One Week

It’s almost one week from our wedding.  It’s been a week of firsts, including this morning when we got up together and went to church without the usual time involved in coordinating so Ben could pick me up on time.  It felt very peaceful.

Other firsts: making a real dinner finally last night (it was an experiment – making a whole chicken in the crockpot.  Turns out you can and it’s great).  Fixing a furnace when it blew an interrupter switch Friday morning (you know you’re in trouble when you wake up in the morning and can see your breath).  Spending time trying to straighten out why the title company didn’t pay the final water bill on the day of closing like they were supposed to.  Getting our bathroom and kitchen completely clean and organized last night.  Posting our first week’s dinner menu on the refrigerator.  Dividing up the meat for a month for only two or three people.  Nailing down a firm date for when we expect Grandma Lila to move in (the 16th of December).  Being called “Mrs. Turner”.  A kiss from Ben (actually, a kiss like that from anyone).  Finally instituting our plan of going to bed by 11:00 at night and getting up by 8:00 in the morning (turns out that’s a lot easier when we aren’t delaying bedtime because when Ben goes home we have to say good-bye).  Deliberately not being mushy in public even though it’s perfectly acceptable to most people for us to be (there is a definite emphasis on most here.  We have learned from exposure to other newly married couples that there is a certain level of mushiness that gets disturbing to friends and siblings who just happen to be around for a little too much PDA).

And as of today, we have a real kitchen floor.  Benjamin, Aaron, Ben, and Michael laid it this afternoon and it looks great.  It’ll be nice not to have the sub floor as the only surface in the kitchen/dining area, though I’m glad we waited to get the travertine-tile laminate floor instead of the wood style we could’ve put down before the wedding.  The tile looks really great and there isn’t the concern of it looking very cheap next to the real wood floors already laid through the house. 

We bought pizza and sat around in the living room on the eclectic blend of furniture we’ve collected (one rocker, one recliner, one glider, and one papasan) and it was a pretty relaxed project.  I made a spice cake last night to try out the beautiful cake dome we were given and we just tried it out.  Turns out spice cake goes really good with brown sugar crème frache.

Jenny’s been coming over just to spend time here the past few days and it’s been really nice – she came and kept us company yesterday while we opened the humbling pile of cards people left for us at the wedding and read them aloud and made careful records for thank you notes.  I miss my sisters now that the sleepy fog of the past week has begun truly dissipating.  I like that Jenny can just wander over while I’m making a cake and taste the batter.  That feels familiarly homey.  Now what’s going to happen is I’m going to really miss her when she gets married next October!