As promised (by Sharayah, not me - I know better than to promise to post since I so often fail to do so), I have also made a list of 10 memories from the last 10 years. I tried to at least sort of evenly space them, and I also tried to not make them too kid-centered since it's about our anniversary and we do mostly only talk about our kids the rest of the time. So, here are 10 fun or sad things we've done.
- The time we left our chocolate strawberries behind
That was actually the second part of our food-related follies right after our wedding. We didn't really get any food at the wedding, as everything went by too quickly. The venue said that happens a lot to the bride and groom, and they packed us two to-go meals. We had a pasta buffet at the wedding, so they just asked us what kind we wanted in our boxes. At the airport we were super hungry. We pulled out the boxes... and it was just dry pasta. No sauce, no anything except dry bow tie pasta.
The second part involved the strawberries. We were going on a cruise for our honeymoon. It started the day after the wedding, so we flew to Florida after the wedding and stayed at a hotel near the ship. In our room we were pleasantly surprised with a big plate of chocolate covered strawberries and some kind of weird structure made of chocolate. It was delicious, what we ate of it. Then we put it in the fridge. And I never saw it again. We just left it there in the fridge when we left the next morning. Sometimes I still think about it. Those poor strawberries, all alone, wondering where we went. The chocolate, never achieving its chocolaty destiny (being eaten by me).
- The time our pee-filled cat carrier was stolen
There isn't much to this story. We were living in a really cheap apartment in Tulsa right after we got married. Panther had peed all over the cat carrier on some ill-fated trip, so I left it outside our apartment on the patio until I got up the mojo to clean it out. It was outside our glass window/doors, which were right next to the front door. Someone just took it one night. Well, I hope they enjoyed it.
- The time we were outbid for 4 houses
When we moved to Delaware for me to work on my PhD, we thought a lot about buying a house. The market was good for buyers (prices were still relatively low from the crash) and my income had increased to the "paltry" graduate stipend at UD from the "abysmal" graduate stipend I'd been getting at TU in Tulsa (you know, the salary that paid for the apartment where someone stole a pee-filled cat carrier). We looked at dozens of houses over a few months, learning all about what we wanted and needed in a house, what we were willing to fix ourselves, etc. We even found 2 houses we really liked and 2 that were pretty good. Over those months we made offers on those 4 houses, and we lost every time. It all worked out, since we ended up really liking the apartment that we found when we gave up on houses. We also gained a lot of house-hunting experience which helped us find the right house in Missouri.
- The time we were up all night in New York
Sharayah beat me to this one. This was our night-before-Thanksgiving adventure. We wandered the streets all night and watched the parade cold and exhausted the next morning. It was great fun. Side note: "The city that never sleeps" is a terrible nickname for New York. After about 2am, everything was deserted. We will hopefully repeat this one someday.
- The time we slept in the freezing car
When traveling before we had kids, Sharayah and I would often save money by not staying in hotels. We would just drive the whole way wherever in one shot, resting or napping when needed at rest stops. On one trip, we knew it would take more than one day, so we brought blankets and pillows and planned to sleep in the car. The back seats fold down to make a flat space that's about as wide as a twin bed, though not as long. Perfect height for Sharayah. I was a bit cramped. Still, adventure! Well, it was a lot colder than we expected. We couldn't leave the car on all night, so we just turned the heat way up until it was pretty toasty, turned off the car, and went to sleep. We woke up colder than we'd ever been. I think we were colder than in New York. We weren't sure what to do, but we eventually decided we'd turn on the car and have to periodically wake up and turn it off or on again until morning. It worked out fine, but I'll never forget waking up able to see my breath, so cold that even Sharayah thought it was cold.
- The time we became ping pong masters
While living in Delaware we had a two bedroom apartment, so until Lucas was born we just had an extra room. One Christmas we had the amazing idea to put a ping pong table on our Christmas list. I don't think we were expecting to actually get one, but my awesome parents got one for us. We set it up in the extra room, and bam! Ping pong room. It barely fit in there. I'm sure it wasn't regulation to have the walls so close. But we loved it. We played so much ping pong. We played two-handed. We played off-handed. We learned to make the ball curve. We became ping pong masters. Sharayah was much better than I was. I'm not saying it's because she's Korean, but she does have excellent hand-eye coordination.
Sadly, when we moved to Missouri, the movers horribly mangled the legs and frame of the table, so now it's just sitting in the basement, waiting until we have time to fix it and play it again. Since Lucas is almost 3 and a half years old and we haven't played since he was born, I don't think it'll be happening any time soon. Maybe when he's old enough to play.
- The time we got super sick for weeks and watched Merlin
I went to a math conference in Wyoming one summer while we lived in Delaware. We drove the whole way, about 25 hours of driving not including stops. That's a cool memory on its own. We stayed in Wyoming for two weeks and did a little adventuring there as well between my math lectures. At any rate, someone there must have been sick with a pretty nasty version of the flu. A few people did miss the last days of the conference feeling sick. Thankfully we must not have gotten it until the very end, because our symptoms didn't really start until we got home. The drive would have been a nightmare otherwise. Once home, we got hit really hard. Fever, chills, horrible congestion, etc. We just hid in the corner of the couch for two or three weeks, leaving only to crawl to the kitchen for food. I made it to the grocery store somehow and bought a bunch of TV dinners, which we never get, just so we would have something to eat. We sat for hours on the couch, miserable, watching Merlin on Netflix. I think we made it through the whole series in those few weeks while we were sick. Possibly we finished after we got better - I don't remember how long the series was. We had never seen it, and we haven't watched it since. At any rate, we ate all those TV dinners and watched that show and sat miserably on the couch until finally we were better. Oddly enough, I kind of look back on the whole thing rather fondly. It was some kind of weird bonding experience to go through it together. If we didn't have kids, a (very) small part of me would kind of like to do it again sometime.
- The time we distractedly watched a hockey game
For my 28th birthday Sharayah bought us tickets to a Flyers game. The game was actually months later, in January, 2014. As it happens, the game fell on a weekend when we were very wondering with anxious excitement whether Sharayah was pregnant. On the way to the game, we bought a test. Then we went to the game and watched it. Distractedly. It was a lot of fun. Then we went home and passed the test. Or, Sharayah did. I didn't really have anything else to do at that point.
- The time we let Lucas ride by himself at a theme park
When Sharayah was pregnant with Finley, my parents sent us on a second babymoon to Branson. There's a lot of neat stuff there, but one thing that sticks out is our trip to Silver Dollar City. Sharayah couldn't really go on any rides, so I went on all the little kid rides (and one big kid ride that I thought was a little kid ride) with Lucas. Other than that scary (because it was too fast) ride, he had a great time. He loved the carousel, as he does everywhere, but he said his favorite ride was the little ride-around-in-slow-circles-in-a-ladybug ride. It was pretty much like all of the little kid rides, except this one didn't go up and down at all and was small enough that they let kids who were 36 inches ride alone. He had a stoic expression the whole time. For all appearances he was either bored or doing his "I'm too scared to move or show any emotions so I will just sit here" thing. However, when the ride ended he was excited and said he liked it, and at the end of the day he said it was his favorite. He still liked it the best when we went back with Finley (though he still appeared not to be into it at all).
- The time we watched White Collar again and ate way too much Red Robin
When you have a new baby, it's difficult to do a lot of really basic things like cooking or finding the energy to do something besides watch shows and fall asleep in the evenings. In Finley's first couple months, we had a lot of take-out Red Robin. For some reason, in this kind of situation (where we are too tired to cook and we actually go to a restaurant) we seem to go to the same place and get the same food over and over instead of spreading it around. Probably once a week (though those months are quite a blur, it could have been more or less) I brought home Red Robin, and after Lucas went to bed we'd sit on the couch with Finley sleeping on one of us while we ate it and rewatched White Collar (don't worry, we did manage to feed Lucas real food). We got two dinners out of each trip, since we each only at half of our meal. On other nights we'd still sit with Finley sleeping on us and watch the show. I think it was just anything to get him to sleep and give us some way to relax. We had seen the show through once before, but it really held up. As exhausted as we were, it's actually a really nice memory to think of that tiny baby (instead of the rather giant version someone has swapped him with now) quietly sleeping on my chest while we ate our strange version of comfort food and watched our silly show.
Honorable mention:
- The time we argued over whether there is such a thing as a brontosaurus
I only have one honorable mention, so I think I can still comment on it a little. This was in Tulsa, so it was in our first 2 years of marriage. It was our first argument and the only one that I still specifically remember. Basically I mentioned that scientists now thought that there wasn't any such thing as a brontosaurus, because the discoverer had made a mistake and it was actually just a brachiosaurus. Sharayah said that made no sense. Technically, at the time, I was (mostly) right: the brontosaurus was discovered 2 years after the apatosaurus (not the brachiosaurus), and scientists later decided they were the same thing. Their rules then state that only the earlier name should survive. As it happens, people don't generally care about nomenclature rules, so the name brontosaurus stuck around anyway. On the other hand, she wasn't actually disputing that scientists now said those were the same dinosaur. She was disputing that that meant there was no such thing as brontosaurus. I think her position was that both names could just mean the same dinosaur. It doesn't mean there is no brontosaurus. She convinced me of this ("won the argument") at the time. The two big surprises to me are that, first, this nomenclature debacle happened over 100 years ago, and second, in 2015 a new study decided that, actually, brontosaurus is different enough from apatosaurus to be its own species, so now Sharayah is even more right ("I never doubted it.")
So here we are, almost to 10 years later. We've had a lot of great adventures.
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