Mudville - Nebraska Edition

So, it turns out us Dunsmores make a mean mud pit.  No matter where we are...we can somehow add water to dirt and make magic. 

It seems to be our thing.

And like the saying goes, once I build it...they will come.  And they do.  My boys and their friends spend hours in these things. 

You remember the original Mudville, don't you? 

I think there is nothing better than letting my boys soak their little toes entire bodies in a little mud.

Clean up can be a bit challenging, but in the end...it's worth it.

Good times are had, friendships are sealed, and...

it makes naptime come all the more quickly (which is what it is all about anyway).

Knowing

Every morning, I get up early to go for a walk before all my boys are awake.  This is my favorite time of day.  Just me and my dog, in the quiet of the dawn.  It is my best (translation: only) time of the day to myself where I can just linger in my own thoughts.  Some mornings my thoughts are slow and still laced with sleep and I can get through the entire thing without even knowing what I thought about the entire time.  Other mornings, my mind is racing with ideas and I find myself finishing my route in record time and I feel like I can conquer the world that day.  There are mornings that I let myself go to the dark corner that I have been sweeping all my thoughts about my family.  It tends to bring out emotional thoughts and sometimes I realize I have cheeks stained with tears when I say good morning to a passing runner. 

This past week, I spent some time in the dark corner while walking around in the dark of the neighborhood.  I came back to the house sad.  My thoughts kept stumbling over one concept.  I don't know how the family that I left in Texas is working through the split that we all have experienced.  You see, there is absolutely no communication between myself and any member of my family of origin.  None.  I assume they still all talk with each other, but none of them to me, and I am recipricating.  My own thoughts and emotions about the past are very present - almost haunting my minutes each day.  I am constantly evaluating how I am coping, my opinions, my past actions, my present decisions, and my future plans and expectations.  I hear the story that my lips tell when people ask me about my family.  All these thoughts and emotions are almost never clear, and perhaps, that is why I decided to start talking about it on this blog.  To get it out and organize it.  To hear other's opinions, and feel other's support.  To make it real to me (because so often it seems like a terrible nightmare that just couldn't actually be true - not in a million years).  But on this chilly morning in the very first light of the day, it hit me that I don't have any idea how they are all dealing with it.  I see nothing.  I hear nothing.  And despite it being my reality, it makes me sad.  Losing a parent to death was horrific, but going on with my life has been possible.  Quite manageable, actually.  But the loss of a parent and your only sibling to conflict and then to live with the knowledge that they are still very much alive is quite different.  It is a little bit debilitating, for me, at least.   And it became crystal-clear to me on that morning that my lack of knowledge about what they feel, about why they acted the way they did, about how they tell the story, about if they are being comforted or ridiculed or what their future expectations are is a gigantic obsticle in my healing.  I am having trouble getting closure after the death of a relationship with people who live on. 

BUT...it is the way that it is.  And I can either attempt to scale this hurdle or move it.  As of now, I am attempting to scale it because I don't feel ready or strong enough to reach out.  But I still afford myself days of pity and sorrow.  I allow myself time to work through the sadness of not knowing.  They, after all, do not know either.  They do not know how I feel, what makes me cry and how I retail the story of our divorce to new friends.  They do not know what it is doing to my children, or my husband.  And I have a significant part of that.  I am choosing not to reach out, just as they are.  I am choosing to keep those things to myself, and not seek out what the answers to them are on the other side of the camp.

When we lived in Texas, I wrote a blog.  I snapped pics of my boys, shared stories of our life, and loved it.  Since all of my family had knowledge of my blog, and had visited it, I made the decision when we moved to stop writing.  I closed my beloved blog and just chilled.  I felt strongly that I didn't think it was fair for my family to be able continue to see our lives, if they were choosing not be a part of it.  And so it was done.  But I missed it.  So after a couple of months, I started this one.  So I could still share my heart and participate in what I love to do, and what is helping to get me through this.  But in the "privacy" of my own space.  You see, it is not that I don't want my brother or my dad to see my precious little family.  Quite the opposite...I dream about them seeing them.  I yearn for them to look into the eyes of my boys and give them a connection to their family.  I wish with all my soul that they could soak up every inch of them.  But, I still feel strongly about them not just voyaristically getting peeks into our lives without particiapting in a relationship after all we have been through. 

So...the very afternoon I came home from my morning walk with sadness of not knowing what is going on in the lives of those that I have lost, I got on the blog to start a post about digging a mudpit for the boys to be boys in.  And I glanced down at the little feature I have on the front page of the blog which tracks which people visit the blog and where they are from.  And my jaw hit the floor.  There was a visitor from Simpsonville, South Carolina.  And I don't know a soul in South Carolina, or Simpsonville for that matter, except for my brother, who is stationed there.  This visitor had been on my blog several times, on several different occasions.  Reading.  Looking at pictures of my babies.  Hearing my story of coping through this break-up. And there it was again two days later.  And then two days after that.  Watching my life. 

And now I don't know what to do.  I love to write on this blog.  I finally feel safe enough to open up and explore my thoughts about what has happened and what I want to happen in my future.  I love sharing pictures of the ones I love with the people that love me.  But I still don't think it is fair for someone who has volutarily given up a relationship with me and my husband and my children to have a bird's eye view of our lives without being bothered to participate in a relationship with us.  But I also don't think it is fair to have to give those same people control by shutting this down and hiding.  I don't think it is fair to censor the murmurs of my heart that I want to share with the amazing people who support me and read this just because I am cautious about who might be reading and what they might be thinking.  I don't know what to do.  I just don't.

twelve

photo by Roanin



So, here we are.  Twelve years.  TWELVE FREAKING YEARS!!!!

Fourteen years ago I met this boy.  He was not what I expected.  He was not my type.  As it turns out, I needed an unexpected cowboy outside my comfort zone.  My comfort zone was way off. 

We spent a year flirting, dating and daring to use the "L" word.  But it was on our first date that I knew.  He was it.  He was the one.  Sounds insane, but it is true.  I remember him picking me up from the apartment I shared with my two roommates.  He came in, met them, and then we went out.  Once he had dropped me off, I came in to find my two roommates waiting up for me on the couch.  They were bright-eyed and full of smiles.  I shut the door and they both tackled me, screaming, "He's the ONE, isn't he?!?!?!"  And all I could do is beem back at them.  He was.

We spent a year planning our wedding and our lives.  We dreamed, planned and prepared.  We worked our little tooshies off building a strong platform for the marriage that would be our future.  It was so great.  Like the way they portray it in the movies.  Pure bliss.

We spent our first year exploring what it meant to be married.  This came with good and bad.  The relationship with my dad and stepmother became especially tumultuous, which provided lots of opportunities for Shawn and I to disagree, fight, scream, cry (mostly me), regroup and then figure out how to come together again.  Figure out how to lean on this new foundation and make it even stronger than where we had come from and trust it to take us into the future.  It was so hard.  Perhaps one of the hardest years of my life.  It was so unknown.  It came with no instructions.  It was easy to doubt, easy to want to give up on, easy to want to run to our own corners and want to stay there.  But by some miracle, we somehow figured out that from the day we decided to be together - there simply were no more corners.  It was no longer about ourselves...it was about us.  The partnership took the place of the individual.  Always.  This is a hard lesson to learn, but one that I know set us up for success.

We spent our first chapter building that partnership.  We moved around and figured out aspects about location that we liked and didn't.  We worked and figured out what our priorities were going to be once we began to add little babies into the equation.  We loved animals and figured out that the important lessons about responsibility and compassion.  We fought and figured out each other's hot buttons.  We dreamed and made plans of how to make those dreams come true.  We learned how important it was to guard what we were building from the world.  We guarded our time, our conversations, our love.  We worked hard and played hard.  And we did it all together. 

We spent our second chapter making little humans.  It took our relationship to the next level.  Seeing yourself and the person you love the most mixed together in a living, breathing object is beyond crazy.  It is something that can't even be described...only experienced.  Three in heaven and two here on earth - they are ours.  Completely dependent on us; innocently willing to trust us and follow our lead.  Not a day has gone by that I don't get my mind completely blown by this responsibility and honor.  And I couldn't have asked for a better partner in it.

We are currently in the third chapter.  Thus far, it has involved a painful decision to break away from the toxic relationship we had with my family.  It has involved a commitment to our family, and an intense faith in what that means now and in the future.  It has involved decisions to make that work.  A move to a new place, with a healthy and clean slate.  An understanding and a respect for what the other has gone through and willingness to help each other heal.  A support for each other's talents.  A promise to push each other to be the best we know we can be.  A unwillingness to settle.  A spirit of adventure and desire to live life, and be masters of our family's destiny.  An ability to call bullshit on each other if the situation warrants it.  And it has involved a lot of love.  Sometimes that love has come easy, sometimes it has had to be a decision.  But it has always been there.

I know I am lucky.  Even when I think back to that first date when I knew Shawn was it, I had no idea how great he was.  I don't think I even had the capacity to think that big.  I was so lucky to have a push from the universe toward this man.  I had done nothing to deserve him.  I wasn't a great dater, picker of guys, or relationshiper.  I hadn't envisioned a man like Shawn since I was a little girl.  I was just lucky.

BUT, I know that luck isn't the only thing that has landed us into twelve years.  It was also all that work.  It was all that struggle, and the perseverance of staying in the ring even when there were no corners to hide in.  It was the commitment to keep trying, even in the face of not having a clue what to do next.  It came from thinking about us, and not ourselves.  It wasn't easy at first...in fact, it sucked.  But each year that has gone by, it has gotten easier.  And I am tempted to write something like "I'm so glad we are to the easy part and we can relax" but I know that couldn't be farther from the truth.  I think the only way it stays easy is to make a decision each day to fight like hell.  Fight against the stress.  Fight against the differences.  Fight against society.  Fight against apathy.  Fight against human nature.  Fight against anything that could harm this beautiful thing that we are creating together.  Fight for us.

Happy Anniversary, Sweet Pea.  I love you.

The Christmas Present I Forgot to Tell You About

So, it was December...mid.  We were in full holiday mode.  Christmas tunes were being carolled, stockings hung...the whole bit.  I was busy attempting to make sure my unconscious plan to fully spoil and overload the kids with material things to ensure their first Christmas in our new home was perfect.  So, I was caught off guard one Tuesday when Shawn announced he would be coming home in the middle of the day on the following day.  He explained he would need to be home in order to meet the delivery man who was bringing his Christmas gift. 

So...call it my delusional mindset Christmas spirit but, to me, that meant that he wanted to intercept the gift he had purchased for me for Christmas as to keep it a surprise.  Of course!  That makes total sense!

The next day, as promised, he arrived home around 2 and walked casually around the kitchen. 

"Sooooo....are you just going to wait for the UPS guy?" I asked innocently.

"Nope, it's already here."

"What?!?  Where?"

"It's out in the driveway."

Ok, now the keep in mind...I was suffering from severe Christmas spirit and perhaps had seen a few too many Lexus holiday commercials. 

"Reeeeallllyyy?  How long until I can go out and see?"

"You can go right now if you want."  

Ok, fine.  That was a little lackluster for such a big surprise, but who cares!  There was probably a big shiny new automobile with a huge gorgeous red bow on in it in the driveway!   

So we go out and I see this green motorcycle.  A little confused, I asked for clarification.

"It's my Christmas present." 

And indeed, this man went out and bought himself a Christmas present. 

We have all gotten rides, even the neighbors (Hi Jeannie!).

And I have to admit it is really fun, despite being super-skeptical at first. 

And so begins the Dunsmore annual Christmas tradition of buying yourself a gift.  Just wait until I show him my version next year...

Spider-iffic!

My big boy turned FIVE.  Holy smokes.  And this warranted a visit from a certain superhero.

We started the day with a new ride.

And then a little shin-dig.

There were even a few cute girls there.

My fatty enjoying a sugar-dipped marshmallow.

Please take a minute to notice the plate of our cute neighbor, Willow.  Candy with a side of carrots.

Here is where things got really wild.  Kids talking and eating, and spidey enters from the back.  They don't even notice yet.

And then they do. 

The chase was ON.

Spiderman even showered all the kids with his webbing.

Unfortunately, the superhero underestimated the power of rowdy party-goers and was taken down.

The hostess with the mostess was called in to rescue said superhero and adjust his mask.  Ahem...

Then we were all good for round 2.

Did I mention cute girls were in attendance?

We opted for a pull-string pinata this year given the violent nature of 5 year old boys (see Spiderman takedown above...can you imagine if we had introduced a bat to this group?!?!).

Rex pulled the winning string (no, I didn't rig it) which scared the heck outta the little guy and resulted in him having a complete meltdown.

My partner in crime...both in party-planning and in creating the birthday boy.  I love this man.

Sweet little Lucy.

And this, my friends, is what the end of a good party looks like. 

Happy Birthday Roanin Luke.  We love you more than we could ever tell you.

*Thanks to my talented friend, Jeannie, for taking all the pictures.