At a bridal shower a few years ago (Hi, Meg!) I played a game where everyone wrote down encouraging words about marriage on slips of paper and the bride chose her favorite. She chose:

"Stay Interesting and Interested"

Right now, I'm trying to stay interested in Jacob's enthusiasm for tiny houses. He was on a kick about a year ago and recently got back onto it. I can't say I encourage him very much because how do you encourage something like this? I'm pretty sure we graduated from tiny house potential as soon as we started having kids. I mean, currently, we have five people living in an 1100 sq. ft house. Per person, we're basically on par with the tiny housers. 

source

He really just wants to build a house on a trailer and drive it around and park it overnight in any spot where he wants to watch the sunrise. So basically what he wants is a "tiny vacation home" which I argue misses the entire point of the tiny house movement. 

For all I tease him about it, I find them pretty interesting, these quirky little buildings with all their nooks and hooks and crannies. 

But were he ever to drive home with a double axle trailer and tell me he was going to build a house, scratch that OUR house, on it...well...I mean for him to do that I would not only have to be on board, I would have to be on duty. 

Especially now that we have kids, staying interested in each others' hobbies is a lot more effortful than just an occasional "how nice" - being interested often means enabling the other person, we have to help each other stay interesting.

I'm the type that is a huge cheerleader for Jacob to follow some passion, but when he actually starts in on it I feel abandoned and overwhelmed, and bitterness mounts because I can't beLIEVE he's out there PLAYing when there are bedtimes to routine and diapers to change! 

Interested is when I let him pursue a passion even when it feels inconvenient to me.

Interested is when my husband is outside with his tools finishing what I'm sure is a very pressing project, while I scramble through the end of dinner prep with two hungry people clutching at my calves. 

Interested is when he comes in for dinner and proudly presents me with...a cherrywood muddler, and I suppress the lip-pursing, eyebrow-raising "THIS is how you've spent your last half hour?" face. Or half-suppress it...or perhaps I just own the snark completely while taking the muddler from him and making cocktails.

Sometimes I have to be more of a mom so he can be something other than a dad for a little while.

Sometimes I have to be more of a mom so our children can watch their dad be a carpenter. So I can watch him too.

I have my interests too. Things I pursue, that make me a happier and hopefully better person. He's interested in those things with me.

And often his interest surfaces around seven in the morning, when I'm nursing my sacred morning coffee as he takes the toddler to the bathroom and tends to the baby who's started to squawk, and he says too loudly: "I'm coming, Lucy June. Papa loves you MORE than his computer." And then to me "I'm just gonna change a diaper here, honey, if that's OK with you."

"Go for it!" I say. He would welcome help, but he mostly just wants me to remember all that he is juggling so I can play like I'm a blogger for a few more minutes. 

Celebrating as Young Parents

Jacob took several days off over the weekend so we could enjoy our anniversary. On Friday we went to Herman Park to ride the kiddy train. Jake insisted that we ride in the very last car, and as soon as the train started to move he yelled: "It's my first train ride EVER!!"

We then got off and had a picnic lunch, before getting back on the train, and Jake yelled: "It's my first train ride ever...AGAIN!!!"

We then migrated to a little staycation at The Houstonian. For some reason, Friday night was the cheapest night to go, so we went. We checked in early, brought the kids, and let them splash around at the club pool. We ordered poolside margaritas and enjoyed periodic slugs of them as Jacob waded after the toddler and I kept the baby upright as she flung both arms relentlessly into the water over and over and over again.

Would I have liked to drink my cocktail and read uninterrupted in a lounge chair? Umm....yes. But Lucy June's undaunted attempts to grab the spraying water in the kiddie pool fountain were funnier for a lot longer than you'd think. And Jake is SO! EXCITED! about life that taking him to do special fun things kinda makes me feel like a hero.

Eventually Jake went home for the night to watch youtube videos of tractors with his uncles, and we grabbed sushi and went back to the hotel where we sat on the couch in our room and watched Lucy June maneuver on the floor. It wasn't exactly a hip, late night bar with deep set lounge chairs, but she is in that phase where she can only scoot backwards and thus for all her efforts just ends up farther and farther away from the object she wants. So...pretty great in its own right.

If you follow me on instagram, you know that Lucy June was raking in wrong gender compliments all weekend. One sweet lady in the line at Marshall's raved in Spanish about my sweet little boys. I smiled and nodded and thanked her, but she wasn't done. She told me we had to try for a girl, and while we were at it we should really go for two girls to balance out the family. At that point, I was just too far in.

But thankfully there was no such confusion at the pool, her cousin's hand me down swimsuit left nothing to the imagination.

So that was our weekend and it was awesome.

Five Years Ago Today

I'm sitting here in my muggy living room all wrapped up in memories of a pretty awesome day five years ago. And since I've basically never put any wedding pics on the blog, I decided to turn it up to eleven and give you a whole entire slideshow. You'll also get to hear "our song" - the song we danced to at the wedding - sung by our college buddy JT.

(And @BazinChronicles totally crashed the slideshow.)

Jun 12, 2009 from therhodeslog on Vimeo.

Mr. Jacob Augustine, Keeper of Bees, Father of my Children, Dishwasher Unloader and First Diaper Changer of the Day, I have more than loved these last five years with you.

On Money and Vacations and Marriage. But Mostly Marriage. And Money.

Jacob and I left on our honeymoon two days after we got married. I had no idea where we were going. (This is not the story I want to tell today, but I will tell enough of it to set the stage for the story that I do want to tell.) We arrived after many hours of travel in the Canary Islands. We got off the plane, chucked our luggage into a rental car, and navigated to where we were staying.

Let me pause here to reiterate that I knew nothing about our honeymoon except that I needed to pack for the beach and that Jacob had gotten "a really good deal." I like beaches almost as much as I like "good deals" so this sounded perfect, and I didn't need to know a single other thing.

As we drove up to this stunning collection of seaside villas, I started to get a little nervous. We were met out front by a manager, and I began anxiously looking around for where the Groupon people stayed. But no. She ushered us to our very own three bedroom two bath villa with a pool looking out over the ocean. I was petrified. I literally wouldn't even step inside. I looked at my new husband, and he seemed like a stranger. I didn't care how "good" of a deal this man had gotten, there was no way we could afford to stay here for ten whole days. Jacob turned to look at me at this precise moment - just as I'd started to get dizzy - and blurted out: "It's free! Katie, we're staying here for free."

The owner of the company Jacob worked for - a Spaniard and real estate guru - had offered that we stay in one of his villas as a wedding present. Eventually my heart rate went down and we proceeded to have a very lovely and very cheap honeymoon.

I feel like that anecdote is a microcosm of our life together: cheap, awesome, with occasionally poor communication and moments of sheer terror. So we'll let it be a precursor to this story. Today's real story:

We returned from our big honeymoon and began our little life in Los Angeles. I started grad school and he started an unpaid internship and we lived very happily in a converted garage apartment with no hot water in the kitchen sink until a newborn moved us into a whopping one bedroom apartment a couple years later.

When the baby was five months old, Jacob and his siblings rigged up a surprise trip to Maui for his mother's sixtieth birthday. They had lived in Hawaii in the 90s, and their mom had always wanted to go back. She'd hinted that she wanted to turn sixty on the beaches where their family had spent many magical years, but she didn't expect that her kids would do anything about it. Her kids are kinda crazy though, so like I said they rigged up this trip.

When his family first started talking about it, I weighed in as a disinterested observer because there was no way our little family would be making this Hawaii trek. Of Jacob's five siblings I thought perhaps the single ones would go, maybe even the married, childless ones, but certainly not us. Certainly certainly not us.

At this point, Jacob had been unemployed for six months. We had a baby. We lived in a one bedroom apartment. I was adjuncting at LMU, and I tutored privately on the weekends; Jacob had found a decent amount of work on commercial sets and even one long gig working on the set of ABC's Scandal; but we were dipping into our savings every month.

When Jacob told me that of course, of COURSE, we were going I was shocked. It was as impossible for him to consider not going as it was for me to consider going. We argued and argued about it and finally came to a miserable compromise: he would go without us. The arguments came to an end, but we were even more unsettled about it.  

One afternoon Jacob was on the phone with a sibling talking about the trip. He glanced at me tentatively, and I retreated to the bedroom in angry tears. It was so absurd. How could he even consider this?! I was struggling as a new mother. I had a high needs baby. We'd been living on the hope of one interview to the next for months. I was stretched so thin by work and mothering, and we still weren't making ends meet. I was the numbers person. I knew this was a stupid stupid financial choice. Why couldn't he see that? Just because we could pay for it didn't mean we could afford it. Not only was he going to Hawaii, he was leaving me alone with our five month old for a week, and it was on my plate to find extra babysitting help, and I didn't know how how I would pay for this extra babysitting because he was taking all our money and flying to Hawaii with it! Oh was I mad and, oh, was I justified. Jacob was so so gloriously in the wrong and I was so perfectly in the right that I marched over to the computer and chose the only option I had left.

I bought a plane ticket to Maui.

Because somewhere through the dark cloud of my anger I knew that "being right" was making me a horrible person. And the only hope that I had was for me to be wrong.

I could either be right and alone and miserable and chanting my angry justifications over and over in my head until he went on the trip, and after he got back from the trip, and for the rest of our marriage.

Or I could be wrong and spend a week on Maui with my husband and our beautiful baby.

I also realized that this impulse in Jacob was one of the precise reasons I'd married him. This desire - the desire to sweep his mother up on the surprise trip of a lifetime no matter the cost - was exactly what I loved about him in theory and consistently what I tried to squash in practice. 

That was several years ago back before Jacob moved us to Houston so he could make better money and we could be closer to family, back before I stayed home full time with the kids, back before I stopped being such a machine when it comes to finances. . . or maybe that hasn't changed.

But I'm learning to embrace life's little "fly to Maui" moments when they arise and let us go out to Chick-fil-a for dinner.

And Jacob has learned to keep a little stash of cash in the house that Mint.com knows nothing about. It's something he sets aside not for poker night, but for date night. 

A Good Day

We knew when Jacob started this job back in the summer that things would be crazy in January and February.

But we didn't expect it to be this crazy.

There was so much work to be had that my brother moved to Houston for it and is living in our third bedroom, and another friend from Fredericksburg is currently bunking in our (albeit pretty homey) garage and occasionally his wife (my best friend from childhood) and their eighteen month old join the fray. Don't read that sentence again. It's too confusing. Just know it's been BUSY. The days are filled with snotty babies and giggles and tantrums, and the nights are full of big meals and laughter and beer and husbands cleaning the kitchen after oh-so-subtle reminders from their domesticity-weary wives.

It's wonderful and very very hard. My friend and I managed to have a few conversations over the toddler din, and when we talked, we talked about our plights as stay at home mothers tending to the endless needs of little people; we talked about how the days are generally frustrating, always exhausting, and sometimes pretty decent. We also compared our days and experiences to our husbands' who for the time being are working all day every day. There are days when Jacob arrives home late in the evening, I toss a baby in his arms and shuffle off to the kitchen (via a solo trip to the bathroom) so I can get food on the table before our toddler barrels into the over-tired freak outs.

He holds the baby with one arm and tries to close out jobs on his iPad with the other, and in frustration he says: "I know you didn't see it, but I worked really hard today."

I drag a toddler to his eighth time out of the evening and rush back to stir the onions on the stove, and in frustration I reply: "I know you didn't see it, but I worked really hard today."

And it's not fun to be that wife. I don't ever want to be that wife. But I have been before, and I certainly will be again.

As I talked about this with my dear friend, I remembered a day not too long ago - a day when the house was still in boxes and the weariness of moving still hung over every moment - when a mom-friend here in Houston texted and said she could get us into the zoo for free that morning if we wanted to come. I was lying on the bed nursing Lucy June, and I started my stock response of how we couldn't because of all that we needed to get done blah blah blah, and then I thought: Jacob would love it if we went to the zoo. Jacob would love it if he came home tonight, and I said, we didn't get a single box unpacked today, but we did see a VERY pregnant elephant. And we did it. We went to the zoo.

As I told this story to my friend, I realized something: nothing blesses my husband more than when the littles and I have a good day.

So, husband mine husband dear, I've determined to have more good days. Each morning when I think of all the things I want to get done, I will remind myself to have a good day.

And even when I haven't had a good day, I want to stop in my frantic blitz clean of the living room before you get home in the evening and remember at least one good thing about my day. That way, when you ask me how the day went and I automatically begin the montage of crazy: "Lucy June ruined three outfits before 10am and Jake threw blocks at me while I was nursing and even though I feel like I spent the whole day cleaning the kitchen, it's still a mess..." I can finish the list with that one good thing: "...BUT Jake did spend half the day in a helmet and leg warmers telling me he was pretty cool."

Me: Jake where did you put my keys?
Jake: Ummm...I put them somewhere.

And now I must go have a good day...and get my toddler out of the bathtub where he has been for the last hour so I could have a cup of coffee in peace.