20 Years is a long time!!

Brooke awoke at his typical 5 am today (I'm not going to miss this chaotic, stressful orthopedic sales job when his last day arrives on Friday and he moves back into pharmaceutical sales). We are so used to these very early mornings that my body automatically awakens then even on the weekends! This was certainly not the case 20 years ago when we got married. I was a night owl who loved to sleep in late. A lot has changed in 20 years.

Post Bachelor Party Golf Tournament. Brooke was a little green this day.

Rehearsal. Might have to cut my hair like that again soon.

In many ways, it feels like life has sped at mock speed since our wedding day. Other days, it has crept.  June 18th, 1994 was a beautiful, sunny, muggy day in Virginia. Our friends and families took over the Woodberry Forest School campus for the weekend. My parents had both taught there since I was one year old,  I had even attended the all male school as a 9th and 10th grader (3rd and 4th former as they say at The Forest), so the campus felt (and still feels) like home. We filled the dorms Dowd and Finch with guests who got to experience boarding school bunk bed life. We strategically booked the wedding between WFS graduation and when summer school and sports camp would start.  We had the campus to ourselves and dispersed over the golf course, tennis courts, and hung by the pool playing volleyball and swimming. It was THE PERFECT place for our active friends and family to have a fun weekend. I will cherish the memories of that weekend forever. (OJ Bronco chase and all).

The Woodberry chapel was beautiful albeit very hot. Most of the campus didn't have AC then and we were all dripping with sweat, most especially Brooke's uncle Terry Smith (pastor at First Congregational Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan) who was the minister officiating our ceremony. We wrote our own vows that I am looking at now in our wedding album. These quotes stand out to me. Oh how naive we were. "Brooke, I will stay skinny and fun, even when you are grumpy after long days at work. I will have a delicious dinner waiting for you every night and will keep my legs shaved for all the sex we will have weekly." Ha! He wishes. I didn't really say that but I do appreciate my optimism with this next real quote. "I want to take your hand and explore the world". I guess we have done a little of that but I sure hope we can up the ante the next 20 years. "I'll try to hike the fourteeners, ski the bumps, scale the cliffs, scuba dive and whatever is next" (autistic daughter, brother with a TBI, good jobs, bad jobs, no jobs). I have been a terrible wife in this regard. Brooke is an avid outdoorsman who loves to mountain bike and get his heart rate pumping. I'm more of a Zen yoga or pilates type. Mountain biking the narrow paths scare me and though I love a good hike, fourtneers are an all day commitment. "Ski the bumps" had to have been a joke or I was overly optimistic that I'd want to ski more as we got older. I'm a beach girl at heart and prefer sand, sun, and ocean waves to snow and lots of gear. In the early 1990's, we quickly realized that I could ski the blues, he'd ski the black mogul runs and we'd meet at the lift to ride up together. Then we created our maniac snowboarder Jack and I have easily handed over the "ski the bumps" torch to him. "Scale the cliffs" rock climbing disappeared when we had kids. "Scuba diving" needs to come back into our lives as that means we are at an ocean somewhere and I am in heaven.

I like this part "And when there are troubles, I will stand with you. Where there are storms, we will weather them together." And there have been storms. Glad we didn't see those coming on our perfect wedding day. Some really dark, hazardous ones and my man has been my rock through them all. Brooke is a man of his word. He is a hard worker. He is loyal to his family and he would do anything for us. I admire him for these traits and I don't give him enough daily credit for them. Many days all I can see (and hear) is his loud swishy swallowing and eating, his shuffling in his slippers across the floor, seeing his unorganized desk and work bench piled high with crap that only he knows where items are, his grumpy end of day exhaustion that we get to live with but everyone else gets to see his funny, and how I am the only one that brings up stuff that we need to work on, which makes me feel like the bad guy. Granted we need to work on communicating better as even I suck at that. Lastly, he is not a dreamer. Any time I fantasize about a trip to Europe or a cool home addition project, he just shoots it down with a "we can't afford that". I know that we can't now but I love to be able to dream and hope for and wish for. I want a partner that will play that game with me not feel threatened as the provider about it. And as I re-read this I'm kind of shocked to see how short a list I have after 20 years together. It could be A LOT worse. And most of the items are MY freaky hypersensitive ear I.need.to.be.medicated issues.

Since this is my blog and Brooke will only read about this when he gets home from work tonight, before he takes me out for a delicious splurge dinner at the Broadmoor (he didn't say "we can't afford that!"), I'll just hypothesize what he wants to see more of in our next 20 years and what Kathy traits bug him. He wants me to exercise more. He'd love for me to go mountain biking, skiing, hiking with him. He'd love for me to look good in a bikini again. He'd love to actually watch the same TV with me instead of him watching sports on one and me watching HGTV, The Bachelor, or a Bravo show on another. He'd like me to drink less wine. I know that I need to drink less wine but maybe if I were happier, I wouldn't drink as much. :) He'd love more intimacy. I'd love that too but I define intimacy with the mental/heart connection instead (i.e. we need to talk...to each other). He'd like me to complain less about having to cook three.meals.a.day. He'd like me to take over stressing about the bills. He'd like me to get a high paying job. He'd like for me to be more supportive of his high stress job. Gosh, I can think of A LOT more reasons he'd want out of this marriage after 20 years :)

Though our marriage could use a lot of work, I am proud to say that where we have done a great job together as a team has been in creating two great kids. We co-parent well. We are a united front. Where one of us is weak, the other is strong. Where Brooke can help with Jack's math (I bowed out in 5th grade), I can navigate the  school autism stuff. When Molly's issues make me crazy, Brooke whisks her out of the house for a hike. When Jack is learning to mountain bike big terrain with his dad, I drive them to the waaaay up trail head so that they can have fun biking down. Same with skiing; they get dropped at the base of the mountain instead of having to navigate parking. We have perfected the art of the tag team. When one has kid duty, the other gets to go do something fun: book club, girls weekend away, lunch with a friend, yoga class, etc for me. For Brooke, he is off on a mountain bike ride or day skiing or a random night out with the boys. We are good at this and yet we have fallen into a rut. We don't have regular date nights and we need that. It's time to reinvent our relationship and I think that the 20 year mark is a great time to do it.

So cheers to making it for 20 years Brooke Bell!! I knew when we met that you would make an excellent father and it's truly one of the reasons that I said "Yes". I knew that you would always be up for adventures and fun and that drew me in too. You still make me laugh all these years later, and I hope that on our hot date night tonight, we can talk and plan for how we make the next 20 years even better!! I know that we can do it. I love you!

The happy couple: June 18, 1994

I haven't worn hose since that day :)

Ahh Summer time.... is ALREADY making me crazy!

It's been 17 days since Molly finished her junior year. 17 loooong days. I'll be honest....I've GOT to spend this next year creating a life for her post high school that doesn't entail her hanging around the house looking at me for interaction and for me to create her fun for the rest of her life. You will have to admit me to the looney bin if that happens. I also will go crazy if I have to witness her OCD pattern of taking out the trash every hour even if it's only 1/4 full, refilling Tucker's food 5 times a day, and if she dumps one of our drinks that we've only had 2 sips from again....one of us is going to LOSE it. And that crazy person might be her very patient brother Jack. I rarely buy soda for the kids, but do so on special occasions, like recently when friends were coming for dinner to celebrate the last day of school. So a can of Mountain Dew is pure gold for my 15 year old son. Imagine taking only one sip, setting it down to go into the other room for a minute, and when you return, your full can of nectar has already been dumped down the sink by our recycler extraordinaire and the can has been efficiently put into the recyle bin. I might have had the same head popping off reaction with my freshly made rum and pineapple juice cocktail that got dumped. The twisting of the knife in the wound was that I had no more juice to mix another drink! I do appreciate her efficiency but it's tipped over to the extreme. Time to nip the behavior. It's always nipping behaviors in this home.

Jack successfully nipped another recent pattern where she'd go into his bathroom first thing in the morning, use his towel to wipe off the counter tops and toilet seat (nice!), and then neatly rehang the towel. Yes, you can picture the next thing that happened....he'd sleepily wake up to get ready for school, stumble into the bathroom to take a shower, and then USE the nasty towel to dry himself oblivious to what had happened prior. I'm not sure who figured out that she was doing this, but Jack quickly created a way to test if she had been in there or not by hanging his towel in a weird way that she would never replicate. In the morning, if it was hanging neatly, he knew that she had been down and tidied up. He then would go and get a clean towel before taking his shower.

Have I mentioned the verbal stim and how it's making me crazy? I know that I have as it got a little FB conversation going and maybe stifled my future sharing abilities a bit. A mean-ish slap down had me rethinking this whole blog thing. But I've recovered and will persevere. Not everyone will like what I have to say and that is OK. So back to the verbal stim. Picture this: Upon entering Molly's bedroom, your ears will be assaulted with sounds from a variety of sources. She has her TV on the Disney Channel, she has her school iPad playing a 3 minute free video clip off of Disney, and then she has her home iPad blaring music. She has the little itouch that died last month sitting there too and she will pretend that that is her phone. I can't stay in there with the loud assault of too many confusing sounds on my ears. It's mass confusion and how can she possibly know what she is listening too? When the 3 minute video ends, she restarts it or finds another freebie. I think that she has to make her verbal aaaAAHHHHHH to cover the confusion? I KNOW that I need to remove at least one of those iPads.....okay, okay...I'll go do that now. She spends too many hours alone in her room and though that makes it easy for me, I also have horrible guilt about it. I'd rather she had something meaningful to do with her time. Like read a book. Or maybe sit in silence and meditate. I think her brain might like that and thank me.

What's hard with a special needs child is that I can't say "Go find a friend", "Go hang at the park", "Go play outside"or even "Go play X Box" (something Jack has NEVER heard me say :)). She isn't like her 17 year old peers driving around going to the movies or to the pool or just chatting at each others homes. EVERYTHING that she does entails ME, or Brooke, or Jack. When you have little kids, you are used to being that person that hauls the kid around and meets their every need. But you also know that your kid will grow up and start having a lot more freedom from you (by 5th grade even!!). We don't have that. I'm scared to think that I never will! I still make every meal for Molly. Every meal. Maybe this is why I'm sick of cooking?

So the key to both Molly's happiness and mine is to keep her actively engaged. She loves hiking, so one of us a day tries to get her out on the trails. She loves to swim, so weather permitting, we try and get to the pool. So there, we have 3  to 4 hours of our day taken care of.....that leaves a lot of down time. Too much down time. 9 hours of summer school per week starts this week and having that schedule will be awesome. Molly LOVES to use her brain, have a routine, and school is the perfect place to push her. Tuesday...please get here fast!

                                                                               

Overlooking "The punch bowl" in Aspen on our way home from the Special Olympics swim meet. Note the Gold medal and ribbon. And the twins. :)