*EDIT - My husband has informed me that my facts were slightly incorrect. It’s no secret that my short term memory is a bit fuzzy. Below is my corrected story, and I think it turned out even funnier than the first.

In case you didn’t know, my husband has been sportin’ a beard for awhile now. It’s his way of taking advantage of his time in unemployment land. To my surprise, I have grown to love the beard. I think it makes him look all distinguished and sexy. So I was extremely disappointed to wake up Thursday morning and discover that he had shaved the beard. And not only shaved the beard but shaved it into a goatee, which as it turns out, I dislike. Majorly dislike.

Now I’m not totally against goatees. I know lots of men have them and they look fine in them, I guess. Just not my man. Mike knew I didn’t like the goatee so he went ahead and shaved it. Friday morning I was shocked to find a strange man stepping out of our shower. This strange man looked a lot like my husband, only he had a moustache that we like to call “Todd Jones Handlebars”.

I begged for him to shave it all off. Just forget about the facial hair, it’s either all or none. Beard or no beard, no in between. I left for work Friday morning pleading with him to please shave it before I came home. Like pronto, before anyone else were to see it. And please My Love, do not go out in public like that.

Guess what? He forgot to shave it. I came home to find the hideous handlebars still in tact. “Oh Mel, I’m sorry! I totally forgot!” Yeah, right. So he starts telling me about his day with Luke and how they went to Wal-Mart… He went out in public with the moustache? I was thinking, “Well at least it was just Wal-Mart” when he proceeded to tell me that after finishing up at Wal-Mart they decided to walk around the mall for awhile to do some leisurely window shopping. With the Todd Jones Handlebars. I’m mortified at the thought.

I conceded to going out for dinner with the moustache because I figured what the hell, he’s already been all over town with it. Even so, when we got home I begged him again to please shave it off. So what does he do? He shaves the handlebar parts… and leaves the moustache. GAH!!

After explaining to him that I couldn’t bear to look at him (but with kindness and tact, of course), he agreed to shave the remainder of the moustache. I now have a clean shaven husband so I can get back to gazing lovingly into his eyes without having all that weird facial hair as a distraction. Although I still wouldn’t mind if he brought back the beard

When you’ve been married almost 9 years the awkward moments become few and far between, but I had one this morning.

I was in the bathroom getting ready to take a shower. The shower was running and my clothes were already off when I noticed the toilet wasn’t flushing properly. Being the superior plunger I am (thanks to my brother, believe it or not) I jumped at the chance to plunge. Apparently my husband heard all the noise I was making and came into the bathroom to check on me (I am just getting over the stomach flu), only to find me standing over the toilet, naked, with a plunger in my hand. Sexy. We might have to rethink our open door policy.

Well, another Christmas has come and gone. All that hype for one little day. We had a good Christmas. We spent a lot of time with our extended family, but we were able to have some down time at home too. Saturday we went to my sister’s house and celebrated with the rest of our siblings, my niece, nephew, and all four parents. Sunday we visited Mike’s dad’s family and Christmas day we visited his mom’s family.

Christmas Eve was our day. It has always been our day. (more…)

Mike and I don’t generally do much for days like today. We don’t really need the greeting card/chocolate/flower/jewelry industry telling us when to let each other know how much we love each other. When my grandpa officiated our wedding he gave us a few pieces of advice and one was to tell each other “I love you” at least once a day. Almost 8 years later we still abide by that.

But on to my story…

The first year we were married (newlyweds, ahhh) I wanted to do something special for Mike on Valentine’s Day. We had been seriously stressed about money around this time and on that particular day we had about $2.00 to our name. We had recently committed to not using credit cards anymore (sidenote: that was a commitment that lasted about a year and had to be revisited several years later) so I had to be creative and resourceful. Since the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach I was going to surprise him with a delicious feast. I still had those steaks in the freezer that Mom had given us several months before and I had an extra box of cherry-chip cake mix (Mike’s favorite). I toted my $2 to the store and picked up a box of Jiffy frosting mix and the cheapest side dish from a box I could find. I had just enough money.

When I returned home I pulled out my “Everything You Need To Know” Betty Crocker cookbook and whipped up a nice marinade for the steaks. Since we we lived in a one bedroom garden-level apartment I couldn’t grill the steaks, so I would have to broil them instead. While the steaks were marinading I mixed the cake batter and threw it into the oven to bake. I did a bit of tidying up and set the table for dinner. Mike would be home soon so I put the steaks in to begin broiling.

To this day I still don’t know what went wrong. It all happened so fast and yet it seemed to go in slow motion. Smoke started to seep from my oven and in a matter of minutes it had filled the entire apartment (all three rooms). Mike would be surprised, but it wasn’t exactly the surprise I was going for. I wish I could have seen the look on his face when he walked in the door, but the smoke was just too thick. He hurried in and we both ran around in a frenzy checking the oven for fire and opening the windows. We disconnected the smoke alarm but we couldn’t do anything about our neighbor’s smoke alarm. Yes, the smoke had risen to new heights! We could hear the smoke alarm beeping obnoxiously from the apartment above us.

We had left the steaks in the broiler because after all, we did need to eat. We checked on the steaks once the frenzy had subsided. They were done broiling, the potatoes were done doing what they do… we were ready to eat! Since the smoke was still pretty thick near the kitchen, we prepared our plates and brought them to the windowsill to eat. Remember, it’s a “garden-level” apartment, meaning it’s half basement and our windows open up to the ground, so we had wide windowsills that turned out to be just the perfect height for shoveling food in. We had to stand to eat but we didn’t mind. The steaks were delicious! We scarfed them down and moved on to cake for dessert. I was afraid the smoke would have ruined the flavor of the cake but that turned out great too!

The best part about the whole ordeal was that for 30 solid minutes we weren’t stressed about our jobs or worrying about our money problems. When we stood at the windowsill to eat, we were just enjoying each other’s company and laughing about the whole thing. It’s what I call my “Melt With You” moment. You know the song: Modern English, ”I’ll stop the world and melt with you”. The song makes me think of that night because for a brief moment the world did seem to stop, and it was just the two of us. Two newlyweds deeply in love, standing to eat our meal on thrift shop plates off a windowsill as if we were in a four star restaurant. And the best part is that our life together has only become richer over the years. We are more in love today than we were back then.

Schneider: Marriage, ultimately, requires a great leap of faith

So yesterday was my 6th wedding anniversary. 6 years. It feels like it went really fast but when I think about it I remember all that we’ve been through and realize it has been a long, productive 6 years. God has taught us a lot and we know that we are still here only by His grace. Thank God for grace.

On a totally different subject, my boss just decided to take an afternoon break to drive his fire truck around town. Yes, he bought a fire truck on ebay. Why? Because he can, I guess.