Tag Archives: love

Oct28

This Morning

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This Morning

Analie’s sitting in her Bumbo, shoving scrambled eggs and bits of cut up pears into her mouth indiscriminately.  It’s hilarious.  I’m adding more scrambled egg to her tray from my plate and she’s squealing with glee as she notices she’s getting more. Eggs are exploding from her mouth.

Joey is sitting next to me on the floor, laughing at Analie’s self-feeding efforts.  She’s so intense; I can’t help myself either.

Joey catches his breath and says to me, “You’re the reason we have such a beautiful little girl.”

I snort and say, “Yeah, but I’m also the reason we can’t have more!”

And he squeezes my shoulder and replies, “Eh, I don’t really care about that.”

Aug18

The Wrong Ice Cream

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The Wrong Ice Cream

First of all, let me just say that it is a glorious, beautiful thing to be able to eat whatever is in front of me without being all fritzy about dairy.  IT’S AWESOME!

Second of all, we were out of ice cream last week.  So since I could remedy the situation, Analie and I went to the ice cream aisle on our weekly Kroger run, and I stood there pondering the oodles of options in front of me.  It was overwhelming.  Finally, I settled on an off brand ice cream, just to see how it tasted.  They don’t sell Blue Bell at Kroger and I am not inclined to drive all the way to Carmel to get the goodness.  I know, I know, what is wrong with me.

Then I saw Butterfinger ice cream.

I love Butterfinger.  Not as much as Snickers or Reese’s, but some days you just need to eat Butterfinger.   That was one such day.

I suppose I should tell you all that Joey hates Butterfinger.  I can’t tell you how many times in the last 7 1/2 years that we have been together I have heard how nasty Butterfinger is because it gets stuck in his teeth.  As I stood there looking at the ice cream flavors, I made an Executive Decision, albeit a selfish one.  I put that Butterfinger ice cream in my cart and paid for it.

Aaaaaand then I forgot it at the store and had to go back for it.  When I brought it home, I threw it straight into the freezer and forgot about it.

Today after lunch, we decided to have ice cream for dessert.

“I got Butterfinger ice cream,” I mumbled to Joey.

“OK,” he said.  ”I only want a little.”

Then I confessed that I had been feeling SUPER guilty for buying ice cream I knew he wouldn’t love.  He looked at me like I was kind of nuts.  And he was all, Sometimes we buy the kind I like that you hate.  So sometimes we can buy the kind you like.

WHAT?  SO COOL!  Looks like I can throw that false Bad Wife guilt in the trash along with the mommy guilt over the diaper rash.

Jun17

Celebrating Daddy

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Celebrating Daddy

(photo brazenly stolen from Cheryl's Facebook album...)

There was never a doubt in my mind that Joey would make a fantastic daddy.  He’s a wonderful, supportive, sacrificial, gentle, loving husband and those are all foundations for being a great father.  Whew, could I possibly squeeze any more superlatives into this post?  It’s three sentences long and already busting at the seams!  (At the risk of sounding contrived, I’ll try to dial them down.)

I am so looking forward to celebrating Joey on Sunday.

Through the years we struggled with infertility, I never felt worse than I did on Father’s Day.  Sure, Mother’s Day was a doozy, but the horrible guilt I’d feel on Father’s Day was a hundred times worse.  Joey loves children.  Even when I went through my several year stretch where I wouldn’t hold a baby (much less look at one!), he never stayed away from the little ones.  If there was a baby around, he’d snatch it within ten minutes.

I felt like Joey could be the best daddy in the universe, and it was my fault he wouldn’t get to fill that role.  There were times when I’d ask Joey over and over again if he didn’t wish he’d married someone else so he could have children.  And every single time, he would tell me the answer was NO.  He didn’t want to be married to anyone else, even if it meant we’d never ever have a baby and he would never get to be a father.

That’s why this year, with Analie, Father’s Day is so special.

You know what?  I still feel the misplaced weight of guilt that comes with infertility almost every single day.  Maybe I always will.  But I absolutely rejoice that Joey is finally a daddy, and he’s the best possible father to our daughter.  I know that when she sees how her daddy loves her, the joy he finds in her, how he’s willing to sacrifice for her it, won’t be a stretch for her to understand the love of her heavenly Father.

There is no greater gift that a father can give.

I’m thankful I had a daddy that showed me these things.  And I am profoundly thankful that Joey can be that example for our little girl.

There is a poverty in the English language when it comes to expressing the love that fathers have for their daughters.  For this I am so grateful.

(Aaaaaand I stole this one too. Hi, Cheryl!)

 

May14

Fifth Anniversary = Wood or Silverware

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Fifth Anniversary = Wood or Silverware

Today, Joey and I have been married for five years.  I don’t actually feel like either one of us is old enough to have been at anything for five years, much less marriage, but I guess we keep getting older when I’m not paying attention.  Turns out I’m not 22 anymore.

We’re not actually doing much celebratory today, we’re doing things tomorrow.  We’re both kind of squished from driving back from Oklahoma yesterday, and we have no food in the house at all unless you count four cans of Ginger Ale, some very old milk, and pot roast leftovers that I forgot about from three weeks ago.  So tonight I think we’re going to be losers and get groceries and return our house to some semblance of order.  TOMORROW we’re going to hit the town.

I’ve wondered for the past 364 days how I’d feel when I woke up this morning.  Would I just remember last year…or would it be not so bad really?

I am pleased to report that it’s not so bad really.  I think this is mainly because we are 12 weeks pregnant from a second round of IVF.  I think we’d both be having a rough time today if that were not the case.  But I’m thankful we will be able to enjoy the weekend, even if we likely won’t be doing something huge to celebrate our anniversary like we might have done in years past.

This morning I was laying in bed thinking about cake (what), Red Velvet from Sprinkles, to be exact, because it is my favorite.  And most of the ingredients are pretty normal…flour, sugar, butter, eggs, buttermilk.  There are a couple that are kind of weird though: vinegar and cocoa.  Vinegar tastes awful and smells worse, but it has to react with the cocoa in order to give the cake its pretty red flavor (unless you cheat and add 2 ounces of red food coloring) and milk chocolatey taste.

You can’t have red velvet cake without vinegar.  And Joey and I couldn’t be where we are this year without last year.  So…that’s my profound thought for the morning.  I realize it’s not actually that profound, but I am way more tired than I expected I’d be after riding in the car so long.  Uff-dah.

Happy Anniversary, Joey.  I love you lots!!

Past Anniversaries

2009 2008 2007 2006

Feb27

Yes, we went to Medieval Times

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Yes, we went to Medieval Times

A couple weeks ago I was riding the elevator and noticed on the elevator TV (what, your elevator doesn’t have a TV?) that they were offering  Medieval Times tickets 50% off.

And Joey’s birthday was coming up.

Well, my Seminary Wife brain clicked on and thought, Well….we’ve never done THAT before….might as well give it a shot.

So I bought tickets.

Not for the night of Joey’s actual birthday, which was Thursday of last week, but for last night.

Traffic was an absolute nightmare, so we took a different route and made it there in fairly record time, which pleased me because usually when we take alternate routes it winds up taking us longer.  But we got lucky this time, probably because it was Joey’s birthday.  Or maybe just because our number was up.

We arrived early, like the ticket told us to do, and fortunately we had brought my iTouch because we wound up having to stand in this large entrance hall with about 1,000 middle schoolers for about an hour and a half.  And I like middle schoolers considerably more than most of you (because I’m almost a youth pastor’s wife) but nearly 1,000 of them in close quarters for an hour and a half with nothing to do is enough to make me want to jump in front of a Mack truck on the Stemmons Freeway.

Joey noticed me getting that wild I AM FEELING CLAUSTROPHOBIC look in my eyes and he knew that it was time to find a different place to stand.  So he whisked me away to a less cramped part of the waiting area and we sat on a bench that me miraculously found and played Monopoly on my iTouch for the next 45 minutes.

It was a long wait.

Also it was 8:00 and I hadn’t had dinner, and that makes everything worse.

Finally, it was time to enter and we poured into the arena with all the middle schoolers. (I do not understand how it was basically  us and I AM NOT JOKING about the 1,000 middle schoolers.  We counted.)

And those discount tickets I got?

Were in the worst possible seats in the entire place.  Like when I say worst possible seats I mean that we were in the back corner with 1/4 of the arena blocked by the place where the king and queen sit, and my chair was an inch from falling down some stairs if I made one wrong move.  (Which, incidentally, I did and then I fell down the stairs.)

But we’re used to our cheap tickets getting us lousy seats, so we sat up there and giggled like middle schoolers (when in Rome…) and wiggled while we waited for our food.

Our waiter came and filled our plastic cups up with Pepsi, and Joey looked at me guzzling mine with wide terrified eyes as he sneaked a peak at his watch.  It was 8:30, and we all know how Pepsi trips me out on caffeine.  But I told him that I hadn’t had Pepsi in two weeks, so I would surely be fine.

Whatever.

Soon our soup and garlic bread came and as we sat waiting for the waiter to FINALLY get to us already.  He was just about to serve the person next to us (who was actually not a middle schooler) when he said, “Would you like some garlic bread sir?”

Then there was this awkward pause, and the server finally realized his mistake and said, “I’m sorry, MA’AM, would you like some garlic bread?  Sorry, I just….the eye patch….one of the guys downstairs has an eye patch.”

The lady next to us was indeed wearing an eye patch, which I had been trying not to stair at.  She continued to stare, one-eyed, at the server, and he continued to ramble.

“The guy downstairs is a Knight and he was sword fighting and a piece of Titanium came flying off one of the swords and got stuck in his eye.”  Then he paused long enough for the eye-patched lady to speak.

“Well, I had a brain anuerism and now I can’t see out of this eye,” she said, obviously peeved.

“Oh.  Well, do you want some garlic bread?” Asked the poor server again as he mentally tried to calculate how much THAT mistake was going to cost him on his tip.

When he finally got around to serving us we were so hungry that we totally inhaled our garlic bread and soup, and then we sat in our super bad nosebleed seats and tried to calculate how much money Medieval Times was pulling down every time they opened their doors.  Joey figured it out, after some quick calculations, and we were like, woaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh.

And then, the jousting began.

We screamed just like the middle schoolers until the Pepsi wore off and we started getting tired and feeling our age.  And as soon as it was done?  We hit the road, Jack and booked it home before all the middle schoolers made their way to the doors.

“Want to stay up and watch the Olympics that we recorded?” Joey asked as we sped up Central Expressway.

“Pssssh, YES,” I squealed.

And we stayed up until 12:15 screaming at our TV while we watched short track and bobsled crashes.

Our poor neighbors.  They must really worry about us these days what with all this yelling at the TV that we do, and of course we do it about 2 feet from the only wall we share in our entire apartment.

Speaking of, it’s almost Olympics time.

And we know where my priorities are.

So whatever I was going to type in this post is now irrelevant because I have only two more days to bask in Olympic glory until have to wait 2 1/2 more years to do it all over again.

Feb27

Best Friends

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Best Friends

Almost every night before we fall asleep, I whisper to Joey, “Are we best friends?”

He always whispers back, “Of course we are!”

And I reply (in a stage whisper, of course), “YESSSS!”

So I was thinking about that while we were trying to fight through the insane shoppers at Central Market today (aside: if you have made the mistake of going to Central Market on a Saturday you know what I’m talking about; usually we are smart and go on Friday but we were otherwise engaged last night, and more on that later.)  Shopping at Central Market on a Saturday is kind of like riding a mechanical bull that turns into a live raging monster halfway through before your turn runs out, and bucks you so bad you get whiplash before you even realize what happened.

Or it could also be compared to one of those schools of fish like is on the Freshwater Planet Earth DVD; everyone moves in the same direction at a constant speed, and if you forgot the red onion just ten feet back there?  TOO BAD SO SAD, HONEY.  The fish are traveling this way so move or be ran over.

It was in this environment that I was pondering the best friend/spouse aspect of Joey’s and my relationship this morning.  Right by the strawberries.  I made the mistake of thinking, and it caused me to pause the jam up the flow of traffic.  So when I finally found Joey again (thank heaven for cell phones) he was all, where have you been anyway?

“You know how we’re best friends?” I asked him.

“Yeah….” he said, absently, because he was trying not to get run over by a stray cart.

“Well, I think if you’re married to your best friend, it teaches you how to be better friends with other people.”

Joey whipped his head around and said, “Why are you thinking about this in the grocery store?”

“I can’t control how my brain thinks and it thought about it here.”  (Which is totally true, I tend to go from pondering profound things to destroying all the aisles in Home Depot in my imagination and then telling Joey how it looked when everything came falling down.  It is amazing to have my brain.)

I went on to explain to Joey, in between dodging crazed grocery shoppers, that being married and being best friends is the best thing that has ever happened to me because it has taught me that just because I don’t like someone once in awhile doesn’t mean our relationship has to be over.  It can grow on a much deeper level once we work through our differences.

So then Joey looked at me sideways and asked, “Um, is this your way of telling me you’re mad at me or something?”

“Pssssh, NO,” I scoffed.  ”I was just thinking about it.”  (Like I said, I have a crazy brain.  I cannot control or comprehend it.)

Being best friends is also the most important thing about being married, I think.  Because it forces us to deal with stuff when it comes up.  It makes us iron out the winkles.  We have to go deeper.

I love Joey lots.  And since he’s my best friend?  I even like to drive him crazy once in awhile.  That’s why, when we got to Target, I made my Vibrams slap as loudly as they could against the ground while we walked, just to see if he would tell me to cut it out because I was making such an annoying noise.

It didn’t work, which was so much lamer than I was expecting it would be.

I had to keep it up for so long that my feet started to hurt from stomping, and finally Joey looked down at me and asked, “Are your feet hurting yet?”

So I wilted and said, “Yes.  I was trying to drive you crazy.”

“I’m too smart for you,” was all he said, and he said it so smugly, too.  ”I knew you were trying that but I didn’t want to give you the victory.”

(He is too smart for me.  Which…which makes me wonder why in the world he married me after all.)

I really love being best friends with my Joey.

He makes going grocery shopping one of the most fun things we do every week.

Feb14

My Valentine

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My Valentine

For Valentines day this year, Joey gave me the sweetest gift.  It was a little garden of Gerbera daisies…

potted in little All-Clad measuring cups…

…with leaves made out of green construction paper, taped to little All-Clad measuring spoons.

I mean, HOW CUTE IS THAT?!

I am thankful for my Joey, thankful that on the least-romantic day of the year, he’s creative enough to come up with something like a flower garden made from a new, gleaming set of measuring cups and spoons.  (I keep sending my plastic ones through the garbage disposal.  It’s truly unfortunate.)

I’m thankful for Joey for many, many reasons.  Especially after this past year, of all years.

  • He has helped lift me out of a hospital bed…and thrown me into the ocean on a deserted beach.
  • He has sat helplessly in waiting rooms and waited to find out how medical procedures have gone…and he’s learned how to give a fairly stress-free shot.
  • He has encouraged me to stick to the plan, to hang in there…and to be spontaneous.
  • He has cried with me…and he has laughed with me until we cried.
  • He has reminded me to slow down…and he has encouraged me to concentrate the energy I have on doing what I love.
  • He has killed cockroaches while I stood there, uselessly screaming…and he has tried to dig crabs out of the sand with me so we could see what they looked like.

He always tells me he loves me.

No matter what.

I love you, Joey!  Happy Valentines day.

Feb1

In Fort Worth

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In Fort Worth

Almost overnight, we discovered that we now have a new term for “infertility” in our house.  Oh yes.  Yes, Internet, it is now called “Fort Worth”.  (Thank you, foot-in-mouth Womens Ministry Lady.)

Last night we were sitting on the futon, which I hate and am dying to replace because it is colossally uncomfy, when I said, “I’m sorry I’m in Fort Worth.”

Joey snapped his head around and looked at me.  ”HEY,” he said.

“No, seriously.” I sighed.  ”Sometimes I am afraid you’ll wish you married someone else…someone who wasn’t in Fort Worth so then you could have kids.”

“Stop that right now,” Joey told me.  ”WE are in Fort Worth.  WE are.  Not you.”

I sighed again.  Because really that does bother me, it bothers me a lot.

“I don’t want to be married to anyone else, even if they could have dozens of kids.  I want to be married to YOU.  Even if that means we have to be in Fort Worth.”  And he squeezed my hand tightly.

“OK,” I squeaked.

A few moments later; “At least there are the Stockyards in Fort Worth,” I said.  (In the real Fort Worth, that is.)

Joey just laughed at me.  ”Way to think positive,” he said.

“And I do call you Cow already.”  (It’s true, I call Joey Cow because I like cows and I like Joey so…of course I’d call him Cow.)

So I guess we’ll do just fine in Fort Worth.  Since we have to be there.

Dec29

I Love Ordinary

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I Love Ordinary

In the months leading up to Joey’s and my engagement, it was no secret that he was going to ask me to marry him.  Back in those days, I really, really, really hated surprises.  (You think I’m weird now?  I’m way more neurotic about a few things five or six years ago.  True story.)  He knew this about me, because we talked about everything.  We talked for HOURS and HOURS and HOURS.

We still do that.

One evening, we drove out to Jordan Creek and, as we walked past a jewelry store, Joey grabbed my arm and whisked me inside to get my opinion on rings.

I didn’t care so much about the ring.  Honestly, I didn’t.  He could have given me a Cracker Jacks ring and I would have been happyl what I wanted was to marry him.  And (this will sound totally weird to all my Dallas readers) the budget was so tight at the time, because Joey was working to pay for school as he went, that we considered just getting the wedding band first (it was cheaper) and add the “engagement” band at the wedding.  Do it in reverse order.

Like I said before, I didn’t care one bit.  I just wanted to marry Joey and the ring on my left hand was an inconsequential bonus.

Looking back on it we probably could have taken out a loan for the ring, but that’s not the way we roll in this Woestman house.  ANYWAY.

Since we had looked at rings together, and I had tried on just the wedding band by itself to see how it would look, I knew we would be getting engaged soon.  And then, because Joey knew me so well, he told me what day he would ask me.  (That way I wouldn’t freak out.)

He chose the day before Thanksgiving.

He found me while I was at home in my tiny little 275 square foot apartment, that I shared with my dear friend Sarah (hi!), baking Thanksgiving pies.

I pulled the pumpkin pie out of the oven and set it on the counter as he walked in the door and presented me with a long-stemmed, deep red rose.  He recited Elizabeth Barret Browning’s How Do I Love Thee poem.  Then, he got down on one knee and asked me to be his wife.

I said yes.

Then I looked at the rose.  On the stem was the solitaire engagement ring we had picked out together.  Not the cheaper wedding band, but the actual engagement ring.  The way normal people got engaged.

I gasped and asked him how in the world he had gotten the money (did he rob a bank?), because just a week before we had looked at the budget and it was not going to be possible.

He just smiled at me and said that God had provided a way.  And He had.

What I love about the way Joey and I got engaged is that it was so ordinary.  No production, no big show…just life.  Together.

Five years ago, we had no idea.  NONE.  We were naive little children and we never would have guessed how our lives would pan out.  But when things get super crazy and I feel like HOLY COW WHAT IS UP WITH OUR LIVES I can look down at my engagement ring and remember that Joey loved me when life was ordinary.  He loved me before he knew there were things wrong with me.  And he loves me when life is cah-ra-zy.

We laugh deeper and we love deeper because of all this…stuff.

And, when I really think about it, my ring is a symbol of God providing for our marriage in a small way – giving Joey means to actually buy me a real ring.  I know he cares about the details.  I know he cares about me.  But golly gee it’s easy to forget sometimes.

That’s why I love my ring.

Nov27

Doin’ Shots: Day ?? (or, The One Where Joey Sprays The Ceiling With My Medicine On Accident)

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Doin’ Shots: Day ?? (or, The One Where Joey Sprays The Ceiling With My Medicine On Accident)

Most people go shopping on Black Friday.  We go to the doctor, get scanned, and do shots.  Oh, and set up our Christmas tree.

I absolutely forget how many days into the shots we are.  At this point, my stomach is a combination of bruised, itching and burning so what’s one more shot?  Bring it on, Dr. Babyplease. WE CAN TAKE IT.

We had a scan this morning to see how the maybe-babies were progressing.  A very nice nurse with a Russian accent, who reminded us a lot of Marya from Hogan’s Heroes, performed the scan painlessly.  I told her she was awesome and painless and, Internet, you should have seen the look on her face.  She said to me, very seriously, in her cute Russian accent, “I haff beeen doing thees for twelf years.  I do NOT hoort peeeeple.”

I told her she wouldn’t have to ruin her record on me, then, because I couldn’t feel a thing.  Not like the last time where I almost screamed.

Then the nurse cracked a smile and said, “Welll, I do not hoort peeeeeple unless they are makingk me mad.”  Then she winked at me.

The moment she left the room Joey and I began whispering Marya quotes to each other.  ”HOOOOOGAN DAAAHLINK!”  And the entire way home we talked to each other in Russian accents.  Pretty much the best doctor’s appointment ever.

OH WAIT.  Except that Dr. Babyplease caught us outside and told us to go home and mix up a dose of Menopur (yep, you read us right: we are mixing drugs in this house now, in addition to shooting them up) and then add an injection of Ganirelix.  Two more shots every day, only these two new ones will be in the morning.

I successfully gave myself a Follistim shot, but I wasn’t about to trust myself with mixing the Menopur powder with the saline and filling the syringe, so I told Joey he’s on shot duty from here on out.  He very seriously laid everything out on the bathroom counter and closed the toilet lid so he could lay the directions there for easy reading.  (We don’t have a lot of counter space, so we make do with what we have.)

A few minutes later, he had drawn up a syringe and was flicking it to disperse the air bubbles.  He was so serious that I started giggling.  Then he pointed the needle at me and told me to swab off because here it came.

This one hurt, so the most logical thing to do was to scream bloody murder.  Joey looked at me with eyes full of terror because he was only half way through the shot.  ”I’m almost done!” He squeaked.

Unfortunately the next shot, Ganirelix, was actually the problem shot.

I tried to read the instructions because I thought I’d give it to myself, but they freaked me out and confused me, so I handed it off to Joey.  They did the same to him, so after he read them two or three times, he gave up and called my doctor.  It was taking forever for them to call back, so he went in the bathroom to try to figure it out again.

This was proving to be complicated still, so Joey gave up and started calling all the medical professionals he could think of since our doctor hadn’t called back yet.  First he called his mom, but couldn’t get ahold of her.  Then he called Deanine, and she happened to be available.  Joey read her the directions and somehow she translated them and instructed him in the way he should shoot me.

I was sitting on the couch attaching hooks to ornaments when I heard him say to Deanine, “Um…what would happen if I pushed the plunger thing in instead of pulling it out, and sprayed medicine all over the ceiling and stuff? … Yeah, it went everywhere … OK, I’ll go get another one.”

This really piqued my curiosity, but no way was I going to go in the bathroom to see what he meant by “medicine all over the ceiling and stuff” because if I went in there, he might stick me with a needle.

Shortly he got off the phone with Deanine, and a few minutes later, Joey told me to stop putting the hooks on our new ornaments and get in the bathroom, because it was TIME.

Miraculously, once we got the whole how to inject it thing down, I was pleased to discover that the Ganirelix didn’t hurt at all.  Not one tiny bit.

Well, not until I walked out of the bathroom and said “Oh, sweet!  That one was painless!”  That’s when it hit me.  OH THE BURN, INTERNET.

It still hurts.  They both still hurt.

Conveniently, we probably had one more dose of Ganirelix than we needed, so it doesn’t look like we’ll have to re-order any more.  This is good news, because it’s not generic and we’d have to throw down a $25 copay for one box of a yicky shot.  So…way to screw up, Joey.  We don’t have to buy extra, and we get a good laugh out of knowing there is fertility medicine on the ceiling in our bathroom.  Not too many people get to have THAT awesome decoration…

Our next doctor’s appointment is Monday; Dr. Babyplease told us we could go on Sunday or Monday, and we picked Monday.  They’ll probably retrieve the maybe-babies on Wednesday or Thursday.  I can’t believe we’re getting so close.  This entire process becomes such a blur!

I’m so glad I have Nurse Joey, though.  Because I could never do all these shots by myself.  He is my rockstar.