Friday, December 17, 2010

11 Rules School Won't Teach You About Marriage

I received this in an email from FamilyLife, & thought I'd share... good stuff!

Rule 1: Marriage isn’t about your happiness. It’s not about you getting all your needs met through another person. Practicing self-denial and self-sacrifice, patience, understanding, and forgiveness are the fundamentals of a great marriage. If you want to be the center of the universe, then there’s a much better chance of that happening if you stay single.

Rule 2: Getting married gives a man a chance to step up and finish growing up. The best preparation for marriage for a single man is to man up now and keep on becoming the man God created him to be.

Rule 3: It’s okay to have one rookie season, but it’s not okay to repeat your rookie season. You will make rookie mistakes in your first year of marriage; the key is that you don’t continue making those same mistakes in year five, year 10, or year 20 of your marriage.

Rule 4: It takes a real man to be satisfied with and love one woman for a lifetime. And it takes a real woman to be content with and respect one man for a lifetime.

Rule 5: Love isn’t a feeling. Love is commitment. It’s time to replace the “D word”—divorce—with the “C word”—commitment. Divorce may feel like a happy solution, but it results in long-term toxic baggage. You can’t begin a marriage without commitment. You can’t sustain one without it either. A marriage that goes the distance is really hard work. If you want something that is easy and has immediate gratification, then go shopping or play a video game.

Rule 6: Online relationships with old high school or college flames, emotional affairs, sexual affairs, and cohabiting are shallow and illegitimate substitutes for the real thing. Emotional and sexual fidelity in marriage is the real thing.

Rule 7: Women spell romance R-E-L-A-T-I-O-N-S-H-I-P. Men spell romance S-E-X. If you want to speak romance to your spouse, become a student of your spouse and enroll in a lifelong “Romantic Language School,” and become fluent in your spouse’s language.

Rule 8: During courtship, opposites attract. After marriage, opposites can repel each another. You married your spouse because he/she is different. Differences are God’s gift to you to create new capacities in your life. Different isn’t wrong, it’s just different.

Rule 9: Pornography robs men of a real relationship with a real person and poisons real masculinity, replacing it with the toxic killers of shame, deceit, and isolation. Pornography siphons off a man’s drive for intimacy with his wife. Marriage is not for wimps. Accept no substitutes.

Rule 10: As a home is built, it will reflect the builder. Most couples fail to consult the Master Architect and His blueprints for building a home. Instead a man and woman marry with two sets of blueprints (his and hers). As they begin building, they discover that a home can’t be built from two very different sets of blueprints.

Rule 11: How you will be remembered has less to do with how much money you make or how much you accomplish and more with how you have loved and lived.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Quick update!

Oh my, I have been horrible at updating this thing. If you still read this, way to go you, & my apologies for being a blogging loser!

Elliot is 8 weeks old as of yesterday. He has gotten so big already (almost 13 lbs & 23.5 inches). He smiles lots at me & Josh & occasionally at other people. He sleeps from about 10pm - 7/8am, & usually wakes up every 4 hrs, but a couple times has gone 6ish hours, which was awesome! He is content & happy most of the time, unless he's tired, & he's not a huge fan of being in his carseat unless he's sleeping so he can get fussy then too.

I am loving cloth diapering! He's getting to the size that the one-size pocket diapers I have are starting to fit, which is fun because I have so many cute ones! I think I'm going to prefer them over the other types, though only time will tell. Up until this point, we have been using prefolds & covers, which is more the old-school type of diaper, but I must say, they hold in those pees & poops - I have only had one poo leak!

I have been busy lately - besides the normal feeding/changing/holding Elliot, we have had a lot of appointments (thrush/mastitis - yuck :-( ) & have been doing Christmasy things, which explains the lack of blogging! My house has taken a definite hit to my busyness, & I'm working on it. We are falling into a more predictable schedule & I know life will slow down soon. Plus, it's so hard to be "productive" when I would much rather just hold my baby! So we are working out that balance. I am also inching back into work; I have been so blessed to have been able to take this much time off. I am thankful to work for an amazing group of people who value the role of a mother! & so thankful to be able to work part-time from home so I can still be with Elliot.

Okay, time to go check things off that pesky to-do list!