“How’s married life?”
“How should I know?  I’ve only been married a week and four of those days were vacation!”
-Lt. Citrus and C.

Usually when reality hits me it does so with enough force to break teeth.  So here I am, a week into marriage, flinching and waiting for some kind of blow to fall…but it hasn’t landed yet! 

Daae says her favorite part of being married is waking up and seeing her husband next to her every morning.  J. and I, neither of us being morning people, tend to ignore the alarm and fasten our eyes firmly shut against the light for at least a half hour after we had  nobly intended to get up, and then try and urge the other person to take their shower first so that one of us can sleep even longer. 

After we’ve both managed to get presentable in spite of ourselves, I’m off to work on campus and he’s off to the city for 4-8 hours a day where his summer job is helping a firm write an article for publication (meanwhile C., being the resident aspiring writer in our newly hatched family, is stuck back as a secretary for a bunch of people who managed to overlook her several emails warning them of her week-long leave and created all sorts of muddles for her to sort out when she returned to their grateful, frantic arms.  There’s no justice in the world!).  After work I’m back at the gym, which after a two week absence has been hellish, for an hour before heading home.  Where, depending on work, chores, and moving in necessities, J. may or may not be.

And as for setting up house!  We opened our hoard of wedding presents monday evening, feeling rather smug about how orderly we were being about writing down who sent what, disposing of boxes, and carefully sorting…until we stepped back and surveyed the carnage from outside our little cardboard cocoon.  We looked at the two rooms filled with receipts, wrapping paper, and presents, looked at the clock (midnight), looked at each other, and went to bed.  And did pretty much the same thing last night when confronted with the wreckage again. 

So far I think we’re a pretty boring couple.

But there is this.  When unwrapping presents and pulling out the one from Dr. Don, he listened intently when I went off in raptures about how Don had sent me plates!   The story of which is that last summer I was in Oxford with him and some other students and we’d gone with him to the Oxford English Dictionary projectwhere we had a presenter, who was also a researcher on the team, who shared his favorite word with us: twiffler.  Which literally means it’s a plate that can’t make up it’s mind what size it is!  Don had given us twifflers and I was ridiculously excited about it!  J., who did not tease me as he usually does for being a hopeless nerd, got this big smile on his face.  And when I rather mulishly demanded, “Why are you grinning?” he just kissed me and said, “You’re my wife.” 

Which, I’m not going to lie, makes me pretty giddy to hear.