Happy Father's Day!

I am so grateful for my husband.  He's the man of my dreams, and the best father to our children I could ask for.  (Have I mentioned that we're having another baby?  I know it's been a while since I've blogged... We've got a little boy arriving at the end of October.)

In honor of Bob, I'm posting this video that he loves.  He quotes it year-round.  Yes, he's living and loving the dad life...

Nine Years Ago

...

I married Bob.

July 7, 2002.

I blogged a little about the wedding weekend last year. And followed it up with a (not comprehensive) list of why I married him.

This year, I'll show you something Bob's doing for me.

I've learned that one of my love languages is home improvement. Bob's speaking my language:


In case that's unrecognizable in the picture, Bob's working on our downstairs half bath. Our friend Fritz has been gutting it, and now Bob's working on eliminating the texture from the walls. (We really love smooth old plaster walls.) And he's working with a toddler in his lap, who desperately wants to be involved.

I love this man.

Happy anniversary, Bob. Nine years, and I pray for many, many more.

Remembering

Nine years ago today, I was getting ready for my Pastoral Counseling class (I was a junior in college), listening to the radio, when I heard the news of the plane crashing into the World Trade Center. It wasn't too long before I heard them reporting it again. (I was only halfway paying attention, and I didn't realize it was a SECOND plane.)

The enormity of it was lost on me at the time. Thinking it was just one plane, I assumed it was a fluke, an accident.

Once I got to class, one of my classmates asked the rest of us if we'd heard about the terrorist attack. I thought to myself, Geez, this is how rumors get started! Something goes wrong with one plane, and next thing you know, it's a terrorist attack!

Oops.

I spent a good part of the day in front of the TV, and as the day wore on, I couldn't shake my fear that something had happened to Bob. You see, he was living in Brooklyn & working in Manhattan at the time. I emailed him. And waited. And then I called his apartment. And waited. (Phone calls were not getting through. The lines were completely swamped.) Finally, in mid-evening, I got an email saying that he was fine. He'd walked his friend Shira home, and he would call me when he got back to Brooklyn.

I was so grateful. He called, we talked, and when we got off the phone, I finally allowed myself to feel the fear that I'd been trying not to face. What if something had happened to him? It was that day that I thought, "Maybe my sister is right. Am I in love with Bob?"

(She had asked me that, point-blank, in the spring of that year.)

At that point, I'd known Bob for about ten years.

I'd never once thought that marrying Bob could be an option. I had no idea he might have feelings for me.

(As my dad pointed out later, any fool could see I had feelings for Bob.)

Perhaps as a result of Bob's post-traumatic stress, things were said more directly and more quickly than they might otherwise have been. September 11th was a Tuesday, I believe. By Saturday, our cards were on the table, so to speak.

We began dating (long-distance), and were married in July 2002, following a (suspiciously short, apparently!) six-week engagement.

On September 11th each year, I am grateful again that Bob was not near the Twin Towers that morning. I think of my classmate in that Pastoral Counseling class whose father HAD been in the Twin Towers that morning, and who was missing for weeks before they found him in a New Jersey hospital.

I grieve for the families who lost loved ones.

And I wince at the prejudice & hatred aimed at Muslims. Surely we can agree that prejudice & hatred do no one any good?

Chicago!

So for Christmas, Jon & Tomo gave us a gift card to the Four Seasons Hotel, with the hope that we could get away to Chicago for a child-free vacation sometime.

I began hoping we could go for our anniversary in July, but the timing just wasn't right. We ended up scheduling the trip for about two weeks later, when we could go for a Monday-to-Tuesday, and my parents could come up and watch the kids. ("Watch." Heh heh. More like "chase." Or "feed and change and bathe and read books endlessly to.")

I felt free the minute we got on the road. Bob got a little annoyed when we hit some construction on the interstate (or the InterNates, as Caroline calls both the internet and the interstate), but I enjoyed it all. Vacation! No deadlines! Just rest, sightseeing, luxury.

I will admit I felt a bit like an impostor checking into the Four Seasons. My family has always stayed in places that are as cheap as possible, and this is really far on the other side of the spectrum. Everything about the place was beautiful and luxurious. Even the maintenance men wore bow ties.

When we got to our room, we discovered that they'd upgraded us ... as I'd suspected they might. When I booked the room, they asked me if we were celebrating any special occasion, and I told them we were celebrating our anniversary. Sure enough, when we opened the door, this is what we saw:

Yes, champagne chilling in ice, chocolate-dipped strawberries, and a card addressed to us, from the Hotel Manager, wishing us many more years of happiness.

Our suite was gorgeous. A marble-floored foyer, two marble bathrooms, a living room, a long hallway with three closets, and a big beautiful bedroom. (With a mattress so comfortable that I now want to buy the Four Seasons Mattress. I'm pleased to learn that you can!) And our rooms looked out to Lake Michigan.

We walked to Millenium Park, past all the shopping on Michigan Avenue, caught a bus to Hyde Park, and walked around the [BEAUTIFUL] campus of the University of Chicago. We ate dinner in a popular little restaurant there, where the waiters wore t-shirts that said "OBAMA EATS HERE." The food was nothing to write home about, but we had a great time. We caught a bus back to the hotel and crashed for the night.

The next morning, we ate breakfast in the Seasons Restaurant. They seated us at a little table for two by the windows overlooking Michigan Avenue. Our food (and my hot chocolate) was excellent, and we lingered on and on. Our waiter was wonderful, exactly what you want in a waiter, and we had a great time. I don't know when I've had such a relaxing breakfast experience.

After breakfast, we headed to the Apple store, where Bob checked out the iPhone 4, and I looked at all sorts of things. We'd seen a young boy walking with his family on Michigan Avenue, cradling his new iMac in his arms, and Bob couldn't resist a trip there. He could have spent a lot more time there.

We headed back to the hotel, packed up, and checked out. It was sad to leave; there was so much more to explore, and we loved the hotel, and I could have stayed & stayed. (Well, no. I could not afford to stay and stay.) We also were missing our children.

It was such a great time, and now I get it. Before staying there, I did not understand why anyone would pay so much more to stay in a "fancy" hotel. I get it now. Everything about it was perfect and restful, and the service was fantastic. I loved it.

Why I Married Him

Yesterday, when I was at work with Bob for a short time, he gave two different people two different reasons for why he married me.*

It made me create my own list.

I married Bob because:

• I love him. (That's the quick obvious answer. And true, of course.)
• He makes me laugh. My family sets a pretty tight boundary around what's funny and what's not, and Bob is always pushing past those lines. I love it.
• He's very capable. Our dining room table? He built it. My desk? He built it. The lamps in our living room? He built, wired, assembled them. He can paint, he can design, he's an engineer.
• He is not as introverted as I am. I really love that he can engage in meaningful conversation with just about anyone.
• In our house, I'm the one interested in cars, and he's pickier about paint colors. It works for us. Of the cars we've purchased together (a Honda Civic, a Ford F-150, a Honda Odyssey, and 2 Toyota Corollas), I selected each of them but MY FIRST CAR, the Civic. He chose that one, convinced that I would love a stick shift, though I could not drive one. It pains me to admit that he was right. If I ever come across a minivan with a manual transmission, I'll snap that baby up.
• He cares. About the environment, about our family, about the church, about politics, about other people.
• I knew he'd be a great dad. And he is.
• He really values that I stay home with the kids, despite the obvious fact that having a second income would make a fairly significant impact on our finances.

I could go on, but I bet he'll be annoyed that I've written this much. He's not a sentimental guy.

*He told one person at work that he married me for my handwriting. He told another person it was because I was so strong. (Which reminds me of when we arm-wrestled for the first time. Have I told that story yet?)

Eight Years Ago

...

I married Bob. July 7, 2002.

And eight years ago yesterday evening, I was lost in Yonkers. I'd dashed out to find a nail place to get my manicure redone. (I'm so not the mani/pedi type ... well, not the mani type, at least. I could get used to pedis.) Anyway, my sister had treated me to a mani/pedi about a week before the wedding, and in trying to drive home (from the salon that very day) (in a truck with a manual transmission, which I really couldn't drive at that point), I messed up the fingernail of my left ring finger. Go figure.

So I had the job redone a week later on July 6th, but then (maybe due to one-way roads? I don't know. I usually have a really good "bump of direction," as my family calls it.) I got lost. I could not figure out how to get back. I think the Metro North Railroad played a role in it, too. I was on the wrong side of the tracks, but couldn't find a way to get across them. I finally stopped and asked for directions at a cell phone store, but the employees were too busy talking amongst themselves to bother with what could be their next customer... They finally deigned to address me, and then, with much impatience, told me how to get back to the SVOTS chapel, where I was currently late for my own wedding rehearsal. By the time I got there, I was in tears. Of course, it was no big deal. They were hardly going to start without me...

I don't remember much about the rehearsal, but then we all headed down to Central Park, where we had a picnic with Chinese take-out. Lots of fun. I wish I could remember the fortune from my fortune cookie. It was hilariously a propos (how do you make an accent grave, for French words??), saying something reassuring about "tomorrow night."

Then Bob headed back to his apartment in Brooklyn, and I headed back to Yonkers for the night.

Does anyone sleep well the night before the wedding? I didn't. It was just so hard to imagine what my life was going to be like. I was 21, still in college, moving from Florida to NYC, marrying a man I'd known for 10 years, but dated for (maybe?) 10 months.

Big, big changes.

The best decisions of my life.

No regrets.