Always a Bride

The following conversation happened someday in August, somewhere in Arizona, sometime during dinner, and somehow I forgot to tell you about until today.

Three months later.

In November.

I know.

I have half potty-trained twins.

Anyhoo, the aforementioned words went like this :

Me: Hey babe, my buddy Sarah B Doyle is doing a photo shoot of gals in their wedding dresses who've been married for awhile and asked me if I wanted to do it. Doesn't that sound like so much fun?

Babe: Do you think you still fit in your dress?

Me: Really?!? Did you have to say the first thing that popped into your head? Were you planning on ever sleeping with me again? Because you may have wanted to think that one through.....

Okay, I didn't really say that. I did fuss at him for his first thought. And the fact that he said it out loud. And then I finished my dinner.

Followed by an entire box of Red Berrylicious Mike & Ikes.

So this was in August and the pictures were scheduled for early September, right after we were going to be home from AZ. I had a few weeks to lose a few pounds.

But I still had it in my mind that I didn't really need to.

I mean, I know what I weighed when we got married and I know what I weigh now. It's not the same, but it's not that far off....

But then, I have carried three children, including a set of twins. And honestly there are some things from which the female body just never fully recovers.

One of those is carrying twins to 36 weeks and two days.

You haven't lived until you look down at your ever expanding belly and you can see an imprint of a head on the right, the indentation of someone else's butt on the left and three foot prints sticking out near your belly button.

I think the fourth foot was perpetually tap dancing on my bladder.

What I'm trying to say is, the weight may be the same, but the package has shifted.

Too much?

Sorry.

About a month later we had arrived home in Ky. My dad was in town catching up after a long summer apart from his girls when Andy announced

Hey! You should try your dress on now.

Did I mention my mother-in-law was there too?

She was.

Nothing like facing the music with an audience. An audience that remembers what I looked like in the dress on that glorious day.

When I was 22. Not 34.

You know, back when my boobs were closer to my chin than they were to my belly button.

Andy rummaged through our guest room closet, tore into the box and there it was, just as lovely as I'd remembered it.

Then, like a shy teenager getting ready for prom I told him to

get out of here while I try this thing on.

It's at this point, I'm still pretty sure I gonna zip this puppy up and come marching outta there shouting

Look at me! I'm ten kinds of awesome. You doubted my ability to suck it in?

Puh-lease.

There was only one problem. Actually it was about six inches worth of problem.




That was the six inches of zipper that wouldn't go up because my back had spread from here to Texas.

I got past my belly just fine, it was the stinkin rib cage that had me in a pickle.

So after a bit of weeping (me) and texting with Sarah (Andy pretending to be me) it was decided that we would just figure a way to rig the back and only take shots from the front.

Not exactly ideal.

So when the evening arrived for the big photo shoot I rode (in my half zipped dress) out to the site with Sarah and our friend Whitney (in her fully zipped dress). We were meeting two other "brides" there and when we hopped out of the car I casually said to Sarah

You know, maybe you could just give it a go. Yank that zipper up for me, you think?

So girlfriend spread her feet out to get her bearings, grabbed hold of the zipper and yelled

Suck it in, girl!

And zzzzzzzzzzzzzzziiiiiiiiiiiiippppppppppppppp!!!!

IT WAS UP!

I couldn't breath, it was all weirdly bunched in the middle, but IT WAS CLOSED.

TAKE THAT ANDY GREEN! (Those may or may not have been my exact words thoughts.)

I didn't know the other two mamas that were going to be posing with us, but they cheered so loudly for me that they became life long friends then and there.

Like just added their names to the Christmas card list friends.

We had a really great time.

 

And I'm so glad I did it.

But I'm pretty sure if she expects me to be ready to do it again in another eleven years, I need to cut back on the Mike & Ikes.

And the gestating of twins.


.........................................................

If you are in the central Kentucky area and you're needing to update that family photo that's been hanging over the fireplace since 1987 Sarah Doyle's your girl. She has a great eye and she's wonderfully patient with kids.

And 34 year old women who talk too much.

You can find her here.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to beg her to take the girls photo for our upcoming Christmas card.

Because we all know what happens when I try to do it.......

It Never Hurts to Ask

The Littles have a new favorite game. It's called ring the doorbell, give the dog a panic attack, talk to mama and then

do it all over again.

It's memories in the making.

Wanna see?




And now some words:

* Yes, that's the same dress Anna was wearing in the Jonah video. It's the best twirling dress we've got. She wears it every time it's clean. And sometimes when it isn't.

* Emily is completely enamored with all things baby. Real babies, baby dolls, baby bottles. She wants to love them and squeeze them and apparently hold them by the head. I did do alot of fancy finagling when they were babies. I even nursed one while changing another, but I don't think I've held an infant by the cranium.

Basically, I just want you to know she didn't get that from the mama.

* The front yard looks like a tornado tore it to shreds. That storm was actually me. I borrowed the neighbors electric hedge trimmers and got a smidge carried away. And then it rained for two days and I wouldn't couldn't clean it up.

But don't you worry, it's not there anymore because the wind blew it all away I cleaned it up.

*About the multiple mentions of Chick-fil-a. It's not that we go there alot. They just really like it.

Really.

In other news, one of my Littles is fully potty trained. Like all the way, big girl panties and all. The other one doesn't give a toot hoot. At all. I'm not gonna name any names, but the one in the fancy pants really likes to tell the story of Jonah and the one in the pull-em-ups is currently napping with 15 baby dolls in her bed. And a happy meal toy. And three books.

You do the math.

The Wrong Long Road Home, Part Two

So there we were, driving around, ignoring the GPS which led us astray in the first place, trying to figure out which way to go.

And by that I mean we were both looking at maps.....on our cell phones. Because who has room in their vehicle for a giant atlas when you have to pack things like fruit snacks and Mount@in Dew dried fruit and distilled water?

(My dad, the king of atlases and AAA Trip Tiks, just got a little lightheaded.)

(I know what I'm getting for Christmas.)

It would be fun to tell you that a bearded man with an axe jumped in front of the car and scared the stink out of us but then turned out to be a very kind animal whisperer who offered to pull our car back to the interstate with his bare hands while playing a fiddle.

But that would be a lie.

And you know I don't like to exaggerate.

Really we just wandered our way back to the (wrong) state route we had been on all the while the GPS is

STILL FUSSING AT US ABOUT THE DANG U-TURN.

And I may have started to giggle.

And Andy may have said

Please don't blog about this.

Hi babe!

By the time we actually made our way to the interstate we'd managed to add an hour to our trip.

Hooray for the grown-ups!

But at least the view was a little better...



When we finally rolled into the hotel parking lot Andy and I were exhausted, annoyed and slightly jittery. (Someone whose name rhymes with Llama may have taken a few too many Excedrin.)

It was El Paso 2003 all over again.

Only we have three children who had been strapped down like mental patients all day and they wanted to PLAY and EAT and

TALK SO VERY LOUD BECAUSE WE'RE SO EXCITED TO BE FREE!

We did what any responsible parents would do. We ordered chinese, unplugged the hotel phone so Emily could chat with all her peeps without calling Japan and unrolled the hide-a-bed which was screaming to be jumped on.

It's a like a rule. Jumping on hotel beds.

Really.

And while the girlies got all their giggles and wiggles out, we calmly laid down on our bed, held hands and stared blankly at the television as the realization that we get to do all over again the next day, and the next day, and the next day started to settle in.

Heaven help us.

The Wrong Long Road Home, Part One

Many moons ago, way before there was a Gaggle, or even Google for that matter, Andy and I were in El Paso, Texas where he was playing AA ball for the Diamondbacks.

(Okay, apparently Google did exist then. We were just too poor to own a computer and communicated with Morse code. I just learned of the birth date of the Google by Googling it. I also just used a noun as a verb. And you knew exactly what I meant. Who's using Morse code now, huh?)

Anyhoo, on the very last day of the season we decided that we would drive as far as we could that night and just stop when we got tired.

We were very ready to get out of El Paso.

I will let you deal with that information as you wish.

Also going on that day was the Kentucky/Louisville college football game. Which I dutifully recorded on our 13 inch tv/vcr.

Yes, it was VHS, why do you ask?

So we went ahead with the plan. I drove while Andy watched the game in the car. On the annoyingly bulky 13 inch tv/vcr combo which was resting on his lap. While he kinda hunched over weird to see the screen because our little car was so crammed he couldn't push the seat back.

He was dedicated.

When the game ended he was fired up. I can't remember if it was because we won or we lost, but he was wired. (I'm sure if he was here he would be able to tell me the exact score, who threw for what and what the weather was like. He's a little scary that way).

Moral of that story is, he drank some Mount@in Dew and declared that he

WAS NOT TIRED. AT ALL.

So by morning we were in Memphis which was about six hours from home. Never having stopped at a hotel to sleep. Never having really eaten much, because who eats at 3 am?

And the Dewski was no longer working.

By the time we walked into my parents house in Lexington, we were a mess. A stinky, overtired, slightly jittery mess.

After sleeping for three days, we vowed we would never do that again.

So this season, as we were planning the trek home Andy suggested that we drive a little after his last game (which was in the morning) to take some of the hours off the long days of our trip and hopefully make it somewhat easier for the girls.

I love a man with a plan.

That day arrived and after loading up the last of our stuff and saying goodbye to our Arizona buddies we hit the road to pick up Daddy at the field. I drove first while Andy finished his game reports on his laptop.

I had flashbacks of the 13 inch t.v. incident. Only it was smaller. And it had wi-fi.

And Andy didn't yell at it for three hours.

Moving on. Things were fine, except for the fact that I had a sinus/allergy headache that was trying it's darndest to turn into a migraine. And Andy was trying to finish his report while the girls were enjoying The Sound of Music.

Again.

And I was driving in the mountains of AZ with the squeakiest brakes you've ever heard.

Ever.

Due to all these issues when we stopped a few hours later to switch drivers and let Mommy Lainey go to the bathroom, we missed a turn.

There's a state route that cuts through parts of AZ into NM that cuts nearly 70 miles off the trip from Phoenix to Albuquerque (our destination for the night). When you're going to be driving for four days, you do what you can to save time.

And your sanity.

Unfortunately, we didn't realize that anything was amiss until we turned onto this



Don't worry children,

THE ADULTS HAVE EVERYTHING UNDER CONTROL.

The whole time we're driving through this lovely desert trailer park Lainey is saying

why doesn't this look like the interstate? Are we lost, mom?

And Lola, the lovely but monotone GPS voice is saying

Make a u-turn, if possible.

Really, what makes you think that would be a good idea?



Huhn.

Yep, this could be a problem.