong throughout it all.

We are happy to be the parents of a wonderful little girl and right now, despite our illnesses, our life is pretty great.

I think we have a strong marriage because we know how to communicate well. And we have so many similar interests as well!

Happy Anniversary Todd! I love you more and more every day.

Thoughts On Living Together Before Marriage

Our Engagement Picture

One of my twitter friends asked how many of her friends / followers lived together before marriage last night. I was one of them who said yes. I think living together before marriage is a great idea, but I didn’t always think that way.

When I was younger, I saw the world in black and white. I am a Christian, so back then I thought living together before marriage was morally wrong. I got to college, and I found that things were not as black and white as I thought they were.

I didn’t date a lot and I didn’t start dating until college. I only dated my first boyfriend for about six months. He was really clingy and I realized I didn’t really like him that much, so I broke up with him.

My next serious boyfriend was a guy I was madly in love with. He was the first guy I lived with, and we were so very wrong for each other. Living together just made our problems worse and we fought all the time. Finally we broke up. I was very upset but I felt a bit like a weight had been lifted off of me. It did take me a good year to finally get over him.

When I met Todd, we started out long distance since we were living on different sides of the state. We’d communicate via email and talk on the phone about once a week because we were on separate work shifts. Our second date was on Valentine’s Day and we went to a wrestling house show with some friends. After the show, we went out to dinner. Todd and I had gotten to the restaurant first and we were just talking. During this conversation, he asked me to move in with him.

I was a bit freaked out because my last living with a boyfriend experience was such a miserable ordeal. But Todd, logically, pointed out that it would be hard to know if we were compatible doing the long distance thing. His logic won out and we moved in together.

It was a completely different experience because it just felt so comfortable and normal living with him. Our relationship has had its ups and downs, but we are able to communicate fairly well to have a happy relationship that lead to marriage.

Now I’m a huge fan of living together with a significant other before marriage. It’s a great way to figure out if you are truly compatible or not.

The New Normal

Since the time we started dating, until about a month ago, Todd always worked 2^nd shift. He prefers it because he’s a night owl and doesn't like getting up early. I've nearly always worked some variation of 1^st shift, which has made a unique dynamic in our relationship.

When we first started dating, we were on separate shifts and we were five hours apart. We’d talk once a week and then usually see each other once a month. We would email back and forth several times a day.

Once we moved in together, we were still on separate shifts. Both in Michigan and once we moved down to North Carolina, we didn't see a lot of each other during the week. But we’d call, text and still email back and forth.

When Emily was born and I got laid off, we had a lot of time together. It was 2008 and the economy was so bad that Todd kept having extra days off of work. It was nice to have him home, especially with a newborn. That only lasted about a year. I didn’t go back to work, but instead went back to school to get my 2^nd degree. We were back on our old schedule for the most part.

But about a month ago, things got really bad at Todd’s job. He had hated it for years and they didn’t treat him very well at all. He had applied to a few jobs here and there, but nothing panned out because he wasn’t very serious about looking for a new job since as much as he hated his old job it paid well.

It got to a point that he had to look for a new job. One company replied back less than 24 hours after he sent his resume. He had an interview a few days later on Monday. By Wednesday he was hired and by Friday he was working.

His new shift is a little weird. He works Friday through Sunday – 7 pm to 7 am. He’s dead during the weekends but then he has four days off. It’s been awesome having him home more.

There has been some adjustment. I haven’t been sleeping well on the weekends so far because of him being gone all night. Beyond that, it’s been awesome to have him home more. He has more time for me and Emily, plus I have to cook a whole lot less.

My Disney World Honeymoon - Part 1

I love Mickey Ears!

This is the 3rd post in my series of Disney trips I've taken in the past. You can find previous installment here -  part one and part two.

Since I remember more of this trip, it will be in several parts.

I always wanted to go back to Disney World after my trip when I was 16. I spent seven years in college after I graduated from high school. My college roommate and I talked about taking a trip down to Florida, but it was just too expensive.

After I graduated, I moved back home because my mom was sick. She died less than a week after I moved back in. My life was in serious flux then so I didn't even entertain any thoughts of Disney. I met and started dating Todd. We moved in together and then as time progressed we got engaged.

We moved from Michigan to North Carolina about six months after we got engaged. Because we were still going to get married in Michigan, we decided to wait a year after the wedding to take our honeymoon.

Planning a long distance wedding is hard so we hadn't really talked about honeymoon destinations. One day, when Todd was sick with the stomach flu, the subject came up. He gave me a choice of Las Vegas or Disney World. Can you guess what I picked?

Even though I was still in the midst of planning a wedding, I started to look up information about planning a Disney World honeymoon. I started to realize that it was going to be more complicated that I had originally thought.

I found disboards.com which is a forum for planning Disney trips. It was and is an invaluable resource. It was there that I found my travel agent with Mouse Fan Travel. She helped with the planning, made all our dining reservations and even got us a discount that saved us nearly a thousand dollars.

Neither Todd nor I had ever stayed in a Disney resort so we decided we wanted to do that for our honeymoon. We also opted to use the Disney Dining Plan, which was pretty new then. On the dining plan, we got one fast food meal and one sit down meal a day, plus one snack a day and a refillable mug.

Since we only live about nine hours away from Disney World, we decided to save money and drive. We made pretty good time and got to our resort, Caribbean Beach, in the late afternoon. We didn't make any dining reservations for that night because we didn't know what we were going to do. We ended up eating at the restaurant at the resort, Shutters. It was good and they gave us free champagne because of our honeymoon.

The next day, we went to the Magic Kingdom. Originally we were going to use that day as a rest day but Todd’s favorite ride, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, was going down for rehab and this was the only chance we were going to get to ride it. We spent about half the day at the Magic Kingdom, riding all of our favorites. Then we spent a little time back at our resort before we went to our first dinner reservation.

I had spent a lot of time on the restaurant section of the disboards forums since I hadn't eaten at any of the table service places before. One place that was highly recommended was Ohana in Disney's Polynesian Resort. I had heard that you could watch the Magic Kingdom’s fireworks right from the restaurant and the music would be piped in.

We waited a while to be seated but we were able to explore the resort which is beautiful. Finally we got our table which had a perfect view of Cinderella Castle out of the window.  The food is served family style and it’s all kinds of meat – ribs, smoked turkey, pork loin and more. It was so yummy!

It’s all you can eat so the server would come every once in a while to refill our food. When Wishes started, I was entranced by the fireworks show. I didn't hear our server behind me and he scared me so much that I nearly jumped out of my chair. Todd thought this was really funny.

After dinner, we went back to our room and passed out. We had an early day in the morning as we were spending our first anniversary at Epcot.