Honeymoon

So, I finally had narrowed down our honeymoon to two locations: Freeport, Bahamas or Isla Mujeres, Mexico. The place I found in the Bahamas that had everything we wanted would not allow us to book less than 5 nights. The sticking point was when my ex husband would take kidlet. We typically split her winter break 50/50, but this year, the break is 11 days. Since I get her for Christmas this year, I figured it would make more sense for him to have the 6 days and for me to have the 5. That puts us not leaving until Tuesday, and since I don’t want to travel on the Sunday after New Years, we’d only have 4 nights. As a result, Mexico won out and it has proven to be the better option overall. It was less expensive, we get a direct flight home (connecting flight there) and neither of us have ever been to Mexico. I’ve been to Freeport and while I love it and would love to go back, it would have been even more expensive in the long run as we’d either have to rent a car or take taxis to do anything besides go to the beach while we’re there. Our money is also worth more in Mexico, so there’s that as well. Currently it’s about 15 pesos for every U.S. dollar.

We’re staying at a little hotel towards the southern end of the island. It has Jacuzzi tubs (a big bonus for me) and while it’s not directly on the beach, they provide free transportation to a local beach club. The beach club is in walking distance and I imagine Eric will want to take advantage of that to hit his step count. The majority of the “action” on the island is a fair distance away, well, as “fair” a distance as you can have on an island that is only about 5 miles long. Many of the reviews I read suggested renting a golf cart to explore the island and I think that sounds like a great idea. There’s a swimming with the dolphins program on the island, and they have a deal where you can stay at their ecological park after your dolphin adventure. The offer includes kayaking, bicycles and beach access as well as lunch. You can pay a bit more and go ziplining, which I might do, but Eric will probably decline. He’s afraid of heights. :)

I’m glad we booked the honeymoon when we did as prices would only go up the closer we got to the timeframe. Now I just need to renew my passport. I’m going to wait to make the name change until we get back from the honeymoon so I don’t have to worry about getting my passport back in time. It sort of sucks to do that since I have to renew my license this year, but at least with my passport, I can get my name changed for free if I request it within the first year of renewal. Wish the driver’s license worked the same, but oh well. Hopefully I will never have to go through this process again!

Spring Break, or When Not to do Disney

So, for spring break this year, Eric and I took kidlet to Florida for the main purpose of visiting his parents who moved down there last summer. It wasn’t exactly a planned trip as we had originally discussed going to visit after the wedding as leave from work and finances are currently tied up with that. However, there was a little family drama over the Christmas holiday that I won’t get into that made Eric feel obligated to visit his parents to reassure them that their relationship was on good terms. So, suddenly, we were scrambling to go to Florida in March.

I’m a planner, a HUGE planner, and while we made the decision in early January, there were many bumps in the road to the point that we were still debating whether we’d make it down there in February. I didn’t even book anything until late February/mid March. In February, Eric had some health issues that really made the trip questionable, but by mid March, that was resolved and the trip was a definite. Still, the constant back and forth was aggravating to me because I couldn’t plan anything until we were 100% sure we were going, which meant I was booking a lot of stuff last minute (at least, to me).

We decided to make the most of our trip and drive down to Orlando for a couple of days before going to his parents’ house. We planned to spend a day each in Disney World and at Universal as Eric and I had both never been to Universal. After spending the day there, I kind of see why my parents never made a point to go there... We split the drive down to Florida in two days since I was sure kidlet wouldn’t make the drive in one fell swoop. We stopped in Florence, SC both on the way down and on the way back since it was a fairly nice halfway point.

While the trip was mostly a success, there are many things I would have done differently. I probably still would have done Disney, though, I will NEVER do Disney again during spring break. It is WAY too crowded. I took kidlet to Disney when she was 5 for her birthday and since she wasn’t in school yet, we could go ON her birthday. It wasn’t terribly crowded while we were there and wait times were reasonable. During spring break, Disney is ridiculously crowded and I was miserable. We got fast passes for 3 rides (only one of which really seemed worth it, but because we booked everything so late, there was slim pickings for rides). We went on Splash Mountain…at like 10 A.M. when it was only like 60 degrees outside. It warmed up to the mid 70’s later on, but kidlet and I were already cold, so adding freezing water to the mix was not my brightest moment. We also had a fast pass to the Haunted Mansion which…I like the ride, but the wait time was never that bad for that one. The only ride I had a fast pass for that was worth it was Space Mountain since that line was always about 1.5-2 hours long. We had fun at Disney, but I am serious about not doing it on spring break again.

Lessons from Disney:

1.       Not during spring break.

2.       Stay on one of the hotels on Disney property that is not owned by Disney. It’s slightly cheaper than Disney, not as cheap as an off site hotel, but you have easier access to Disney transportation, which is free.

3.       If you stay off site at a hotel, take Disney transportation ALL the way to Epcot before getting a taxi back to your hotel. Our taxi was over $40 and about half of that was just getting off Disney property. If we had taken the monorail back to Epcot from Magic Kingdom, we would have saved ourselves at least $12.

4.       Determine the dates you want to be at Disney and book reservations as soon as you know them. I would have loved to do some kind of character dining experience, but they were all booked by the time I tried.

5.       Don’t book Splash Mountain at 10 AM in March. Yes, Florida is typically warm all year, but it does get chilly in the early mornings and evenings…

Our second day in Florida was spent at Universal. I really wish I had done some research on the rides at Universal before we went. Apparently, Universal proper (we didn’t do Islands of Adventure) has a thing for 3D virtual rides. The first ride we went on was the Minion one and that made both Eric and I sick to our stomachs. From there we did Shrek (not as bad, but similar idea) and then Transformers (not as bad for me, but Eric hated it). By that point, we were really unhappy because this is not how we wanted to spend our day (or money). Thankfully, we were able to break out of the 3D world for the Mummy ride and for the Disaster ride, both which were awesome. We did do Harry Potter/Diagon alley and enjoyed the roller coaster there (because the 3D effects weren’t as vomit-inducing on that one as on the others) and Eric bought us all wands at Ollivander’s wand shop. We also tasted butter beer, which we all enjoyed. Our last ride was one Denise chose, which was the Woody the Woodpecker coaster. I wanted to do ET, but she was adamant and we were all pretty exhausted by that point anyway.

Lessons from Universal:

1.       Don’t do it. Seriously, it’s got nothing on Disney and the ONLY reason I can see going back is to do Hogsmeade for Harry Potter. We might do a return trip at some point to try that, but I don’t think it’ll be the next time we go to Florida.

2.       Research the rides before you go on them. If you don’t do well at virtual 3D moving rides, Universal is really not for you. After Transformers, I told Eric which rides had the 3D and what I thought we should skip and we were all much happier.

3.       Don’t do Escape from Gringotts first thing. When we got there, the wait was over 2 hours, but after lunch, the wait was just over an hour. Diagon Alley was still filled with people (and watch out for all the idiots who stop in the middle of the walkway to snap pics of the huge dragon), but the wait time was more reasonable.

After Universal, we drove to Eric’s parents, which was about 1.5-2 hours away from Orlando. We got to the area after dark and proceeded to get very lost. If you’ve never been to Ocala, or have no reason to go there (i.e. family obligations), I highly suggest you skip it. I had a roommate who was from Ocala during my short stint at a small liberal arts college in Florida and one weekend, we went to visit her parents. It’s basically like they took Southern Maryland (St. Mary’s County, specifically) and transported it to Florida, removing all traces of any hills and replacing them with palm trees and Spanish moss. There are tons of horse farms everywhere, miles of countryside, and not much else. Whomever designed their street system must have been smoking something because they have multiple streets with the same names, just slight variations. For instance, we were told to take 80^th Street. Well, there’s an 80^th Street and an 80^th Avenue that actually cross each other. The road his parents live on has a similar road on the other side of town. We got so lost and we were both pretty aggravated and pissed off by the time we finally managed to find it. Lesson from that experience: don’t trust Google Maps for everything. It’s a new development, so I’m not even sure if it was ever put ON google maps.

All in all, I’m glad we went as I was able to keep a promise to kidlet to return to Disney in three years, but if I could have done this differently, I would have planned to go at a different time and preferably after the wedding. I’ve calculated my leave for the rest of the year and I’m going to have to scrimp and save it if I have any hope of going on a honeymoon with Eric in January. We’re still trying to figure out where we’re going, but I’m leaning towards going back to Freeport in the Bahamas. I went on a cruise there a couple of years ago and the area is really nice. I’m just trying to figure out where we should stay while we’re there. Hopefully we can decide on that and start booking it soon!

On This Day in History...

I have a livejournal account. I’ve had it for over a decade now, though I don’t write in it nearly as often as I used to. But it’s there, and every now and then, when I’m having an especially boring day at work, I’ll look through all the entries I wrote over the year on a particular day, normally whatever day it happens to be or a surrounding day. Today, I looked at all the entries from January 7^th, starting from 2004 and working forward. When I got to last year, I wish I had just skipped it. The entry on the 7^th and the preceding day were about Derrick and his sudden decision to go back on his word and leave the townhouse we rented together when the lease ended.

For a bit of back story, when Derrick and I broke up, we still had almost an entire year left on the lease. We had a huge fight in February of that year, right around when we were supposed to renew the lease, and for some stupid reason, we decided to try to stay together and renewed it…even though it was clear that neither of us were happy. A few months later, we called it quits, but were still stuck in a lease. At that time, we were at least still friendly with each other and agreed that we would maintain the townhouse until the kidlet’s school year ended and then we would go our separate ways. Last January, Derrick decided that he wanted to go back to school on the GI Bill and, under the guise of “asking” me, told me he didn’t intend to do as we had agreed and stay in the lease until June. This left me in quite the dire circumstances, as I couldn’t very well afford to pay for the entire rent by myself and it seemed silly to rent a place for a couple of months until kidlet and I would move in with Eric. I also didn’t want to switch her school in the final marking period, but the idea of commuting from Eric’s house to the old school just seemed stupid. My sister suggested I move at the semester break, but at first this seemed impossible since our lease wasn’t up until March. Then I realized, while I had to pay the rent until March, there was no requirement that *I* had to live there. So, after Eric got the house situated, kidlet and I moved to his house and I was able to enroll her in her new school and the same daycare program she had been attending.

Many friends of mine questioned whether Derrick would actually follow through with his plans for school or if, like so many of his other half-assed schemes, he would just end up moving back in with his father and just play games, working minimally. I don’t know if Derrick ever made it into college, though I do think he at least made it to where he planned to attend college as his father passed on in May or June last year. Shortly after he dropped the bomb on me, I unfriended him on Facebook and I haven’t heard anything from him since he finally moved out of the townhouse in March.

Looking back on the situation now, I can still feel the anger, the slap in the face of what I thought was a fairly sound friendship despite what had happened between us romantically, but at the same time, I feel freer. I don’t think staying friends with Derrick was wise. The more distance I got from the relationship, the more I realized how fucked up and one-sided it truly was. There was a time I would have done anything for that man, and I feel ashamed at the foolish and clearly lovesick girl I was. The second time around (we dated twice, in case I haven’t mentioned it before), I wasn’t as foolish, but I was still willing to do anything to maintain the relationship.

It’s funny, I can’t help comparing my relationship with Eric to the one I had with Derrick. When Derrick and I moved in together, I made sure he had a space away from my child. It’s like I intuitively knew that he wasn’t really interested in being a stepfather. So, I made a rule that kidlet couldn’t go up to his room (he was a REALLY loud snorer, so I had a separate room on the same level as kidlet). I thought it would simply be an escape for him when she got to be too much to handle. Instead, it seemed to become an escape for him from everything: me, work, life, etc. With Eric, I didn’t set aside a specific place for him. We hardly have the room for it, but there isn’t anywhere in the house that kidlet is banned from. Their relationship is not always perfect, they’re still adjusting to each other and kidlet is often a very stubborn and loud child, but I feel like he at least puts forth the effort. No longer do we have a nightly dinner battle where kidlet and Derrick would test to see who could be more stubborn, and I was stuck in the middle, trying to work out a compromise. Eric, for the most part, let’s me take charge of the parenting in the moment and just backs me up, but we spend a lot of time talking after kidlet is asleep to make sure we stay on the same page when it comes to her. I remember Derrick complained in the midst of our break up that I, how did he put it? “undermined his authority” with kidlet. In reality, he never had any authority over her because he never earned her respect. And his method of earning her respect (picking fights with her over trivial things, like dinner), left a lot to be desired.

That’s not to say things with Eric are always a bed of roses, though I suppose, that is actually an apt description if you keep in mind that along with their silky and fragrant petals, roses have thorns. We have our rough patches, it’s been an adjustment, moving in together, especially under the circumstances that we did. Yes, we had planned to move in together last year anyway, but it happened a good 4 months before we initially planned. But the difference, at least to me, is that Eric has always viewed us as a family, a team. He sees me as his partner, not his roommate. We have a joint account that both of us contribute to with each paycheck, not just at the end of the month when the rent/mortgage is due.  Derrick once told me that we were either going to make it or fail together, but I see now that, like his promise to stay in the lease until June, it was just empty words with no meaning.

I read once that it takes 2 years to fully forgive someone. I’m not sure if that factors in the ways they wronged you or not. I feel like I’ve moved past my marriage to kidlet’s father, and that for the most part, I’ve forgiven him and myself for all that went down there, but it’s been almost 7 years since that ended. I’ll say this of Derrick, I no longer feel an uprising of vile hatred whenever I think of him and I am genuinely curious if he actually managed to enroll in school and excel. But not curious enough to reopen that can of worms. As far as actually forgiving him? I’m pretty sure I’m not there yet. 

The Detox That Wasn't

I've come to the realization that the only way I'm going to actually enjoy (or at least tolerate) the drinking part of detoxing is if I make the drinks myself. The juice detox I attempted to do was disgusting and I just couldn't get through it. Out of 6 drinks, I only liked one, so after trying to choke down the other drinks for about half a day, I finally gave up. On the plus side, during the elimination diet, your body is already starting to detox because it's not getting the usual chemicals/foods that you normally eat, so I do think I got some benefits from the experience. However, I think the next time I do this, I will find some smoothie recipes and make my own detox drinks at home.

The elimination diet definitely was worse this time than last time. I had a horrible migraine that lasted from Wednesday afternoon until about 7pm Saturday night, even though I stopped doing the detox drinks at about 2 in the afternoon on Saturday. I cut out caffeine and sweets on the first day, red meat on the second day, other meat and dairy on the 3rd day, and then just had fruits and veggies on the last day. I feel like, even though I didn't do the full detox, I did reap some benefits from the elimination diet.

I'm not sure when I'll attempt another detox, though I'm hoping sometime in January/February. Another perk to doing it myself is I can choose how long I want to do it, and I could do a day or a two day detox diet instead of 3 days. Three days is difficult to accomplish with my work schedule and having kidlet home, so I feel like if I did a two day, I could just pick a weekend she's with her father. Usually, I try to find a long weekend she's there, but if I only did two days, I could easily do it while she's gone and then be ready to start eating solid foods again on Monday.

Anyway, I would NOT recommend the Juice from the Raw detox, unless you are used to drinking juiced vegetables. The only juice I liked was the Piney Apple Mint drink.

Preparing to Detox, Round 2

                Even though I hated the drinks in the Kaeng Raeng cleanse, I decided to try detoxing again as it seems like more issues have popped up since having my Mirena removed last December. But I knew I couldn’t stomach that cleanse again, so I decided to try a full juice cleanse. I’ve ordered from Juice from the Raw, their whenever cleanse. I plan to start it Saturday and give my system a good clean right before Thanksgiving. The timing isn’t the greatest, but the winter months are already hitting hard and I worry that my issues will be exacerbated by the cold.

                So, basically, my latest issue is my skin. I have horrible eczema on my right hand, though it’s cleared up a bit on my left, it has spread to my legs in recent weeks. I’m constantly trying not to scratch at it, but the itching is ridiculous and sometimes it just really hurts. I’ve been putting cortizone cream on my hands with lotion, and that has been helping, but it’s not curing. My next stop after the cleanse will be a dermatologist, but I want to at least give this a try. My job is adding a ridiculous requirement to their health care plans that requires me to get a PCP and take a health survey. They will then send the results of that survey to me and I have to take it in to my PCP and have them sign off that they spoke with me about it. My hatred of doctors is making me resent my employers, but if I don’t do it, I face hefty fines. So, I figure when I get the survey, I’ll find a PCP and schedule a physical, and then I’ll dump all my problems on that poor unsuspecting soul all in one visit and get any referrals I need!

                Once again, in preparing to detox, I’ve started the not-so-fun elimination diet. I kicked the caffeine and sugar habit on Monday, yesterday was my last day of red meat. Today will be my last day of any meat and dairy. Tomorrow I give up bread, which means Friday will be a long day of just fruits, veggies and water. *sigh* Eric is taking me to get sushi on Friday night for dinner. No raw fish for me, just the vegetarian stuff. I’m not a fan of “real” sushi anyway, so it works out that the place we go to has a vegetarian platter. I had it before my last cleanse and it was surprisingly really good, particularly their avocado roll. Then Saturday, I start my cleanse. Kidlet is with her dad until Monday night, so I have a good 3 days to just feel miserable while I try to restart my body. I’ve rescheduled appointments and just plan to sit at home and watch the Gilmore Girls while I feel like hell. :P I’m not sure if it’ll be as bad this time or not, but I’m prepared for the worst. Maybe it’ll be better since I lost some weight between my last cleanse and this one? One can dream…

                I just hope the drinks aren’t as disgusting as the last ones were. It’s nice that they are pre-made and bottled so all I have to do is open a bottle and start drinking. GroupOn had a deal for this place, which cut the price essentially in half. I figure I’ll have two full days after the cleanse to ease back into eating normal food before the smorgasbord of food on Thanksgiving, and even then, I can limit what I put on my plate. We’re having Thanksgiving with Eric’s family at his sister’s house and it’s my year with kidlet, so she’ll get to meet all of his family. I don’t have her for Christmas this year, which sucks, but at least I know I won’t hear her pounding on my door at 5 am on Christmas begging to go see the presents. :P We’re supposed to have Christmas with my family the Sunday before so they can see her open presents and we can exchange with them as well. I’m not planning on going down for the traditional Christmas Eve dinner and gift exchange because Eric isn’t off that day and we’re not sure how early he could leave the office. So, I’m planning on just cooking us a meal for two and then Christmas Day we’ll spend with my extended family.

                Haven’t updated in a while, but life has been pretty hectic. I had to plan a conference for work in October, which took a lot of time and effort on my part. I’ve asked the head of the conference to please plan it for November next year if she wants me to attend because I don’t want to plan it in the middle of making final plans for the wedding, and I plan to be off a lot in October next year, so I wouldn’t really be around to help anyway. But we’re slowly getting things together. We have quite a few vendors booked and will work on the rest in the coming months. Having 2 years was probably the best decision I ever made. I don’t feel very stressed about it right now, but I expect that to change as this final year draws towards a close.

                I will try to update each day of the cleanse like I did before. We’ll see how well I do!

Toxic

Do you ever think you’re moving past something, letting go and moving on from a situation, only to read something that reminds you of that situation and makes you think about that situation in a whole new light thus rendering you angry and upset all over again?

I had that experience today. I remarked recently to Eric that I felt like a lot of my ragey feelings with Derrick dissipated after I got the check from the landlady and closed that chapter for good. I also remarked that I seemed to have an easier time of letting go of the situation with Derrick than I have had of letting go of the situation with The Greek. I still feel very ragey and angry about things regarding The Greek. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that when I told Derrick I wanted nothing more to do with him and then subsequently blocked him from my life, he left me alone. When I did the same with The Greek, he ambushed me on a train…

But then I read this article and suddenly it brought everything back up again. So much of this was Derrick, although Derrick was a lot more cagey and manipulative about some of it. He wouldn’t outright tell me I couldn’t see friends or family anymore, but he would refuse to participate in any family gatherings or refuse to help with child care so I could attend (like my cousin’s funeral). The dynamic with our families was also very vastly different. While I had to beg and plead for him to come to most events, it was just expected that his brothers could come by the house or that we would spend time with them whether they called us up to plan it or happened to be at the same place we were and an impromptu visit would occur.

This went even further though in that while he wouldn’t outright say I couldn’t see my family or friends, it was clear that if I chose to see them, it was time I was choosing to not see him. Case in point: my brother came home for a class reunion one summer when I still lived with my father, so my pseudo stepmother and her daughter and grandson came down to stay the weekend. My daughter spent the night with me so we had enough rooms/beds for everyone. Derrick wanted me to come out late on that Friday as he had unexpectedly gotten the weekend off, but seeing as I knew I wouldn’t sleep well Saturday, I declined. He declined an invite to swim with my family because he “wasn’t feeling social.” Then he went out to a party and saw a movie we had been planning to see together without me. While I acknowledge a lot of this was my own insecurity, I felt like in some ways he was punishing me for not coming out Friday by going to the movie without me. Most importantly though, it should have started to become more clear at that point that he was not interested in spending time with my family (specifically my daughter) and that his "not feeling social" was yet another cop out.

He didn’t always say that “we should just break up” during an argument, but Dr. Nerdlove is right in that it is incredibly rage-inducing to be, as Dr. NerdLove so eloquently put it: “Standing there and acting like the stern, disapproving parent” in the middle of an argument. Derrick was great at this. One of the comments actually addressed the way Derrick handled it in a much better fashion:

I want to point out something here. You deliberately goaded her into losing her calm. You deliberately incited her to anger, then stood there calmly as if to prove to her that her anger was a failure on her part. After all, look at calm, collected you! If you can do it she can do it, so her not doing it is proof that she just isn't as rational or smart as you.

In other words, you callously manipulated her specifically so you could feel like the cool, rational, superior male, as compared to the crazy, raging, irrational, inferior female. In fact I think that you chose this woman specifically because you could twist her faults into justification for thinking of yourself as her superior. 

It also shines a laser onto the real problem here: you're entitled enough to expect your partner to do all the hard emotional work in the relationship, but insecure enough to be threatened if she's too good at it. So you choose someone who already has a lot on her plate, make her responsible for guarding your widdle feewings, then you sabotage her constantly. That way you never have to face your insecurities head-on or do the hard work of handling them yourself, plus your ego gets puffed up because you can pretend she isn't your equal.

Case in point: comparing my relationship with him to my relationship with my daughter during one of the many fights we had after we moved in together. The fight was about me sending “mixed signals” and in some warped attempt to prove his point, he compared our relationship to the one I shared with my daughter and then couldn’t understand why I got so angry with him. It couldn’t have been that the relationship dynamic between a parent and child is vastly different (or at the very least SHOULD BE vastly different) than that of romantic partners. He actually said that I couldn’t take constructive criticism. Thankfully, at least at the time, he acknowledged that his criticism in that instance was anything but constructive. But he acted like I was being irrational for getting angry at him for making such an unfair comparison. That directly goes to the second paragraph (which I have helpfully bolded) in the comment above. Clearly I am inferior to his logic and self control, after he accused me of something that, in retrospect, he was guilty of at the very least during the time after we broke up. Hell, WHEN we broke up, I asked him what he wanted and he said “enlightenment.” I guess I wouldn’t call that a mixed signal so much as a vague answer…

I can fully acknowledge and understand now that I was way more into Derrick than he ever was in me. I fell for him head over heels the first time we dated. I’m pretty sure that at least 90% of the reason I even started dating my ex husband and allowed that relationship to progress at the rapid rate it did was because I was so devastated by my relationship with Derrick ending the first time around that I just jumped at the first guy who showed interest. I was also devastated when he gave the smallest indication that he wouldn’t date me because I wasn’t as thin as I had been when he knew me before, so I went on an extreme weight loss plan so that I was closer to my original weight by the time he came to see me in October of 2008. I felt often that I was more of a convenience for him than anything else. I’m not saying he never loved me, but I am saying that I felt that way sometimes.

Speaking of that weight issue thing that kind of coincides with this comment by the LW to DNL: “There were things about her I didn’t like, and what I didn’t like I fixed by giving her my advice and of course she changed those things.” I don’t want it to sound like it was all Derrick’ fault. I obviously made the choice to try to lose weight and while I can definitely say that decision was influenced by his distaste for pictures I had sent him; it still was my choice to not tell him to FOAD at that point. I was hurt.

I realize it’s only been about 6 months since everything finally came to an end with Derrick being in my life at all, and really only like 3 or 4 months since I could officially close the chapter on the townhouse, but I hate feeling like this. I mean, I guess that is why so many things about sexual assault have the “trigger warnings” on them. The reactions I’m having are normal and I realize that, but it still sucks. I just want to close that chapter for good, but then I remember that I basically shut the Derrick drawer up in my head and locked it for so long that I never really dealt with it last time. I want to deal with it this time so I don’t make the same mistakes again. Though I feel like I tend to choose abusive relationships, and I hate the idea of being the perpetual victim. But with Derrick it was so much more cold and calculating than with my ex husband, that I didn’t register it all at the time, but in the aftermath, I can totally see it. I mean, my high school boyfriend used blatant tactics to try and control me, my ex husband threatened to fight for custody to convince me to stay, but with Derrick it was much more subtle. I guess that explains all of his social engineering books.

It’s funny, but on the one hand, I’m thrilled that Derrick didn’t do what The Greek did and he respected my choice to end any future involvement, even as friends. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s so much that he respected my choice or me, but more that he just didn’t care enough to bother with me anymore. He clearly didn’t respect me enough to honor the commitment he had made to maintaining the townhouse for a few more months, he clearly didn’t respect me enough to honor his word on when he would vacate the townhouse, and he clearly didn’t respect me OR our landlady enough to honor our written agreement with her, leaving me to pick up the pieces and ready it to return to her.

As they say, time heals all wounds, but I think the thing that struck me the most about this particular letter to DNL was not so much that it sounds like Derrick could have written it, but moreso that I know he never will.

Wedding Planning

This weekend, a friend of mine is getting married. I’m very excited for her and her future husband, and also interested to see how she planned her wedding. With my own wedding about to hit the year mark, I’m really starting to get more pumped up about planning.

Eric and I have already done quite a bit of planning. The place, caterer, and photographer are all booked. We had a tasting last month and will be going for another one in the late fall, early winter. We plan to book the DJ next and talk more about whether or not we want a florist. I’ve been thinking I might do silk flowers for the bouquets and then have large pumpkins with sugar pumpkins and squash decorate the tables. I’m thinking of having the big pumpkins in the middle of the table with a garland of leaves around them and leaves spread on the tables themselves, and then the little pumpkins and squash in arrangements on the ends of the tables. These can all double as favors as the cooks among my guests can take the sugar pumpkins and squash home for baking, and the parents among my guests can take the big pumpkins for carving for their kids. If we do that, we won’t have much need for flowers, and honestly, I’m not really big on floral decorations for a fall wedding.

I’ve talked to both my sister and Eric’s sister, who will be my bridesmaids. Kidlet will be my junior maid of honor as she said she didn’t want to be a flower girl. Eric’s niece will fill that role, and hopefully she won’t be too scared to do it. I figure in February or March, I’ll make plans with my all 3 girls to go dress shopping. That should give us plenty of time to get them their dresses for the wedding. I’m not sure what color I will go with since my dress is not white and I don’t want them to clash, but I’m thinking either a deep purple or brown, or I can be slightly ironic and have THEM in white while I am not!

My theme for my wedding is basically Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream meets fall, so it’s a Mid-Fall Night’s Dream. The faerie aspect will be in the bubble lanterns with LED candles hanging throughout the pavilion. I also plan to string up some lights to give it more of a whimsical feel. I hope to buy some lighted leaf garlands to put around the windows as well to bring in the fall décor.

We are having our engagement pictures done in a few weeks and I’m really looking forward to that. Our photographer is a girl I used to go to high school with who had very reasonable prices and allowed clients full access to all photos. So, that means that we don’t have to pay more to print our photos, we have full rights for printing. However, if she offers some sort of wedding album after the wedding, I will probably buy it from her just because it’s less work for me. But it’ll be nice to be able to upload our photos to facebook pretty quickly after the wedding.

Initially, Eric and I were not planning to do much of a honeymoon. Since our wedding is during the school year and I can’t very well leave kiddo for a week, we originally planned to go to a place in PA for a long weekend. But then I realized that the week after Christmas next year would be Travis’ week of visitation for kiddo. He may not be able to keep her the whole week, so I plan to discuss with my sister and other family if they can care for her for a couple of days until Travis can take her. Once we realized that, we started looking at cruises and all-inclusive resorts in the Caribbean. We’re looking at Mexico and a cruise out of Jacksonville, Florida. If for some reason, no one in my family can keep her for the first few days of that week, we may do something closer to home.

I remember being very disappointed last year when I realized that we’d have to put the wedding off for a year in order to have the wedding we really wanted, but now I’m actually really glad we have the extra time. We’re still a little over a year out from our wedding and we’ve already got many of the major things booked. Next on our agenda is the DJ and rental company (as we may need tents if the weather is bad), bakery for the wedding cake, and possibly florist or farm for the flowers and/or pumpkins. I will also likely need a few alterations to my dress, so a seamstress, and we need our officiant, so we will need to look into that as well. We are not sure about transportation as our venue has two separate areas for the ceremony and the reception and it’s a bit of a walk for some of our older relatives, but we’re leaning towards some sort of limo/bus service.

Most importantly, it’s coming together well. I feel like since we have not been procrastinating and we have been booking things every few months since we started planning that everything will come together well by next October. In the meantime, I also don’t feel like wedding planning is taking up all of our lives. That may change once we pass the year mark and the timeframe gets tighter, but I’m hoping our early planning will help alleviate that. No matter what though, I’m excited to marry Eric and continue building a life with him and kiddo.