Magic and Fairy Dust

Something about this quote from last week’s epsiode of Grey’s Anatomy just really hit home for me so I felt compelled to share.

“Okay. I know this is the first time on a Peeds rotation for some of you, not for others. But I wanted you to understand that I run my Peeds unit a little differently. This is not general surgery in miniature. These are tiny humans. These are children. They believe in magic, they play pretend, there is fairy dust in their IV bags and they cross their fingers and they make wishes and that makes them more resilient than adults. They recover faster, survive worse. they believe. In Peeds, we have miracles and magic and in Peeds, anything is possible.”

I believe in magic and fairy dust, too. Or at least I want to believe. I like to think we aren’t all world-hardened and embittered. I like to cross my fingers, make wishes and believe in miracles. Even if you can’t see it, I do believe that anything is possible and dreams do come true.

100 Days of Marriage…and Counting

This week we flew uneventfully past the 100 days of marriage mark. Gosh. Where have the first three, pushing four, months of marriage gone? For me they’ve been all about working on the new site for The Sweetest Occasion, traveling (I’m in Chicago right now visiting Ami!), sifting through the seemingly endless stacks of wedding gifts, getting thank you cards written and in the mail, and dreaming big about things to come in the future – including possibly a house if we can swing it and find a place we love in the next year or so.

So. To answer the age old question, “does it feel different?” Yes. And no. No in the sense that I didn’t wake up to butterflies and rainbows and the stuff cheesy chick flicks are made of the morning I first woke up with a wedding band. Our relationship is largely the same, the good and the bad, and nothing revolutionary has been altered with the signing of a marriage license. Yes in the sense that now there is an extra sense of contentment, an even deeper understanding of partnership and foundation. Oh. And our coffee table is no longer consumed with the scraps of DIY projects and empty rolls of Xyron adhesive. (Which is a huge bonus of marriage if you consult my inner clutter-hating neat freak.)

Oh! Most notably, I finally have healthcare coverage for the first time in years. It’s definitely good to be the spouse of a teacher with the benefits that come from being an employee of New York State – after years of worrying and paying for healthcare out of pocket, I officially have great coverage again and that’s a huge relief. I’ll save my rant about the cluster that is our healthcare system for another post, but for now I can tell you simply that I’m happy to finally be covered again.

So, with that said – how did you spend your first 100 days of marriage? Did they feel any different to you or was it status quo?

Remember

This post was written on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Another three years have passed since the day I wrote this post, and still I find myself incapable of shaking the fog that envelopes my mind and my heart every year on this day. I remember last year, an incredible post written by Meg from A Practical Wedding. This post. In a few simple sentences she stirred up so much emotion for me and ultimately, appreciation. Appreciation for life, for friends, for family, for not having lost someone that day, for all the years I lived in quiet innocence before our existence was forever changed. At any rate, here is my own September 11th story. It isn’t overly unique or dramatic, but in sharing it I know I’ll continue to remember and I believe we all owe it ourselves as individuals and as a nation to remember always the way we felt on that day and in the weeks that followed…

I ancticipate that for much of our generation, “where were you on September 11th?” will continue to be a question asked long into the future although perhaps not with great frequency. My 9/11 story isn’t all that spectacular but I will share it anyway…

On September 11, 2001 I had been a college student for a just a few short weeks and at the time the first plane hit I was making my daily commute to campus for a 9:00 class. I heard about the first plane hit on the radio during the drive. I was listening to a station where the DJs are notorious for playing elaborate jokes and weaving incredible hoaxes. I was pretty shocked as I listened to the DJs announce the plane hit and kind of dismissed it as a sick joke.

By the time I got to campus I had a sense that it probably wasn’t a joke because there were strange gatherings of people clustered here and there with heads bowed in deep discussion. As I entered the main building on campus there was a very uncomfortable buzz about the place that thickened as I entered the academic wing of the building where a lot of people were gathered before going into class. The door to the classroom I was expected to be in was locked and a group of my classmates sat outside. Many students at JCC are in the military or spouses of military servicemen because of my home town’s close proximity to a prominent military base in Upstate NY and therefore it wasn’t unusal that one of my classmates was there in unifrom. What was very unusual was that when he overheard my classmates discussing what had happened [apparently he hadn't heard yet] he got a look of panic in his eyes and quickly lifted his ruck onto his back. “Tell Professor Johnson I had to go!” he said as he took off in a run down the hall. I started after him until word started to spread through the building about the second plane hit and with it, all classes were cancelled for the day.

Making my way downstairs I met up with two of my close friends and we spent a couple of hours in the auditorium watching the live news coverage with much of the campus community. We then spent a good part of the day at one of my friend’s houses trying to come to terms with what was happening. We were young, only 18, and to us this was unfathomable. Later in the day we went to Friendly’s for dinner. We were trying to just keep moving forward and not become one of those people glued to the tv reliving over and over the occurances of that morning. When we walked into the place nearly the entire staff was in the dining room and the manager had brought a small 13″ television in and set it up at one of the booths so patrons could continue to watch the news coverage. I think that is when I truly realized that this was a huge deal, a lot bigger than anything I could have imagined. When I showed up to work later and found out we were closing for the night this knowledge was confirmed and I went home and spent the night quietly in front of the tv.

The aftermath of Septmeber 11th in my community was perhaps different than in most others. Fort Drum is one of the most prominent military bases in the nation. As soon as the terrorist attacks occured our community became very aware of what this meant. The base went on lockdown nearly immediately and surrounding the gates the presence of MPs was at a level I had never experienced. It wasn’t long before many of the area soldiers were deployed to Afghanistan and left behind frightened spouses, children and friends. Among those to go was the husband of a good friend I worked with. I spent a year watching her mourn September 11th and suffer the affects it had had on her life. As proud as she was of her husband, as happy as she was to have him alive, the idea of what might happen was never far from her mind as he missed their first Christmas together and eventually their first anniversary. All around us people were going through the same things where in other communities I believe people largely moved on. Now in Watertown there is a constant ebb and flow as soldiers continue to deploy and return from Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s always with us there. It’s there in the eyes of the children who have parents at war and in the grief of widows, widowers, friends and family as soldiers return home in flag-draped coffins. For those who say 9/11 is a thing of the past, I assure you, it is not.

Snapdragons

For some reason I am now completely in love with snapdragons after seeing the ones I bought to take with me to the baby shower last weekend. They are so pretty and so sculptural. If you bought them wholesale, would be they be terribly expensive? I think they could make great flowers for DIY wedding centerpieces. Just saying.

Loving the Journey

A few weeks ago, I decided to visit my old blog. My old old blog. The blog that predated weddings and getting married and becoming a complete blog fanatic. It was, in fact, the first blog that stuck with me and it saw me through some rough times during the year Mike and were doing that whole long distance thing, which was also the year I lost my beloved maternal grandmother. I’ve toyed around with the idea of deleting that blog, but somehow I can’t bring myself to part with those random musings, those random moments that were often nothing more or less than an outpouring of emotion – happiness, frustration, glee, hope, confusion. I had no idea at that time just how completely blogging would change my life – which is not to be dramatic, it’s simply true. With that said, there were some really great posts and one in particular made me smile so I thought I’d share it with you here. Roughly eighteen months later, I can tell you that on March 30, 2008, I basically had it all figured out…

“I’ve come to realize that the only thing we can truly expect in life is the unexpected. Expectations, in one fashion or another, inevitably fail to come to fruition with great regularity, and for that reason one should never claim to know the ending of the story when they are still in the first chapters of the book. Never has this been more true than in my own life. There were things I fully planned on happening that never came to pass. The were other things I would have bet my life on never happening that unfolded in a series of unanticipated events that dramatically altered the course of my life forever. Occurrences I would have believed would break me, paved a road to a greater happiness than I had ever previously experienced and in the process, set me free from self-imposed constraints I never realized existed. A year ago, two years ago, three years ago…I never would have imagined I would be where I am today with regards to life, love, career, family nor geography. Perhaps with some irony, I could not be happier to be where I am, and that has served to make me keenly aware of just how uncertain life is, both in beautiful and tragic ways. This weekend marked a major turning point in the direction my life will go from this point forward, and it brings me to the blissful realization that we should always expect the unexpected, and that we should love the journey no matter how unpredictable.”

Amen to that.

And what, pray tell, was going on the weekend of March 30, 2008? We had just picked out my engagement ring, shown here with my custom wedding band…