Also wanderlust.

Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.

Traditionalists

True to form, my family spent this Thanksgiving doing what we do best -- cooking and laying around. My mom busted her ass getting all the food prepped, my dad accumulated so many grocery lists we probably ended up with more sticks of butter than any family needs, and my sisters and I soaked in the spoiling that comes with having the most awesome parents in the world.

Shout out to Mom & Dad: Me? Grateful for yous. ;)

Charles made his famous stuffed pumpkins!

Mom's Leek Stuffing beat out her Pumpkin Stuffing this year.

Yes, we managed to eat all of that.

Matty G. is officially a part of the Thanksgiving tradition.

Ben & Renee got to choose decorations for their table. A bear with a tiara, Sherriff Woody, and a light up Snoopy. Obviously.

Lots of Black Friday ambition, but guess how many of them actually went shopping?

Betsy managing to fall asleep in the middle of the living room floor? Another Thanksgiving tradition.

Renee had a really bad cough, one that sent me back in time to when I was five and would get a cough so awful I had to sleep sitting up, one that plagued me into my 10th year of my life when my mom was so exasperated at trying to contain it she finally taught me how to do a shot of Bourbon, one that followed me into my 20s that would wake Shannon up from sleeping in the next room and compel her to fix me some tea just to shut me up.

Renee did what I used to do when a coughing fit steals your breath -- cried. And it broke my heart. So I scooped up the little petri dish, rubbed her back, kissed her head, and tried my luck.

Lilly also had some disease, but hers involved faucet nostrils and chronic diarrhea. I hate snot, which is probably why her face is raw today. I was pretty diligent about washing my hands since 1) I already contracted the Vomit Disease of October from that little petri dish, and 2) I was playing soux chef for my mom.

Alas, those little contaminants got the best of me.

I managed to eat the Thanksgiving feast, complete with four pieces of pie (yeah, I came down with pie madness), and got to watch three episodes of Dexter before I was bombarded with Children Afflictions. When I say bombarded, that is no exaggeration. It was a sweaty-toilet-trash-can-combo kind of purging. It was so bad I cried.

On the bright side, I'm not feeling so guilty about those four pieces of pie now. I'd prefer not to have nature's bulimia, but if it's got to happen, Thanksgiving is a good one to bulim.

Thankfully, it only lasted a day, a day that I spent in a Phenergan-induced coma that made consciousness feel like swimming in sausage. By Saturday I was good as new, so Mack and I took his new remote control airplane to Jacobson Park to do loop de loops and soak up what was probably the last bit of sun we'll see until March.

Dulywed: Year 5

Mr. Thomas,

Holy shit. Can you believe it's been five years since we had a 3-minute-and-16-second ceremony that committed us to each other for infinity?

The last couple of days have definitely tested your devotion regarding the "in sickness and in health" part, but you have taken such good care of me while I purged Thanksgiving from both ends and barely managed to keep my eyes open for three of the last 48 hours that I'm no longer worried about the bedside manner you'll have as a doctor. You amaze me with the extent of your caring, and even though I've seen it when you rescue spiders and crickets, I'm usually too resistant to being vulnerable to accept it for myself.

What a lovely surprise to see that beautiful heart that lives under your hard exterior, and what a blessing to have it getting me G2 and ice and phenergan and ibuprofen and vegetable soup every time I whined for it. I felt so bad at one point all I could do was cry, break apart, fall to pieces, but rather than let your annoyance for emotional outbursts take over, you responded by picking me up and putting me back together. Thank you for packing up all of our stuff, for loading the car all by yourself, for putting away the beds we slept on at my parent's house, for bottling up your emotions, for excusing mine. Thank you for helping me get better.

Five years doesn't seem like a long time, but when we were looking thru the old blog archives the other day, I was amazed at how much we have done in five years; the places we've seen, the people we've met, the experiences we've shared. I realized five years is a lifetime, specifically Ben's lifetime, and seeing how much he has seen and grown and learned shows the potential inherent in half a decade. I think we've done a pretty good job helping the first five years of marriage reach their full potential.

There was the time we laid on the bed in a beach cabin in Beyin looking out at the ocean while listening to Beethoven. The time we stood under the stars in Negril and you told me I looked beautiful. The time in Venice when we drank coffee on the boardwalk and watched the bird man have his Sunday service. The time we swam off the coast of Mexico with the ancient Mayan ruins on the bluff overhead. The time we watched the elephants dunking each other and spraying water through their snouts in the lake in Mole. The time we rode the Boughaz ferry into North Africa under the moonlight. The time we hiked out of Topanga Canyon in the dark holding hands. The time we took your new remote controlled airplane to Jacobson Park and you became a 9-year-old in a 32-year-old's body. These have all been pinch-me moments in my life, moments that I hope flash before me just before I die, moments that have happened since I met you, that I have shared with only you. These moments are what marriage is all about for me. These moments make all those moments where I think about poisoning you fade into the background.

This anniversary is supposed to involve gifts of wood or silverware; wood because a marriage is considered strong if it makes it five years, and silverware as a reminder of the connection formed over meals together. To be perfectly honest, I don't think a marriage is strong until it hits the 40th anniversary, and since most of our meals are enjoyed with a side of Millionaire Matchmaker, silverware isn't really an appropriate reminder of our connection either. How about a trip to Belize instead? Awesome.

I know we've got an endless amount of work to do until our relationship deserves wood, but I'm proud of us for getting this far. I am getting better at accepting your cup gardens and am trying to see how saying "No" to some things that sound really fun is saying "Yes" to spending time with you. I am learning how to argue according to your linear map, and I am almost there when it comes to not taking things so seriously. You've still got a long way to go with saying "I'm sorry" and resisting the urge to shut down the conversation and giving in to negativity, but I know somewhere deep down inside, close to that place in your heart that you accessed to take care of me the last couple of days, you're working on it. 

Mack, I love you. And I fully accept that love is a pain in the ass, that love is sometimes the very root of unhappiness, that vowing to love someone for forever is setting yourself up for failure. But when I look back at the past five years, loving you is the best thing I have ever done... definitely not the easiest, but indisputably the best.

Happy anniversary, cake.