Tag Archives: marriage

Book Review: Girls In White Dresses by Jennifer Close

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Book #2: Girls In White Dresses by Jennifer Close

Picture: Barnes & Noble

I love a book that makes me laugh out loud. This one did, over and over again.

I’ve been wanting to read this book for a while, but I felt odd about it. I’m not the girl that this book was written for. I’m the antithesis of that girl – something that’s very obvious to me some days. I was the first one to get married. I had one year of post-college, normal “20s” life, then I started law school, met my husband and was engaged before summer.

But, contrary to my expectations, I still found this book relatable. You can hear some of these conversations coming out of your friends’ mouths, or your own. It’s fresh and engaging, ignoring the cliches of “waiting for Mr. Right” and instead illustrating what real life looks like while you are looking for it.

Except… When I brought the book up to some girlfriends at coffee on Sunday, the only one not married or engaged replied “The book about the girls having a midlife crisis because they’re single? It was ok.”

That was NOT what I took away from this book AT ALL. Which makes me wonder if I got it at all. Is that what I was supposed to see? Is that what it means to someone going through it?

In some ways, I feel like I missed out on those years, and wish I would have had a few more of them. In other ways, I’m glad I never had to. I love being married. I love feeling settled and always having a safe place to land.

Either way, Girls In White Dresses was a quick, fun read that I loved. A+

Maybe I’ll Start Tomorrow…

Posted in Life Ramblings by

“It’s a holiday…”

“I should really start on a Monday.”

“We have cupcakes left over from last night…”

I woke up energized, and I STILL had this argument this morning. It seems to be in my nature to get in my own way. Don’t worry, I won out over my excuses. But it reinforced how making life changes is an every day decision.

So I did two things to help me succeed (at least in the resolution to get healthy):

1. I got my husband on board with me. Like a lot of women, my eating habits changed when I moved in with my husband. And now, we have some collective bad eating habits. I’ve learned from past attempts that it’s harder to make changes when someone is sitting right in front of you, eating what you WANT to be eating.

2. We put our money where our empty promises used to be. We decided to give WeightWatchers 360 a try, so that we’re both on the same page. I’ve done it before, and it worked while I stuck with it, but when I decided I could get the same results on my own and dropped it… well, I SHOULD be able to. But it hasn’t happened. So I’m jump starting my progress with a little more structure.

For the rest of my resolutions, I have a spreadsheet. I’m addicted to spreadsheets. They’re normally color coded. I’ll probably color code this one while I’m watching the Rose Bowl.

All day I’ve been thinking of other things I should have resolved. But I’m hesitant to add any. I tend to try to do too much at once, and then fail horribly at all of it. I might need to resolve not to resolve any more…

The Year I Finally Keep My Resolutions?

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2012 is finally ending. I can say with certainty that it was the hardest year of my life. I am completely content to see it go.

In fact, I don’t really want to look back. I’m curled up by the fire with a glass of wine, in a minor food coma from the amazing dinner my husband made for me. Why ruin that by focusing on the less-than-fabulous?

I have been looking forward. Bring on 2013.

The Birthday Of A Blogging Resolution

This blog was one of my resolutions last year. It’s the one resolution I’ve been somewhat successful at keeping. This blog brought me back to writing. It helped me find my inner word artist again.

Now that “writer” is my full time job, and I’ve found my way back to my first love, fiction, I considered hanging up my URL and saving my words for work and novels. But as I went to discontinue my domain before it renewed, I couldn’t do it.

Partly because I’ve learned the key to me keeping resolutions – telling people and documenting it. One of the reasons I survived NaNoWriMo was my plastering of NaNo badges all over my Facebook so that even people I haven’t spoken to since high school knew what I was up to.

Now, granted, if anyone from high school reads my blog they don’t know it. But as my journal of sorts, I think documenting my attempt to make 2013 the year of keeping my resolutions on my blog might make a difference. So here goes…

2013 New Years Resolutions

  1. 365 Days of Gratitude: One of the things I’ve learned over this past year, is that even on the worst days you can imagine, there are things to be grateful for. And sometimes just noticing them can turn things around. So I resolve to document one thing I am grateful for (not repeating), every day in 2013.
  2. Read 25 New Books: I feel like this number is lame. It doesn’t sound very challenging. But I had a hard time choosing. Aside from writing, reading for fun was one of the things I lost in law school. I want to get myself back into books. But not to the detriment of…
  3. Writing 250,000 Words of Fiction: Again, arbitrary number. But I’ve learned that if I don’t pick a concrete goal, I get lost. So what this comes out to is just over 20,000 words a month. And NaNo comes at the end of the year to play pick up in November. I wish I didn’t need to assign myself to write, but I learned in December, as my NaNo novel sat abandoned, I need to.
  4. To Hit My Goal Dress Size: I know. Really? So cliche. The number one resolution people make and abandon before President’s Day. But I’ve reached a breaking point. I’ve always been curvy, even when I was in high school and trained for a competitive sport 5 days a week. I actually love my curves. What I don’t love is feeling like a blob from all the weight I gained in law school. I don’t really care what the number on my scale is, I know what size I feel comfortable and health at, and I am determined to get there by 2014.
  5. Be A Straight-A Wife: There’s no good way to quantify your marriage, but as our relationship changes (and we don’t spend all day in the same apartment anymore) I want to do my part to keep our marriage healthy. I want to be less critical, snap less, and go out of my way to be show love more. Because my husband really is my best friend, and sometimes he gets the worst of me.

In fact, now I’m off to snuggle next to him on the couch to watch the ball drop. Good-bye 2012. I plan on making 2013 a year to remember :)