Greg

20 years of marriage!

August 3, 2022 by Kristin Leave a Comment

In the past year, I learned Greg doesn’t like packaged taco seasoning and bought my engagement ring on sale at a pawn shop. This after I’ve been wearing the ring for two decades and made taco meat more times than I could even begin to count.

With that, happy 20th anniversary, husband. I’m glad we can still learn things about each other after knowing each other for more than 24 years and being married for two decades.

After moving from Lexington on our first anniversary, we have lived in three houses in Murray during the past 19 years — and I hope we never move again. We’ve been parents for three-fourths of our marriage after a season of infertility that seemed so long at the time but led us to adoption. We changed jobs and completed so many projects. We’ve traveled and made a home that is nothing like I expected but I can’t imagine any other way at this point. We’ve grieved and laughed and celebrated and wondered and fought and cried and rejoiced and lived.

Thankfully, we naturally land on the same page about many things: We choose sporting events over museums. We like to sleep with the AC turned down to 68 degrees. We love Mexican food. We enjoy hosting parties, having game nights, and making plans with our people.

I’m truly thankful for the million small moments together than have made up our life. And I’m looking forward to whatever is to come.

Being in our 40s celebrating 20 years of marriage together seems like such a grown-up accomplishment. But it also seems like exactly where we are supposed to be. Let’s keep adventuring and learning together. Let’s go celebrate, maybe with tacos!

*****

Look back with us: Five years. Six years. Seven years. Nine years. Ten years. Eleven years. Twelve years. Thirteen years. Fourteen years. Fifteen years. Sixteen years. Seventeen years.

Ways to connect with your partner

March 15, 2021 by Kristin Leave a Comment

Greg and I have known each other for 23 years and have been married for more than 18 of those years. We’ve recently talked about how so much around us is changing, but we are thankful for the steadfastness of our relationship. Truly, I don’t know how I’d navigate life without him. Plus I like him.

Are you looking for ways to keep the spark, excitement, and romance alive in your relationship? If so, then here are some of the steps that you should definitely consider exploring to keep your marriage a priority.

Date Each Other

I’m going to be honest on this oft-given advice. Greg and I aren’t good at actual dates. We are good at stealing some together once kids are in bed or while driving in the minivan when the kids are occupied. Yes, we like to go on dates, and we’d like to go one soon. We’re overdue because the one he planned to Red Lobster near Valentine’s Day was canceled when we all were quarantined.

We know kids complicate adult-only outings, even just for a few hours, but our experiences of trips every now and then or at least dinner with them are worth it. We can talk and regroup and plan and, yes, talk about the kids.

Give Gifts

While quality time is my love language, gift giving is right up there. Of course, the types of gifts have changed through the years. Sometimes it will be a nice day out, and another time it would be a gift from somewhere similar to bhoma jewelry. One of my favorite recurring gifts is near our anniversary, Greg takes my minivan to get detailed. He deals with getting it there and back home again. The fresh smell and lack of crumbs speak volumes to me about his desire to help make my life a tad easier and much neater.

When I think way back to when he proposed, I love remembering being surprised by his question, his presence at that exact moment, and the ring he presented. We aren’t really jewelry people at this point, but London Gold can help you choose the right sparkle if you are. Now I get gifts like a countertop ice maker and a vac mop. Again, a cleaner, easier life is valuable in this season.

Share Passions

We all have passions and hobbies that we are interested in. it’s important to take the time to make sure that you are appreciating your partner’s passions and showing them that this is the case. We love watching college basketball (especially live!) together, so you’re likely to find us in the stands rooting for our favorite teams. Of course, now that our favorite teams are done playing this season, we’ll still settle in on the couch and watch other March Madness games.

We also like watching shows together in the quiet house once our three kids have gone to bed. When the weather cooperates, we like exploring creeks and woods on our property. This past spring, I even went turkey hunting with him for the first time. I don’t care about the hunting part, but I loved having a good fiction book to enjoy nature with my husband.

We love to travel with our family and explore new places and revisit familiar ones. (Our last adult-only trip was to Colorado, and I definitely want to go back!) Thankfully, we agree that museums aren’t our thing!

Embrace Spontaneity

Of course, you need to make sure that you are injecting a healthy level of spontaneity into your relationship. The surprise gifts, trips, and dinners are valuable for connection plus they’re fun! Remember, gifts and surprises don’t have to be extravagant, but it’s truly the thought that counts. Everyone wants to be remembered, so grab a favorite candy bar, jot a note, or send a lovey text.

I could tell you about a million things we’ve gotten wrong in building our relationship and marriage, but these are a few of the things we’ve gotten right. Thankfully, there’s been more right than wrong, and here we are together ready for whatever adventure comes our way next.

Porch Stories in August

August 28, 2019 by Kristin 13 Comments

Well, August always gives me all the feelings. I feel filled by summer, but I don’t want summer to end. I like routine, but I like having my people close too. Basically, I wasn’t ready for my kids to return to school until they did.

My dad died the week before Summer Break started and then we spent the first long weekend of Summer Break on a wonderful vacation to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Then I just never really had all the space I needed to process the grief that came with my dad dying and the realities that revealed. I had a long lunch with my mother-in-law who is also my friend last week because we needed to catch up. I’m thankful for the space for that sort of thing now. And I’m thankful my kids’ school years are off to a (mostly) smooth start.

Highlights

When I turned 40 in May, Greg gave me a trip to Colorado to visit some longtime friends and the Rocky Mountains. Again with the grief, we delayed the trip until our anniversary weekend in August. It was perfectly timed and such a wonderful trip. I shared about it the trip along the way on Instagram and Facebook {You can see all the posts & pictures here!} and then wrote a whole blog post once we were home.

The weekend before school started, we went with our best friends, my mom, and a nephew to Holiday World, an amusement park about three hours from here. If our family has a happy place with too much stimulation, this is it.

We spent a lot of evenings this summer riding through our woods, including the backside of our property that a company has been logging. I never would have predicted to find myself fascinated with the logging process. The picture at the top of the post is from one of our rides recently. There’s some profound about the seasons of the land and how God grows things from the ground to provide for us.

Favorite things

Adoption post – I always love sharing our adoption story, so I’m thankful Mandy Farmer invited me to share about adoption changed my legacy. {Read the post here.}

Jason Gray’s new music – I have to pep talk myself regularly because I’m quick to forget how to navigate well life’s winding road, so I’m grateful God gave me a soundtrack for this season. Jason Gray has a new EP of five songs that are the anthems my soul needs. If I didn’t know better, I would think this musical stranger wrote these songs for me in the midst of “order, disorder, reorder over and over,” as one of the songs says. But I am aware I’m not the only one who needs to perceive the new thing God is doing. {I wrote more about this.}

PackIt Freezable Lunch Bags – We love these lunch boxes! They have built-in gel packs that freeze so the food inside stays cold until my kids’ lunchtime. The bags fold flat and don’t take up too much room in the freezer. Plus when the packs thaw later in the day, the bags don’t sweat. Plus they’re easy to wipe out inside.

Counseling – My calendar once again has regular counseling appointments on it, and I’m so thankful for that space. I’ve missed it (and my counselor specifically) and I’ve needed it more than ever with all the things that got stuck in my head over the summer. {Here’s a post about when I first went to counseling in 2017.}

Outdoor Movie Night – Y’all know I love when life happens on the porch. We recently had a Friday Family Movie Night out there. We watched “Breakthrough,” which is based on an inspiring true story, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was (mostly) prepared for the boy to fall through the ice, require a miracle, and live. But I wasn’t prepared to relate to the momma main character who adopted her son, has diabetes, and wants to control all the outcomes in life. Talk about hitting home. Even so, I’m thankful for my family and our time together. I also really love our new projector and screen so we can have more nights like this – but probably with a lighter movie!

From the bookshelf

“Blue Smoke” by Nora Roberts – She’s written hundreds of books under two names, and this is the first one I’ve ever read. I really loved parts of it, although I had the mystery figured out well before the end. Still, I read it in two days and didn’t regret any of that.

“The Sometimes Sisters” by Carolyn Brown – This was a Kindle deal purchase quite a while ago, but I really enjoyed the sisters in this story and how their characters grew in their own stories and together as a family as they processed their pasts and recent grief. I liked the lake resort setting too.

“A Grief Observed” by C.S. Lewis – A friend had recommended this book to me and I found it for 25 cents when I happened upon a used bookstore in Estes Park, Colorado. I read it on the plane on the way home and marked several passages. I’ll be thinking about this one for a while and likely revisit in the years to come.

“Without Merit” by Colleen Hoover – I also found this fiction read by one of my new favorite authors for 25 cents at the used bookstore. I devoured it in two days. I loved how this story developed, revealing secrets one daughter in a complicated family couldn’t hold inside anymore. It’s a story about love and forgiveness – and how those things look different for everyone.

“Ugly Love” by Colleen Hoover – Disclaimer: This book had more sex scenes than I would normally read. I skimmed them. But I really loved the character development, how the story was mostly told from one character in the present and one character in the past, and where the plot went.

“All Your Perfects” by Colleen Hoover – Yep, another one! She’s a wonderful storyteller and I really loved how this one alternated between then and now chapters of a marriage. Infertility was a major theme in the book and having walked through that in my own life, I was impressed with how accurate and heartbreaking that storyline was.

“Verity” by Colleen Hoover – Obviously, I’m a fan of this writer. This is the seventh book I’ve read by her, yet this one was the first suspenseful one. She did that on purpose, venturing out of her usual emotional romance. Of course, there was some of that too. I read it in a day, thought I had it all figured out, and then was still a little surprised in the end.

“Finding God’s Life for My Will” by Mike Donehey – I heard this Tenth Avenue North lead singer recently on Annie F. Downs’s podcast and ordered his new book before the podcast episode was over. He said things about leaders and followers that intrigued me and encouraged me to follow Jesus more closely.

In “Finding God’s Life for My Will,” I marked catchy lines and thought-provoking paragraphs and rhetorical questions I need to keep asking myself. I texted a friend a few pictures of pages from the chapter about sorrow & joy and I read aloud to my husband funny and meaningful stories. I’m going to recommend the book to multiple friends with whom I have ongoing conversations on faith. (Obviously, I’m recommending this book to y’all too.)

I haven’t read many non-fiction books this year and am generally selective about which ones I read. This world is so noisy and bossy. But in this book, Mike Donehey shares stories that are gentle, funny, and true. He quotes scripture and reminds readers of what Jesus did for us, what we should do about it, and how life is not nearly as complicated as we make it sometimes.

On the screen

I already told you about “Breakthrough” and there’s not much new TV on right now. My kids did watch “Lion King” with my mom while Greg and I were in Colorado.

“New Girl” – I don’t usually choose sit-coms, but I needed some laughter in my life, so this is a good choice right now. I literally laugh out loud sometimes and these roommates and the new girl roommate in their life.

How was your August?

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