Dysfunctional Ever After | Page 15 of 23 |

DEA Got a face lift!

Well, well, well, look at what we have here! Dysfunctional Ever After has officially moved to WordPress, hallelujah, amen. I worked my bum off to put together some logo/branding elements and just a week (or two?) later, here we are! What do you think? Do you love? I love.

Serious things are on the horizon, so I thought it was about time I took this here blog seriously too.

Transferring everything from Blogger to WordPress was not without its headaches. I lost all of the comments on previous blog posts, lost all of my photos, and lost my email. Thankfully I was able to get all of my photos back into their appropriate posts (exception being our bedroom and living room makeovers, naturally — but I’m working on it!) and set up a new email at hello@dysfunctionaleverafter.com. ~~It is yet to be determined if I can keep all my feed burner followers, so in a sense this post will be a test to see how that feed works.~~ Fingers crossed that all works out, but either way I have no regrets and am super happy with WordPress. (Update: I did lose all of my feed burner subscribers. Sigh.) I just feel like there are so many things that I can do using WordPress that I couldn’t have done using Blogger, so all the hassle was worth it.

Anyways, here we are. Take a look around! All the blog posts are the same, but there are a few new pages (contact, about, disclaimer) and posts are clearly divided into three categories: Family, Career, and House. Hope you enjoy!

xx.

Game Night – Don’t leave it for the weekend!

friends

On Wednesday I blogged about de-stressing after a stressful work day. Those things, in my opinion, are to be done sparingly so you don’t become a couch sloth like yours truly. But today I’m writing to tell you about a weekly ritual I do to keep me sane: game night. The key with game night is we don’t do it on the weekend, we do it on a weeknight. There’s no point in waiting to do everything until the weekend! The work week can be fun too, you just have to put in a little effort.

You see, I refuse to adhere to the idea that we only get two of seven days to live our best lives. This “Thank God it’s Friday!” thing leaves us constantly chasing a ball we keep kicking down the field. Me? I like to enjoy my ball here and now. I’m going to enjoy at least 80% of my life. I’m not settling on 28%. That’s bullshit and you know it.

So, once a week we have a game night of sorts at our house. (Okay, that’s a lie, sometimes it’s at another friend’s house but more so than not it’s at ours.) It’s a day that I can reliably count on to let everything else go for a few hours. If I’m playing Dutch Blitz, there’s no time to worry about Lola, work, or how long I can procrastinate grocery shopping until Ryan just leaves me for a more domestic goddess. Game night I get to just be carefree Samm that only has one problem and one problem only: everyone around me cheats at Settlers of Catan and that is just not freaking fair.

Last night we had Isaac and Kristie over for game night. Isaac is a long time bestie, someone I met my freshman year of college and told me I reminded him of this. (For some reason I didn’t run the other way.) I introduced him to Ryan, and they lived happily ever after until Ryan and I got our very own happily ever after. He’s our third wheel and we love him for it. Kristie was my roommate, my partner in crime, and right hand woman at my wedding. Her and I are totally opposite in some ways, and exactly the same in some. She is my soul mate.

In order to keep them entertained and loving me the way that I love them, I fed them. Target is full of all things cute and Valentine’s Day themed this time of year, so I decided to grab some dollar spot finds and make our game night extra special. We had cupcakes from an earlier celebration from Cupcake! our local cupcake paradise, so decided to feed them to our friends last night too.

Cupcakes, garland, and virgin mimosas, does this excite you as much as it excites me? Because it should.

I mean, do you just die? You could save this for the weekend every week, but after seeing this, why would you? It’s Thursday night and you’re alive, baby. Throw yourself a mini party.

So here’s your recipe for a weekly game night:

Minimum one friend that you tolerate
Drinkable liquids that don’t taste horrible
A menu of games so your guest(s) can feel like they have options
Pretzels, because everyone loves pretzels
Candy, because everyone loves candy and a sugar rush never hurt no one. Except diabetics.
Decor, candy for their eyes
A smile to remind everyone you’re having a good time, and to guilt them out of leaving early

Infertility and Me, a Love Story: Part 2

marriage, motherhood

Hey, you’re joining us in part two of Infertility and Me, a Love Story. Click here to see Part 1!

Infertility wasn’t an issue in high school. Infertility wasn’t an issue in college, either. It really became an issue for us after we realized we were kind of at a wall. We’d both graduated college, he had his career established, I was working my way into my career and finding my way quite nicely, we had a mortgage, we had a dog. Where’s the baby? The baby wasn’t coming. I wouldn’t be carrying our child. That’s our wall.

It’s not that we just looked at having a child as the natural next step for us. It wasn’t that. It was that we had everything we wanted to have, we had the room both physically and emotionally to care for a child, we had room to grow the family we so desperately wanted.

It was around this time that one of my best friends went through with adoption for her son. She found an agency she loved that treated her well, and the couple she placed her baby boy with were equally, if not more, amazing. Overall it sounded like she had as positive an experience one can have doing something as selfless as placing your child in another home.

So, we made an appointment.

Adoption had never been off the table for me, even before I knew about my infertility. Walking into the adoption agency I was filled with hope. We were going to talk through the process, get some numbers, and get things set in motion. I was so excited, and told just about everyone where we were going. This was the start of something amazing, after all.

What actually happened was a little different.

The counselor we met with was nice enough, but she made it clear that people our age rarely come by their office. They typically work with people in their mid-to-late thirties. That wasn’t a problem, of course, but it put me off right away. It makes sense that they would typically work with people older than us. Most people don’t start trying to have a baby until our age, and only after a few years will they find out what is wrong. After they find out something is wrong, then they’ll spend time trying to correct whatever it is before they finally decide on adoption. I felt the need to apologize for being diagnosed so young, for marrying so young, and for wanting to grow my family at a reasonable age. We knew this would be a long process, so we wanted to get started as soon as possible.

Then she pulled out her packet and walked us through what a typical adoption looks like with their agency. The initial application, the thorough application with the home study, the waiting, the placement, etc. It was all very straightforward, very cut and dry. If I’m honest, it’s all things I already knew. But looking at the packet on her desk I couldn’t help but feel that it was all very transactional. I didn’t know if I was buying stock in their company, or becoming a mom. I was disappointed. I don’t know what I expected to be different, but this was not what I anticipated for this meeting.

I started crying as soon as we got back to our car. As cheesy as it is to some people, I have always felt that in that moment God was telling me “this isn’t a part of your plan”. I knew our first child would not be adopted via traditional domestic infant adoption. I can’t tell you how disappointing it is to have your heart so set on something only to be told no by God. I wish I could say I trusted Him, and trusted that everything would work out, but I didn’t. I was just heartbroken. There’s no other way to explain it.

If not adoption, then what? Medical intervention and foster-to-adopt, that’s what.

Stay tuned for part three.

Samm