Embrace the Ordinary vol. 4

Almost thirteen years ago, on a rather ordinary day (well, sort of. It was extraordinary in that it was my first day at a campus job, and the first day I met Fence…), I met some people at Regis University. I was getting acquainted with the other students in the campus ministry office, whom I’d be working with for the next several years.

One of them was Fence.

About twelve years ago, Fence and I were engaged.

Eleven years ago, today, we said, “I do” and became Mr. and Mrs.

Since that one extraordinary day, we’ve had quite a lot of ordinary days.

You know the kind, the alarm goes off, and goes off again. One of us grunts and groans, stumbles out of bed. The other rolls over and tries to grab a few extra minutes of sleep. Babies enter the scene, and grow up into amazing children. Our ordinary days are days filled with errands, school, work, reading lots of books aloud, walks to the park, picking up toys, fixing broken things, trips to the doctor for horrible coughs and broken bones, long hours at work, several wake-ups during the night with young ones, dozens of loads of laundry, dishes, burned meals, great meals, tears, fights, laughter, prayers.

We have an extraordinary kind of ordinary life.

It’s extraordinary because we’ve been married 11 years with few marital problems, and I thank God for the graces He’s given us to make that possible.

It’s extraordinary because we have 5 happy, healthy children. Having more than 2 children (as you know) in our society makes us stand out. It’s a big family and that alone is extra-ordinary. Many might say odd or weird or crazy…but whatever. We’re a happy odd, weird, crazy family.

It’s extraordinary because we work hard to give our children a faith-filled life, teaching them and living our faith with them.

It’s extraordinary because no one else has a life quite like ours. We have inside jokes. We move often. We cook crazy food and normal food. We have some rooms of the house which are fairly orderly, and a few which are a hot mess. We do lots of fun things like gardening in every state (Fence always builds me nice garden boxes, even if I’m not the best gardener), camping with an infant, mountain biking with kids (not me, just Fence has done that so far), road trips on a whim (vacation/leave days can be hard to come by), homeschooling (suits our family really well!), watching TV series together (like LOST, Doctor Who, Bones), and wine-tasting (one of these days maybe we’ll start a wine journal so we can remember what we like).

Our marriage is extraordinary because it’s ours.

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