Cheers to 5 Years! (I’ll take my water in a shot glass, please!)

So, as I am getting home last night, I started to think about bills that need to go out and money and pretty much sent myself into anxiety overload. I know this comes as a shock to most of you, but yes, even millionaire teachers stress about money. Anyways, I texted my husband this long message of freaking out, to which he responded: “Relax. We will probably always have issues but I’d rather have them with you than with someone else who doesn’t love me.” Fair enough. Ditto.

This just happened to be perfect timing for a sweet reminder because the next day just happened to be a special day for us. Wedding Anniversary #5. Time seriously flies when you are having fun… or busy….or struggling…. but mostly when you are having fun. I have spent the last few days thinking about our relationship and I feel blessed for the amount of times I have smiled.

When we started dating in 2009 and we were both at weird turning points in our lives. I had just moved back west river from a terrible year in Aberdeen and he just recently moved back to the area from Cheyenne. Ray and I had a hot, but short lived flame a few years before this in high school. And since I feel like this is an official record, I just have to say that it was short lived because Ray never asked me to be his girlfriend. So, I jumped ship before I could get hurt. Turns out, he was scared too. HA! But, I have good faith that it all happened for a reason so that we could find each other again when we really needed each other. Anyways, we met up in October 2009 while I was home for a football game and everything happened pretty quickly after that. Ray isn’t home right now, but if he was he would want me to add to the official record by saying that I, LeeVi, said I love you first.

When Thanksgiving 2010 rolled around and we were still happily together, my parents had a talk with us about marriage. It was a loud, but subtle hint that they approve of our relationship and that there would be certain benefits to being married while I am going to school. Of course, we had talked about marriage before, but he hadn’t asked me yet! We spent the next couple weeks talking about marriage A LOT with our families and with each other and eventually decided, “Okay, let’s get married.” Yeah. Seriously. That was it. There was no proposal or anything fancy. Just an equal agreement. And it happened fast. We were married February 18,2011 at the Belle Fourche Courthouse.

I’m going to go off here for a second, don’t mind me… If you ever felt like you wanted to get people instantly jumping to conclusions, judging, and talking, all you have to do is have a short engagement and get married at the courthouse. EXCUSE ME! I wish I would have gotten some money for every time someone asked me, my parents, or my siblings if I was pregnant. WTH? Can two people not just get married without some kind of outside influence? And the naysayers! My goodness. The people that thought it was necessary to share their judgments with me was appalling. I can only imagine the ones who didn’t have the guts to say it my face. Ugh. That was maybe the most frustrating thing during those first few months….and I hope you are all enjoying the show now! :p

…Anyways…. We spent the next 2 years working my way through college. I was the one going to school, but it was definitely a joint effort. Ray had the responsibilities of keeping us going financially and keeping me going academically. College is hard. And marriage is hard. Not gonna lie, those first couple years were difficult. Lots of adjustments to make and we were both still working on growing up and had lots to learn yet about life. By the time I graduated in December 2013, our marriage was in a good place, we had actually started to try for a baby,  and things were starting to fall in line with me getting a teaching job right away. We have spent the last 3 years working on our dreams of being happy, successful, and parents. I have devoted much of my time to teaching and coaching and Ray has kept busy being a mechanic. Late 2014 it was determined that our chances of conceiving a child was low, and as heartbreaking as that was, I think that it only brought us closer together. We were determined to not let that take away the joy that we could make for ourselves in our marriage. In fact, by the spring time we had not only accepted this, but we were excited about being the coolest aunt and uncle on the planet some day!

Then, this last fall, I got mono. Just kidding. I THOUGHT I had mono! Turns out, it was just a lil baby making me too exhausted to move! Say what?! Ray and I spent a week in shock I think. The first people we told were my parents a week later and then slowly got the word out to our siblings and extended family and finally made it public info at 18 weeks. We are completely and totally excited and thrilled and anxious to have this baby here. Don’t worry, her name won’t be Mono.

Sitting here, typing this lil love story at 29 weeks pregnant with our little miracle baby, and anxiously awaiting my husbands return from a business trip he has been on all week, I can’t help but smile. I know I have said it before, but I am going to say it again. God has blessed me beyond my hopes and dreams and we couldn’t have done any of this without our love and faith in Him.

Cheers to 5 years and so many more, Ray! I love you!

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Heart of Gold

I had a totally random surge of emotion while talking to my sister, Megan on the phone tonight.

Sometimes its fun for me to think about how my sister and I were growing up. Love/Hate relationship, like most normal siblings. We LAUGH A LOT about the things we used to do and say to each other when we were younger. Dad used to always say that we would be best friends someday , but honestly, when you are 17 the last person you even want to look at is your 13 year old sister. It was a mutual feeling. But alas, Dad was right. She is one of my most trusted and treasured friends.

She has quietly, yet epically made it through college at SDSU. She doesn’t brag about herself, but she should. She started as a freshman in the honors program and is now graduating at the top of her class with a nursing degree in May. She studied abroad in Sweden last summer. She is also the Mistress of Ceremonies at the Pinning and Hooding Ceremony for the College of Nursing at SDSU. And we are talking about nursing, which I believe is Not the easiest degree. And SDSU. Division 1 school with a prestigious nursing program. So, yeah, she’s smarter than the average bear. And I have no problem bragging about it.

While she has obviously been busy being an academic badass, she has also had to work her entire way through college. She has juggled work and life expenses along with the stress and rigor of her honors and nursing courses.

I love talking to my sister; especially now that I am preggers I have a million silly questions that only she can tolerate.   A lot of times when I  call my sister in the evening she is at work, so she can only talk long enough to answer my question or she has to call me back later.  She works for a company called Advance. They are a company that provides around-the-clock medical care for mentally and physically disabled people of many ages. They are in small, home-like settings, so she is assisting them with daily and living needs along with anything they need medically. She has worked there for a few years and she loves what she does.

I don’t remember if it was last year or the year before, but state wrestling was held in Brookings. My brother was competing and was doing quite well in his bracket. As the day went on, the time was creeping to the start of Megan’s 10 hour shift at Advance. Megan knew that her shift and Clarence’s advancement through his bracket was going to overlap. She called everyone she knew to ask them to cover her shift just for about an hour, so that she could watch her brother. No one came through for her. Not wanting to disappoint her brother by leaving and also not wanting to disappoint any of her residents by not showing up, she left the state tournament in tears to head for work. I don’t know if the idea came to her while she was leaving the building or while she was driving to work, but somewhere along the way she came up with a plan to meet everyone’s needs. She had decided that she was going to take her work with her to the state tournament. It was Leslie’s day for a social outing and the state wrestling tournament is where they were headed! Since he is a wheelchair bound person, she had to take the big, wheel chair accessible van. I remember her telling me about how she had to load him by herself, (if you don’t know my sister, she is a tiny lil gal)  and then drive quickly, but carefully back to the tournament, which was on the other side of town. Then, she had to find a place to park. I don’t know if finding the place to park was as difficult as the actual task of parking this large, bulky handicap van. (haha) She unloaded Leslie and rolled into the gym just in time to watch our brother take the mat for the championship round. Clarence won the state title that year, Megan got to be there, and Leslie got to go to the tournament and see lots of people. 🙂 Everyone was smiling and everyone was winning!

This is just one short story that comes to mind when I think about Megan and the kind of person she is. She is always thinking of others. She might possibly be the most frustrating person ever when it comes to making decisions, and it has taken me a while to realize it, but this is because she is contemplating how all the outcomes could affect all the people directly or indirectly involved.

So tonight, as I am talking to her and trying to help her make a decision about something, she started to talk about work. The way that I could hear the smile in her voice as she talked about a resident made my heart swell up. She talks about her residents the way that I talk about my ‘kids’ at school. I LOVE my kids. She LOVES her residents. The difference is that she is part of a very small and special population that it not only good at, but loves working with a small and special population. She is very much a part of the elite group of people that I wish we could all emulate a little more.

Megan shared a story a few weeks ago and I have been trying think of a way to share this story again with my friends.

It makes me cry every time I read it. The love and kindness that she is showing the world is not going unnoticed. Everyone is projected in a certain direction for a reason. Megan is right where she needs to be and doing exactly what she is meant to do. Nursing is her calling as a professional and she is a giver of kindness, understanding, and care. No doubt that she is a blessing and an angel to so many people already!

God is SO good! ❤