Ch ch ch ch changes…….

Wedding anniversary

Matt and I celebrated our 10^th wedding anniversary on Friday. I was looking through some old photos and of course I found wedding photos (still not stuck into an album – proof that I’ll never make a scrap booker!), and I also found a photo of me pregnant with Jimmy a year later. What a difference a year makes. Now I look like an older version of photo two, but my stomach isn’t quite as large .

Wedding reminiscence

We had a simple wedding ceremony in the courtyard of a restaurant. It was very low key, but I always wished we hadn’t bothered with the wedding bit at all. I was in trouble for not having a church wedding anyway, so we might as well bit the bullet and done the whole thing in a registry office. We compromised on everything trying to keep everyone happy, and it didn’t really work. Mum wasn’t happy that I wore my glasses – I should have got contact lenses especially for the ceremony, or perhaps groped my way up the ‘aisle’ and kissed the best man by mistake. I have been wearing glasses since I was 11, and I didn’t think Matt was going to be too horrified to see me in glasses on the ‘big day’. In deference to everyone’s (i.e. my mother) expectations I wore makeup, applied by an expert, fake fingernails, and even had my hair done. I had something relatively ‘bridal’ made, but couldn’t quite bring myself to wear a veil. The flowers in my hair were a last minute touch. They were supposed to be Matt’s buttonhole, but he left them at home.

The ceremony was farcical, which is pretty much what was to be expected of us. Matt had told me that he was going to change his vows from ’til death do us part’ to ‘for the term of his natural life’, of course when it got to that part of the ceremony we both started laughing and couldn’t stop (he hadn’t changed them- we did the standard vows because we weren’t interested enough in the ceremony to change them). We didn’t go on a honeymoon, but spent one night in a hotel in the city. My family had travelled from interstate so I arranged a lunch at our place the next day. So instead of sipping champagne on a white sandy beach (and/or nursing a hangover) I was cooking lunch for 17 the first day of our married life. We were renovating our first house at the time, and decided the money/time would be better spent renovating the bathroom…..we could go on a honeymoon later. Yeah right. Three months later I was pregnant with Jimmy, and still cooking every meal in an electric frypan because we didn’t have a kitchen!

Screaming for drugs

Jimmy was born in May, one year and one month after we got married. I think I was just about to give birth when this photo was taken. Jimmy was big – both boys were 10 pounds when they were born. I was planning to go down the natural birth route – no drugs, dim lights, whale song (just joking about whale song, that stuff drives me mad). The no drug thing went out the window at my first contraction, by the time Matt got me to hospital I was desperate for drugs, and thought I was going to die. 16 hours, an epidural and episiotomy later Jimmy made his entrance. Matt commented afterwards that he had to take his wedding ring off because I was squeezing his hand so hard that the ring was digging into his hand and hurting. Diddums. He regrets mentioning it.

The point of this post: Change

So why all this delving into ancient history? Well I’ve been thinking about the TIF challenge and the theme of change. I have been mulling over the theme all month, but haven’t done anything yet. I’ve been thinking about the changing seasons (reading too many US and UK blogs I think) but we don’t really have seasons here- we have two seasons horrible (hot/wet) from September to April and nice (warm/dry), May to August. I think I feel about the start of winter the way everybody feels about spring – thank goodness the bad weather is over!

I was also thinking of the change in terms of growth – the way plants grow from seeds into trees (must be all the gardening I’ve been doing), but I haven’t got any ideas for translating this into a project. I thought about change the way Embellisher did, in terms of environmental impact, and I am watching with interest to see what she does.

And I also thought about changes in terms of growing older. The grey hairs, wrinkles, saggy bits and also the changes to the female form wrought by pregnancy. I was surprised that with each pregnancy my naturally blonde hair got darker and darker. Many people suggested I should colour it, but I wasn’t interested. I have noticed it is getting lighter now – so I am assuming it is because I am going grey. I am not unhappy about this, nor am I worried about wrinkles, saggy bits, or giant stretch marks that make my stomach look like tractor tyre prints in a ploughed field*. I am very fat though and I think I should do something about that. I actually don’t mind being fat as such, but I need to be conscious of my health. So what will I do for the challenge? I contemplated doing nothing – that would be a change……

*in my youth I briefly contemplated getting a green tree frog tattooed on my stomach. I’m glad I didn’t – it would look like road kill now.