Today my lovey love love-boo boo bear-sweet baby angel dinosaur face turns 27. I’ve known him since we were both 21. It’s crazy how life can go by fast and slow at the same time. I’m so happy that I’m your wife, Josh. I love that we can drive each other COMPLETELY insane and laugh about it 5 minutes later. You’re my best friend, you’re my favorite man in the world and I’ll love you on every birthday you have until I’m not breathing. Thanks for always testing out ages for me for a few months so I know what to expect. You’re the best.
Today Josh and I pack up and head back to south Florida where my dearest friend is going to commit to the love of her life and we’re all going to drink and dance and celebrate love. I’m SO excited. Keep an eye on Bri’s blog for wedding pics and amazing posts about her new life in San Francisco!
I love love.
Today is Friday and tonight Josh and I have a semi-formal wedding to attend. I love weddings, they always make me cry. I love love. Ahhh…
Anyway, I’m excited because it’s been awhile since I’ve seen Josh all dressed up and let me tell you that boy cleans.theheck.up. So pumped to see him in a suit. Oh, and Josh, if you’re reading this, FYI…you’re wearing a suit.
Anyway, all this to say that I have this board on Pinterest where I just pin clothes I will some day make Josh wear, some I’ve already made him wear (see photo on the right). I highly reccommend you make a similar board.
It’s not a secret that in our home, I’m the more neurotic cleaner. Our schedules are so busy that occasionally I’ll get home after a long day and realize that house hasn’t had anyone attend to it in a few days, have a major freak out, clean for hours, and go to bed grumpy – but sated. I love Josh, but he just doesn’t look at our house the way I do.
Similarly to the way men and women differ in how they view their bodies, Josh sees what’s good, I see what’s wrong. He sees the organized living room, I see the mountain of laundry piling up that may avalanche onto us in the middle of the night. Anyway, we’re different.
The other week I was kind of having a rough go of it and when Josh brought me home [after picking me up from work at 6] I was stunned. The man c-l-e-a-n-e-d our kitchen. [I immediately cooked a big meal – I LOVE cooking in a clean kitchen] He also started a few loads of laundry, finally threw out the broken lamp that had been sitting in our hallway for literally weeks, and scooped the kitty litter! No special reason, he just wanted to do more around the house.
He’s amazing. I feel so loved. How does your spouse make you feel loved?
xoxo,
Adora
Thank you to my amazing friend, and brilliant photographer Andy Delva, who came up here and took pictures when this low budget mess was going down. He gave me amazing shots even when I told him we didn’t want to stop and pose for anything. Without Andy, I would have had no pictures of this day at all. Thank you also to my amazing, creative, and hard working friends & family who enabled us to throw the whole shebang for under $2000.00 (dress and suit included). Especially my sister, who made my bouquet when I told her no flowers, iced my cupcakes, sewed yards of bunting, made my garter, crafted the bridesmaids headbands and even made Josh’s Boutonniere and countless other things. Finally, thank you to my husband Josh for taking my “make something out of pallets for the stage” statement and turned it into a piece of art that was perfect for our wedding.
The night before our wedding I get a text from Josh asking “Will this work?” I still think it looks like magic.
When he first saw me down the aisle…he said he was just nervous
Wearing my mom’s pearl pendant necklace
The men praying over Josh
putting on my dress
Groom
garter
sunlight
My two brothers together
my niece had plenty of dress to hide in
down the aisle with pop
Pastor Tom does a good wedding
we’re cute
locking it down
we do
my dad giving Josh the gift I made for my future husband when I was 12…so embarrassing
after the ceremony our first moment alone
our little table
I found these cake toppers from 1988 at goodwill the week after I got engaged. They were $1 and I loved them.
my sister is the reason almost anything looked good at the wedding
cupcakes that my amazing friends baked in mass, and then my talented sister iced and decorated in record time after they were in place
war
toasted
she’s cute
the toasts were often…detailed
my new brother in law
they’re brothers now
The first boys I ever loved
First Dance
lovely facial expression, about to toss that thing
gettin’ it
toss
fake. she’s not shy.
reception dancing [don’t tell the church]
I got too low…and fell down
cha cha slide like bosses party hard like bosses
reception dancing [don’t tell the church]
i could have danced all night…after I took off my shoes
adios babies!
And now, if any of you haven’t seen it before…once again, here is the video Josh put together of our day.
This week was…let’s just say not the greatest week I’ve ever had. I got to the level of upset beyond crying and just relatively comatose. This is pretty standard for me, my brain will only let me have so many emotions and then it’s like “that’s enough of these feeling things for you” and I kind of just go nuetral. Well, many things added up this week and I got to that point on Wednesday. So, when Josh picked me up from work we talked a little, he took me out to get my favorite soup and then when we went home he drew me a bath.
We had talked a few days before hand just in passing how it’s been years since I’ve had a bath (since I’m a shower girl) and it used to be something I would do to relax. So, he started the water running, found random Star Wars bubble bath that my sister had given him for Christmas, lit all the candles he could find and started some Explosions in the Sky playing softly. It was magic. I sat in that water and (carefully) read my kindle for at least an hour…maybe two (okay, it was two) and I didn’t realize the candles shouldn’t have been bright enough to read by until I looked up and saw my book light clipped to the shower shelves.
That boy thought of everything. I think this is going to become the nice (FREE) thing he does for me when things just aren’t going my way & you are not going to hear me complaining about that!
Back in 2011, when Josh and I were just dating and his old boat of a Volvo finally and completely died, I talked him into getting a scion, because I had a Scion…and we were cute like that. So he went off and got himself a nice little $10k of debt in the form of a silver 2007 Scion TC.
Cut to last Tuesday.
After months of discussion, Josh took his TC into Carmax to see what they would offer him. His payments were reasonable, but we just couldn’t afford it anymore, and in a quest to try and cut debt and monthly bills, off he went. I had prayed over this errand and when they came back with their offer of exactly 7 dollars more than we owed (the offer was $7000 if you want to know) we jumped on it. I was worried that Josh would feel sad but when he saw how much we were saving each month, he was all smiles. So our insurance went from $165 a month to $65 a month and our car payments went from $255 a month to $0 a month. Thanks Mom and Dad for the sweet car back in 2006! So the savings comes out to $355 a month minus whatever extra gas we use. I don’t think we will use that much more gas, because we’ve had to be a lot more purposeful in our errands and so often we would end up in separate cars at the same place.
So for the last week we have been getting into the swing of being a one car couple.
Here are 7 things that I have learned in the first 7 days of being half of a one car couple. 1) Fix up your bikes. One of you will be without the car most of the time, so have a bike on hand for trips to the grocery store, the gym, a friends house, the work out will do you good.
2) Know that it will be inconvenient at times. Once at work I announced I was headed out to lunch and almost made it to the door before my boss asked how I was going to get there. Oh yeah, I brown bag it now…I forgot. Another time I wanted to go shopping bad, so bad that only another girl reading this can appreciate that I was stuck at home and hadn’t yet fixed up my bike.
3) Whichever of you owned the car before, don’t drive for awhile. This rule is for someone with my personality (read: selfish). I know I need to detach myself from this thing that was ‘mine’ for the last 7 years, I never wanted Josh to feel like he was using my car – just that he was driving our car. So I’ve only driven it myself once, I try and get him to drive every other time. This is for my sake. If you weren’t the baby of the family and you have no problems with sharing, you may be able to skip this step.
4) You will spend more time together. My sweet man is not a morning person. At all. When we had 2 cars, he would almost never wake up and spend time with me in the morning. He tried, but it didn’t happen. Now that he has to take me to work, he has to be awake (to drive – see #3). He has a hectic work schedule, so no morning time together sometimes meant no time together at all. But we now have an hour a day (30 minutes each way) where we can spend time together while we are relatively undistracted. So no matter what, he leaves with me at 7 and picks me up at 6 even if he has to go back to work after that and it’s been so good for us.
5) You will communicate more. In our 2 car lifestyle, there was no need or reason to really schedule with each other. Other than saying he had a long day and would be home late, there wasn’t much need to tell each other where we were, where we were going, etc. Now we basically need to have tabs on each other most of the time so we naturally check on each other more. I think this is good for our marriage, it was easier to live parallel before, now it’s not.
6) You will save more money in other ways. I can’t jump in the car and run off the grocery store or the mall or wherever. I have to plan those trips. I plan my grocery list better, because I only have one or two shots at it. I have to pack my lunch, I have no other choice. I have to make coffee in the office instead of going to Starbucks at noon. When I get the urge to leave the house and go shopping…I just can’t, and that feeling passes, probably with $30 in savings at least; Lord help me if I get on Etsy or Amazon though.
7) It will get the ball rolling. Let me tell you something, getting rid of half of your debt, even if it comes with inconveniences will get you addicted. It feels great to just suddenly not owe $7,000. Now I’m like “What else can we sell?” “Do we really need this?” and I’m amped. I want to get out of all debt and I think this is the kick start we needed to make that really happen, and happen soon.
So any of you out there ever get down to one car? No car? Tell me about it!
My husband and I both work in ministry. He works on production at a large church and I work in the web department of an international relief and development organization. There is so much fulfillment in being able to say you really believe in the mission of the place where you work. It’s so fulfilling for Josh when he works hard at creating a cohesive church service and he gets to see people make a decision for Christ or take the next step of obedience in Baptism. I love when hard work on a web page or graphic design inspires someone to donate to a project that educates poor students in Haiti or provides water to people in need in Nicaragua or shelters an orphan in Zambia. We are so blessed in our jobs. That being said, ministry is beyond a full time commitment.
In our first year of our marriage there have been countless late nights spent apart because of the requirements of our jobs. While we wouldn’t change jobs for the world right now, it has caused a lot of issues. Our different temperaments, the different ways we were raised, and our vastly different views on how a house should be kept have caused a lot of tension. I was talking with an older person the other day, who has been married for 40+ years and they told me that all the issues I told them about came down to just one issue: communication. All the tension, they said, is based on differing expectations that haven’t spelled out for each other, and our busy schedules were ensuring that we wouldn’t be able to tell each other everything we needed in casual conversation. One issue seems so much more conquerable than dozens so I took the rest of their advice.
They told me to have Josh write down everything he could think of that we should communicate on once a week, and for me to do the same. So we did. Not surprisingly many of the points were the same on both of our lists. So, I’ve taken the lists and created a document. We’ve both agreed to meet every Monday, review the document and the dozen or so question is asks, and together write down our answers. This thing covers everything from bills to sexual expectations to social engagements to household chores to prayer and beyond. We talk about how the previous week was and our expectations for the coming week. Then we will place it in a binder and keep them all there each week adding the fresh document.
This way, we get the business of having a life together out of the way in about an hour each week and then, when we do have precious time together, it can be spent just enjoying each other – as friends, the way we started. We’re only a few weeks in, but I really think if we stick with it – it will be a useful tool. Has anyone else tried something like this?
Welcome to my blog! My name is Adora. Here you'll see plenty of DIY projects, random videos, recipes, and fun little things from my life. I'm so glad you're here!
While some of my posts contain affiliate links; this blog would not be possible without the support of my husband Josh, and our beautiful baby boys, Jett & Jace!
Today is Friday and tonight Josh and I have a semi-formal wedding to attend. I love weddings, they always make me cry. I love love. Ahhh…
![reception dancing [don't tell the church]](http://adoramae.com/wp-content/uploads/IMG_1039.jpg)
