Ten Year Check-In

Ten years ago this month my husband and I stood in front of our closest family and friends and publicly expressed our love and devotion and took vows of commitment.  The goal of the event was to establish a principal value in our world: our love was equal to (not less than) the love of any other married couple.  As I sit here in my office typing this blog ten years ago seems like a different time entirely.  It was a different time.  People stumbled over the vocabulary: "Do you call him your partner or husband?"

In 2006, our wedding in Austin, Texas was not recognized by the law of the land.  Most guests in attendance on our most special occasion had never experienced a wedding between two men.  The newness of the event was nice, since we could make up the rules as we went along without worrying about expectations.  We kept the guest list well edited; we realized at the time that we didn't have many close gay friends - the majority of our friends were straight, which is a fact that is (for some strange reason) still true today.  We served drinks before the wedding ceremony to ensure (have kidding/half serious) that our honored guests (of mostly straight people) could handle two men kissing after the "I do's".  In the spirit of Gandhi's "be the change you wish to see in the world" we held a fun wedding, and at the time we hoped one day we could get legally married.

As is true in life, I'm learning, things appear to be happening slowly and then they appear to be happening all at once!  Seven years after our wedding, in the fall of 2013, that legal marriage happened in Santa Barbara, California.  Our union was recognized by the law of the land, finally.

In the early spring of 2016, our twins were born in Austin, Texas.

And here we are...

It's been a very special ten years, and we are just getting started.  After ten years, my husband is still the man of my dreams and he still owns my heart, completely.

I am grateful.

My life is so special because we are standing on the shoulders of the men and women who lived before us and lived in a time when being true to yourself and loving who you wanted wasn’t always an option and came at a great risk.  If my husband and I had been born in a previous generation, then our life would have been different.  We know this fact, and we've done our part to keep pushing things forward for the next generation.  Isn't that the point of life?  "Leave the world a better place than you found it."

Lake House

Well, here you go...I've found my dream lake house.  Isn't this gorgeous?  I'm posting the photos here so at least I can visit PICTURES of a lake house...

More photos here.

Vacuum Lines by Diane Dekker Redlegs

I saw on my husband's Facebook feed this post getting shared, which is a perfect read for my current situation in life.  My husband and I had almost 10 years of marriage before our tiny humans arrived to live under our roof.  We're accustom to living in a house of order and elegance, but that reality has changed.  There is a boatload of baby gear which greeted the twins' arrival in this world.   Our house is morphing to support the rearing of children and it's an adjustment for me.  I am saying goodbye to my constant order and elegance, and I predict I will be a very, very old person when it returns...

...and that's a very good thing according to the advice from Diane:

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Vacuum lines

(pay attention young mother's, you may want to read this 😉).

19 years ago, Scott, all 5 kids and I took a trip to Omaha. Kenny was 10, Todd was 8, Kevin 5, Ryan 2, and Lisa was 6 months old. We took a day and went over to visit Scott's Aunt and Uncle who lived in Omaha, in their beautiful new home. When we pulled up, the exterior said to me, "this is what dreams are made of". As his Aunt gave us a tour of their home, I just remember thinking how amazing it would be to have such a beautiful home, full of rooms and bathrooms and a huge kitchen that screamed to be full of family and fun, but what stuck out the most in my mind and sparked a completely different envy than just the size of the house, was the vacuum lines that remained in the carpet in the formal dining room. As we strolled into the dining room, I remember thinking to myself, "oh my gosh! Her vacuum lines are still in her carpet probably a week or more after she vacuumed!! What I wouldn't give to clean my house and have it stay magazine perfect for more than 5 minutes!!" I couldn't wait for the day that I would be able to do that and not have it messed up by sticky little finger prints on the perfectly waxed dining table, or Legos hiding under the table, or walking in to discover Ryan's latest art creation had so carefully been designed on the wall with crayons.

Here's what I didn't know at that time, (and somewhere my mind couldn't even go), that to have all of this picture perfect cleanliness, the kids would have to be gone. You see, I wanted those things because the everyday struggles of 5 loads of laundry, toys everywhere, mouths to feed, meals to prepare, beds to make were overwhelming to me, and the beauty of a pristine home was something only dreams were made of. Hell it took me 20 minutes in each room just to find the floor before I could vacuum it. I never grasped (no matter how bad I wanted vacuum lines to stay in my carpet) that my kids would one day grow up and leave. That thought doesn't exist in a young mothers mind, it's just the things that old ladies talked about, and the endless reminders they tried to give me that "it all goes by so fast".

Then one day I woke up, went to clean my house, carefully placed vacuum lines in my carpet, looked at my beautiful dinning table with a perfect wax coating and zero finger prints and realized it would stay that way for days.....and that's when I realized that vacuum lines are lonely. That Legos and dirty clothes and mouths to feed and backpacks to get ready are sometimes very overwhelming, but they're never, ever lonely and that what the old ladies had been telling me was true! That the Legos slowly disappeared without me ever noticing. They were replaced by video games, and then football gear and then by empty bedrooms waiting for a visit home from college or life. That the loads of laundry gradually got smaller, the dirty dishes were less and the endless treasures of Pokemon cards, or rock collections all disappeared. Everything sits magazine ready in my home now and I appreciate and love this time of my life, I only wish I had known the cost of vacuum lines, because then I surly wouldn't have wanted this day to come as fast as it did.

Happy Mother's Day to mothers everywhere. To the mothers with vacuum lines who miss their children everyday, and to the young mothers who struggle through the mountains of laundry and responsibility. Cherish your children, their messes and stresses and the hell they put you through as teenagers, and trust me, vacuum lines are overrated 😉 ❤

~Diane

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Don't Eat People

Here's a picture of John trying to eat his sister, Susanna.  We're hoping his cannibalism tendencies fade after a few months, since one of our family rules is that we don't eat people (unless we're on a plane that crashes in the mountains and it's the only way to survive).