The beginning…

I usually start in the middle and then work my way back to the beginning, and that is what I did here, too. I called my blog afourytale and then didn’t really explain why. My friends and family that read know that the four part is due to my four kiddos and then there is the quote that is inscribed on my wall “Once upon a time in an ordinary life, love gives you a fairytale.” I have a fourytale. Cheesy, but true.

Now don’t get me wrong, we had friends over for dinner last night and after they left, I looked at my sweet husband and I said, “Babe, we are seriously boring.” Now, normally I think boring is good – because boring to me means healthy, drama free, crisis free, trauma free life and that is good, that is what I want. But sometimes that also means that when I meet with people I don’t really have anything to talk about. Small talk is difficult for me…I have no idea what to say. I don’t watch the news on a regular basis, I am not a sports fan, I have no idea who Tory Burch is or what she makes, I buy wine at the supermarket and have no idea about what makes one better than the other, if you start talking finances my mind goes into a blurry freeze and I can’t comprehend past the third sentence, I work and raise four kids all day so I can talk about that – but that is pretty boring at a dinner party. Now, I am totally off topic, but I just wanted to keep it real – I have a beautiful, boring fourytale.

Back at the beginning, how this wonderful mess all started was a phone call. A desperate phone call from my college friend begging me to go on a camping trip with her. I had just moved into a new apartment (my very first one, all by my buying groceries on a credit card, big girl self) and was going to start my very first big girl teaching job in two weeks. Now I am the girl who read everything, studied everything and worked in college. So when she called and I was trying to prepare lessons and curriculum I told her I most definitely could not go on a camping trip with her and she said she would call me tomorrow.

Well, she did call the next day and wouldn’t take no for an answer. That Friday we drove up and to my surprise a handsome young man insisted on helping us put up our tent. My heart instantly knew that this was the boy – the one I was going to marry, but my head was screaming, “NO!” this can’t be right, not right now. Reason being I had just gotten out of a seven-year relationship and I just wanted to have a life of my own. Well needless to say that didn’t happen. That was the boy that I was supposed to marry and about a year and a half later, we did just that.

Friends and family came from all over and helped us celebrate our new life together.

I love the bottom picture because my parents are in the background – their love story made it possible for my love story. Pretty cool, I think.

It was at the rehearsal dinner that I truly realized that I was at the start of my very own love story. I looked around the room that night at the dinner and I saw my parents, my aunts and uncles, and my grandparents and I saw that they were all living beautiful love stories. My grandparents had started all this and their grandparents before them. My existence was due to a legacy of love stories. Love isn’t like you see it in the movies – love is getting married and taking in younger siblings because they need a better home, love is two young people moving away from home with two young children and finding their way together, love is going every day to visit a wife in a nursing home even when she can’t remember who you are, and now I was starting my own real life love story.

We have been married 10 years and have four kiddos. We live in suburbia with plain jane regular lives and it is good stuff. Marriage is not easy and parenting is even more difficult, but I still believe I have been given a gift of a fourytale. I guess that is what this blog is all about – the not so adventures of my fourytale…and that folks is the beginning.