So I cried a few wedding tears today. They were silent, and I think the only one that noticed was my sister Casie. But, tears of joy were deffinetly in my eyes and heart today when I first laid eyes on the venue that I (and Daniel through my brief explanation) really really really love. It was all because I saw the place I want to get married. I saw the grass I want to walk down the isle and look into the eyes of my future husband. I saw the tree I want to stand under when I promise him the rest of my life. I saw the vision of chairs filled by our family and friends all there to support our love and our future together. I saw our wedding, as perfect as I had ever imagined it could be. And so my eyes welled up with the realization that this very well could be the place we say "We Do" to loving eachother forever and for always.
Today was very special. Not only did my mom, sister, and Daniel's mom fall in love with my wedding dress, just as I had already, but we also got to dream about this wedding and what the vision for that day will look like. Among the many details and possibilities, one theme runs strong. Something I know Daniel would agree with me on. Our wedding is going to have a strong sense of family and of community. We want our wedding to reflect our love for all our many family members and friends we have been blessed to share this life with. We truly are fortunate to have so many amazing people in our lives that bring us more joy and laughter and excitement and love and strength than you ever realize.
We can't hardly wait for the wedding to be here. In case you were wondering, we will be busy in May every year, starting next spring. Celebrating our anniversary, that is. I Love You Daniel Allen Solnok. You are the one God made for me and the one I choose to love today, tomorrow, and every day that is to come. Miss you so much and counting down the days until I can give you another kiss.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Tempura Fried Laughter
So I'm sitting there laughing with Morgan last night, having a really fun girls evening in, watching Army Wives when it suddenly hits me how ridiculously emotional I was before Daniel left for this deployment. You want to know how I came to this conclusion, I'll tell you.
Okay, picture this, it's three days before he leaves, we are sitting at dinner with a group of our closest and bestest friends having all you can eat sushi. Morgan is ordering all the yummy tempura rolls and, knowing how good they are (and ignoring the fact that they are not going to make me feel like sushi was the healthy eat-out option tonight), I order a few myself, along with a few healther picks. After much anticipation and after my stomach had been angirly growling at me for quite some time, our rolls arrive. But do you want to know where my delicous but oh so unhealthy deep fried goodness end up? On the opposite side of the table, that's where! No big deal, at first. I delightedly eat my "healthier" options, waiting patiently for someone to pass me a few of the golden yummies on the other side of the table.
Time passes on and with hope fading fast that there would be any left for me, I politely ask Daniel if he could please pass the tempura rolls. He kind of ignores me (I think he has selective hearing) and so I ask again. But, his selective hearing must have tuned me out, so I reach over him, sort of in his eating space, across the the table, and stick my chopsticks into the tempura rolls directly in front of Morgan and Adam's faces. Then I get that look that no one wants to get, that look of shock and horror. I wasn't letting anything get in my way of eating those tempura rolls, not even Daniel's annoying obsession with healthy food and polite manners in public. Well, that was it. I got that look and that's all I needed to throw a little temper tantrum right there in the middle of dinner
"Oh, what, I can't eat tempura. What am I, Fat?"
"No, it's not that. But can't you eat what's in front of you instead of reaching across the ENTIRE table?"
"Oh, so now I can't eat anything you think is unhealthy cause then you'll call me fat?"
"Oh jeeze, Kaitlyn. Really? Okay, well if that's how you want to spend this night, fighting, then go ahead."
That was it. I was ready to call it a night, go home, and retreat to my icecream in the freezer. Now of course we made up and it didn't ruin the whole night, but as I was recalling this incident with Morgan over wine, it dawned on me just how high emotions ran that last weekend. I didn't realize it when we were living those moments, but looking back, I had to laugh, like really hard, at that whole situation. Did I really get made at Daniel and imply that he thought I was fat cause of my undying need to eat the less healthy rolls clear across the table in which I had to be extremely rude to other table guests to retrieve? YES! And that thought made Morgan and I laugh histerically for like 5 minutes.
Wow, stress before deployments is unavoidable, as much as I thought I could defend myself against it, I was a fallen victim. My lesson has been learned. Prepare yourself for the inablity to act rationally when your loved one is preparing to leave for 6 months. Be ready to recognize the signs of emtional instability so you can stop yourself before you let it ruin too much of that precious time. I am thankful we made it past those four days without too many bumps, although there were enough of these little moments to cherish from now until he comes home. And last, but not least, be prepared to laugh about your tantrums with a good friend over a glass (or two) of good wine, it really does the soul some good to realize it's not your fault you were an emotional wreck, it's the deployment's fault. And that is who/what I choose to blame for all my emotional inadequacies over the next few months, end of story.
Okay, picture this, it's three days before he leaves, we are sitting at dinner with a group of our closest and bestest friends having all you can eat sushi. Morgan is ordering all the yummy tempura rolls and, knowing how good they are (and ignoring the fact that they are not going to make me feel like sushi was the healthy eat-out option tonight), I order a few myself, along with a few healther picks. After much anticipation and after my stomach had been angirly growling at me for quite some time, our rolls arrive. But do you want to know where my delicous but oh so unhealthy deep fried goodness end up? On the opposite side of the table, that's where! No big deal, at first. I delightedly eat my "healthier" options, waiting patiently for someone to pass me a few of the golden yummies on the other side of the table.
Time passes on and with hope fading fast that there would be any left for me, I politely ask Daniel if he could please pass the tempura rolls. He kind of ignores me (I think he has selective hearing) and so I ask again. But, his selective hearing must have tuned me out, so I reach over him, sort of in his eating space, across the the table, and stick my chopsticks into the tempura rolls directly in front of Morgan and Adam's faces. Then I get that look that no one wants to get, that look of shock and horror. I wasn't letting anything get in my way of eating those tempura rolls, not even Daniel's annoying obsession with healthy food and polite manners in public. Well, that was it. I got that look and that's all I needed to throw a little temper tantrum right there in the middle of dinner
"Oh, what, I can't eat tempura. What am I, Fat?"
"No, it's not that. But can't you eat what's in front of you instead of reaching across the ENTIRE table?"
"Oh, so now I can't eat anything you think is unhealthy cause then you'll call me fat?"
"Oh jeeze, Kaitlyn. Really? Okay, well if that's how you want to spend this night, fighting, then go ahead."
That was it. I was ready to call it a night, go home, and retreat to my icecream in the freezer. Now of course we made up and it didn't ruin the whole night, but as I was recalling this incident with Morgan over wine, it dawned on me just how high emotions ran that last weekend. I didn't realize it when we were living those moments, but looking back, I had to laugh, like really hard, at that whole situation. Did I really get made at Daniel and imply that he thought I was fat cause of my undying need to eat the less healthy rolls clear across the table in which I had to be extremely rude to other table guests to retrieve? YES! And that thought made Morgan and I laugh histerically for like 5 minutes.
Wow, stress before deployments is unavoidable, as much as I thought I could defend myself against it, I was a fallen victim. My lesson has been learned. Prepare yourself for the inablity to act rationally when your loved one is preparing to leave for 6 months. Be ready to recognize the signs of emtional instability so you can stop yourself before you let it ruin too much of that precious time. I am thankful we made it past those four days without too many bumps, although there were enough of these little moments to cherish from now until he comes home. And last, but not least, be prepared to laugh about your tantrums with a good friend over a glass (or two) of good wine, it really does the soul some good to realize it's not your fault you were an emotional wreck, it's the deployment's fault. And that is who/what I choose to blame for all my emotional inadequacies over the next few months, end of story.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Symptom Number Two
As some of my friends may recall from my eating habits during Daniel's bootcamp, my appetite was slightly missing. In place of full meals and healthy snacks, I ate gallons of Mint Moose Tracks ice cream to supplement the inadequacies of my diet. Well friends, the second symptom of deployment has finally hit, I knew it was only time. I have officially lost my appetite and it is hiding somewhere sneaky, probably behind the Mochi in my freezer. I'm not sure if this is permanent or if perhaps it will come back when I finally get that phone call mentioned in my previous post (which I am still waiting on, by the way.) From the time I woke up until about 25 minutes ago, my diet consisted of half a bowl of shredded wheat cereal. So, just to make the picture a little clearer, I have only consumed about 100 calories since 11 am this morning and it's now 6pm, that is highly unusual for me. I am a girl who likes to eat her meals. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, desert, morning snack, afternoon snack, late night snack....the list could go on, depending on the day.
There are two problems with this whole appetite situation. (1) Shredded wheat does not have enough nutrition in it to keep me full all day, which it didn't. I actually got hungry but didn't really care, for whatever reason. Maybe I will figure out why in a few days, I'll get back to you on that. (2) I don't even like shredded wheat! So now not only am I eating less than usual, my taste buds have forgotten to remind me that I don't have to eat what I don't like eating.
So the second symptom of misery (or at least of loneliness when your Marine is deployed) is clearly loss of appetite. Although my body is somewhat malnourished at the moment, it does make for a really quick weight loss technique, one that I am NOT encouraging, so don't go trying to loose your appetite to loose weight, it's probably going to come right back when he gets home anyway. I fully intend on driving down to the store in just a bit and buying a gallon of some sort of ice cream, since that is what sounds good right now. Bye for now.
There are two problems with this whole appetite situation. (1) Shredded wheat does not have enough nutrition in it to keep me full all day, which it didn't. I actually got hungry but didn't really care, for whatever reason. Maybe I will figure out why in a few days, I'll get back to you on that. (2) I don't even like shredded wheat! So now not only am I eating less than usual, my taste buds have forgotten to remind me that I don't have to eat what I don't like eating.
So the second symptom of misery (or at least of loneliness when your Marine is deployed) is clearly loss of appetite. Although my body is somewhat malnourished at the moment, it does make for a really quick weight loss technique, one that I am NOT encouraging, so don't go trying to loose your appetite to loose weight, it's probably going to come right back when he gets home anyway. I fully intend on driving down to the store in just a bit and buying a gallon of some sort of ice cream, since that is what sounds good right now. Bye for now.
Oh the places you've been!
So it's two weeks into this thing they call deployment. The phone has found it's way back into my constant carry, into the bathroom, by the running shower water, on the pillow, by the burning stovetop, and often in the top of my bra, to name a few places. It is safe to say, I refuse to miss any chance of communication. I have been finding myself being a bad bad girl and answering it at the most in oportune times, like at work. Then, when it's not him (which it often isn't), I have to explain to the other person, whom I have no desire to talk to, that my fiance is deployed and I only want to talk to him and I shouldn't have answered my phone at work but what's a girl to do! Skype has been a miracle maker, that's for sure. You underestimate how precious it is to just stare at some one you love. I could stare at him all day and not say a word and that would be sufficient communication. I mean, seriously, we haven't had to exercise our phone skills like this in YEARS, like since junior year of high school. We are trying to get better at our phone conversations, but our relationship has reached that point when you no longer have hours of material to gab about. That is why I LOVE Skype. Because we can make silly faces at eachother and don't have to talk every mili-second of the time we spend "communicating". Staring at eachother is just fine by me when it's him I'm looking at. And although I can't speak for him, I would guess he agrees that I offer a pretty good view in return.
So as week two comes to a close and week three begins I'm still waiting, make that obsessing, over my next phone call. Since the Tsunami hit, I have still not reached contact with him, which is frustrating, but understandable. That's why God made patience, for moments like this when you need to wait it out for your deployed Marine to get out of the field, get to his phone, hope it's charged enough to make a call home, find internet connection, hope not too many other guys are using that same WiFi, and finally dial his favorite phone number to reach his favorite person,ME, to either talk to or stare at (which ever is more convenient at the time.)
And then, when the phone calls don't come, the Insomnia (in the aforementioned blog) returns. Which leads me to why I'm blogging at 2am, because I have absolutely nothing to look forward to tomorrow and sleepiness is no where to be found when the phone call obsession takes over. Which reminds me, I think I made it this far without a major meltdown due to the fact that I have had a constant schedule since he left. I think tomorrow marks the first day that I can honestly say, I have nothing planned. I hate to see how these things they call deployments feel when you stop planning your every waking minute. My best bet is probably to just keep it all planned out, keep something to look forward to every day off, even a trip to Costco or Target to get Care Package supplies. I need to remain focused on keeping busy, or this facade I have created to cover up my real emotions about living minus my other half is going to fade quickly.
Off to bed, or at least near a pillow in a horizontal position. Thanks for reading, all of my not so many bloggers out there :)
So as week two comes to a close and week three begins I'm still waiting, make that obsessing, over my next phone call. Since the Tsunami hit, I have still not reached contact with him, which is frustrating, but understandable. That's why God made patience, for moments like this when you need to wait it out for your deployed Marine to get out of the field, get to his phone, hope it's charged enough to make a call home, find internet connection, hope not too many other guys are using that same WiFi, and finally dial his favorite phone number to reach his favorite person,ME, to either talk to or stare at (which ever is more convenient at the time.)
And then, when the phone calls don't come, the Insomnia (in the aforementioned blog) returns. Which leads me to why I'm blogging at 2am, because I have absolutely nothing to look forward to tomorrow and sleepiness is no where to be found when the phone call obsession takes over. Which reminds me, I think I made it this far without a major meltdown due to the fact that I have had a constant schedule since he left. I think tomorrow marks the first day that I can honestly say, I have nothing planned. I hate to see how these things they call deployments feel when you stop planning your every waking minute. My best bet is probably to just keep it all planned out, keep something to look forward to every day off, even a trip to Costco or Target to get Care Package supplies. I need to remain focused on keeping busy, or this facade I have created to cover up my real emotions about living minus my other half is going to fade quickly.
Off to bed, or at least near a pillow in a horizontal position. Thanks for reading, all of my not so many bloggers out there :)
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