Islands

Growing up, I watched my parents fight on an almost daily basis, and I swore up and down I was never getting married. I swore it. I knew me and I knew that I could probably never meld my life with another person.

After turning 17 and graduating from high school, I entertained the idea of MAYBE getting married, then once I was at college for a year, I once again swore off the idea. I had plans for myself, and none of them included a man.

After dating Terry on and off and on and off again for a year, I told him I would marry him. That is one of my biggest regrets in life. I knew I never wanted to marry him, and I knew I probably never would. it wasn't fair to him or myself, but I loved the attention, albeit most of the attention was negative, but it was attention nonetheless. The relationship ended badly, though I don't know how else it could have or would have ended.

After Terry, I once again swore off marriage. I was alone and I was happy. I went to New Zealand, graduated university, started my first "real" job, had my first house, lived on my own, all by myself, and I was happy.

When I met Chris, I figured it would never evolve into much more than a platonic friendship. He would be someone my age to do things with outside of my job. But we fell in love, hard and fast.

Considering how small Yuma was, there wasn't much else to do. Chris and I were at each others house daily, making dinner, playing games, or watching movies. It broke up the monotony of my day-to-day and I looked forward to talking to someone other than pubescent tweenagers.

We decided we were going to get married in January and he proposed in April. Because we didn't want to live together before we were married, we got married 4 months later.

It's really hard for me sometimes, because I was so happy being alone, and sometimes being married is so hard, that I question why I ever got married in the first place. Don't get me wrong, I don't regret marrying Christopher, but being married is hard.

Lately I have really reflected as to why it is so hard for me to be with someone else, and I think I have pinpointed it to a few reasons.

First of all, I have never seen a healthy relationship. What does one look like? How do they communicate? How do they work together? My parent's marriage was all about lies and deceit. Each of them were on their own boat paddling in different directions of each other away from the island in the middle of nowhere. It was always my mom expressing how she was a better parent than my dad, and my dad telling us not to tell mom. Mom pretending to care but really only ever caring about herself and how she appeared to others. The more I look at our family/home life the more I realized how unhealthy it really was.

My parents never taught me how to properly resolve conflicts. All I ever saw was yelling and screaming when one or the other of them was upset. I don't know how to calmly and rationally express how I'm feeling, because I was never taught, and I definitely never saw it.

I'm not making excuses, merely I am admitting my own faults. I see my weaknesses, and I know how they came about, what I don't know is how to "fix" it. I don't know how to communicate my feelings other than shutting down or exploding. That's all I know how to do.

I feel bad that Chris has to deal with me in my broken state. He is so patient and kind and forgiving when I get into my little ... moods, and he never wants to give up and leave. I offer to leave him almost daily so he doesn't have to deal with me any more, but he never takes me up on my offer. I know I need to get better, I need to figure out how to better myself, how to rationalize my feelings, and how to express them in a more mature way, but I don't know how.

When I get in these ...moods, it's basically to a point of no return. I have to let it run its course before I can get back to normal. I have been this way for as long as I can remember, and it's never really been a big deal until now. Now I see it affecting the one I love more than anything in this world. I lash out against him and I hurt him more than I help him, and it's really not fair to him, but I don't know what to do so I no longer hurt him.

Compassion

On Thursday, I woke up with pain behind my right eye. I figured it was because I fell asleep watching Psych with my glasses on. So I got up, showered and rushed off late to school, like I do any other day.

Well after driving to school the pain behind my eye got worse and worse and worse, and I started to get sick to my stomach. If I was focused on something at close range, like my computer or a book, it wasn't bad, but every time I moved my head it got worse and worse. I tried to teach my first class, which made everything even worse, because writing on the board then turning to students and talking and looking for hands and keeping students on task, so doing my job basically, made me feel dizzy and lightheaded. So on top of stabbing pain in my head and feeling sick to my stomach, I no longer could even stand up. I gave my students some easy group work to do and sat down at my desk. I have NEVER had pain in my head like that before. I debated what to do. I felt like I could probably make it through until I was done teaching and then drive home, so that's what I resolved to do.

During second hour, as I was at the board, I could no longer stand up and became so light headed I had to sit down. I didn't know what was wrong with me, and every time I looked up things were blurry and tunneling in on me. I texted Chris to see when he was coming into Brush to drop off cattle at the sale yard. He told me he already did, and was headed home. I wanted to cry. When I told him what was happening, he pulled off the road and turned around to come get me. I called down to the office and told them I was leaving at lunch time after my third hour (Chris was mostly home, and it would take about that long to get to the school).

As I climbed into his truck to go home I started crying. I was in so much pain, and I had never, ever left a job early. Not once. When i got home I was pretty much debilitated. Chris cradled me and got me medicine and fed me lunch. I love that man so much.

I realized a few things on Thursday:
1. I love Chris more than words can express, he sacrifices for me daily, and I don't thank him enough for that.

2. I need more compassion. Chris took care of me and let me cry in my pain on Thursday. I didn't have that much patience or compassion for him when he was sick. I was so overwhelmed and frustrated and exhausted that I couldn't even look at him or talk to him without getting angry. That sounds horrible, but I'm being honest, and I was ready to leave because I couldn't take it any more. I felt alone and helpless. That was selfish of me, because guaranteed Christopher probably felt that in such a greater magnitude than I did, but he never said anything.

3. With how badly I was hurting on Thursday, I can't even imagine how Chris has been feeling the past 3-4 months. Mine was an isolated incident, but I can't imagine waking up day in and day out with that feeling. I don't think I could handle it. I also realize just how incapacitating it really is.

I'm happy to say, after taking two of Chris's migraine pills (OTC, don't worry I didn't take any of his heavy meds) I felt a lot better. I have had a dull ache since then, but it isn't bothersome, and I can still accomplish what I need to get done.

It's crazy how much you can learn from such a small moment in time.

Written

So I really am terrible at keeping a journal. It's weird really, I love to write, and I do it all the time. But when it comes to keeping a daily journal, it doesn't happen. What's even worse, I am more likely to write {personal} things on this blog than I am to write it in my journal. I've even tried buying cutesy journals in hopes that it would entice me to want to write because they are adorned with flowers or sayings or beautiful pictures. Usually, I only get one or two pages filled in before they become another neglected "thing" of my past.

I think it's because I was raised with computers. Everything I've ever written from the time I was in the second grade was to be typed. Sure we did some handwriting activities, etc. but even our simple journal entries were to be typed. The short stories I write {for school} are usually handwritten, but beyond that, I have to type anything I write. It's almost a curse really, because there are things I want to document, but I don't feel the Internet, and especially Facebook, is the place for me to record and share those feelings. That being said, I also know me, and know that unless I record these things that are happening and the feelings I experience, I won't remember them.

So as much as I hate it and don't want to be one of those wives who document everything on their blogs, I feel it has come to that time in my life that I need to do so. Really, after looking at it, there are more pros than cons, so I just need to suck it up and start documenting my life. I know it's not ideal, but I have found several websites that you can utilize and put your blog posts into a "year" book. So I can still have the tangible evidence of writing things down, even if it's not in my own, scribbled hand.

Ding Dong the Doorbell's Dead

So our house is old. Straight up that's All there is to it.

Well, we have updated it with some fresh paint which has been SO refreshing. I'll post pictures soon, we still have a bit of trim to paint before it's finished, but it already looks 10x better. I think I've ranted about this before, but our house was painted 10 different colors when we moved in. Now the downstairs (minus the hallway and laundry room) are all painted. Now our front room and tv room is one color, our dining room and kitchen is one color, and the bathroom and bedroom are one color. Much better.

I am actually surprised at how well I did taking pictures to document the doorbell update. I wish I had done this with the rest of the house. I think you would appreciate my documentation/ pictures of the house so much better if you saw what it looked like before we started working on it.

I know Chris has a few pictures, so I'll see if I can get them to show the pre/post house look.

So far, we have installed ALL outside doors, which means they actually lock now!!!!! And we have keys now!!!! (The one door didn't close completely and two of them didn't lock, so MAJOR improvement right there, and you can probably see now a little more why I started crying when I first saw the house like I mentioned here.)

Anyway, I'm slightly digressing from the purpose of this post. We painted the dining room and kitchen yellow. It's a nice "mellow yellow"

In our dining room is where the doorbell is.

As you can see, before it looked like this, very 70s. Which is fine, and I'm sure this is an antique I just ruined and I will probably regret it when I find out how much it was worth in good working condition, but it was ugly, especially with our updated wall. It just didn't look good. I wanted to take the whole thing off, but that looked like even more work that would probably end up doing something to the wiring of the house, so Angi told me I should just paint it.


I took down the box, and took out the fabric that smelled of the 70s (I don't know how to explain it, but that fabric just has a certain smell,) and said goodbye to the regal eagle.

I spray painted the box gray and cut out a piece of fabric using the old one as a pattern.

After the box dried I took some liquid nail, and glued the fabric back inside the box. There was a piece of screen that was behind the old fabric that I kept so the shape would hold.

We thought we could just take the pipes off and then spray paint them, but after we looked at them closer, we realized that we couldn't, and if we did take them off, we wouldn't be able to get them back on.

I figured I would find something later to paint the pipes with, but when I was at school one day, Angi beat me to it.

I like it so much better now, and it actually goes with the rest of the house. (We have gray trim throughout the house except the bathroom/bedroom).

Resolutions

About a week ago, while Chris and I were laying in bed, we wrote out a list.

We made a Tiffany list, a Christopher list and an Us list.

We created a good list. Some of these things included start our garden, clean up the chicken coop, clean up the yard, try a new recipe/week, stick to our budget, have a designated date night. This is not comprehensive, obviously, but these are a few things that we are really wanting to accomplish this year

One of the items on the Tiffany list was to complete a craft a month. With my two weeks off, I was able to complete one of my crafts on my list of things to do.

I am not really a photograph as I go kind of person, mostly because I'm a huge! procrastinator, and if I stop in the middle, I may not get it done.

I bought 6 boards (1x6) and a can of stain about 2 months ago. Does that tell you anything? Anywho, with my few days off, I got my boards sanded and stained. I decided at the last minute to bring more green into our bedroom (our comforter has green in it, and our main color is a cream color with brown trim/accents). I took a pillow case to match the green and also bought a stencil.

I did manage to snap a picture before screwing it together. But, post-staining.

I love how deep-rich the color turned out.

I was a little nervous about doing the stencil, but I think it turned out pretty great. It did smear a little bit, but considering that Chris and I are the only ones that see it up close, I'm not too worried about it, and it still looks great!

Wouldn't you agree?

Too little time, too much to do

We've been busy around the Leffler house these past few days. I had an incredible 2 weeks off that I thoroughly enjoyed. I spent some time with the kiddos, I finally got the living room cleaned up, and got a few craft projects crossed off my list.

Chris's parents got here Wednesday evening and with Chris having 3 days off in a row, we got busy getting working on the house.

The dining room, kitchen, living room and front room are all painted, just trim waiting for paint now. We (mostly Angi) also got the range hood replaced, cabinets removed, and bar removed. We still have lots to do, but it's been great seeing the transformation of our little home.

When we moved in, there was about 100 different colors throughout the house; and they were mostly DARK colors. I HATED our bedroom so that was a priority that got {mostly} done back in September, but with Chris's health, our progress got stalled.

Anyway, I had a nice two weeks off, and we are {finally!!} slowly making progress on the house. I'm excited to see what it looks like once we are all finished.

Here is a little teaser of one of our projects. I didn't think of taking a before picture until we were in the middle of taking the cabinets off. But I think you get the idea of what it looked like before.

Welcoming 2013

One Year Ago Today, I posted on Facebook.

"2011 you were so good to me. Here's to 2012 being just as good"

And I tell you what, it did not disappoint. 

In 2012:

I spent a week in Moab for Spring Break with my best friend.

I got engaged to my dear companion Christopher.

 

 

We got a new puppy.

 



I got a new job.

 

I married my sweet Christopher and inherited an amazing family.

 

 

We bought a house.

 

 

Looking at this list, it seems kind of short, but let's be honest, there were several downs paired with these ups, but that doesn't mean this year wasn't great, nor does it mean that next year wont be just as good as the past two years.  I can say with 90% certainty there wont be any major events to document other than our normal day-to-day living.  But guess what?  That normal day-to-day living reminds me how much I have to be grateful for, reminds me what a wonderful happy life Chris and I are building and living together, and how is that not great?