Ok, I carved a pumpkin. Now can I start listening to Christmas music…Please?

Isn’t the autumn fun? Piles of leaves to jump in and pumpkins to carve…

I love the change in seasons. I love the cool crisp morning air and the clear breezy afternoons. I love the warm colors in the trees and the crunch of the leaves on the ground beneath my feet. The one bad thing about this time of year, it says “winter is coming” and “prepare for the snow!” Yuck! I have this theory about the snow—it may be pretty look at and fun to play in but the snow is something to visit, not live in. I must concede, however, there are a few good things about winter—our wedding anniversary, my birthday, and Christmas!

You know what they say, “it’s the most wonderful time of the year.” Autumn is the gateway to the “most wonderful time of the year”! If you had a holiday season so jam packed with events wouldn’t you be in a rush to have it begin and want to make it linger longer after it had past? And so, my point, I am one of those ‘crazy’ people that think it is perfectly appropriate to listen to Christmas music from October 1^st until January 31^st. Yes… I am one of ‘those people’.

I pulled out my Christmas music and began secretly listening to it 2 ½ weeks ago. But it is now the last week in October, I have carved a pumpkin and everything so can I now start listening to my Christmas music publicly instead of in secret? My guess is most of you are those ‘other’ people. The ones who think that I am nuts, that I am overshadowing other fun or important holidays—like Halloween and Thanksgiving—with my incessant need to sing “Deck the Halls”. But I say to you, is there such thing as a Halloween or Thanksgiving song? –No. Christmas music is just too good to listen to it only 30 days of the year. Plus Christmas music makes me happy, and isn’t that the whole point anyway?

I can’t wait to be home for Christmas, go a wassailing (whatever that is), listen to the silver bells, etc. I am not, however, “Dreaming of a White Christmas”.

Pull out your Christmas music and sing along with me—go ahead—you know you want to!

I am not a farm person

I have never had much interest in growing things. I have never been successful in my efforts to cultivate flowers or house plants. What can I say? Plants just don’t like me. I think that maybe they can sense my dislike for their homes of mud and insects and choose to dislike me in return—the harder I try the faster my plants die.

So, when Tyler suggested that we plant a garden I secretly laughed inside. The only thing that I have ever been successful at growing is weeds. I told him that could be ‘fun’ but I really was not a farm person and proceeded to remind him of the sketchy relationship that I have with all forms of plant life. So that was the end of it no garden, no weeds, no dirt and, no ‘wild bugs’ to deal with.

Well the snow melted off, it started to warm up and Tyler again approached the garden subject. I found it funny that a man that refuses to eat almost all fruit and vegetables wanted a garden so badly. What was I to do? I gave in. We spoke to our landlord and made arrangements to use part of his back yard for the garden plot and I set the terms: Tyler was in charge of all the fertilizing (I wasn’t going to have anything to do with the manure)!

I didn’t realize how much work a garden would be: all the time that would be spent watering and weeding. We went on a week trip and found our garden over grown with weeds! Why is it that that weeds seem to grow 10 times faster than the plants that you actually wanted?! In addition all the weeds to be plucked from the ground I hadn’t realized, when I agreed to a garden, that I would have to talk a friend or family member into watering for us while we were on vacations and weekend trips. What a nuisance?

Much to my surprise it has been kind of fun planting and cultivating our garden—even though I was positive that we wouldn’t have any surviving plats by the end of the summer. I knew that if we wanted any of our plants to survive we had better plant a lot, and so we planted 15 different varieties of fruits and vegetables: 5 different kinds of tomatoes, yellow squash, zucchini, 2 varieties of cucumber, carrots, potatoes, peas, mint, basil, rosemary.

Much to my surprise we have had over half of our plants survive! This is huge progress for me, a real break-through! I am thrilled to share with you that we got 13 pods of peas before all of the pea plants died. The story unfortunately did not turn out as happy for the rosemary, lemon and other cucumbers which have complete died out. And we only lost half of the zucchini plant.

Luckily for us our landlord is a sweetheart and an experienced gardener. He has been very helpful and has probably done as much watering and weeding as Tyler and I have done—he may be a good part of the reason that any of our plants have survived.

There is a certain kind of satisfaction that comes from eating something you have grown. I can’t say that I have not been converted to the dirt and bugs lifestyle; I am still not a ‘farm person’ but I do have to say that this first experience in gardening has been a little more fun than I had anticipated.

I will begin at the beginning

Looking for a creative outlet—and not being crafty or possessing enough to patience to scrapbook—I decided that a family blog would be the good way to go. Completely new to blogging, and not being very computer savvy, it has taken a while to get it up and running. The funny thing is that this mirrors the reality of our lives…

Tyler and I have now been married for 7 months and have yet to unpack all of our boxes—we still have random bins from our separate apartments piled in the front room. It has taken us 7 months to get the internet set up, decide where exactly the furniture should go, plug in lamps, and to hang up pictures.

It has been fun, though, setting up our lives; making plans. Being married is slightly different than I pictured it, and I am glad. I couldn’t have imagined how much fun it would be set up our home together—washing and putting away all of our flatware, lining our kitchen cupboards etc. It’s so nice to have warm legs to stick your cold toes on in the middle of the night and to have someone to tell you how beautiful you are every morning—even if you don’t believe it because of your unbrushed teeth and uncombed hair.

Marriage is about give and take, and learning to ignore the insignificant things your spouse does that annoy you. I used to be so picky about my husband drying his hands on the dish towel instead of the hand towel or laying on the bed with his shoes on. I have learned to say “please” when I ask him not to do that or, better yet, to bite my lip and keep the thought to myself, cringing only on the inside. How particular my husband used to be about the toilet paper being torn exactly on the perforation rather than in the center of the sheet—I try to comply, but when I don’t he fixes it and just smiles.

So that’s us, our beginning. The journey to forever is bound to be great.