Our Homes through the years

Westwood 2008-May 2009

Sanderson June 2009- September 2010

Calgary September 2010  -Aug 2011

L&A Road Sept 2011 - April 2012

Lavington Way April 2012 - Jan 2014

Glendora Way Jan 2014 - ongoing..

On Fighting

Fights. We've all had them. We've all won some and we've all lost some.

This isn't going to be a list of our Top 10 fights (that's next week) because unless something relates to a particular instance or circumstance you are going through our disputes are between ourselves and I'm not going to tell you about them. Unless maybe I find something about a certain argument funny. Sometimes Jaime finds things I am mad about funny and she laughs and seeing her laugh makes me laugh although I am still mad, it's no longer as important to me as seeing her laugh.

Whether you personally think this or not, I believe all relationships are based just as much on the fights as it is the make-ups. In some relationships, in only takes one fight to destroy everything you've built together. In others, it can disintegrate into unhealthy relationships based on fear, disrespect and dishonor.

This was a casebook bad relationship...

Jaime and I have had our share of fights. I think it's impossible not to be in a relationship you care about and not have a heated exchange or two. It's how you choose to react in these times that define your future. I'm not going to speak for Jaime on this matter but I don't think she will disagree with me on too much of what I'm saying.

If so, we'll fight about it later.

I honestly believe that you need to have a few disagreements under your belts before getting married. Get it out of the way now before it's too late and you're riding the Divorce Train to Single Town. Just like we needed to experience moving to a big city with very little in the way of a support network to address any compatibility issues we had.

I'm not ashamed to admit it but we did have some bad patches in Calgary. We went to a couple marriage counselling sessions. To be honest, I wasn't impressed with it or the counselor - we vented our mutual frustrations to our therapist, who said nothing, offered no feedback, and then promptly told us she was taking a two week break and for us to come back after her holidays. She didn't even offer a band-aid solution. We were on our own to try and figure stuff out until our next appointment but she had no problem taking our money. I doubt she even went on vacation. She may have thought we were more trouble than it was worth, Or she knew something we didn't; we will either fix this on our own or one of us will be gone in two weeks. It was up to us to figure out where we wanted to go.

But here's what I did get out of that experience; Reflect what you heard your partner say. It's pretty simple - your partner says "blah blah blah" and you repeat back "What I hear you saying is blah blah blah". That allows your partner to either confirm or rearrange their thoughts into a more coherent concern. I use it often, at home or at work. I think it helps.

My other take-away; What's the Win-Win?

In hindsight, that might not have been from that counselor. But the theory is simple - what solution can the two of us arrive at where we both felt we 'won'? It involves compromise and finding a middle ground. It might feel good to be in a situation where you win and your partner loses but in the end, one day you're going to be on the losing side and it will suck. All I can say is try to be graceful in your loss, humble in your win.

I am grateful to Jaime that we try to find the Win-Wins. I think that is very important. Although I said I wouldn't dig into our closet of arguments, I think she's okay with this one 'minor' disagreement we had a few years ago.

The Case of the Ugly Utensil Holders

Ugly

Awesome

I absolutely hated a utensil holder we had - it was a wire bar thing you'd see in an IKEA kitchen display. The handles would poke out and basically it drove me nuts. Of course, there was a lot of other stresses going on in our lives but that utensil holder, at that time, represented all that was evil in my world. I loathed it more than the when Messier and Keenan became Canucks and destroyed all I held true to hockey (okay, not that much). 

I tried to replace it with a Heinz ketchup can because I thought it was 'hip' and 'retro-cheap' but that became the bane of Jaime's existence (probably for the same reasons I preferred it). We fought with way more passion and intensity that would be expected over a utensil holder. In the end, Jaime bought a decent looking cookie jar which we now use. Win-win.  

Anyways, I guess I'm saying is that another reason why I love Jaime so is our ability to have these disagreements and at the end of the day or week, we are able to apologize and move on with our lives. Sometimes in the heat of the moment we might forget about the Win-Win or the 'what I hear you saying is...' for a couple of days but with time, I think we get to it. Sometimes I have no idea what she is mad about and I am sure she feels the same towards me sometimes. I've since learned not to keep my issues bottled up and not think things like 'if i just don't address it, it won't bother me'. I've learned that from Jaime.

And as the day gets nearer, we will be arguing a lot more. I am apparently not allowed to man the BBQ after the ceremony nor can we have a magician. And for her part, she promised to ... well... I'm keeping that story in my pocket until another day.

In the end, as long as we continue to grow and parent from a position of love and respect, I'm happy, which sure as hell beats that other option entering a marriage.

Okay, 70 days to go...

Our year in Calgary 2011/12

Calgary. 2nd worst. winter. ever.

So we moved to Calgary, found a decent little house central to the main highways that crossed through the city. We lived across from a closed school, our view was the school field with a playground so we had that going for us.

I remember receiving some advice from a friend who had been married for nearly 10 years. They thought the best thing they ever did was make a big move together. To be taken out of your comfort zone, to go on a great adventure together and experience the joys, trials and tribulations that come with that can either forge a relationship or strengthen it. We were lucky in that Calgary definitely did all of that for us.

It wasn't easy; we worked hard at overcoming schedules, distances, and disagreements. The winter was horrible, made doubly so because of our jobs driving to and from appointments or home visits. We both worked in family services in some way; Jaime helped families work on plans to reunite, I was predominantly shuttling children to and from family visits and/or schools and foster homes. I put a lot of mileage on my little PT Cruiser and soon learned a lot of the back ways to avoid traffic congestion the Deerfoot or #1. But it was still a lot of time on the road. I was involved in only one accident, with minimal damage to my car when someone ran a light. I got three speeding tickets in a month (2 were those sneaky ones, where the cops hide about 30 yards down from where the zone goes from 60 to 50 km/h and another was a photo trap. Not cool.). 

By late Spring we had enough. We were shuttling Jordan over by plane from Vancouver 2x a month and I was steadily paying for that via credit cards. The winter was long and traffic awful on those mornings when snow was in the forecast. We would never be able to afford a house. If we stayed where we were, Avery would never have had a baby brother. All our friends lived too far away for a simple 'let's just pop over and visit X'. It was an all-day excursion if we were to attempt that. I really missed the mountains and trees and native Calgarians would say 'Oh, you can just take a short drive to Banff.' But if we couldn't find the time, money and energy to go to visit friends, we sure weren't going to drive for an hour just to look at trees. But we did take a few trips up north to Mike and Sonia's which gave us the opportunity to catch up on some lost years where we only saw each other at Christmas dinners at our parents' homes so that was nice.

Calgary was amazing for other things though - wind being one of them. We did go to a cool piano bar once and it was a lot more multicultural than you would have thought. But maybe that was the area of town we lived in.

Oh, and there was an Olive Garden.