Seventeen!

We picked the Saturday of Memorial Day for our wedding not because it was a holiday weekend, but because it was the only weekend in a three month window in which both the venue we wanted was available and we didn't have other commitments. When Dr. BB told his oldest brother the date, his brother said (and this is a direct quote) "It's a holiday weekend - I'm not sure I'll be able to make it." 

A few weeks ago, we got an invitation in the mail to my oldest niece's (the daughter of this same brother) graduation party on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, we sort of laughed and the first thing my husband said was, "well, it's a holiday weekend - I wonder if we'll be able to make it." 

Here's the annual photo, friends! It was too cold for me to be wearing that dress, in truth, but I refused to wear pants. Or real shoes. The ground we are standing on is filled with goose shit, directly to the left of us is an outhouse, and in front of us is the pavilion where the graduation party was happening. But I made my sister-in-law take a bunch of photos of us anyway. Even though we all probably will end up with E. coli infections. 

The traditional gift for 17 years is furniture and the description was something about being sturdy and dependable and I nearly cried. Why can't the traditional gift be something like a musical instrument (happy!) or silk (sexy!) or a dog? The modern gift is shells and while we tried desperately to fill up at a Shell station, we just didn't run into one. 

If anyone's asking, you should know that we had a fun day listening to Counting Crows, worrying about the dog's stool (seriously, don't get a pet unless you want to talk about poop all day long), and thinking about how very little my niece was when we got married and now SHE CAN VOTE. 

Here's to seventeen more years.

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For my fellow Americans, how are you spending your long weekend? For my non-American friends, are you doing anything fun on this lovely Monday?

Rhabdomyolysis or Bust

I am tired. I am chronically exhausted. And Friday night all I wanted to do was come home and go to bed. Alas, I got home and had to walk the dog and then make dinner and then eat dinner. After dinner, I walked the dog (because she is still on edge about fireworks and won't go out if it's even close to sunset) and then I started getting the process of what I thought was going to be going to bed. 

But Dr. BB's left arm was swollen and it was super noticeable and there was no real cause for the swelling. We did a brief phone consult with my FIL, a retired family physician, and he suggested we go to urgent care/ER just to get it looked at. I sighed, knowing that my early bedtime was not happening. Dr. BB drove us over the river to the hospital

(Ours is a rural hospital that is independently owned. I have no idea how it's still in business, but the employees there are the happiest I've ever met in health care.)

and we were giggling the entire time because we thought we were overreacting about a silly thing. Not a silly thing when he skipped triage and was booked into a room right away. The ER doc decided, literally because it was not busy, to run some blood tests. Turns out he has exercise-induced rhabdomyolysis and normal CK levels are between 30-200 and his was close to 12000. 

The thing about rhabdo is that it happens to people who exercise too much or too hard. I've only ever heard of rhabdo in the context of long-distance athletes, including runners and cyclists, and when some Iowa football players did a squat off that landed a bunch of them in the ER. It's also common in folks with a BMI of 35+, either because of obesity or because of musculature. You know who you don't usually see it in? Healthy 45-year-old men who weigh less than I did when I graduated from high school. On Tuesday he did a lifting practice he's done dozens of times before. On Wednesday he did a lifting practice (different body part). On Thursday he did a what he called an easy tennis lesson. On Friday he was in the ER and if we'd been twelve hours later, the doctors were pretty sure he would have been in kidney failure. 

(Several doctors have talked to him about the importance of rest and recovery. I honestly don't think he did anything unusual or out of the ordinary for him - or me, for that matter. We are both befuddled.)

Meanwhile, the ER doc gets him admitted and the hospitalist comes down to the ER to check in with him and as soon as he walks in the door, he starts laughing. He was expecting a college football player and he got my husband. Jokes all around except my husband was NOT laughing because this is a Big Deal.  

Anyway, he's a weird case. His numbers are not coming down as fast as the doctor would like, so he's still in the hospital and we don't know if he'll come home this afternoon or tomorrow. One of the doctors he saw over the weekend even seemed to indicate he could be in the hospital until Wednesday, which would be very, very bad because the hospital is very, very boring for a guy who actually feels fine, but is rather confined in his movements because he is hooked up to a constant IV drip. 

Oh, but somehow this has become about my husband.

ME! I'm so fucking tired. I am not sleeping well. Saturday night there was a terrible storm and my girls were already out of sorts because Dr. BB wasn't here and I ended up sleeping on the couch because someone has to comfort Hannah. I'm doing all the chores and bringing my husband food in the hospital. 

Oh, I guess I should stop complaining. At least I'm allowed to come home. 

So I guess this is a PSA. Exercise is bad, just like I always thought!

What about Zelda?! She needs love, too. And someone to murder.

Have you ever had rhabdo? My husband has never spent a night in the hospital before - have you? How many nights were you in the hospital?

Sweet Sixteen

 

Yesterday was our sixteenth wedding anniversary. Woot woot!

It was also a bit of a shitshow (a never-ending flat tire, rain, travel), but that's not going to stop us from taking our annual photo in our driveway. I'm not going to lie, friends, the idea was that we used to go places to take this photo, but in the last few years, it's been a driveway photo. Don't judge us. (Dr. BB: Can we take this photo next week? Me: Do you even know who I am?)

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Indulge me with a bit of a trip down memory lane of some of these photos. 

May 2008 - wedding photos!

May 2009 - wedding playlist

May 2010 - two years

May 2011

May 2012 - Four More Years!

May 2013 - Five Years - Apparently I used to be really anxious about my face on the blog. How times have changed.

May 2014

May 2015 - Thunderclouds. This might be my favorite anniversary photo ever. 

May 2016

May 2017

May 2020

May 2022 - This photo just shows that I've had these same glasses for two years and I hate them, so maybe I should get some new eyewear?

May 2023 - Fifteen years.

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May is my absolute favorite month - lots of family birthdays, including Dr. BB's, our wedding anniversary, the end of the semester means my husband becomes a little bit less stressed, and the weather has officially changed to livable. What's your favorite month?

7.25 Relationship - Fifteen Years

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the twenty-fifth day of the month is "Relationship."

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When we first started dating, Dr. BB had one lone grey chest hair. We used to joke about it. And then suddenly there were three grey hairs. And now? Now most of them are grey. I used to have a normal neck, but now it's all sagging and wrinkled. 

Last week, we were preparing a recipe with lots of steps. It's a recipe we've made dozens of times and we have it down to a science exactly who does what and when. We do this almost entirely in silence. The communication is me dumping the stir-fried veggies into the blender and him knowing to heat up the grill and turn off the oven. The choreography of our routine is flawless.  

Not to brag, but we have grocery shopping down to a science. The list organized by section, the knowledge of who takes the cart down what aisle (I take it down the egg aisle, while he navigates the cheese aisle without it), the speediness of him scanning items while I bag them. We are the winners of the imaginary game of Supermarket Sweep we are playing.

Yesterday was our fifteenth wedding anniversary. Fifteen years. 

In some ways, it doesn't feel like fifteen years. That's more than a third of my life, but it still seems like I learn something new about my husband every day. But in other ways, it does feel like we have a relationship shorthand that comes from being together for a long time. The wordless looks. The silent understanding of who is going to do what chore. The quiet contentment of knowing exactly what the other will order at a coffee shop. The glare that happens when someone skips a song on the playlist curated by the other. 

I love my husband. I love being married. Here's to the rest of our lives together.

5.7 Contact - Photo Text

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the seventh day of the month is "Contact." 

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We had not communicated very well in the morning and I had to leave the house to go pick up a prescription for the cat from the vet's office, but Dr. BB had not taken any house keys with him. I put a set in the garage (which he could get into because he has a garage door opener) and sent him a text message with a photo of the keys.

All of our contact is through texting when Dr. BB is at work. I just checked and it looks like the last time we actually had a conversation on the phone was in December. Do you text, call, or video chat on a regular day?

4.25 Relationship - Tiny Marriage Traditions (Mostly Parenthetical Tangents)

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the twenty-fifth day of the month is "Relationship."

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Kaelyn recently had a post about how we're all basically just mediocre and that's great because not everyone needs to be or can be super successful and what is success anyway as long as we're kind and caring and vote for the best candidates? And it really resonated with me because I mostly just want to be the kind of person who is left alone to read my books, walk my dog, and talk to my husband about whether or not we have enough wrapping paper for the birthday presents we have to wrap. I don't want to be the person who is in charge and is super competent and makes plans and does everything.

And I sort of think that way about my marriage, too.

I adore my husband. I think he's definitely more than mediocre in intelligence, he's hard-working, he's patient, and he's creative in coming up with solutions to problems. He's also forgetful, a tiny bit reckless, resents authority figures in a way that makes me nervous that he has regular interactions with police officers,

(For a very small window of time, he was on a committee with the chief of the campus police. There was an email exchange in which the police chief shortened by husband's name with a different nickname than my husband uses, so my husband responded in kind by shortening the police chief's first name that he also doesn't use in the reply email. It was all passive aggressive and HILARIOUS. Because the police chief is a bit of a power-hungry tool.)

and has food preferences that drive me absolutely batty.

But we work well together, forgive each other's foibles, and are the same page about the big things, like how to care for the girls, finances, and how we spend time. But it's just an average marriage, right? We're not winning couple of the year for our great couple's trips, our system of communication, or posting great matching outfit posts on Instagram. We're just happy to be with one another and that makes it perfect for us, but we're not shaking up the world with some new form of marriage that will revolutionize the world.

It's February and I just checked that I have never written on this blog about our Valentine's Day tradition and how it came to be and how it represents the absolute mediocrity of who we are.

The year we were engaged, I was working three jobs and really was taxed beyond my mental ability. I sort of forgot it was Valentine's Day until I got home and somehow realized that I hadn't considered a gift or a card or anything for Dr. BB. Now, I sort of thought that anything that happened that year we were engaged would set the tone for the rest of relationship and I knew that February is depressing as hell for me and if we skipped celebrating Valentine's Day for the rest of our lives because I forgot in 2008, I would regret it. 

So after we ate dinner, I dug around in my crate of crafting supplies 

(My mom is a big crafter and is constantly disappointed that I don't really do many crafty things. She's occasionally impressed with my sewing projects, but generally my sister is the one who does the crafting. ANYWAY. Because of my mom's influence/gifts, I have a lot of paper, stickers, felt, punches, stamps, inkpads, colored pencils, markers, and just general crafting supplies. Don't get me started on the number of buttons and random beads I own. I store them all in a Budweiser crate that I also got from my mom for this purpose. Why Budweiser? No one knows.)

and found construction paper and a Sharpie and I sat down at the coffee table while we watched a DVD of Buffy and I made him a card.

And now every year on Valentine's Day, we sit at the table after dinner and make each other cards. One time we were traveling on Valentine's Day and I even brought some paper and markers with us (we borrowed a pair of scissors from the front desk - I am not even joking) and we made them in our hotel room. It's our tiny way of saying "this holiday is about love and I love you." 

Dr. BB's 2023 creation for me. Pretty minimalist, but hilarious.

Obviously, neither of us is a great artist, but the thought behind the cards and the time we spend together making them is always memorable. 

Two other tiny traditions in our house:

1) On our wedding anniversary, we always take a photo of the two of us. These photos vary in quality and whether or not I have brushed my hair, but if no other photo exists of the two of us in a given year, we'll always have our anniversary photo for the holiday card.

2) For Christmas, we open our presents before we travel anywhere else. Just the two of us (and Zelda who likes to play in the boxes and Hannah who LOVES to destroy the wrapping paper).  

Nothing super exciting or above average. But absolutely wonderful.

What's a tiny tradition in your house that you'll never give up?

Me and My Dude

Fourteen years ago, this guy and I got hitched. It seems both a long time ago and like it happened in the blink of an eye.

Here's to many more, maybe even one where we can take a photo somewhere more exotic than in our driveway.

Edited to add (I've had the blog longer than I've been married):

Wedding pictures!!!
Wedding related content: Beware

Snapshots

Want to see some of our engagement photos?

Fancy Tea Ignored

For Christmas, I put some fancy Harney and Sons Pumpkin Spice tea on my wishlist and one of my kind friends gave it to me. It was something I had been reading about (I do a lot of reading about beverages to replace caffeinated beverages) and was so excited that I would have a second option for my morning tea. I generally drink Celestial Seasonings Cinnamon Apple Spice, which I can just get at the grocery store like a common plebe.

(To be completely honest with you, they have nearly identical ingredients and taste very similar. I'm not saying you should just buy Celestial Seasonings, but you should probably just buy Celestial Seasonings.)

Anyway, every morning my husband, who is the designated tea maker in the house, asks me what kind of tea I want. I generally just says "the regular kind," because, you know, the fancy tea has a limited supply, but if it's a day when I need a pick-me-up or it's special in some way, I'll request the fancy tea. Yesterday was the MLK Day holiday, which I had off from work and this week is going to be a bit crazy with a combo of dentist and doctor's appointments, so I requested fancy tea.

In our morning routine, I take the dog out and feed her while Dr. BB makes tea, empties the dishwasher, and feeds the cat.  Then we clean the cat's chin (she has kitty acne), then we give the dog her medicine, AND then the people get breakfast. 

So it wasn't until after all this was done and I took a sip of my tea to realize that my husband had not made me fancy tea - he had completely ignored my request and made regular tea.  Hence MLK Day is apparently NOT a special day at all.

Do you have special beverages to start hard/exciting days?