pseudokids

there was a picture in the mass of moving this round that had no frame and just lots of blue electric tape on the back trying to be a makeshift holder.

julie newman gave that picture to us from her house a really, really long time ago. i remember the negotiation that wasn’t really like a negotiation. she showed it to us. they nonchalantly talked about like, fifty bucks, whatever. julie newman was always excited to see me and always called me things like dollface and honey, but in a way that was not like usual and condescending but so sweetly endearing. she gave me a hair clip with italy on the back and a bear that smelled like lavender when you put it in the microwave.

she came to the wedding and she said she was proud of me, but didn’t know if she had a right to be. OF COURSE YOU DO!! i tell her this and it comes from a place of reality. she has no idea how often i wear that hair clip.

she talks about how her sons are doing a different life route than my brothers, how they are marines and away from her. she says all this with smiles and faith. she has a blonde streak in the front and i love her for coming here to be with our family on this big day after so long away. it doesn’t matter how many months it’s been since she’s talked to my mom on the phone, how many years of height growth she’s missed from cameron and eric—she is in our lives and she has a right to feel proud of the good things we do. we are her pseudo-kids.

every grown up should have a pseudo-kid. someone else’s child they have a big hand in nurturing and loving and bringing up. a kid who came over every other day to get snacks out of your ample sweets cupboard, billowing with folds of plastic orange reeses wrappers and blue crinkles of chips ahoy. or a kid like i was to julie newman where we only visited her every so often, but i would just sit quietly and listen to her energy while she told mom about the latest. i never was big into playing as a child. i wanted to sit and listen to grown up talk more, i guess.

every kid should have a pseudo-parent, too. kids need lots of good adults who can also spoil their dinner, and give them presents their parents would never think of. hug them ridiculously tight and shower them with cheek smooches even if the boys squirm away.

i’m thinking lately about being a pseudo-parent. taking in the neighbor kids and kissing their cheeks raw. julie newman always kisses our cheeks. i liked that.

i liked that.

big numbers about lovin a boy i’m gonna marry.

Hey Jrad boy.
I love you.

I love you times a thousand.
I love you times the speed of light with a cherry on top.
I love you shouted a hundred times over the intercom of the biggest intercom in the world.
I love you enough to fill up that one 600 million dollar screen on that one football field.
I love you every breath you take SQUARED.
I love you with enough fervor to start a religion.
I love you plain and simple, like sharing a bowl of Raisin Bran.
I love you a kajillion laps around the Atlantic Ocean.
I love you the amount of seventy million times seven kernels of popcorn--POPPED. (That makes it bigger).
I love you NINE days a week. Take that, Paul McCartney.
I love you sung by multitude choirs of angels all day and all night for a ridiculously long period of time.
I love you up to the clouds and back down to the worms in the dirt and all the animals that live in between.
I love you as wide as the ocean and as high as the sky.
I love you the amount of dollars it takes to give every person in the world three thousand times the amount of dollars it takes to do Oprah's hair every day.
I love you as much as all the animals, vegetables, and minerals in the world. I imagine this is a lot.

It is a lot.

Some of these things I read and I’m like, how can that possibly be real? How can I possibly really feel that? But I totally do. Totally.

I can’t wait to marry you, fiancé.

the engagement.

I’m ENGAGED!!!!

and here to tell you

the whole amazing

story

about this boy that I am head over heels madly

in love with. and also, I am going to be in love with him

for my whole entire lifetime,

OKAY?!

okay.

   

There’s a ring on my finger. It means eternity. Real alive eternity with this person who is the most, the very most

incredible person I have ever known.

 

Jared Schultz? He’s magnetic. When you first meet him, you see those blue eyes and they melt you. You look inside his eyes and see such goodness, humility, and all the things your heart desperately wants to be. Then he will smile at you, with his perfectly formed teeth. That smile comes easy, stays long, doesn’t tire. He will ask you about yourself and put you at ease. He will be genuinely interested. You can tell that he cares about you. His heart is so big and good. He lets me be me, and plus better. The feelings we have shared

Jared boy, he is love. I get to be the recipient of a good chunk of that, and I am so, so…just grateful. These feelings for this person are the biggest and deepest I’ve ever had. 

Nothing is ever going to keep us apart. Not time, space,

or death.

 

 

I am the luckiest human. I get to marry him for all of time and all of ETERNITY on AUGUST 14th.

 

People are really confused about love. Some cynics, some dreamy and blind sap-a-holics. And some of them think love just stops with you and your spouse, if you ever get that lucky. But I have news! My marriage is going to last for all of eternity. The love I have for Jared is going to be perpetuated and multiplied in our experiences together, and, too, in little Jareds running around! AH, what more good could I do for the world??!

My choice in this man is as perfect as I could ever dream. If I could have crafted him myself from the ground up, every feature and weakness and preference—I would have picked the exact nature of Jared Schultz. God is incredible, you guys. He has this amazing way of bringing the people most perfect for our growth into our lives and creating experiences to create these fiery feelings of adoration and appreciation for these people.

 

 

So, wanna hear the proposal story?

Garrett’s open house was the night before and the whole time? Jared and me being just ever so slightly pouty. Watching the gifts being opened with crossed arms. Every person who walks through our door is asking me: are you next? we heard there might be another wedding this summer. rumors. can i meet him? do i need to interview him? And I want to find some ring pop and throw it on my left hand and just tell everyone that I KNOW WE ARE GETTING MARRIED but we haven’t talked all the details so…

and I just have to keep smiling annoyingly and mysteriously.

Sunday. Is he gonna ask me? I am dropping hints like crazy. IMPATIENT. I’ve been waiting forever for this. But he’s casual, and like, hey, let’s go play piano. Okay. I’m trudging around talking to Kaylie and whining about how I just want to be engaged and balahaskjd whine whine. I come back into the room and he asks me to play a song. I start playing and after a while I realize a few of the keys are stopped.

Weird, I think in my mind.

Whoa, what do you think is happening?

This happens every so often, I tell him. Sometimes the keys just get stuck.

I pound down on the broken keys, with, um, great force. Jared lets out a little gasp.

Well, we should see what’s wrong in there!

Nah, it’s okay. It happens all the time.

No, really, you should come here.

He opens the piano, and inside is a ring box.

((seriously, my first thought: that’s weird that someone’s ring box is sitting in there!))

Next thing I know that ring box is open and it’s for ME!

He asked, and I said YES.

Now, we’re engaged.

cool, huh?

:) :) :)

SNEEZE

a million little posts with sentence fragments clutter up this space. snippets of conversation i overhear that i mean to expound upon, you know, profoundly or whatever. snipped off thoughts because there's no time to sit and stew and package it up tight and brightly.

writer's block of sorts,
where only a little gush comes out
like a giant sneeze
instead of a runny nose.

my brother got married this weekend and i wrote a measly paragraph about it.
a measly little snotty sneeze.
the rest i wrote about was deep deciding and delicate stuff. ME STUFF. i've got to get my life in a straight line so i can breathe and write about the huge events. not just the huge things.

mom's lungs were congested with crud all weekend
every boy coughed in the night.
i ran through music theory for hours and hours
and my alarm didn't go off this morning.


ACHOO.

and this is why my life is magnificence after all.

Jared: hey baby'
i love you
Sent at 2:40 PM on Monday
me: hey!
i love you right back, you know.
Sent at 2:41 PM on Monday
Jared: yeah, i know
and I love knowing that
Sent at 2:43 PM on Monday
me: :)
you make my life bright.
Sent at 2:44 PM on Monday
Jared: you do the same and you also make my future look bright
me: hah.
nice one.
do i get to see you soon, darling?
Jared: yeah, i'm working on something right now
me: okay.
you work on that thing
oh my gosh, i love you.
it hits me like a tidal wave like 2360 times a day
that is a lot of times per day, schultz.
Sent at 2:47 PM on Monday
Jared: and guess what, I'm totally okay with that
me: YEAH YOU BEST BE
Sent at 2:49 PM on Monday
Jared: well I've been thinking about you all day
me: my hands just flew to my cheeks in a big grin
you love me too, boyfrien?
Sent at 2:54 PM on Monday
Jared: sure do
me: i can't wait to see you, sweetheart.
i need your upliftment
and your beauty
Jared: you doing okay?
i want you to be happy so I will come right away
ff;lsdkjfa;sdlfja;lsdkjfa
me: yeah, yeah. just another blah music theory day
you can finish what you're working on!
Jared: nah, ill do it later
see you in like ten
Sent at 2:58 PM on Monday

I shower for leisure.

i picked off all my makeup SLASH cried it all off
woke up at 5 am.
not in that order.
i haven't blogged lately because i don't want this to be a pity party.
but i gotta describe.
rushes of chills every day tell me things are going to be fine like i always know they will be.
but i have no time to run for 20 or 30 minutes, let alone my hour soul-searching journeys.
showering has now become a leisure activity.
crying in front of a professor, especially one who wrote your textbook for your dictation class and also a hymn is a very embarrassing, frustrating experience that decided to send itself to me today.
another girl cried in sight singing and her face flushed red and humiliated the whole 50 minutes. I wanted to kick over my music stand and wrap her up in a big sweatshirt hug.
this deal is a little rough sometimes. allows for not a lick of humanity. (people who do well in the music school? they don't eat. they don't sleep. they don't have friends or boys they are in love with.)

but i'm telling kaylie, i feel so blessed! my life is so incredible for so many kazillions of reasons and these things pale in light of what they could be, in light of what they have been. of course i'll take these issues over high school time any any day.
tired of having to spend my time with all my own stuff. all my own homework, all my own food, all my own thoughts. want to reach out and do so much and soul search and jam and play and have not the time nor the energy.
can i just keep praying harder and pushing myself harder and not adjusting? or is Heaven telling me I need to cool down and I'm not willing to listen because I have my own agenda?
That's the million dollar humility question, isn't it?

a dove chocolate wrapper message.

dull throbs in the bottom of my pelvis and right side of my head remind me that i need to take care of myself.
i like this idea of taking care of myself far more than i like that self-improvement stuff that just ends up mashing me into infectious ground meat,
and just because i want to be a meatball?
no.
i am a steak. or maybe a whole chicken, alive and bach-bach-baching. i am something weird, something a whole lot of people can't and won't understand, because they are not paying attention. that's fine--there are so very many times when i don't pay attention, when i don't pause to GET someone else.

but i'm just done molding, shaping, nipping, tucking, primping, flumping around like a blob. God needs me to be big like i already am, and not a blob. i already am big and formed like He wanted.
i already am enough.
the challenge is not, actually, to push yourself to be MORE than you are.
just to be who you really are already.

that sounds a little like those cheesy sentences printed on the insides of Dove chocolate wrappers.
i've learned,though, that cheesy things lose their scoff factor when they find a reason to wiggle into your life and materialize in your heart and become your truth.