Monday, November 26, 2012

A big reason this marriage works

When we last checked in on the blog all the Healds were in their jammies on a lazy Friday-after-Thanksgiving morning. Girls on/by the couch with an ipad, Jared on the ground with a pad of paper, me in the rocking chair with my computer. We were talking about plans for a long, lazy weekend…and that makes Jared and I both just a wee bit antsy! The reality is that neither one of us can sit still for any decent length of time.

 

I keep laughing thinking of this picture in my mind because less than 2 hours later we were across town buying special chalk paint because in that small amount of time I’d talked Jared into letting me redo the kitchen table and chairs. We spent the afternoon outside with the girls playing as I prepped and painted while Jared cleaned out all his tools in the garage.

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(table before – see how yucky the top looks compared to the leaves that never get used? Totally time for a makeover!)

By the time Friday ended the table, 4 chairs and their 2 coats of paint were drying. Saturday morning we got up, talking more about Jared building us a wall of built-ins in the family room. See that pic above? Tan colored wall, couch, bookcase, art work…it was all just like that when we went to bed Sat. night. My dad had come up Saturday afternoon and Jared talked to him about maybe staying a few days after Christmas and working on those built –ins. Then we went to bed.

Sunday morning we got up and dressed for church. Long story short we forgot until we were leaving that the carseats were all pulled apart and in the foyer. By the time we had them together and in the car we would have been 20 minutes late for church and we just gave up. The girls were upset so I stayed downstairs calming them down. Next thing I knew Jared was in his sweats headed into the garage and would soon be making all sorts of loud noises out there.

What does this have to do with our marriage? The moral of this story is that neither Jared or I can stand to sit still and once we have something on our mind we want to do we’re all in to get it done! Sometimes it does cause a few tense moments but we’ve (most of the time) learned to have patience with one another. Here’s a quick rundown of Sunday starting at 9am.

-have discussion about what it would take to install the not yet built built-ins. Begin to move while still talking. Take everything off walls, move couch, onload current bookcase, unhook all cables, phone etc. Putty holes in the wall.

-toss Matney in the car and I head to Lowe’s for paint while Jared heads into the garage. Grab paint and supplies and come home. Stick the turkey in the oven (we hadn’t had Thanksgiving yet), find the girls some toys and haul my almost 8 month pregnant behind up and down a ladder to paint the wall. Check the turkey every 30 min to baste.

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-finish painting wall, clean up paint, start cooking sides, etc. Bring dad in from outside and take the turkey out of the oven. Jared starts coming in and out with the bottom cabinets they’ve built.

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The girls were very excited for the chaos and for new places to play. In the left picture they were “home in bed” and in the picture on the right they were in a cave hiding from Captain Hook.

And this is when I started really laughing. 24 hours earlier, heck, 12 hours earlier we had a clean house, were talking about working on bulit-ins once the Christmas tree came down and now it looked like a bomb had exploded! And see the table and chairs? I am still debating painting the legs or leaving them brown. I rubbed the edges of the table and chairs with sandpaper before I waxed them so that the original dark wood color shows through. Decisions, decisions….

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-the guys worked a few more hours outside. I tried to keep the girls out of their way (HK REALLY wanted to be “outside with the boys”). Pretty soon they were attaching things to the wall and making sure the fit was correct.

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- and this is when I got REALLY excited! The base cabinets will have doors and shelves, the top cabinets will have shelves and be bookcases and then the TV will go in the middle. I know there is a lot of work left to do building the cabinets, adding doors, trim, etc but in my mind Ta da!!!!

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By 7pm the girls were trying to talk Jared into letting them sleep in the boxes. It didn’t work, they should have paid attention and noticed he had on ear phones and was ignoring them! We all called it a night. Dad drove back home and we all were in bed asleep by 8:30.

So now it is 1030:pm on Monday and I am downstairs helping when needed and blogging while Jared works. Y’all, my husband is a rock star! A few years ago he had a few random tools and was not so handy. He’s read books and watched videos and taught himself everything. He was even out in the masses at 4:30am Black Friday to get a drill at Home Depot.

In a lot of ways Jared and I are very different. He’s a morning person, I’m not. He loves to travel, I like to be close to home. We don’t like the same tv shows or music or food, etc. Many times during the past 8 years we’ve talked about needing things we can do together that we both enjoy and I think we’ve finally found one! Our communication skills while planning could use some work still but we’ve both really enjoyed coming up with something, planning it and then seeing it turn into reality. Plus, Jared discovered he loves to build and is really good at it and I love any excuse to paint, organize and take a trip to Homegoods!  It is a total marriage win-win!

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