Sunday night

One of my simple pleasures in winter is being able to put the kids to bed at 7:30, just because it's dark out. Emily's onto this and doesn't fall for it anymore, but she likes to read at night anyway. It's the other two that are a work-out and luckily can't tell time yet. I think they need more sleep in the winter anyway. And there's something about Sunday, between 3 hours of church and all this family togetherness, that makes them a little more unruly than other days of the week. So sometimes by 6:30, I'm ready to turn my "mommy" hat in for the night and put them all to bed. Tonight Taylor and I both had meetings at church from 6-7 so we let them watch "Veggie Tales" which is a rare treat around our house to let them watch anything on Sunday. Emily's almost 11 so I do leave her in charge from time to time, and they usually watch a movie so there's not much to fight about. When we came home we had scripture study and put them to bed.

Taylor and I had a talk the other night. It's time to put more effort into our marraige. We go through marital hi's and low's and lately it's been a low. Nothing bad really, or nothing any other marraige probably doesn't go through from time to time. We're just sort of living parallell lives but not really connecting. But we agreed that we do want to make things better and the past few days they have been better. Here's a thought. I've been reading through some different marraige books and I came across something that clicked. When we feel like communication has broken down in our marraige, we try to be better communicators. But communication isn't the problem. It's being in love. That's the feeling we've lost, not our ability to communicate. If we can rekindle the feelings of love for eachother, better communication happens. A great marraige isn't built on great communication but great love. That's paraphrasing, but it made sense. Because sometimes I feel like we forgot how to talk to eachother or we don't have much to say but I think it's because neeed to be "in love" again, not necessarily become better communicators. And it's just all the little stuff, like being thoughtful, respectful, doing kind things, saying nice and positive things. It's hard, marraige is. It takes a lot of effort and pride-swallowing. It's interesting that most love stories are about falling in love, but not about the next 60+ years of staying in love. That's where the real effort and lasting love are. Taylor and I are sealed together forever and I want to make our marraige the best it can be.