When It Comes to the Wedding, Bigger Ain't Necessarily Better!

My kids are adults now.  That means that weddings are happening with great regularity.  I don't get invited to all of them.  But thanks to the wonders of Facebook, I get to see many of them!  And I realized...my age is showing!

Our son got married last August.  The wedding was beautiful.  It was very simple compared to many of my friends.  They didn't want to go into debt for the wedding, and we're proud of them for that!  They rented an art gallery...one room.  So the wedding ended and the reception started right away.  The wedding was totally them!

One of the things that has changed since when we got married, is that there is a whole pre-wedding process.  People go in before the wedding and set up.  Conversely you need a tear down crew.  Hair and makeup are a process that begins hours before the wedding.  Cakes are works of art.  If TV shows are to be believed, brides spend months shopping for the perfect dress.  Budgets must be significant (we didn't pay for our son's wedding, so we don't know).

When we got married, we didn't have TV shows that gave us wedding expectations.  The internet didn't exist.  And I didn't have any friends who had already gotten married.  All I had was a budget of $1000 which would be about $3500 today (according to an inflation calculator I used).  That included the wedding, reception, photographer, my dress, my sister's dress, my mother's dress and my dad's and brother's tuxes.

I tried on 1 wedding dress.  It was $600.  Obviously I couldn't spend that much on a dress.  So I made mine (for $80) during my spring break weekend.  I sewed for 20 hours a day for 3 days.  I prayed that it wouldn't fall apart on my way down the aisle.  I swore my mother to secrecy.  There was a spot of blood on the headpiece, where I pricked my finger while sewing on the lace appliques.  I didn't know to bustle the train, so when Mom took the dress to the cleaners, it had footprints on it!

We got married on the same day that we graduated from college.  That meant we had the chapel for about 2 hours (graduation day was back to back weddings).  We had 2 floral arrangements for the altar and 6 pew bows.  That was all the decorating we did.  Oh, and my bouquet. We took the floral arrangements with us to the reception.

I probably should mention that we graduated from college in the morning, moved out of the dorm in the afternoon and got married in the evening.

The hotels in the area were all full because of graduation, so we had one hotel room for our family of 5.  I got to the hotel room 1 hour before we had to leave for the wedding.  I had 15 minutes to do my makeup and get dressed.  I couldn't find my contacts, so I went through the wedding blind.  Actually that's not so bad because you're always on someone's arm.

Back in the day, sit down dinner receptions weren't the norm.  We had appetizers, punch and cake.  No tables and chairs.  We had a great photographer.  I figured that the day after the wedding, I had my husband and pictures.  I wanted good pictures!

And the piece de resistance was that there was gas rationing in 1979.  Many of our guests couldn't get a tank of gas, so they couldn't come.

2015 will be our 36th wedding anniversary.  And all of the things I just told you are great stories from our wedding.  So...if you can't afford the wedding of your dreams, don't worry.  Because you're still married.  And in 36 years it will be the wedding of your dreams.

Feeling blessed, how about you?

As the Sheba Blooms!

I have never had a dog that wasn't a rescue.  Of course, since my dogs have all been long lived, I haven't had very many dogs.  Sheba is #4.  She follows Dixey, Casey and Lucky.  All have been herding breed mixes.

Sheba has been in our home for 5 months.  We're just now moving out of the honeymoon period and into the "settled" period.  It has been an interesting path.  We had less info about Sheba than we have had about any of our previous dogs.  We know that she arrived at the shelter in Alabama on July 15th.  She had all her shots.  She has a heart murmur.  She is about 3 years old. She was transported to Florida with about 30 other dogs in late July or early August.  According to my sources, she was a "transport mistake"; the shelter had 2 dogs with the same name and accidentally loaded both on the transport.

We got Sheba from Ewenity Farms Herd Dog Haven at the end of August.  I actually went to her foster mom's house to see a different dog.  All the other dogs were running along the fence lines, supervising the neighborhood.  Sheba came up next to me and sat down, leaning into my leg.  I get more dogs that way!

We were told that Sheba was a timid, submissive, low energy female border collie/spaniel mix who was housebroken and didn't bark.  Now that she's settled in, I think we can all agree that she's a female dog. LOL!

You see, that's what happens with a rescue dog.  What you see isn't always what the dog really is.  Most dogs don't "enjoy" the shelter experience.  Frankly, it scares the spirit right out of them.  Add a multi-state transport, in a truck with a bunch of other dogs, and being sent home with a stranger and then sent to another stranger's home...well, you'd probably be submissive and scared too.

When you adopt an adult shelter dog, you are getting the entire dog, including all their previous experiences.  The difficulty here is that we don't know what those are.  So you love them and you wait.  You establish a routine.  You love them some more.  You wait some more.  And you get ready to do some basic training when you see the dog's true personality start to emerge.  And with Sheba, it didn't just emerge, it busted out.

First we realized that Sheba marked territory (unusual for a spayed female).  Then we found out that she wasn't quite as submissive with other dogs, now that she had a family to protect.  Then she barked.  And I thought she was settled in.  But now we've found that she is impish.  She is always searching for food.  She hides what she doesn't eat.  She'll steal food related trash. Everything goes in her mouth.

Our best guess is that she wasn't an inside dog where she lived before.  She was probably part of a pack of dogs, so she didn't have to be the one to bark to go out.  She just followed the others.  And since she is a submissive dog, she learned to scavenge for food (and based on her weight, I'd say she's pretty good at it).

Based on my description so far, you're probably saying "I'd never take a rescue dog".  And if you feel that way you'd be missing out.  Big Time!  Sheba is a lot of fun.  She is great company and very happy!  And like every other rescue dog I've met; she doesn't take what she has for granted.  Oh, I know that dogs live in the moment...but rescue dogs never forget where they came from.  And they will spend the rest of their lives showing you how thankful they are!  So we are the lucky ones--because of the love of a rescue dog!

Feeling blessed, how about you?

When Did They Become Adults?

This morning I read an article about creating a "bubble list" of tasks your young adult should be able to do BEFORE they are living on their own.

As though you don't have enough to do, maintaining your home and not killing your teenagers...now you have to teach them how to do all the things that you do too?  And taking that a step further, now you'll have to go back to doing all those chores that the kids have been doing for you.  Not much of an incentive to launch those kids, is it?

When we were sending our son off to college, I made him a stack of "what if" lists.  He, of course, thought I was nuts.  But...as I explained to him, not only was he learning how to be an adult; I was learning how to be the mother of an adult.  So, he needed to cut me some slack.

Included in those lists was an "illness list".  For example one card was labeled "stuffy nose", another "upset stomach".  They were in a box with assorted over the counter meds.  Then, when illness struck (as it will on a college campus), a quick reference to the appropriate symptom and he knew which med to take.  And, I knew that when he felt crummy at 2 a.m. (because no respectable illness strikes in the light of day) he had the meds he needed.

For our daughter, I used a binder (her choice).  She wanted recipes, medical notes AND general household tips.  So we copied all her favorite recipes, made a section for the stash of OTC meds and wrote basic laundry and cleaning instructions.  She said it's like asking my advice to look at the book! 

The beautiful thing about a card file or binder (or sheet of paper on the fridge) is that your young adult has something to refer to for those obscure or infrequent needs.  Our daughter doesn't get sick often, and when she does she doesn't feel like doing research.  She doesn't have to remember what to do, because she knows where the information that she needs is.  The first couple of weeks in her new apartment, she had to consult the laundry section of her binder frequently (she was afraid she'd do something wrong).  Now she knows exactly what to do.  The secondary advantage is that I feel like I've helped her to be independent.

Now, if I could just figure out a way to teach the dog to load the dishwasher...

Feeling blessed, how about you?