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Our time in Grenoble

2012-01-03T14:13:00.002-06:00

In France, it's customary to take long vacations at least twice a year.
Before marrying Tim, my longest trip anywhere was 7 days, tops. Usually a weekend. But we've been here 14 days already and we have another week before we head home to the states. The length of this trip has really given me the opportunity to get to know Tim's family in a way that wasn't possible before we were married and during the wedding. We've had the time to fall into a routine here, make multiple visits to friends and family members, meet church acquaintances of my in-laws and attend a few events there. It's been such a special time for me too, to reconnect with the culture in which I was raised and see how another intercultural family "does life" here. I have loved every minute.
I've been collecting memories with my camera phone. We've brought out the big camera a couple of times, but sorting/editing/publishing those always takes a back seat to our client's pictures, so who knows when I'll be able to share those.

Here's what our days have been made of:

Thankfulness. We have so much.
Table time is sacred here. Twice a day, my mother in law cooks a delicious (multiple course) meal and we gather and pray and feast and talk across the table. I really want to bring this back to Chicago, lengthening our meal time and making it into a restful, recharging time of day.

Look at these two pictures. This is the same room.

How often have I not invited friends over "because I don't have enough space"? Our table at home in Chicago seats 4. I keep letting this little detail put an endpoint to my hospitality. The Tabailloux family home is not large, they actually eat their family meals in the kitchen. However, every year they host up to 23 friends and family members for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. They do this by moving the couches outside onto the patio, bring a long garden table inside, dress it up, and seat everyone on gathered chairs and stackable stools. We were shoulder to shoulder and loving it. I got to know lots of Tim's cousins just because the proximity was so close, we had to talk. I'm going to invest in a table with leaves, stools, and long tablecloths when I get home. And who cares if my dishes don't all match. Spending quality time together across a table is more important.

After Christmas dinner, my father in law, Jean-Luc, passed around printed lyrics to Christmas carols and we all sang together. It was such a sweet time of remembering Jesus' birth and the dire and miraculous circumstances surrounding it. Tim played the piano. Is there an end to his list of talents? I haven't found it yet.

I got this necklace from Tim's grandmother, Mamie Suzanne. It's a Huguenot's cross and presently has come to signify the faith of French Protestant Evangelicals. My mom has this necklace from our time living here in the 1990's and so do all the Tabailloux wives. I have now joined the club.

He's so handsome. I want to nuzzle my cheek in that beard every minute.

We climbed up to Grenoble's Bastille. This is the view from the top.

This "telepherique" was built for the 1968 Grenoble Olympics. I felt confident about riding down the mountain in that little bubble until I climbed inside, then had to do some controlled breathing exercises to make it through the slow ride down. A lot more intimidating than a ski lift.

The mountains around the Tabailloux home are breath-taking. I took this on a ride to the grocery store. The most mundane of tasks are infused with so much beauty around here.

The French know how to party. Every occasion is a special occasion. Every friend brings a bottle of wine when they come to visit, and we open it and toast in their honor. It's so fun to clink glasses and celebrate every little thing.

My father in law was a good sport about wearing the birthday hat all day on his birthday. He's the most endearing man. This is him receiving birthday wishes from a land line. The novelty!

Tomorrow morning, we'll board the high speed TGV train to Paris. When we got married four months ago, we knew we had this luxuriously long trip to France plus this detour to Paris ahead of us and we had a hard time conceiving of taking a nice honeymoon. What could top Paris? So we went to Wisconsin, and it was kind of boring. We are so excited about our little lover's excursion to Paris! I think we're both thinking of this as our real honeymoon.

Chapter 10: Shortening the distance

2011-12-23T16:48:00.001-06:00

Keeping in touch with the Atlantic Ocean between us was hard to do. We had to work around the 7 hour time difference, family obligations, and limited privacy. It was also a really healthy challenge because it made us get creative in how we communicated. We started making videos for each other. Tim was back and forth between the mountains in Grenoble and Paris doing some videography work for a corporate communications firm and I flew down to Florida to be with my family for Christmas. The videos were brilliant for sharing all of our travel, experiences, and family events with each other. Whatever we did or saw throughout our days, we shot a few seconds of video so we could show each other what we were up to. We used everything from my macbook's Photobooth application to Tim's Canon 5D Mark II camera to film these clips.
Please enjoy a musical mash-up of some of our video mails set to music :)

If his goal was to win me over with all those classic Parisian scenes and Chartreuse mountain views, he achieved it. He probably won you over too. I watched his videos over and over again.

We were hosting these videos all over the place and sometimes trying to email them to each other without success. I got tired of the chaos of disorganized information so on Christmas day I created a private blog for us to post our news to each other.

I tried to not make the design too feminine, so he'd actually want to use it. This blog was a communication tool that really worked for us since we were both blog savvy already. It was like a bulletin board: whenever one of us had a thought, video, or picture to share, we posted it and let the other person check it at their own convenience and leave a response.
I love this diptych of our opposite places. He was in the mountains and I was at the beach.

This was when the longing started. He was always on my mind and I wished so badly to be with him in all he was doing. Even though it was hard, these digital greetings and updates helped us immensely to understand one another and share our lives.
But still, I had to get up there to see him and decided to make it a little sooner than I originally planned.

Our first day in France

2011-12-21T15:48:00.001-06:00

It took less than seven hours to fly from Newark to Switzerland. Here, it is customary to greet a friend or new acquaintance with a bise (pronounced: bees), short for bisou, which means a kiss. Each region of France has its own way of doing the bise, some start on the left cheek and then kiss the right, some regions kiss four times and others two. Tim says here in Grenoble they start on the right and just kiss twice, unless the person you're greeting is from up north and stubbornly holds on to their own style of doing the bise four times. It happens very fast when you first see someone; a fluid, thoughtless good manner for all French people.
All I have to do to survive here is smile often, listen closely, speak sparingly, and most importantly: start on the right.

Chapter 9: See you soon

2011-12-18T14:00:00.000-06:00

On Monday morning, I got up early, put on some coffee, and started working on importing, sorting, and editing my pictures from the day before. Tim joined me about halfway through this process and offered to show me a few tricks of his trade before we left the house to go out for breakfast. Once again, he was very kind and not overbearing in his guidance on how I processed my pictures.
"You could do this to warm up the white balance if you wanted to, but that's just what I like."

It is a cozy thing to wake up and sit at the kitchen table with someone, drinking coffee and talking. I loved this part of our time together, and I still really love my Tim time every morning.

Aixois bistro is one of my favorite Kansas City restaurants, and it's French, so we had to go. We had just enough time to eat a nice meal together before he had to start his drive back to Chicago.
When we got settled at our table, the conversation suddenly became halting and awkward. It was like all the natural ease we'd had flowing suddenly stopped and we could barely come up with a new topic to discuss over breakfast.

As we were finishing our meal, I excused myself to go to the ladies' room, and as I was washing my hands in the sink I remember staring at my reflection in the mirror, inwardly demanding that girl to tell me what was going on.
And then I realized: he still didn't have an answer from me about whether or not I would come to Chicago. He was about to leave and had no idea what I was thinking. I felt horrible and resolved to go right out there and tell him that I did want to put forth the same amount of effort into this that he already had and travel to Chicago to see his life there and meet his friends too.

When I returned to the table, Tim was getting his coat on to leave.
"Want to take a walk before I go?"

Excellent. I would have plenty of opportunity to set this straight.

The weather was bright and cold as we set off through Brookside and Tim and I were able to converse easily again.
Lesson in dating: the forward moving walking process is so much easier on new relationships than staring at each other across a table.
We talked about our families some more and what it was like to grow up in two different cultures. I had a hard time finding a natural segue into telling him I wanted to come visit and after a long loop through the neighborhood--with our endpoint in site--bless his heart, he asked me again.

"So do you think you'd want to come up to visit sometime in the next couple of months?"
"Yeah, I really do."
"Really?!"
"Absolutely. Maybe in January if you have a free weekend?"

He was so excited. I was so excited. I think he even did a little skip/jump on the sidewalk like he always does when he's happy. He told me all about what we would do and what he would show me in downtown Chicago and how we would meet his friends and hang out with his brother and his fiancee.

"..and we can go ice skating in Millennium Park and go up in the John Hancock Tower and we'll go to a Blues bar..."

He had all these ideas. It was adorable.

We got back to my house, and in a matter of minutes his car was packed and we were in front of my house saying goodbye. We hugged. The kind of hug that lasts one and a half seconds and you're both wearing thick overcoats and when it's over feels like it was no real hug at all. It was the only time we'd touched since the first awkward hug when he arrived. Closing that space made me jumpy. We said 'see you soon', and he was gone

I went inside, laid on my couch, and tried to lock every memory into my head and analyze all that had happened. I was relieved that it was over so I could rest and think and be alone. I called my mom and told her that I thought he was wonderful and perfect, but I couldn't be sure until I got to Chicago and saw him in his own environment.

And then I went on with my day, and I started to miss him. The next day, he called me as he was boarding his plane to France.

And now, one year later, we are about to board a plane to France together to spend Christmas with his family. It will be the first time I've been back to the country where I grew up since 1998. I'll start this series back up in January on the anniversary of my first visit to Chicago to tell you all the details of that trip, or you can sneak a peak right here. Thank you so much for reading. There's plenty more coming.

Chapter 8: What next?

2011-12-17T00:24:00.003-06:00

After the Crossroads, we drove to Loose park and left our cameras in the car this time.
My awesome moment of feeling fun, free, and lighthearted about the whole situation fleeted as soon as I realized that our time together was drawing very short, he was planning on leaving in the morning, and we hadn't talked squarely about what was going on between us or where to go next. I channeled that uncertainty (in classic Bethany style) through feeling pressure to say and do the right thing, and I had no idea what that was in the moment. My greatest fear was that he was about to ask me to be his girlfriend, and even though I wasn't ready to say yes to that, I really didn't want this process of getting acquainted to end. I could feel the conversation coming soon, and I was right.

After walking a couple of laps around the park, Tim piped up:
"I know this is kind of early, but I really like you. And I'd love it if you came up to Chicago to visit and meet my friends and my brother sometime."

To which I replied:
"Thank you!"

I know this was awful. But it was the only honest reply I could give right then. He looked confused. Of course he was confused, he had asked me an important question and I had completely thwarted his answer.
"I'm so glad you came down here, Tim. It really means a lot to me that you were willing to go through all this work so we could get to know each other in person."
"Yeah, of course. I knew if I didn't come now, I wouldn't have the chance for the next couple of months and the emails would fizzle out before then. I wanted to give this a good shot."

He was so straightforward. Clear-thinking. Decisive. And my thoughts were all half-baked and soggy.

"I had a lot of fun today."
"I did too. It's too bad I have to leave in the morning."
"What time do you have to leave?"
"Well, don't you have to be at work by 9?"
"Well, yeah, usually...but I took a personal day so I don't have to go in tomorrow."
"Really? You don't have to go in at all?"
"Nope."
"Very nice! My flight to France is on Tuesday afternoon, and I haven't done any Christmas shopping for my family yet, so I better be back in Chicago by tomorrow night."
"So we have until around noon tomorrow."

Taking the personal day was my little insurance plan for giving us more time together: if we didn't like each other, I was just going to tell him I had to be at work and then he'd have to leave early the next morning. But that wasn't the case, and it was a good time to tell him we could have the next morning together. It's okay to ~~lie about~~ omit these things when you have a stranger from the internet staying at your house.

Maybe the conversational tangent about having until the next morning distracted him, or maybe he was encouraged by knowing that I was enjoying myself with him, but either way he didn't bring up the unanswered question of whether or not I would come visit him and I was grateful to have some more time to think about it. We still had one more hurdle to conquer that evening: meeting all of my friends.

My church in Kansas City was the heartbeat of my social life. Most of my friends attended the Sunday night service and I never missed. I was excited to see what Tim thought of it and wanted to introduce him to all of my people. I had told a few of my closest girlfriends the unfolding story of our initial contact online and they were eager to meet him in person. Everyone got the same line:

"This is my friend Tim. He's visiting from Chicago."

Most everyone glided right passed this and asked all the normal "what do you do" and "where are you from" questions followed by the "great to meet you, gotta run!"
A couple of others who weren't in the know shook his hand while giving me a look that said "male visitor from out of town? this is interesting."

It was important to me for Tim to see that part of my life, and after I'd had some more time to think about it, I decided I did want to make a trip to Chicago to meet his friends and see his life out there. Unfortunately, I forgot to actually tell him this.

Chapter 7: our first date

2011-12-15T14:09:00.000-06:00

I grabbed a wool sweater, hat, and my beloved and beat-up Olympus E-410 DSLR camera that my parents got me for Christmas several years ago. It looked very shabby next to Tim's Canon 5D Mark II camera and luxury series Prime lenses, but Tim was so sweet and encouraging about my photography efforts.

"Oh, cool! Is that your camera? Can I play with it?"

I was embarrassed to hand it over, but he looked at it and figured with it like it was a new toy, pronounced it "very nice" and handed it back. He could have taken that opportunity to be proud, condescending, and even arrogant about his camera, but he didn't. I liked that.

We hopped into his Mini Cooper, and I navigated us down to the Crossroads, Kansas City's art district.

"Can I warm up your butt for you?"

"What?"

He laughed and hit my seat-warmer button. Seat warmers in the winter = true love.

He started making more cheesy jokes as we drove, and I was just a sucker for them. His international background gave him comedy material that I'd never heard anyone use before, like eastern European accents and jabs at French cultural norms. I knew exactly what he was talking about and it was so funny to me. We started speaking in mixed sentences of French and English (or Franglish, as we call it) and I was so impressed that his French and English were equally perfect.

I suddenly realized that I couldn't put him in any one box or attach a specific label to him. Was he French or American? Ridiculous or sincere? Professional or whimsical? He seemed to have all these opposing character traits and he made them work together in his personality.

We arrived at the Crossroads (which were deserted that Sunday) and started taking pictures.

I tried to take a nice portrait of him, because I knew photographers spend their lives making others look good and rarely get their own picture taken, but this was the best I could do back then with my Olympus.

Then he asked me if I wanted to try his camera. His camera that cost thousands of dollars, that he used to run his business, the one that if anything happened to it he would be screwed (I didn't know then that he had two more of those at home).

"Are you sure? What if I break it?"

"Haha! You're a funny girl. These things don't break."

"Yes they do!"

"True. But it's all insured. So have fun."

So I tried his camera, and it was a dream. He took the above photo with my camera. Why didn't I wear the strap if I was so worried about breaking his Canon? What was I thinking?

Then, as I handed his camera back to him something happened, some chemistry laden exchange that I will never forget for my whole life because it was the first time I felt weak with romance over my husband.

He looked at me like I was a prize he wanted and planned on winning, and with a confidence he had waited to unleash until that moment, said:

"Come over here. Let me take your picture."

And this is what it did to me. My eyes got drunk. I became all sheepish and delighted and dizzy.

Then I tried to pull myself together and give him a serious model face.

And he cracked a joke and made me laugh.

It was so much fun. It was easy and full of light and happiness. In my mind, we became partners that afternoon. We were equal, balancing each other out with our differences and similarities. I had started to trust him, and he made me quit taking myself and the weekend so seriously and just enjoy the unspoken things that were happening.

And we got our very first picture together.

Chapter 6: December 5th, 2012

2011-12-14T20:56:00.002-06:00

The concert ended and we mingled with some people we knew there. Tim introduced me to his Kansas City photographer friends, Dave and Jessi who are wedding photographers with the Smiley Face Collective. He had met them on the Don't Give Up workshop they all attended. Incidentally, Dave and Jessi's blog was how I found Tim in the first place, but somehow that didn't come up in conversation on the night of the Christmas concert. I really enjoyed meeting them, and especially appreciated that they didn't ask any questions about what we were doing and where Tim was staying and why he was even there. They were just happy to see him and wanted to hang out, so I invited them over for brunch the next morning. The name of my game was still to surround us with a buffer of other humans until further notice.

When we got home from the concert, we made small talk on the couch for a while. That conversation is lost on me now. I think it involved youtube videos, stories about our parents, and eating M&M's from the candy dish. I think we were both eager for a break from the work of getting acquainted with our real life selves and happy to have some privacy and rest. I showed him to his guest room and then retired to my own room.

I distinctly remember feeling bitter against the culture of dating and all the hoops it made me jump through. Meeting potential suitors on the internet, for goodness sake, and having them drive 8 hours just for us to size each other up. It was tiring and uncertain. I went to sleep having no idea what the next day would hold.

December 5th dawned bright and cold. I went to work in the kitchen getting food ready for our little brunch party. I invited Graham over as well, so that made 6 of us. Pretty soon the house was filled with friends making easy conversation, all getting to know one another, and I had the opportunity to fade into the background and quietly take in their conversation. This put me at ease and took off the pressure I had placed on myself to produce conversation rather than listen and learn about the kind of person Tim was. I started enjoying myself and getting comfortable being around him.

I wanted Graham to be there and get to know Tim specifically because I needed a trusted male friend's opinion of him. I wanted to watch Tim interact with a new guy in the room and see how he acted in that situation. I know that men have this secret man language they speak with their eyes, and I wanted to be able to talk to Graham later, privately, about his impressions of Tim. This may sound manipulative and sneaky of me, but let's just remember: stranger from the internet. That is all.

[sidenote: I'm still really glad I did this. You should do it too when you meet someone from eharmony.]

Tim and Graham talked about taxes and their own small businesses and other entrepreneurial jargon that made them sound smart and responsible. They did the secret eye thing and came out friends, which I liked. Dave and Jessi brought laughter to the room. Anna and I procured crepes, fruit, and bacon.

I love this picture that Dave snapped of Tim and Jessi right before we sat down to eat together.

We had a wonderful time, and when everyone left to go enjoy the rest of their Sundays, I wasn't nervous or uncomfortable at the idea of being alone with Tim anymore. He asked me if I would show him Kansas City and proposed we go out to take some pictures, just the two of us, and I really did want to go.

Chapter 5: An Introduction

2011-12-11T12:09:00.001-06:00

In his defense: he had been invited to a black and white Christmas party and thought it would be original to go wearing all white. He borrowed some articles of clothing from his roommate and flipped a belt inside out to make it work. Funny, once you know the context, which I didn't.

It was high time we gained a mutual understanding of each other's lives, or this was going to fizzle out over something menial.

Around midday Saturday, when he was supposed to be driving from Chicago to Kansas City, I sent him a text message asking how his trip was going and didn't hear back from him for several hours. He finally called halfway through the afternoon and told me he had been dealing with snow storms throughout much of his trip, but he should be in around 8pm. I felt bad about all he was enduring to get to me. Would he think it was worth it by the end of the weekend?

As the afternoon dragged into early evening, I got more nervous, which made me short tempered and hyper focused on the house being clean and the refrigerator stocked. I think I ran out for milk at 7:30pm, only to have Tim call soon after to tell me he was only minutes away. I made it home in time to pace the living room and do some breathing exercises with Anna before I heard a very regular knock on the door. Shoot. I had meant to keep an eye out and light on and greet him like I'd been expecting him, not make him stand there knocking, hoping he was at the right house.

Our front step from the porch (where he was) to the inside doorway (where I stood) was unfortunately high, meaning that when I opened the door and greeted him with a welcoming slash friendly hug, I was a few inches taller than him.

"Hey!"
"Whoop, oh, hey, hi!"
"Come on in! Are you tired? How was your trip? Did you find the house okay? Are you hungry? This is my roommate Anna!"

Nervous chatter had to be better than awkward silence, right?

"Hey! Oh yeah, not too bad. It was fine. Yeah, google maps. Um...can I use your bathroom?"
"Sure, right this way! This house is so old the light switch is on the outside of the bathroom door, but don't worry, we won't prank ya!"

It was all I could come up with. I was moving so fast through these motions I didn't even take a good look at him. I couldn't think clearly and suddenly Anna and I were standing stiffly in the living room waiting for him to come out of the bathroom.

"What do you think?", she whispered.
"Not my type.", I whispered back.

I think I said this because he had dark hair, which I knew full well beforehand from pictures, but maybe I was hoping it would be lighter in real life? Or maybe it was that he smiled a lot and seemed genuine and friendly, and I tended to go for the moody, burdened intellectual over-thinkers. I don't know.

Tim came out of the bathroom and Anna and I tried to pretend we hadn't been anticipating his exit from the can as much as we were. What would happen next??

Luckily, he was hungry, and I had man food. I sat him down at the table and fed him some chili. Ten minutes later, the three of us were out the door, in my car, on the way to a Christmas concert at a church across town. Some of Tim's photographer friends attended there and wanted to see him. I wanted to get to a place where the main focus wasn't us and our awkward social predicament that sociologists haven't named yet.

I was steel that first night. I made stiff, cool jokes and snorted instead of laughed, prepared for him to send signals that he wasn't interested in me. I handed him my iPod as I drove, and he chose upbeat lighthearted Christmas music for us to listen to in the car. I had my hands on 10 and 2, and when he asked inquisitive things about Kansas City, I answered factually. We were three friends going to a Christmas concert, no one better dare think anything different.

We arrived late and climbed to the upstairs balcony. The band was singing their own version of "Last Christmas I gave you my heart." Tim leaned forward and rested his arms on the pew in front of him to take in the music.

He's been humming that song all year long.

Chapter 4: the rollercoaster of preparation

2011-12-10T22:28:00.001-06:00

Towards the middle of that next week, it became clear that Tim was definitely coming to visit on Saturday because he was working non-stop to get all his editing done and making good progress. I kept him company while he worked via skype. We sent little videos back and forth about what we were doing. He had just gotten his new piano and was so excited about it. I swooned some more over this clip.

We talked a lot about our families that week. I learned that most of the people in his Christmas video were his immediate family: he has six brothers and sisters. I tried to learn all their names and ages.

We switched back and forth between French and English in our conversation. We kept finding out even more things we had in common and were less and less surprised by it.

Somehow, Anna was fine with me inviting Tim to stay at our house over the weekend.

More than once I had a reality check that he was a stranger that I met on the internet, and this could seem very shady.

It was totally shady! And unsafe. And weird.

My one recourse was that Tim had recently attended a photography retreat/workshop with some acquaintances of mine in Colorado, and I figured if they could spend a weekend in a house with him and come out of it unscathed, I was probably safe. Still, I put some mace in my bedside table and commissioned Anna to not leave me alone with him until we both agreed he was harmless.

And I made a lot of plans. I planned out as many activities for us as I could that involved public places, so if our meeting was a total social trainwreck, we wouldn't be stuck at my house staring at the walls. I decided that no matter what I thought of him after I met him, we would still have a nice weekend. Even if we decided to never see each other again.

It was definitely a hard and strange time of preparation, being excited to meet Tim but fearful of the unknown. Hoping for the best while preparing for the worst. It was just odd what we were doing, how we were starting this friendship. I had never wanted to start a relationship online and felt embarrassed about heading that direction. This was the kind of thing people snickered about, including me.

A whole week of this, and before I knew it my guest bedroom was prepared, it was Friday night, and Tim sent me this picture:

Seventeen photo-shoots finished in 5 days. All so he could come meet me. This was so endearing. I got the impression from his actions that he wasn't afraid of hard work or making a bold move to pursue me.

He said he would be in Kansas City by Saturday evening, and I was fully ready to give him a chance.

...

And then he went and tweeted this picture of himself.

Chapter 3: the most awkward phone call in the world history of dating

2011-12-09T23:59:00.001-06:00

He said he would call around 9pm, and I've learned since then that he's always on time for everything. My phone rang at 8:58pm.

"Hello?"

"Hi, is this Bethany?"

His voice was...higher than I had anticipated. I cringed.

"Yeah. How's it going, Tim?"

We hobbled through an incredibly awkward conversation. We talked about the weather in Chicago, and then in Kansas City. We both had snow. We talked about church since it was Sunday. I forget what else we talked about. Maybe his brother's job? Finally, trying to get it over with as soon as possible, I turned the conversation to his trip to Kansas City.

"So, you think you want to come down?"

"Oh, I hadn't really thought about it much. It could be fun, though, right?"

What? Was he a total flake already?

"Yeah, Kansas City's a really fun place. There's tons of cool neighborhoods. I love it a lot."

"I have some friends who live there too. They've been trying to get me to come visit."

"You'd have plenty of people to see."

I didn't even know what I wanted to say. The last thing I wanted to do was talk him into coming. It was his idea in the first place! I never asked him to come. He was already frustrating me.

"The thing is, I'm leaving for France next Tuesday to spend Christmas with my family...and I have seventeen photo-shoots to edit and mail out before I can go. I'm just not sure I'll be able to get it all done in time to spend a weekend in Kansas City before leaving for France."

What the hell.

"Well, that sure sounds like a ton of work you've got there."

"But hey, I might be able to get it done! If I don't come this weekend, it'll be a long time before I can get away. As soon as I get back to Chicago, I'm booked the first three weekends in January shooting weddings. So I really hope I can make it."

What wedding photographer is booked for the entire month of January?! Who even gets married in January?!

"Okay...have you...do you have any place to stay while you're here?"

"Uhh...no...like I said, I hadn't really planned that far."

"Right, of course. I was just wondering because...my roommate and I have this sort of guest bedroom, and, well, I haven't asked her, but maybe if she's okay with having a houseguest...you could probably stay with us."

"Hey, thanks for the offer. I really hope I can get everything finished up in time."

"Sure, absolutely. However it works out will be great."

We wrapped up the conversation and said goodbye. Then I told Amy that judging from that phone call, I didn't really feel like I wanted him to come anyway and spent all night trying to figure out why the hell his voice was so high on the phone when it was obviously a full baritone or bass in his Facebook videos.

Many thanks to Tim for allowing me to include this. A ridiculous college roommate video shenanigan made me cry laughing. Our first phone call may have been terrible, but I still wanted to be friends with the guy in the videos. We just needed to get passed our nerves...and he needed to get through an ungodly amount of editing before we could start having fun together.

Chapter 2 of the Tim and Bethany love story.

2011-12-06T12:53:00.001-06:00

I'd like to take a pause before I get into this and spell out why I'm doing this.
For starters, my parents' story of connection is very precious to me. It's my history and it informs my values. I love it. It tells me who I want to be. Ergo, I expect my love story to be important to my children, so I need to write it down. Secondly, I put my faith in a God who is mighty and loving and very, very detailed. I believe that He is on my side and He fights for me and my dreams. I believe that He orchestrated impossible circumstances to give me the wonderful husband that I'd been dreaming about since I was young and I think He can make your unlikely if not impossible dreams come true too.

Now, after that first initial email contact with Tim, I took a deep breath and gave myself a pep-talk. How many other people in this world look great by their web profiles? It's the easiest thing in the world to create: pick a flattering photo, write something witty, add some credentials, and that's it. I decided to not get my hopes up.
However, the more we talked, the more we realized that we had everything in common. The similarities between our stories just kept piling up, right down to having horrible teachers in second grade who made us afraid of and hate school. We both had short furlough experiences in the USA that led us to believe living in America was a utopian experience. We were both middle children.

Emails begot g-chatting, which begot Facebook friendship, which begot Twitter following, which begot texting. I was studying him, and finding all good things. Specifically this video he created of his family at Christmastime

Behind my computer screen, I swooned. I would've married him just for his sweet family at that point.

These little bits and pieces of his life experience that I was able to catch through social media were integral in our early friendship. I knew all the words to the songs his family sang because I sang them when I was a kid. His mild yet spicy family dynamic, with swirls of French and American culture was not only incredibly attractive to me, it showed me that because of my own history, we could relate on a very basic familial level, and that was huge.

In one month we had covered all this ground, and on the Sunday that I returned home from celebrating Thanksgiving with family, Tim texted me this: "Are you busy next weekend?"

Since someone who is in Chicago should have no concern about my weekend plans in Kansas City, this was out of the ordinary. I remember being in my room, and staring at my phone wondering if I was ready to meet this guy and risk a potentially very awkward experience to move the friendship passed the 500 mile hiccup we had going on.

"I don't think so. What's up?"And I waited for his response. For forty-five minutes I waited. I checked that it sent, and it had. I waited longer. I agonized that he had changed his mind. I agonized that his phone wasn't working. Oh, those forty five minutes.

And then finally: "Sorry, I'm in the middle of a photo-shoot. I was thinking maybe I might come down to KC."
Gosh, that feeling was weird. He was so bold I wasn't sure what to do. Why would he travel all this way to meet me? He was probably one of those socially special types. Or was he perfect? I couldn't know yet, I'd never even talked to him on the phone. The possibility was exciting, but also frightening.

"That could be cool."
"How about I call you tonight and we talk it over?"
"Sounds good."

Then I walked into the hallway and told my roommate, and we screamed like little girls.

I just need you all to understand one thing:

2011-11-21T09:23:00.001-06:00

Something wonderful has happened. There are two individuals in this world who have reached a crux in their aging process and now look EXACTLY THE SAME! Those two people are:

My Uncle Bob Jerry Seinfeld

My dear Uncle Bob and Jerry Seinfeld. I'm so excited about this.
I should tell you a little bit about my Uncle Bob (since you all know about Jerry Seinfeld). Uncle Bob has a Ph.D. in Fisheries and Allied Aquaculture, which makes him a fish doctor. Who knew that fish had their own doctors?
Uncle Bob likes to doll out fish facts on Facebook. Ask him anything, he'll know!
Hey Uncle Bob, is it true that fish swim differently during a full moon?

I distinctly remember going on a walk with him once when I was eight years old. I couldn't figure out why he was so far ahead of me, so I tried to take exactly the same number of steps as he did so I could keep up. The problem was that his legs were twice as long as my height back then. He is married to my Aunt Bev, the synchronized ice-skater. As you can imagine, these two are quite the pair.
Their daughter, Allyson, is 3 days older than me. We thought this was so cool and, for the majority of our childhood, fancied that it legitimatized us as twins. But then, by the same mysterious powers that Uncle Bob and Jerry Seinfeld ended up looking the same, Allyson and I ended up looking dramatically un-twin-like.

Such is life.

we're moving!

2011-11-16T12:29:00.001-06:00

And now for a post where I don't overthink my life too much and just tell you what's new:
We're moving in January. In Chicago, also known as the Windy City, where the wind chill is known to cut through layers of wool and leather, straight down to souls, and makes eyes water not just because it's a physiological reflex, but because being outside in that weather just makes you sad. It's going to be great!

The first time I came to visit Tim in Chicago, we spent a Sunday afternoon at a dear family friend's home in Oak Park. As we were driving through this neighborhood, the old architecture turned me into a rubber neck and I suddenly piped up: "Where are we right now?!".
"My mom grew up here," Tim answered.
That's a valuable statement for a guy who was raised in France and didn't come to the states to live until he was 18. This neighborhood has rich history for him. I find this so fascinating; my mother-in-law grew up marinated in the culture of Oak Park, then moved to France, fell in love, and raised her children there. Without even realizing it, she must have continued to live and teach cultural norms specific to Oak Park to her children, and when Tim decided to go to college in Chicago and encountered his mom's old neighborhood, he felt like a certain amount of "home" was there too. I loved it.

Tim's parents own the place we live in now and we've been renting from them. It's been great, but now that Tim's brother and sister in law are expecting a little one, they need these three bedrooms and finished basement more than we do, and we want to be closer to the city for work anyway. The first place we looked was Oak Park. After seeing a couple of duds and getting discouraged, I got a call back from a building management company that had advertised an apartment with lots of windows. We went to see it, and fell in fast, optimistic, googly eyed love. We do that a lot.

This is the building; a concave structure with the ethereal light of heaven shining down into everyone's homes and hearts.

This is that wind I was telling you about. Flattering, no?

There was a problem: we saw the apartment at the beginning of November and couldn't move in until end of January. We knew it would be gone by then, so I called up the building manager and expressed my undying love and affection for her apartment and begged her to please call us in January if another one came open. She must have found my begging to be charming because she replied that they might hold it for us if we put in an application fast enough. So we did and we were approved. We decided to go see the apartment again and think realistically about living without a dishwasher or in-unit laundry, on the third floor without an elevator. It turns out that modern inventions can't trump natural light and deep, deep closets or free radiator heat.

This is our new place:

so cute

2011-10-30T22:38:00.001-05:00

This right here is just the most adorable moment. Tim's grandmother, affectionately known to her family as Mamie Suzanne, turns the corner into her 80th birthday party, shocked at the huge crowd gathered in a little church to celebrate her.

Mamie Suzanne is the matriarch of a community of Christians living in Grenoble, France. Her son (my father in law) now pastors the church that her husband planted in 1967, and the congregation loves and respects her so much.

At her party, everyone who wanted to share got up and told stories of how Mamie Suzanne had blessed and encouraged them over the years, and helped them to better understand the love of God. She's already left such a great legacy in her wake.

I love grandparents. I have four of them, which is unusual and incredible and a huge deal on its own, so I can't believe my fortune to have another sweet grandmother in my life now. I will meet her for the first time this Christmas when Tim and I get to France to celebrate. Parties!!

my coffee snobbery knows no bounds

2011-10-29T13:27:00.000-05:00

One of the things I miss most about Kansas City is all the delectable coffee shops I had within 10 minutes of my house in midtown. I'm talking about the kind where the good folks behind the counter were career baristas and barely thought me worthy of a second glance unless I dropped a fiver in their tip jar, and I never had that much cash. I knew my place in those shops. I'd smile and order something easy, knowing that even the spare drips from their high end espresso machines could stop me in my tracks as I scampered out of their way with my Americano to find a table just so I could keep breathing in the rich coffee air and let it infuse my clothes for a pick-me-up later in the day.

I would say it's my one guilty pleasure, but I have lots of guilty pleasures, so I won't.

There is nothing of the sort here in Wheaton, and that's usually fine. But sometime I get a hankering for expensive espresso and Caribou and Starbucks just can't deliver. Woe is me. My life is so hard.

Tim and I have an unspoken rule that whenever we do a photo-shoot in downtown Chicago, we get a date in the city afterwards. Last week we stumbled up Caffe Streets, and melted a little inside.

It was this good:

Thank you. Thank you. And once again; I thank you. Latte art is the way to my heart.

Chapter 1: October 25th, 2010

2011-10-26T00:28:00.001-05:00

Today is a marked day for us. I wasn't going to write about it or tell the story for fear of the general public thinking our decisions over the past year were brash or unwise, but all day I've been marveling at the beautiful changes in my life that started one year ago today, so I guess opinions don't really matter. On this day last year, I found Tim.

On October 25th, 2010 at 4:39pm, I was doing what I do a lot; browsing a photography blog. The Smiley Face Collective had a beautiful post and I left a comment.

After I submitted the comment, I glanced at the other comments in the box and saw the name "tim tab" above mine, and I thought that was very odd. When people use funny internet aliases instead of their proper names, I just think it's dumb. So I clicked on the dumb alias to see who this person was. It led me to another photo blog.

The pictures were exceptional, so I looked through a few posts. Pretty soon I started seeing wedding pictures from France. This really grabbed at my attention because I grew up in France and I have never seen particularly good photography of French lifestyles. I haven't been back to France since I was 11, so my memories were in a time warp and these pictures were opening up a new understanding for me of how young people do life and weddings in France. I was fascinated, so I expressed my appreciation through another comment on this Tim Tab's blog (this timestamp is an hour off, I really left the comment at 4:47 pm)

After that, I switched over to the photographer's profile to find out who this person was.

I had to read it a few times to fully grasp that there was a real person living on this earth who had that resume of life experiences. This guy was around my age, worked my dream job, went to the same university that my dad graduated from--which I had been hearing about my whole life--to study the same degree that I got, and he grew up in France, just like me. Besides that, he appeared to be a highly motivated, hard-working person to own his own business at the age of 24. He seemed very down to earth, and had a goofy sense of humor that made me chuckle condescendingly. And he was very, very cute.
I sat back from the computer screen and wondered what was going on. It was all very strange and frustrating. This little bio was the most fascinating one way conversation I've had in my life: he had laid out the basics of his story and there was no way I could respond. He lived 8 hours away and we had no friends in common (although I found out later that we did).
I decided that the best thing to do was forget those 20 minutes of internet snooping because they would only drive me crazy. Tim Tab, whatever his real name was, was a figment of the internet and not anyone I could actually meet, so that was it.
Later that evening, I went to hang out with Amy and Natalie. We made pumpkin cookies, ate way too many, and then had a "pute hang" where we sat around in their living room on our computers, browsing and chatting. I checked my email and my heart about stopped when I opened this:

He was flirting with me. I just knew it. He must have followed the link I left to my blog and figured out that we had everything in common and surely he was just trying to start a real conversation. Amy insisted that he was doing nothing of the sort (and she was right) and even though he was a really good photographer, he had way too many typos on his website to be the man of my dreams. I told her, adamantly, that she was wrong and she rolled her eyes. Then I started a reply to him, smiling at the screen with my hands poised over the keyboard, not knowing what to say. This went on for about 5 days until I finally wrote him back a simple one liner, asking him what his story was and how he got to Chicago from France.

The rest is a long story, and I may tell it in a few more pieces over the next few months if anyone wants to hear it. Some simple math can tell you how fast our relationship moved: we've been married for two months already. Our families and friends supported our decisions to get engaged after 5 months of dating, and married after 3 months of engagement. I wouldn't advise that pace for anyone else, but it was good and right for us and I wouldn't give up this precious time of already being married or the peace I have in our marriage vows for anything.

Today in honor of this anniversary (and because it really needed to be done), Tim and I changed the text and pictures of his profile to reflect the current state of Tim Tab Studios.

timothee martin

2011-10-21T18:54:00.001-05:00

Sometimes we will be doing some very mundane task, and I'll look over at him and be struck all at once by how incredibly handsome he is, how I love him so much it scares me, and how I'd die without him if he was gone. I couldn't possibly love him any more than I do at this moment.
But I will tomorrow.

done!

2011-10-17T22:03:00.000-05:00

We are on day 9 of a 10 day long trek from Chicago to San Francisco (to shoot a wedding) to Sarasota for my sister's wedding back to Chicago. We are tired, and so ready to sleep in our own bed tomorrow night.
This last leg of our trip was really sweet.
My sister always looked forward to her wedding in a completely different way than I did. I mostly saw the wedding as a huge roadblock standing in the way of me and my married life, I couldn't have marriage without hassling through the wedding. I resented a lot of expectations culture placed on my wedding and broke the mold as much as I could. We had a 3 month engagement. I wore an old wedding dress. We had our reception before the ceremony. We got married on a Wednesday. Our bridesmaids and groomsmen were our siblings. We didn't have programs. I figured if we had to have a wedding, we were going to do it our way, and so we did and it was beautiful.

Megan was different. She loved the whole process of a long engagement and wedding planning. She loved picking out the cake and the bridesmaid dresses and decorating the church. I know how much she looked forward to her wedding and so it was a joy to be with her on her wedding weekend, buying her lingerie and having a bachelorette party, attending the rehearsal dinner and telling stories, carrying her cathedral length veil for her and taking her pictures.

And since I'm all about the videos these days, here's one highlighting all the special moments we had together. I shot this on my iPhone, people, so don't expect much. And the music is by Ben Rector. I forgot to site it in the video. Sorry, Ben! Love your stuff!

This season of both of us being engaged and getting married has been really eventful, and as exciting as it all was, I'm really glad that it's all over and we have the memories now. We can settle into this new season of being sisters in the same situation; newlyweds figuring all this out together.

honeymoonin'

2011-10-07T23:53:00.000-05:00

Here's a little diddy I put together about our honeymoon to Door County, Wisconsin.
We relaxed it up and saw some pretty things. Enjoy.

Man Food

2011-09-29T21:59:00.001-05:00

There's a hungry man in my house, and his hunger cannot be satisfied with my old singlehood favorites like grilled chicken and lettuce. Heck, I used to eat chips and salsa for dinner. Hungry man calls that half an appetizer. I've got to change my ways.

When I inherited hungry man, he came with a pantry full of disjointed ingredients that I feel I must use because I hate wasting food.

I was staring at said pantry around dinner time and picked up and stared at a bag of lentils for the eighteenth time when hungry man happened to walk by and said "I love lentils!"

I heard that marriage was all about compromise, and now I believe it. I took his beloved lentils and I made chick food out of it that was so good he tweeted about it and volunteered to do the dishes.

I bring to you: the Mighty Lentil Burger

Ingredients:

3 cups cooked lentils
½ tsp salt
½ medium onion, diced
½ tsp pepper
1 tsp soy sauce
1 fresh clove of garlic, pressed
1 tsp worcestershire sauce
½ cup rolled oats, finely ground
½ cup bread crumbs
1 egg

Directions: Sauté the onion in oil until soft, about 5 minutes. Mix the lentils, onions, pepper, egg, garlic, soy, and worcestershire sauces in the large bowl, then mix in the ground oats and bread crumbs. Form the lentil mixture into patties and cook em up immediately in a frying pan with some olive oil. Dress it up real nice like I did down here. Eat up and love your life.

all this beauty

2011-09-22T00:17:00.001-05:00

It's been an eventful month here in Wheaton.
Tim and I have been shooting weddings every weekend, getting the house in order, cooking seemingly healthy meals, and trying to have as few newlywed mishaps as possible. This includes not elbowing each other's faces in the middle of the night, not hurting each other's feelings with careless humor, and not accidentally dumping each other's wallets in the washer along with our clothes. It's going fairly well.
We're living the delectable life of people who work from home on our own schedule. I won't tell you how late we sleep in every morning because I just can't bring myself to admit it to the world.

My work is getting better. I feel less like a wedding crasher and more like a competent photographer with every wedding. Tim exuberantly gushes over my good photos every week and slides past my failures like they never existed.
Here's a few of my favorites that I've taken so far:

Tim handles of all the important moments and poses while I catch the details. This has to be the easiest way to learn this gig. I can't believe my chance at 1) getting this guy to fall for me 2) convincing him it was his idea to let me shoot with him and 3) learn the technicals at my own pace while he takes care of the hard stuff.
We are completely blown away by all the love and support we've received through wedding gifts. I wade through them every day on my way to the coffeepot (which is also a wedding gift) and I just can't believe how nice people are. Everything around me in my house was given to me. I didn't have to work for any of it. Such grace!
Tim's incredible friends are becoming my incredible friends too, and each time I grow a little closer to them, I get all choked up at how sweet and kind God is to put me in the middle of such good people. They threw us a party the other night, because we got married a thousand miles away and they couldn't handle the non-celebration any longer.

Do you see how fun they are? No, let me show you more.

Whenever I move to a new town, and it's happened plenty of times in my life, I expect a certain level of anonymity for at least the first couple of years. Not so here in Wheaton. I know the barista at the coffee place from bible study, I run into so and so's Mom at the grocery store, and this girl down here has figured out I've got the stash when it comes to dresses and comes over to borrow them and we hang out. I am known already.

It's a good feeling.

I don't know why I've been given this good life. It's all ice cream and chocolate cake right now. I don't know when it's going to get hard or which parts are going to evaporate without warning.

But anyhow, enough of that.

Honeymoon

2011-09-06T22:26:00.001-05:00

Door County, Wisconsin

And when it was over, we got to come home to this sweet, comfortable, colorful, musical work in progress:

Life is beautiful

convinced.

2011-08-31T12:30:00.001-05:00

One week ago today, I married the right person.
I am so at peace knowing this for sure. For all the worrying and dating and agonizing and waiting and over-analyzing of every relationship decision I ever made (and I made several wrong ones) this might be the greatest relief of my life; to know beyond any doubt that I chose the right husband.
I knew we were compatible before he proposed, I confidently said my vows before God and many witnesses at our ceremony, but then on the day we got home to Wheaton my heart nestled into a place of incredible security that we did not err on this decision to be married and the vows we made to stay together until death separates us.
I am Tim's wife, and I was never supposed to belong to anyone else.

We did it

2011-08-27T21:54:00.001-05:00

a little bitter and a lot of sweet

2011-08-20T05:34:00.001-05:00

How are you supposed to feel 4 days before your wedding? I keep asking myself this. We've had a crazy week around here.

Nine days ago, while on a mission trip to Guinea, West Africa, Tim's brother Marc started having terrible headaches. They progressed to the point that the team there decided to send him home to France. This was a terrible worry for Tim's family because they were not in France to welcome him home, they were here in Florida getting ready for our wedding. It took 5 hours in a bush taxi, an overnight stay in a national hospital in Conakry, Guinea, a flight to Paris, and an 8 hour train ride to get Marc to the hospital near home in Grenoble where he was diagnosed with a form of hydrocephalus. Due to a hardened and malfunctioning valve that regulates cerebro-spinal fluid levels inside Marc's skull, fluid was building up pressure to dangerous levels and causing him terrible pain. He had to have emergency brain surgery to drain the fluid and release the pressure, and his family was an ocean away from his bedside.

This was heartbreaking. A mother's worst nightmare, to say the least. Marc made it through surgery and woke up with great relief from pain, but the doctors were not satisfied with the results and fear they will have to go in again to implant a permanent shunt inside Marc's skull to continue to drain out the excess fluid.

After much deliberation and agonizing, Tim's mother decided to fly home to France to be with Marc. On Wednesday morning, 7 days before our wedding, Tim flew into Tampa and got to spend one hour with his mom in the airport terminal before her flight left for France.

To say that we are sad that these two precious family members will not be at our wedding would be an understatement. I can't even talk about it without crying. We grieve the loss of their presence even in these preparation days, but that grief is little compared to the relief and peace we all feel that Marc is not alone.

There will be two empty chairs at our ceremony, and no one is allowed to sit in them.

A wise pastor of mine once said that in these hard situations, we are not to ask "Why, God?" It's not our business to know His reasons. Instead, we should ask "What are you doing? How can I join in and be part of your plan?"

I keep asking this, and for now all I know to do is to marry Tim and have the sweet little beach wedding we've been planning. So today we wrote our vows and I picked up my wedding dress and Tim's ring and then we took the families down to the very important beach to scope out what our ceremony time will look like.

It should make for a nice backdrop, no? We're getting married here because decorating stresses me out and I figured the heavens could do it for me instead.

So that's what wedding week looks like here. Our first guest arrives today and it's all madness from there. Here we go.

the only good use of a Nicholas Sparks novel

2011-08-16T22:33:00.000-05:00

I loathe Nicholas Sparks for his crimes against women's emotional expectations of romance and healthy relationships. So I'm destroying his book in order to create these flowers for my wedding. How's that for romance, Nikky?

something old

2011-08-13T23:20:00.001-05:00

When I was little, my family would sometimes spend summers in the USA at my grandparent's house in Alabama. Mimi and Opa had lived in their house since my mom was a baby, so the house was a museum of artifacts from the 1950's onward. Especially the basement.
The basement had a pool table, a workshop, two guest bedrooms, a storage room, and a sewing room. In one of the guest rooms, there was a cedar chest. In that cedar chest was a large collection of TIME magazines and newspapers from important dates in history like the Pearl Harbor attack, Kennedy's assassination, and the USA's first lunar landing. All this was plenty to keep my 11 year old self occupied for an entire afternoon.
One day I got through all the magazines and newspapers and dug deeper into the cedar chest, passed unframed paintings and old certificates. My hands brushed soft lace and I uncovered my grandmother's wedding dress.
This was such a priceless find, and for some reason I thought I would get in trouble for removing it from the chest. I shut the door to the guest room and laid the dress out on the bed. It was yellowed with age and crumpled from being folded in the same position for decades. In some places, the threads had simply given out.
I listened for any activity upstairs, and when I heard none, I wiggled out of my summer playclothes and slipped the dress over my head. I didn't even need to unzip the metal zipper. Since there was only a vanity mirror in the room, I pushed a chair in front of it and stood on the seat to take a look at myself in my Mimi's dress. It was so long on me that the tea length hem brushed my toes. The scoop neck hung loose and repeatedly fell off my shoulder. I was fascinated with the story I was wearing all around me. All of the people in my life and the love that holds them together was decided one October day in 1951 when my grandmother wore this very dress that her mother sewed for her and pledged her life to my grandfather. I would not be if not for that day and that covenant. It was just too cool.
I put the dress back and never told anyone I had worn it. A few years later my aunts had the dress cleaned and restored and surprised Mimi by displaying it at their 50th wedding anniversary reception. It was nice to see it white again.
When I knew that Tim was going to propose, Mimi's dress was my top choice in wedding dresses, but I heard that the condition of the dress was too poor for me to wear. Even though I found another perfect wedding dress, I still wanted to display Mimi's at our wedding, so my Mom graciously had it shipped down to Florida from Alabama.
When I got here last week to get everything ready for our wedding, I bee-lined to Mom's closet and got Mimi's dress down and unwrapped it. Mom helped me slip it on over my head and pull the zipper up the side.
This time, it fit perfectly.

tabai-love-llioux

2011-07-27T23:59:00.001-05:00

When I was 10 years old we were living in France. After being there since age 3, I was so good at passing for a little French girl that no one ever thought I was American unless they had a conversation with one of my parents (whose American accents were obvious despite their hardest efforts at language school) or heard my last name. Somehow, parents and last names don't come up much in the classroom, playground, or gymnastic lessons when you're 10, so I rarely had to out myself as a foreigner. And that was a good thing for me.

I wasn't a very talented gymnast, but I liked to try. I can still stand and touch the floor without bending my knees, so I'd say the lessons were a win in the greater scheme of my life.

I have two lasting memories from my gymnast days. One of them is standing in line with the other girls waiting our turns to practice the balance beam. We were talking about how we couldn't wait to see Titanic in the theatre. Only one girl had seen the movie already and she announced to the whole group that Leonardo DiCaprio died at the end after having sex in a car. We were all confused and crushed.

My other memory is of my last competition. I wore my team leotard, half white, half purple with long sleeves. After completing every part of my routine, the forlorn French judge looked down at his paper and wrote down my score. At the end, we all sat on the floor of the huge gym and our coaches called our names over a poor quality speaker and read our scores for everyone to hear.

I didn't know when my name would be called, and I couldn't wait to find out how I had measured up. I listened and listened to the names and numbers but never heard my own. Coach was almost at the end of the list and I was straining to hear every word he said when he spoke a jargon name and started trailing numbers. Suddenly I realized that those string of scores were mine and he had just publicly read my name as "Brittany Bo-Ah-Trig-T".

I burned with embarrassment that my name had been so butchered by my coach. He should have known me! Now everyone would know that I had an American last name with the offensive "ight" ending that the French simply cannot pronounce. I was so thrown off that I didn't catch my scores and I was about to go up and ask for them again.

I thought a lot about my name then, and how I liked it for myself and how American "Boatwright" sounds, but I hated that it set me apart and made me different from my friends. And I'm sitting here now, 14 years later, and I cannot believe the irony that I have one month left to have this name before it changes to the most incredibly French last name that ever existed. Tabailloux. Ta-ba-you.

If I ever have a little girl, I'm going to teach her to be proud to stand apart from her peers and then take her to France just so I can introduce her to other little girls and marvel that when I speak her name over them, no one will even blink.

month 1

2011-07-19T19:31:00.002-05:00

I moved to Wheaton a month ago yesterday. Would you like to know how my life has changed? Of course you would. Why else would you read this blog.

I now sit only on black leather. My (almost) husband can't get enough of black leather and he outfits most of his seating arrangements in the stuff. Couch, car seats, office chairs. It's all black leather. And it also happens to be summer right now, so I have grown quite used to peeling myself off of every surface in which I sit.

This leads me to the other thing that's my new thing, because I wouldn't need to do any peeling if I weren't wearing shorts. I have been a shorts-hater since high school in Florida. Shorts were practically my only option for surviving life and I loathed baring my short stubby legs which I inherited from my mother which she inherited from her grandmother. I wanted the legs my sister proudly walked on because her growth spurted by more than a foot in less than a year during her unforgivably un-awkward awkward stage. I just knew I would get a growth spurt too someday and have beautifully long legs, but then when I was 14 the orthodontist smacked my x-rays on the lightbox and happily announced that I had finished growing. I wanted to cry. And since then, I have never worn shorts.
Tim had a problem with this. He would start sympathy sweating the moment I arrived at his house wearing jeans on a 90+ degree day and cry "ENOUGH! WITH! THE! PANTS! It's summer!!" I would then inform him that there was a reason I moved away from Florida to the snow-packed midwest one January many moons ago, and that reason had much to do with my hate for shorts. And bathing suits. We all know what happens to me with the bathing suits.
But even I had to admit that I was really uncomfortable, and one day when I went on a post-office run I noticed that Old Navy lived across the parking lot. So I went. And I bought shorts. And Tim assures me all the time that he is not ashamed to be seen with my legs like I am and he actually likes them. The angel. So now I own two pairs of shorts and do laundry every other day so I can keep wearing them all the time. That was a lie. Of course I don't do laundry that often. You don't either.

Thing # 3: I'm drinking soda again. Goshdarnit, Tim, why'd you have to do this to me? One tiny sip of his Dr. Pepper one day and I was hooked again. I've been drinking diet...but still. I have to kill that one.

And this one is only temporary I PROMISE because the box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch is almost gone. I will not keep eating it. I can't keep eating it because I just have to eat it all until it's totally gone and then I won't ever eat sugary cereal again, Mom, because it won't exist in Tim's house. His guest from last month bought it and left nearly the whole box and it just calls my name from the pantry every day. It even uses my middle name. Bethany Lennnnnn...I'm waiting for you...please come pick me up! Like a sad little baby or something. One more bowl and it will all be over. Really.

Also, Tim and I are farting around each other now. So there's some great news. At first I was only farting the non-smelly farts around him, you know, because I'm a lady and I don't poop either, but last night he caught a whiff of a really bad one and cried "Oh, babe! Gross!", which was quickly followed by: "Praise God she's human! It finally happened!"
And really, that's just love.

In other news: I have easily grown accustomed to seeings beautiful pictures every day as Tim edits on his gargantuan 24-inch computer screen right next to me. My eyes are no longer amused by sub-average photography. I am a now a picture brat.

Side note: I also really enjoy it when Tim hollers at grooms on his screen who kiss with their eyes open (the brides never do this). But if you're a client reading this, he doesn't do that to you. Promise.

Speaking of which, I've been going with Tim to shoot weddings. After he uploads the memory cards and wanders away to do something else, I sneak onto his computer and delete all of my bad pictures so he won't ever see them and think I'm a bad photographer and I hope that then he'll decide that this whole working together thing is really wonderful for his business right from the start. I had great confidence in this secret system of mine until he told me that he found a bunch of terrible pictures in his trash and went through all of them before he realized what I had been doing. Oh, the humility. Why did I not think to empty the trash too?

In the general sense of life, I am learning that I am not right all the time. I spill things and break things and fart and take bad pictures and make spelling mistake and now there is always someone with me to notice and look the other way after I've noticed that he's noticed but is pretending like he didn't because he's sweet like that.

In short: it's going unbelievably well. We are definitely catching up on lost time by spending a minimum of 13 hours together daily. We are loving each other more all the time, and we've heard that's what it's all about. So that's great.

job 1:21

2011-07-15T22:46:00.000-05:00

Keith died this morning after a long battle with cancer. Josh wrote this in the afternoon:

life with this guy

2011-07-05T23:39:00.004-05:00

this fantastic portrait was taken by one of the Don't Give Up Project photographers

I've been living in the same town as my fiance for 20 days now. The transition been mostly wonderful and a little bit hard. The hard part was largely due to me packing out my first week with camp and then going right back to Kansas City for a wedding. On the night after I got back to Wheaton, Tim's shirt was soaking up my tears as I stressed about not having enough time to spend with him and plan our wedding. My fault, I know. I just really needed to do all that stuff before settling into his routine.
We've both been a lot more cheerful and optimistic this last week. Everyday, I go to his house and we simultaneously work on his business and plan our wedding and future life together. This is usually a seamless process, except when I accidentally make him work for 5 hours on a Sunday. Then I find him pulling me out the door by the wrist, insisting I leave the emails and airplane tickets and brochure layouts for another time so we can enjoy the sun while it's still shining.
I really love learning his quirks. The guy eats breakfast at noon, lunch at 4pm, and dinner at 8pm. I'm still perplexed about what to do with that schedule.
He loves awkward people the most. Especially new ones.
He is so generous. I feel reproached by my own fear-driven attitudes of self-preservation every time I see him open up his attention, time, and possessions to those around him.
His open heart is easily touched by others, but never swayed in any direction other than the path he was already walking before they came along. That impresses me to no end.
He teaches me new things everyday, like how important it is to linger over a cup of good coffee in the morning before starting to work, and go for a swim in the evening before it gets dark. He says it's not healthy to stay inside when it's summer.
He is a master Googler. Whenever he discovers something that he doesn't already know, he researches it until he understands it; like which weight of paper to use for our wedding invitations (that he designed) or what anodizing does to pots and pans (and whether or not we should register for them).
I teach him new things too, like how to shop for healthy groceries and what a table runner is.
He has the best magazine subscriptions. Always marry someone who comes with good reading material.

We're having so much fun being together every day.
We're doing everything we can to prepare for marriage. So many people have warned us that it is hard, so much harder than we could possibly know from the outset. I keep waiting for a hidden pitfall to take us by surprise, so we have frank and honest conversations about our hopes and expectations, trying to communicate them to each other and find the deeper need and history that created them in the first place.
My pessimistic side is still waiting for some marriage Boogey Man to jump out at me and burst my happy bubble. But when I search our story and ourselves for that ruiner, all I find is the man I love sitting in front of me watching me chew on my lip in deep thought, and he's smiling for the simple joy of being in the same room as me even though I worry about things I don't know and can't control.
Wherever the pain is, it's not here yet, so I'll stop looking for it.
We are merry and almost married.

Camp

2011-06-27T10:30:00.001-05:00

When I was 8 years old, my mother was invited to be a speaker at a Baptist church camp for girls during one of our summer furloughs to the USA. We were all really excited because this meant that my sister and I got to go along for free (which was a big deal for our meager-waged missionary family). My dream of becoming infiltrated with regular American girls doing regular American girls things like eating fruit roll-ups, wearing clothes from the County Seat, and watching Saved by the Bell would finally come true. I still remember spying on Mom's end of the telephone conversation where she made all the arrangements for us. It was going to change my life.
Well, the greatly anticipated week of bliss turned into a week of hell. The camp was dirty, un-airconditioned, and bug-ridden. The girls there hated us for being new, different, and the speaker's daughters. Our counselors spent most of their time applying lipstick while staring into their hand-mirrors, and on the last night at chapel when we were all supposed to cry and tell everyone that we got a holy call to the mission field, my sister and I stayed in our chairs because we'd already been there, done that.
We hated it. Mom hated it too. There was no greater childhood disappointment than camp.
I begged my parents to never send me back, and they swore they wouldn't. I stayed away from camp for 16 years.
Then I applied to be a counselor at a local day camp for kids with cancer and their siblings. The reasons for this were as follows: I wanted my first week in Wheaton to be as busy as possible (because that's how I deal with major life transitions), and I still think that sick kids are the coolest people on earth. I was pretty nervous going into the whole experience because no one hates camp more than me.
I got hooked about twelve minutes into day 1 when I met the campers in my group; four 8 year olds who will likely grow up to develop a cure to their disease while achieving world peace as a side project. They were awesome. We spent the week dancing, singing, playing, swinging, bowling, jumping, laser-tagging, swimming, carnival-ing, movie-watching, and bus riding. It was wonderful and exhausting and hilarious and fun.

You do not know what hard work and determination really means until you watch a sick kid try to play. Each slow step and stop for breath checked my heart for all that I take for granted and impressed me beyond belief at the strength of character these little ones possess. It was an incredibly humbling experience. I loved it. Have some pictures.

day 1

2011-06-19T00:25:00.001-05:00

My first day in my new town was such a raging success, I have to blog about it.
I started it off with an orientation meeting. Next week I'm volunteering at a day camp for kids who have been affected by cancer. I can't wait to play with these little guys in an environment that is catered to them and their specific needs. I also got to see some middle-aged female baseball fans wage a Sox vs. Cubs war in the middle of the meeting. It was fascinating. Later, upon learning that I had just moved from Kansas City, one of the ladies assured me that it was okay if I wanted to wear a Royals hat at camp. I'm so relieved.
Then I returned to my temporary home, a basement bedroom belonging to a family who knows and loves Tim. I got a little more settled in and then had lunch with the family.
After that, I got in my car and drove for exactly 7 minutes and arrived at my fiancee's house. This was so cool for us. I walked in the door and we just marveled that we get to see each other so easily, every day from now on. We beat long-distance!! With style!
Later in the afternoon, I went with Tim to shoot an engagement session at the zoo! Too much fun.
During the shoot, Tim got a text message from his friend Sarah saying she wanted to invite me to see a movie with her and some other girls. Cha-ching! When we were done taking lovey pictures, I bade him farewell and scampered off to make some girlfriends.
Finally, Tim and I ended the day by chilling at my future brother and sister-in-law's apartment.

I think this is all going to work out just fine.

Goodnight, Kansas City

2011-06-17T09:13:00.001-05:00

At the end of today, I won't live in Kansas City anymore.
After my second bout with tears last night, Tim asked me how my heart was feeling. I thought about it for a second and told him it felt like scrambled eggs; all stirred up and half baked.
As excited as I am to start a new life in Chicago with my fiancee, it's going to be hard as all get out to drive away from this place.
I moved to Kansas City alone when I was 19. I wanted independence so bad I couldn't think straight. Being on my own in a new place made me feel like I was fully alive.

It was January and I came from Florida. I didn't even know how to drive in snow, but I figured it out the hard way--along with a lot of other things--and I've been making my own way here for four and a half years. That's 6 months shy of the longest stretch I've ever lived in one place for my whole life.

But now I want to be in a family again and I'm smitten by a good man who wants to love me till we're old, and that deal is too good to pass up...even though it means leaving my sweet little city.

photo cred: The Parsons Photographers

Yesterday I quit my job, said goodbye to my friends, and we packed my car. If we leave soon, we should be in Chicago by dinner time, and then I'll keep myself as busy as possible so I don't get sad.

this is what we do:

2011-06-01T19:46:00.000-05:00

skype every waking minute
match our clothes without meaning to
he taunts me with my wedding band

Long distance engagement ends in four days.

My Dream Wedding

2011-05-29T15:07:00.000-05:00

But we can't and won't do it this way. Tim and I need our families too much to start our married life without them there with us. I just really hope we can keep the simplicity, joy, meaning, intimacy, and spontaneity evident in this video. It's going to be unconventional, that's for sure. Stay tuned to find out how it unfolds.

He asked me to marry him

2011-05-27T14:53:00.001-05:00

Saying yes was the easiest thing I've ever done.

Don't blink or you'll miss us being engaged. We're getting this deal done quick.

Seriously.

2011-05-22T23:18:00.001-05:00

Do you see this precious peanut? I've been crushing on him for the last 4 weeks of his life...the only 4 weeks of his life.

I don't know what it is about tiny little newborns, but they just help my brain.
These last two weeks have been full of extreme emotional circumstances and hard conversations, and whenever I feel like I'm going to lose all capacity to create brain waves, I text my newly un-pregnant friend Alissa and ask if I can come rockabye her baby.
This is usually a mutually beneficial arrangement.
I then sway this little guy to sleep and stare at his face like you do the ocean. After an hour or so, I realize I can think straight again. I hope some therapist reads this and later gives me a high five for finding such a healthy coping mechanism.

Yes, that is a stress break-out starting on my chin.
Also; aren't babies the best accessory? I love wearing babies.

Venice

2011-05-18T20:39:00.000-05:00

I took Frenchman home to meet my parents last weekend. That town is so bright and sleepy.

My Frenchman and I

2011-05-16T06:52:00.001-05:00

This is my Frenchman.

I met him about 6 months ago (I'll tell you how sometime and you probably won't believe me) and we've been having the most fun together ever since.

He lives in Chicago and I live in Kansas City, so we spend most of our time together on the phone or picking each other up from the airport. We have a remarkably similar childhood experience and Meyers-Briggs personality type. Sometimes we go on fancy dates, and other times we end up at the grocery store buying ingredients to cook because all our plans fell through. I like both about the same.

He thinks I'm the prettiest girl in the world.

I keep asking him if he really exists.

We start and end our conversations in French, but usually speak English in the middle.

My Frenchman gets his joy from knowing that God loves him. He doesn't worry about too many things. He absentmindedly chews on the collar of his t-shirt when he's watching a movie or editing pictures, and I think it's cute.

He also keeps his beard longer than he prefers because he knows I think it's cute.

Sometimes he makes me laugh so hard I can't breathe. He usually plays his piano for me and we sing together.

I think he's the most talented photographer I've ever known.

I'm moving to Chicago next month, and I'm doing it for love.

They can't be serious. Are they serious?

2011-04-29T06:56:00.000-05:00

SOURCE

Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice at the Royal Wedding.

Sweet Home Alabama

2011-04-28T12:32:00.004-05:00

SOURCE

My entire extended family lives in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky; all of which are in a state of emergency today because of these storms. My grandparents had to spend the night in my uncle's basement. I'm so glad they're all safe, but 200 other people (likely those with less resources for safe housing) are confirmed dead since last night. No one knows how many homes and businesses were destroyed, and there must be thousands left jobless. This is terrible.

#meetthetabs

2011-04-28T10:20:00.001-05:00

Last weekend was a doozie: I got to meet Tim's family for the first time when they arrived for their visit to Chicago from France.
Now, I've done this before a few times with other guys that I've dated, and I've never been worried about it at all.
But the Tabs...well, there's more of them than in most families (Tim is the 2nd oldest of seven children).
And they came from farther away.
And if the first meeting bombed there wouldn't be much opportunity for a do-over since they're going back to France soon.
And most of our interactions would happen in a language I haven't practiced much in the last twelve years.
And these people are quality, I tell you. Cream of the crop.
Just look at them! Standing in front yard there--which overlooks the Chartreuse mountain range in southern France, by the way--silver crowns of wisdom adorning the parents' heads...dark, handsome features on the sons...daughters confidant in their natural beauty...and don't even get me started on that hunk of burning love all the way on the right...
I was really nervous.

But I could have saved my nerves because it was a wonderful visit. I received 8 hugs when I first met them. The girls were all: "FINALLY! We get to meet you!" and the guys were all "So glad you're here" and the parents were all "We're really glad to know you, Bethany."
And then we spent the weekend sitting around dinner tables for hours, going on road-trips together, and listening to Papa Tab preach an Easter service. I got to have really good conversations with every single member of the family, and that was a huge blessing.
I'm a huge fan of them. They're a party.

"the things you do for a cruise..."

2011-04-19T16:35:00.003-05:00

So, I should let you all know that this girl right here is headed out on a cruise this summer. The Boatwright parents announced at Christmas that they were giving the family tickets to a 7-day trip to Cancun, the Cayman Islands, Beliz, and some other places I can’t remember right now. Thanks Mom and Dad! So excited!

Anyhow, Tim was freshly in the picture and so immediately I was all like “Can I bring my boyfriend too!?”. They said yes.

It only took me a couple of months to put together this equation:

If (Tim = photographer) and (Cruise = me in a bathing suit), then (Cruise = pictures of me in a bathing suit)...possibly shared with the world via this cursed interwebbery. For all you girlfriends of mine whom I’ve heard mumble about how lucky I am to have my own personal photographer always snapping my portrait, take note. It’s all fun and games until there’s a bathing suit involved.

The shock and awe of what was coming made my eyes grow to the size of coke bottles and put me in a nervous sweat. I started cursing society for making it socially acceptable to have girls wear next to nothing anytime they’re within 30 feet of a body of water and call it “normal”. I also exhaled a few expletives and devised a plan.

A major diet plan. I dwindled my normal-person groceries down to nothing and then started with serious resolve. I ate nothing but steamed tilapia, asparagus, apples, grilled chicken, cucumbers, fat free cottage cheese and spinach for ten days. Ten days I held strong! Through cookie decorating for Easter, through two birthday parties, through dinner with friends where cheeseburgers were to my left and fragrant tacos were to my right. Through bagel Friday at work. Through it all I held strong. My roommate even offered me chocolate truffles and I held strong.

I did lose weight, it’s true. I fit into my super skinny jeans again and relished waking up every morning to see how much I lost overnight. It was getting ridiculous when yesterday I hit a figurative brick wall so hard I scraped my figurative face on it. I woke up and the scale said the same thing it had for the last three days. I got to work, tired and hungry, and sat at my desk while my co-workers made a Starbucks run. After that, everyone was talking too loud, breathing too loud. The stress of packing up my house to move overloaded my mind. I took a break for lunch and begrudgingly spooned fat free cottage cheese into my mouth and chewed on some passé strawberries. Still hungry, I came back to my desk and tried to work.

An hour later, I was still miserable and only getting more frustrated. The office was cold and I wasn’t regulating my own temperature well enough, so I resorted to tucking a blanket around my lap after going back to the fridge for more cottage cheese.

I suddenly heard laughter, looked up, and saw Marlene and Heather giggling behind an iPhone that was pointed at me. I looked down and realized what I had become: a freezing, irritated, hungry, carbohydrate-deprived girl who was obsessing over every ounce of fat I ingested. This was a problem. Plus, I looked ridiculous scraping the last bit of fat free cottage cheese out of the container while sitting under a blanket in public. Want to see? I'll humor you.

You're welcome.
So I went home and ate a steak for dinner. Then I went out for coffee and added some cream and sugar to my cup and felt like a normal person again.

And now I’m going to dinner with my friends and I’m going to eat like I’m celebrating balance, because I am.

When I told Tim about all this, his response was the title of this post.

Chick-fil-anguage

2011-04-18T15:53:00.003-05:00

Tim: "Thanks, babe."
Me: "My pleasure."
Tim: "I think it's hot when you speak Chick-fil-A to me."

Thrifted

2011-04-16T22:03:00.000-05:00

You guys, I scored a vintage gem today. I've been looking for something special to help out my life for a while and I finally found it. I'll be hauling most of my stuff into storage next week, moving out of the Lydia house, and living out of a suitcase while sleeping on an air mattress at a friend's house for the next couple of months. Transitional adventure? Yes please. I like the sound of it, minus the suitcase part. I need something bigger and prettier than a suitcase to hold my clothes and picture frames for a while. I've been looking for a nice big old trunk and I finally found her today.

In't she a beaut?

Sometimes, when you're antiquing, you find things that are pretty and functional and helpful and classy.
Other times, you find things so hideous and unexplainable that you just have to try them on, take lots of low grade cell phone pictures, and blog about them just to exclaim to the world that they were once intended to be taken seriously.
Are you ready?
Ok.
I would like you all to meet the Madonna.

She seems innocent enough at first, right? Madonna always does. Don't be fooled. Look closer at the details.

White leather with embroidery and lace, you guys. Including a zip-up front closure. There's just no excuse for that.

This dress screams 1980's Women's Lib. It breaks every rule. Too hot to be worn before Labor Day, and too white to be worn after. It's the anti-wedding dress, because who needs a man to be able to wear a white dress if she wants to? I should also point out that the shoulder pads were still present to make this number intimidate any glass-ceiling supporter.

It was hard to walk away from this treasure, but Madonna went right back on the rack after I had my dress-up fun. I'm sure she'll make someone very happy someday.

Regarding the slow fade-out

2011-04-15T20:41:00.001-05:00

I am writing this blog post in order to out myself.

Last week I was riding in a car with my dear old friend Sean. He's been a good friend to me since I moved to Kansas City four and a half years ago. Sean asked about my near future plans, and I reluctantly told him about getting ready to leave Kansas City. I don't like to talk about these things because it puts the spotlight of the conversation on me, my decisions, and how the other person chooses to react to news that I am leaving their life.

Sean's response to me was, "Ok. How do you want to be celebrated before you go?"
That question made me feel like a naked person in a crowded room.

I have moved many, many times. I am good at it. I love the thrill and challenge of being in a new place.
My tried and true method of leaving one place for another is to either go so fast that I don't have time to say goodbye to many people, or perform the trusty move that I like to call the "slow fade out".

The slow fade out is when I know that a change is coming a long way in advance, and I begin to taper off on all my relationships early. The theory here is that by the time I leave, my friends won't even miss me. My exit was so silky smooth that they've already filled in the gap of me with some other friend, activity, or interest. I really like the slow fade out. No one gets sad. I don't feel guilty for leaving. I don't think of sweet memories of time spent together that are now over and can't be re-lived. I just drive down the highway and cry mute tears that no one will know about and will surely bother none.

I tell you, it's not even a conscious decision, but I've been avoiding people. I've been busy. The weather is too bad to drive to meet you. Sorry, I'm out of town. I have to write a paper. I'm on the phone. Money is kind of tight right now, so no, I'd rather not go out to dinner. I'm too tired. That's the slow fade-out. Friends stop asking, to give me space, and before they know it I'll be gone.

Sean didn't really like this plan. He told me I couldn't do it, actually.
This all comes down to something at the root of me; I hate disappointing others. At all costs I will strive to never knowingly make anyone sad or uncomfortable. I know that my Kansas City community loves me, and I don't want to bother them by leaving. Let's all just pretend I'm staying until I'm gone.

Hopefully there will be a part II to this blog where I can report back that I conquered the slow fade-out and chose to truly feel what I am losing in Kansas City, but I need all of you to first know that this little mischief is what I've been up to thus far. It's not too late to nip it in the bud, though. I'm not leaving for another couple of months.

And right now two of my best friends are having a birthday party, and I need to go love on them. Keep me accountable to being a good friend to you. I'm not gone yet.

#attheoffice

2011-04-13T15:04:00.003-05:00

Heather, Marlene, me, and Aril

...having a great time at work every day

terribly wonderful

2011-04-11T00:27:00.001-05:00

My sister and I had interesting days today.
She reported on the memorial service of a fallen police officer in Chattanooga. His wife stood up in front of news cameras and, in her mourning, said that she would trust God and not lean on her own understanding.
I watched a little trouper take 21 stitches to the forearm. It took almost an hour for the doctor to sew him up. His mom cried and his dad, knowing him better than anyone, kept making him laugh despite the pain. Kids amaze me. Parents do too.
I wish we could all live in a world where our bodies don't break and bleed...and I think it was really sweet of God to prepare such a place for us to go when we're done here. Today I remembered again how undeniable it is that He put a little bit of Himself into each one of us so that we can handle crises we were never intended to endure.
Megan and I both cried over witnessing these events today. I think that if your job doesn't move you deep in your heart, you should at least get a hobby that does. Please. The world needs you at your most passionate.

Snuggie? Or inverted bathrobe?

2011-03-27T20:28:00.001-05:00

I will never tell.

isn't he wonderful?

2011-03-15T00:17:00.007-05:00

A very long time ago, Tim told me he had a surprise for me.

Well. It wasn't that long ago. I'm talking January...but the Frenchman and I have covered a lot of ground in a few short months of being the token of each other's affections--and I don't just mean the space between Kansas City and Chicago--so it does feel like a very long time ago.

Anyhow, before I went on my January visit, he was talking up this surprise. He kept going on about how it was a really, really good one. Then I got to Chicago and he took me on trains, and in cabs, and up to the 96th floor of the John Hancock building, then down Michigan avenue, then ice skating in Millenium Park, then to the Vivian Maier photography exhibit, and none of those wonderful activities was the surprise he was talking about. I left to come back to Kansas City, and still he boasted of his great surprise that was yet to come.

I went back to see him last weekend, and he promised that the first afternoon I was there, I would finally get to experience whatever this big surprise was. All I knew for sure was that it was weather sensitive and I had to not be afraid of heights to be able to enjoy it. I started developing unproven theories about what it could possibly be.

As soon as I arrived in Chicago, it started snowing. We were warming our hands on mugs of hot coffee when Tim made an ever so ambiguous call to "the place" asking if our "appointment" was still on despite the snow. The people said yes, and my man smugly assured me that his great surprise was still happening despite the snow, "because by the time we're in the air, the weather will have cleared."

In the air?

"So...is it an airplane or a helicopter?", I asked.

I still love the look on his face when he realized he'd let that bit of information slip. And he still loves the look on my face when he told me we were going on a sunset helicopter tour of downtown Chicago.

Whose life am I living here, people?

It was wonderful. I'll let the pictures tell the story of the experience, except for two snippets that show how hilarious and genuine my sweetheart is.

We got in the car to drive to the airport (because that's where helicopters take off from, go figure), and Tim handed me his camera bag because I wanted to play with those bad boys on the ride to Midway. I opened the bag and was surprised to find that he only packed one of his Cannon 5D Mark II's. He usually takes two cameras on important shoots.

"Just one?", I asked.

"Yeah", he replied, "if the chopper goes down, I only want to lose one camera."

"Seriously?! What about our lives, mister?"

He chuckled and said something about preserving the value of his estate.

Comforting.

And then, when the pilot was getting us settled in our seats, he asked Tim if he wanted to sit up front to take advantage of the better view for photography. The window space up there was easily three times what is was in the back. Without hesitation, Tim declined the better seat next to the pilot. He wanted to sit next to me in the back, even though it meant his view would be limited.

Speaking of his pictures, here's a few incredibles. If you want to see the whole collection, click here.

Well.

2011-03-11T22:55:00.002-06:00

I have never been one to tell a story before its finish, and my life is currently a whirl of several different stories that are positively swollen with potential for fat happy endings, but it's too early to tell just yet.

When I was a kid, my mom refused to promise me anything except that she would never stop loving me. I begged for promises for birthday parties and puppies and vacations and new shoes, but she flat refused to tell me on certain terms that any of those things would materialize. Her word was strong as steel because she let no weak promises slip in to her language.

That was a grand tangent.

The point is, I won't tell my stories yet because they're not finished. But that strong as steel word told me tonight that I needed to update my blog with something...anything, for goodness' sake, so I will tell you things that I am sure are true.

I have eaten oatmeal with raisins, apples, and honey for breakfast every day for the last 5 months. I love this food. I start thinking about it everyday around 7 pm. If I'm not careful, I eat it for dinner too. Gosh. I could eat some right now.
I have been 24 years old for almost 24 hours. It feels good.
My boyfriend is the most admirable man I have ever known, save for my father and grandfathers.
I want to be a Child Life Specialist. I've tasted it for two months now, and I love every day that I spend at the children's hospital with those kiddos helping them understand and cope with being sick, and remember joy in the midst of their pain.
I am going to move away from Kansas City sometime before August. If I hadn't been slowly preparing myself for this for the last year, I would wretch at the thought. I love all that this sweet little city and its beautiful people has been for me since I was 19 years old, but I have two big life dreams that can't come true here, so I will go. But I promise to come visit as much as I possibly can (except in February and August when the weather is profoundly irrational).

There they are; the things I know for sure.
Now, a funny:
On Wednesday I was at the hospital , learning more about how to do my dream job, and I met a sweet girl for the first time. We were getting acquainted, talking about various play activities and whatnot. Near the end of our conversation, I thought I would be nice and let her know that she had paint on her forehead. I figured she had broken out the finger paints for her play-group that day and one of the kids had tagged her without her knowing.
"Oooh!", she said kindly, "that's not paint. It's ashes."
I wanted to crawl in a hole and die. It was Ash Wednesday, people. What kind of a Christian am I?

That's all for tonight, buddies. Except for one thing, doesn't my Mimi look positively regal in her birthday picture?

I mean, she could be the queen of England.
The other night over the phone, Opa (that handsome gent pictured above) told me he remembered the first time he ever told a girl he loved her. I asked him how that turned out, and he said: "Oh...you know...well, she's sitting right in front of me."

Sleep tight, my readers.

when we text

2011-02-27T15:34:00.001-06:00

Tim: booty shake! (_/_) (_\_) (_/_)

Me: Cindy Crawford :º)

Tim: what? googling her now

Me: You don't know who Cindy Crawford is??
10 minutes later..
Tim: My friends tell me she's a model.
Me: You're so French.
Tim: I know. It's pretty bad.

We're obsessed with this site.

So.

2011-02-24T21:23:00.004-06:00

I've been irritatingly sick for almost a whole week, but I will discuss this no further because I know several people who are dealing with serious illnesses that have long surpassed mere irritation.

I talked to Tim on the phone for five hours today. FIVE! I was stuck in bed with the sick, and he was editing a wedding shoot. Take that, long distance. It can be done.

My sister is getting married, did I tell you? I am gaining a very quiet, kind-hearted, upstanding, honorable brother-in-law. I'm even pretty good friends with this guy already! Although I nearly sabotaged our early camaraderie with an unhealthily large dose of sass right before we met for the first time:

My sister was mortified. I just wanted to be buddies! Like right away! We recovered over turkey and stuffing. He appreciates my humor now. I'm pretty sure.

So that wedding will be a fun activity for the Boatwright clan this October.

I have spent the last three saturdays in a classroom for eight hours, and this next one is my last, thank goodness.

When will it be spring? I hate February weather. It makes me snarky.

My friends recorded this song. You should listen to it because it feels like June.

it's the end of an era

2011-02-22T23:46:00.001-06:00

Well, folks, I had my first day of orientation for my Child Life Practicum yesterday. It was great. I learned about hospital alert codes and infectious disease prevention and I got a textbook and made a new friend and got a badge with my name and a poor quality photo of me on it.
I also got some moderately bad news; I have to kill my nose ring.
I know.
You're all weeping over my lost mark of independence and wild self expression and undeniably adorable little sparkle on the right side of my face. Except for my mother. She's probably fist pumping right now with a gleeful smile.
I have until Monday morning at 7.30 am to pull that sucker out of my nose.
Here's to being a sensible adult without any metal in her face. Cheers.

speaking of muffins

2011-02-22T18:07:00.002-06:00

overheard

2011-02-19T18:35:00.000-06:00

little girl: "Can you marry your dad?"
Dad: "No."
little girl: "Can brother and sister marry?"
Dad: "No."
little girl: "Mom said they can, it would just make their kids really sick."
Dad: "Let's go."

tired

2011-02-17T20:48:00.000-06:00

Me, laying on the dining room floor, exhausted: "Is it even 9 pm yet?"
Anna: "8:16. Perfectly acceptable time to go to sleep."

me and my babe, bein' all cute.

2011-02-14T11:12:00.000-06:00

rodney

2011-02-11T20:23:00.002-06:00

Dad: "I'm headed to dance practice."
Me: "Dance practice?"
Dad: "Yeah! The elders are doing a line dance to "Achy Breaky Heart" for the seniors ministry's Opry Land themed dinner banquet. I think they're gonna make a video of it and put in on the YouTube just like last time!"
Me: "That's great, Dad."

a morning with the sweethearts

2011-02-07T18:56:00.001-06:00

One day in late 2009, I sat at a kitchen table on Norton avenue with my roommate and helped her compose the perfect "I respect you a lot but don't like you like that and I hope we can still be friends" e-mail to a nice guy in one of her classes who had asked her out.
Months later, Bethany moved out of that house, and then I moved out of that house, and we didn't see each other so much. Then I ran into her a couple weeks ago and she told me she had a boyfriend. I texted her and Emily a few days later to ask if they wanted to grab breakfast this Sunday, to which Bethany replied: "I'M ENGAGED!!!!!"
I took that as a yes to Panera breakfast.

Guess who gave her that ring? The nice guy that I had so carefully helped her reject a year and a half ago. He proposed on their 3 month dating anniversary. They're so excited.
I love it when respect turns to love.

When I was a little girl, my dad would tell me stories about Chicago

2011-01-28T19:30:00.006-06:00

Something happened to my dad when he was 19.
I'm not sure the details, I just know that he was a boy before it happened, and the general premise is that he collided with the Almighty and decided to lose his life to get it back. He left Atlanta and went to Chicago for bible school.
His stories were bigger than anything real.
Swaying skyscrapers, high high piles of dirty snow scraped from the wide streets, wind that bit your face, rivers running through the middle of town, and food so tasty it made you sick. Before I learned geography, I thought Chicago was a state. It had to be, to fit all that in.
I finally got to see it. When I stepped off the train, I understood what he was talking about for the first time. Ogilvie station is the size of a cathedral. The braided steel beams that hold it up leave little squares of glass where you can look up and see how very tiny your reflection is compared to the vast ceiling. Union station is even bigger. Michigan avenue is America's Champs Elysees. And there is no cold like Chicago-cold.

I had to call him from the financial district, just to tell him I understood now. Tim and I were on a bridge with a wooden plank sidewalk. My fingers were so stiff from cold that I had to really focus on punching the right buttons on my phone. Yes, I still have a phone with buttons--get off me. Water rushed beneath me, buildings taller than redwoods eased back and forth in the wind above me.
I have a crush on this city.

Most of these photographs were taken by Tim Tabailloux, boyfriend extraordinaire.

Chicago.

2011-01-17T11:44:00.000-06:00

I think I heard you say you wanted some baby pictures

2011-01-11T19:02:00.005-06:00

Jim and Bethany are my neighbors, and they have wanted Zia for a long time now. They are such good people. Zia has no idea that she hit the parental lottery.

This little girl is also already cooler than all the other 2-week-olds of the world because she was born at home, in water, on Christmas night. What a baby.

We've got a rock-star family happening right here:

(pink rocket onesie printed especially for Zia by her daddy)

I am so happy for this family.

And the winner is...

2011-01-09T17:41:00.000-06:00

would you like a treat?

2011-01-06T15:39:00.001-06:00

I would like to give you a treat.

Well, the folks over at this modern dining room furniture site would like for me to give you a treat.
Do this for me: have a look at some cute and functional stuff over here, then comment on this post and tell me what you would get if you had a $25 gift certificate to get something snazzy for your life. I'll pick someone's name out of a hat this Saturday at noon, so leave me an email address so I can let you know if you win.
If I were you, I would pick this:

or this:

or maybe this?

You tell me, my friendlies.

Someone's gettin' $25. Check back Saturday.

I wish I weren't born yet, so I could be friends with their kids

2011-01-03T14:53:00.001-06:00

So far, the best news of 2011 is that Blakely and Tom are engaged!

I have been friends with these two for a very long time and I just can't really describe how remarkable they both are, separately and now together.

This family is going to be really special.

how to: care for everyone

2010-12-28T19:15:00.003-06:00

How to: care for extroverts How to: care for introverts

Here's the deal, you guys:

2010-12-27T01:59:00.006-06:00

It's never too late for anything.

My dad recently officiated this wedding.

This bride is a 72 year old gal who has never been married. She has taken care of her sister (who has Down's Syndrome) for her entire life, and was recently bound to a wheelchair because of a bone disease.
The groom is a 75 year old former Navy fighter pilot who nursed his late wife through years of heartbreaking cancer treatments before she died.
And now they are newlyweds. The bride's sister was the maid of honor. She got to wear a pink dress and a tiara. The groom wanted everyone in attendance (except my pops) to stay seated during the entire ceremony so that his bride had an ideal view of the whole scene as she wheeled down the aisle.
I just think this whole thing is darling.

Abednego; world's greatest dog

2010-12-24T20:07:00.003-06:00

If there is anything cuter than my pup opening up his Christmas present, I need you to prove it to me.

Choose Joy

2010-12-24T00:01:00.001-06:00

My dear friend Jensen gave me this for Christmas. It is a perfect gift.
In case you don't have your French-English pocket dictionary handy, it means "Choose Joy: because it's all relative."

I talk myself out of joy a lot. I believe a cynical whisper that says joy is far off and I have to work for it before I can have it. I get confused when I see joy in front of me and think it was supposed to look like something else. I think it's not for me, it must be meant for another person. I try not to touch it in case I'm not supposed to. I tell myself that I don't deserve joy. Not just yet. I think I even believe that if I choose joy, I'm just setting myself up for pain later on.

This is all not quite right. And believing this lie makes me not quite right.

I trust a man who said that He came for me so that my joy may be full, so this gift is a beautiful reminder that His joy is available to me whenever I choose to choose it.

You too. Choose joy.

you didn't know this turned into a photo blog did you?

2010-12-15T19:36:00.001-06:00

I'm sorry. I'd love to write something delightful here, but I've got this monster term paper hanging over my head. The semester of hell is almost over. Have another picture. Later.

this is my dad

2010-12-07T21:42:00.001-06:00

Nigeria, circa 1980

We're made of the same stuff

2010-11-28T14:14:00.003-06:00

This cracks me up more than most things.

Happy Thanksgiving, friends

2010-11-25T15:50:00.003-06:00

do you have any idea how delighted I am?

2010-11-23T21:42:00.007-06:00

I get to hang out with this guy in Georgia over Thanksgiving break.
When he was 1 day old I got mad that I couldn't hold him, scooted angrily across mom's hospital bed, and kicked him in the head by accident with my black patent leather mary-janes.
He's okay now though.
Tonight he took me on a drive. We listened to terrible music and rode up and down hills. Hills! They don't have those in Kansas.
Do you know what else they don't have in Kansas? Dam stores. Not sure why.

a lot of sister memories for some reason

2010-11-16T22:35:00.004-06:00

It's a late night at Miller Nichols library. There's an older gentleman here sitting by me who has been on his phone for 48 minutes now. He's complaining to a friend about some situation in the community. I know the main floor of this library is not labeled a "quiet zone", but come on now. Forty eight minutes of audible complaining? Who can stand it?

I must make sure I have a constant stream of music playing in my ears or I'll have a conniption.

This song just played on my shuffle.

Once, almost three years ago, I flew to Florida in the summer to visit my family. I was wearing this outfit:

I thought I looked cute. I thought I looked SO cute. My mom and sister pulled up outside of baggage claim and picked me up. I was so excited to see them, especially in my cute outfit. Those two arrived in a silly mood and spent exactly 4 seconds greeting me with hugs and the next 2 minutes exclaiming over how disjointed my outfit was.

"The colors don't match! What is HAPPENING with that necklace? Since when do you have those bangs? Is this how they dress in Kansas City? Bethany, really, what's going on here?"

I tried to explain myself for a little bit, but I got my feelings hurt pretty early and gave up. I told them I didn't want to hear another word of opinion about my outfit and plugged my pink iPod mini into the car stereo, picked this song, and turned the volume up.

There was awkward silence for 58 seconds.

Then Deb Talan sang "I don't give a damn. I'm happy as a clam. Nobody knows me at all".

And then the three of us just died laughing in that car. We laughed so hard we cried.

The air smelled like ocean and we wiped away salty tears from our faces and flew down a sunny interstate lined with palm trees.

the chicken or the egg, if you will

2010-11-13T13:52:00.005-06:00

"The great question in the history of healthcare is still whether women defined caregiving, or caregiving defined women."
-Linda Wright

just another post on my medical terminology class

2010-11-11T21:44:00.000-06:00

But seriously. This word is ridiculous.
I love it.

does this make my bag look big?

2010-11-10T21:27:00.000-06:00

Be honest.

schmesolution.

2010-11-10T21:01:00.006-06:00

One of my new year's resolutions was to be a little more put-together. You know. Wear make-up. Fix my hair. Something.

Well, I'm not sorry to report that it's November and I am sitting in the library wearing hand-me-down jeans, an ancient hoodie (I'm talking middle school, people), and no makeup. To be completely transparent, I didn't shower today. Even contacts were too much for me to deal with and so I'm wearing my glasses.

It's just the way I am. Is this wrong? I refuse to believe it should be my lot in life to spend precious minutes matching colors and painting on powders and blotting lipstick. I don't know. I could be wrong. This is why I left the south.

My sister came to visit last January. She and Dad drove 12 hours through a snow storm to get to Kansas City. I knew they would be exhausted and stressed when they arrived. As soon as they piled in the door, I greeted them with hugs and offered food, a hot drink, my warm bed, the bathroom, whatever they needed to rest from their long and arduous journey. My sweet sister looked at me with sparkling blue eyes framed with eye-liner and mascara and asked: "Do you have any hair-spray?"

I blinked at her a couple of times, then turned silently and walked down the hall where I rummaged deep into the contents of my bathroom closet until I came up with a can of old, cheap hairspray. I handed it to her and watched as she stood in front of my mirror and liberally sprayed the liquid glue all over her head, shaking her blonde curls like Farrah Fawcett in a summer breeze. There was a look of tranquility on her face. When she was done, she turned to me and said; "It just doesn't feel right without hair-spray".

Someone tell me how we're related.

here goes nothing

2010-11-07T17:11:00.005-06:00

This weekend, I got to attend the 16th Annual Midwest Child Life Conference. It was my first experience at a Child Life event with Child Life people in a Child Life setting. As I was getting ready for the first morning's session, I felt a little bit like I was headed into the first day at a new school. Luckily, I've done that a few other times in my life (9, actually), so I adopted the old familiar "fake it till you make it" attitude.
I would just like to say that after two days of hearing from and being around Child Life Specialists, I have come to the conclusion that this field is full of incredibly intelligent, beautiful, compassionate, and strong women. Yes, women. The only man I saw all weekend was the tech support fellow who had to run all over the hospital getting microphones and projectors to work for us. This job is to women as fire fighting is to men.
I am both terrified and delighted at all this is going to require of me. I'm going to have to explore the tragic depths of what it means to nurture and support a child through traumatic circumstances. My daily task list could involve anything from distracting a child during a spinal tap, to facilitating a play group for kids receiving chemo, to helping parents explain to their child what their diagnoses means, to holding babies in the NICU when parents have to leave to go to work.
I've had more than one moment already where I've stopped to ask myself just who I think I am to think I could possibly handle this responsibility. I'm not sure. I don't even know if I'll get through to the end of the process. I still have to complete a practicum, then an internship, and then a certification exam before even looking for a job. But I'm excited see what happens and how I learn and grow throughout the process.
Here goes nothing.

this muscle is genius

2010-10-31T00:01:00.002-05:00

I just learned the basics of the human cardio-pulmonary system, and that information has me in awe that I am alive.
For every minute of the last 24 years, my heart has worked constantly to pump oxygen-needy blood to my lungs, then bring it back--bright red and full of life--and send it all the way to the very tips of my fingers and toes. Then it starts the cycle all over again.
This muscle is genius.
My choice and consciousness have nothing to do with the process. It just happens, and it has just been happening absolutely perfectly since before I was born. Thank you, dear heart. You're doing a great job. At beating.

One time I put on my mom's stethoscope and listened to my own heart. It was jarring; that unfamiliar, quick, regular little drum I got to hear. My vitality in a sound I could plug into my ears, like a song on my ipod or something.
Hearing someone else's heart is a trip, too. It's an intimate thing. Only the privileged get listening access to that sacred rhythm. My friend Laura is a nurse, and she had a patient whose wife grew worried when she leaned her head against her husband's chest and noticed that his heart beat sounded didn't sound the same as it usually did. He went to the hospital and found out that he needed an immediate quadruple bi-pass surgery.
I love that story.

Reactions to "Runaway" video by Kanye West

2010-10-28T10:09:00.002-05:00

Watch the full length video here.

Okay Kanye, here's what I think:

Your new video is a stunning work of art, no doubt about it. What you've done in "Runaway" is going to be important for a long time. I'm pretty sure my kids will be writing history papers on the social commentary you have going on here.

I just have a few questions and comments:

Your phoenix girlfriend is very pretty, but what's up with the extreme sexual objectification of the woman you love? Thanks for letting her express herself with spoken language for 48 seconds of your 35 minute video, but I feel like she's really just present in this film to dance provocatively to your remixes and celebrate your appreciation for breast implants. Also: that little bit you sang about slapping her around pissed me off.
Please just tell me what you're saying about race relations in this film. I'm seeing glorification of the Ku Klux Klan and the N-word and I just don't understand. Is this progress?
Thanks for the ballet scene. It was incredible. I appreciate the honesty in the lyrics of "Runaway". That's some tough subject matter, but it's relevant to your target audience.
About that Michael Jackson moment: you're saying you're the next MJ. Am I right?
Your idea of community with all the friends at the long table breaking bread together was beautiful. I loved it. Now, your lyrics to "Devil in a New Dress" are rumored to be offensive to Christians: "You love Jesus, but you've learned a lot from Satan...I see good Christians makin' brash decisions...May the Lord forgive us, May God be with us." As a Christian myself, I'm not offended by your criticism of hypocrisy. I would be offended if you criticised my God, but you didn't. So we're cool.

I know you're always feeling misunderstood by the world, and this video is an expression of that. You're the phoenix who is awesome and complex and constantly needing to reinvent herself. I get it.

Mr. West, you're such an incredible influence on young people in the world. I know you care about the next generation or you wouldn't have had that scene where the free spirit child is running with that gorgeous red cloud behind him. But here's what I think: kids actually don't have to trade their free spirits for cult driven hate costumes like you portrayed by putting a KKK hat on little kid's head. The influence of your media makes a huge difference in how kids see themselves and who they grow up to be, so why use your talents to lock them into a prison they didn't know existed in the first place? You know? Leave the bad stuff for the history books and write something new and inspiring for the kiddies.

no bad news

2010-10-25T11:36:00.001-05:00

Friends, I have something exciting to tell you.
Remember how I had an idea of a new career I wanted to pursue a few months ago? I'm doing it. It will take me another year to learn what I need to know and complete requirements for it, but I am on my way to becoming a Child Life Specialist.
I had this job once for about 5 years where I got to work with young people, and I loved it very much. I would like to do it again. There's no kid in the world who isn't going through major transition--all the time--and the best parents and teachers need help from others to pour time and attention into them so they can make it to adulthood in one piece. I want to do that for kids who are sick. So I am going to.
I found out this weekend that I got accepted into a practicum program at one of the finest children's hospitals in the country. It starts next Spring and it is right here where I live.
Now, that's no bad news.

community college

2010-10-21T22:50:00.004-05:00

sunday is for singing

2010-10-17T15:34:00.002-05:00

no power of hell

no scheme of man

can ever pluck me from his hand

till he returns or calls me home

here in the power of Christ I'll stand

Some bedrock parts of my faith are hymns I can only recall in my grandmother's voice.

bethany vs. fat stack of medical terms

2010-10-14T23:16:00.002-05:00

Place your bets.

Hey Sis;

2010-10-13T22:30:00.006-05:00

Don't forget. We're going. If you can get time off of reporting on crazy stuff.
I'm thinking August? Otherwise it might not be hot enough/smell bad enough for an authentic experience.

I can already taste the pains au chocolat and hear the awful French version of my name being spoken. So excited.

How great is my day?

2010-10-12T14:04:00.002-05:00

This is what happens when I take a vacation day: homemade macaroons for breakfast.

Review of Aaron Hale's new EP "Ghostly"

2010-10-10T13:57:00.006-05:00

Here's something new: my friend Aaron Hale is about to release a new EP and I think you should know about it.

After spending the summer leading worship at various events throughout the southeast, Aaron Hale is ready to settle into fall with the release of a new EP. Although the title may sound appropriate for late October, the theme gives a fresh perspective on what it means to be Ghostly.

The first track majors on ethereal purity and the weightlessness available through forgiveness. "Ghostly" lands in the ear as a pleasant and original tune. The end of this song has a slow swell into repetition of the line "there is hope for me". This message is an inspiring, fuss-less theme that encourages the listener beyond the circumstance of heavy brokenness. "Ghostly" has a deeper personal meaning with every listen.

The second track, "Got a Lot to Give" may have been written as a personal anthem for Aaron and his wife Heather (who are in the process of adopting a little boy named Arthur from Ethiopia), but the message is applicable to anyone who wishes to emulate the teachings of Jesus into their lives in order to love those around them in a truer, more self-less way. Aaron captures the struggle to do this. This song communicates the feeling of having much to offer while simultaneously facing the complicated red tape of not knowing "the right way" and not "having the words" to bring about the desired change in one's self and surroundings.

"Wake Within Me" was co-written with Robbie Seay. This talent combination results in lyrics made of alluring poetry about finally reaching light, warmth, and a familiar love after traveling through darkness and despondency. Aaron's voice is the strongest instrument here, set against gentle guitar and keys. This song is simultaneously delicate, beautiful and strong. Aaron's limited patience for over-production serves this song incredibly well. It stands on its own as a lovely conclusion to the EP.

Please visit Aaron's website for more information on his ever-promising music career, adoption story, and of course to purchase your copy of the new "Ghostly" EP as soon as it it released on October 12th!

the best

2010-10-06T12:51:00.001-05:00

One year ago today my friend Nanette, the closest mother lady I have out here, was diagnosed with breast cancer. We spent the fall squeezing hands and deciding to smile, then we all got together to pray for her to be healed. I will never forget hearing her husband, Woot (who had lost his sister only weeks before) tell the Lord out loud in front of everyone that he loved her and begged Him not to take her away just yet.
Nanette had me over for tea some time around then and we sat on her back patio and asked each other what we thought about how God does and doesn't heal people when we ask him to, and how He is still good regardless.
Then came surgery, then all the radiation, and then the Winter.
Woot let her sleep in late every morning and brought her breakfast in bed while her stitches healed and the snow fell.
In February Nanette had a birthday and we celebrated with her as she found out there was no cancer left in her body. We sang lots of songs about strong love that day.
And tonight, one year after it all began, Nanette and I ate salads on the Plaza like ladies do and talked about everything in the world but cancer.
How about that?

This happened.

2010-09-30T10:41:00.001-05:00

We just died when we saw each other. I love co-workers. Especially this one.

these two

2010-09-28T07:55:00.001-05:00

Denis: "So, what did you study in college?"
Jensen: "I majored in English and minored in Women's Studies."
Denis: "Gosh, I wish I could have studied Men's Studies or something like that."
Jensen: "That's what they call 'History'."

What's a post-modern Ethicist to do?

2010-09-21T20:22:00.001-05:00

"The disturbingly post-modern implication is that there really is no particular core knowledge or central discipline that constitutes ethical expertise. There is no ultimate answer, no final authority to whom we might turn. Somehow, the answers, if there were any, would come from a discussion that incorporated philosophy, theology, law, medicine, sociology, and common sense in a strange and new amalgam. The ethicist might mix a little Kant, Mill, and Rawls, a little Anglo-American case law, some Christian, Muslim, and Jewish moral theology, a little quantitative sociology, a little ethnography, the results from a public-opinion poll, a little clinical experience, and some self-reflection. This solution, while often practically useful, is theoretically unsatisfying."
John D. Lantos, M.D.

these swirling days

2010-09-17T13:45:00.001-05:00

A pastor in florida is acting like a real jerk and the strip clubs in Missouri are shutting down. Fall is blowing in and I have two new friends. I study all the time and I like it. The parents celebrated 28 years of marriage on the same day that we remember the attacks on the world trade center. It's a shame that their anniversary has a sad brush stroke painted over it by the world. I keep getting the chance to go to shows and listen to good music played by delightful friends and this puts me in a perpetually good mood. We hired on a temporary staff to help with fundraising at work, and I'm suddenly the closing manager again. How did that happen? And why do I love answering their questions and making sure they're well trained and confident in doing their jobs and that the building is securely locked at the end of the night and all of their cars start successfully before I drive off? I get this inner satisfaction.

Undergrads are so cute. Yesterday at UMKC I got stuck walking behind two girls sharing an umbrella wearing their rain-jackets with their jeans tucked into their rain-boots with their backpacks loaded down with books and they were the cutest little ladies I've ever seen. Even if I only saw the backs of their heads.

You guys...

2010-09-08T19:49:00.004-05:00

I have to read this book for school.

Pediatric biomedical ethics with an emphasis in palliative care and decision making = sad times.

Cat-sitting, day 8

2010-09-06T00:26:00.000-05:00

Cari went to Italy. I went to Cari's apartment to take care of Henry.
He's pretty curious.

hello world

2010-09-04T20:27:00.004-05:00

The weather has turned here in Kansas City. It's cool enough to sit outside the Roasterie on a Saturday evening and study medical terms.

Cool pertaining to the temperature, not my level of social aptitude.

Alex and Ashley got married today. If I had enough money for a plane ticket to Virginia and time off school and work, I would be there. Instead, I sent my well wishes via text message to Ashley, who responded hours later:

Ashley: "I am officially Mrs. Alex Ruhl now!!"

Me: "I love that!"

Ashley: "We're on our way to the hotel. Ooh la la."

Me: "Aw yeah."

I was pretty sure the conversation was over, but then my phone lit up immediately with a new text message and I read the visible excerpt on the outer screen:

"HEY! You should come over after studying."

Which was so weird. I mean, their hotel is in Virginia. I flipped open my phone for further investigation.

It was from Shannon.

10 things I would tell to my 17-year-old self:

2010-08-26T13:31:00.002-05:00

1. Don’t stress too much about deciding which college to go to. You’ll end up going to 3 different ones anyway and your best friendships won’t come out of class.
2. Don’t get such an attitude with Mom and Dad about them trying to keep you out of debt. Graduating without loans is the best thing ever.
3. Try to stop working so much.
4. A series of really hard circumstances are about to start coming at you fast, and they’re going to hurt. It’s not because you’re being punished. It’s just the way life is, and it gets better.
5. If you could see what God is trying to work and build into you right now, you wouldn’t be fighting Him so hard about it.
6. Don’t wait until 18 to get the swoopy side-bangs. Get them now.
7. Who cares if you’re driving a 1989 maroon Buick Century with paint peeling off the front bumper. You have a car. And it’s really comfy.
8. Spend as much time as possible with your little brother and be really good to him. You won’t get to be in his life after next year.
9. Stop worrying. Just stop.
10. Hit highway 41 going north until you get to Proctor Rd. Turn right, and keep going until you find Sarasota Baptist Church on the left. Go on a Sunday morning and find the 11th grade Sunday school room. There’s a girl named Michelle in there who is a riot and she actually understands what your life is like because her dad is a pastor and she moved around a lot too. Meeting her and her friends is going to make your senior year. Don’t be shy. They’re going to think you’re really cool even if you don’t think you are.

[I stole this idea from Jeff and Sara. You do it too]