Of Love and Leap Year

This is the results taken from Sonia Medeiros February writing challenge: of love and leap year. It involved choosing 5 words from a list and including them in a 250 word count challenge. My 5 words are: underwater, idiosyncratic, escaped, disorderly and quip

Why a letter from a bride to her groom on her wedding day seemed to fit this challenge I'm not sure however it did. Of love I suppose.  I'm always suprised to find how these particular challenges seem to prompt me towards such interesting forms of writing.

I was even more surprised however to find that the idea of an underwater wedding is apparently not all that novel and so without further ado the results of this challenge.

To my groom,

A wedding performed underwater could anything else be so unexpected or downright weird?  Well I think we both have some idiosyncratic tendencies so I can’t help think this suits us perfectly. 

I love that we’ve escaped the everyday norm.  It has been admittedly a little disorderly trying to figure this out but I’m so glad we did.

It can only be kismet that we both travelled here to Thailand 4 years ago to get away from the pressure around us to find someone to be with. 

I was all set to just enjoy what life had to give never mind love.  Instead that first trip with our tour group I found you.  I’m so glad we were the only singles so that we were inevitably paired up. 

I thought it would be awkward diving and exploring the ocean with a stranger but once we were introduced and off to explore something began to change.

Perhaps it was the beauty of the ocean all around us or the gentle touches required to show one another things we had spotted, but slowly everything began to fade away and before long all I saw was you.

It may not have been love at first sight but by the time we surfaced I loved you and you me.  I never imagined your little quip “come back here next February 29^th and marry me” would be something we would actually do 4 years later. 

With all my love and affection,

Your Bride

Lunch

I am not a fan of making school lunches. It is way too hard to convince my pre-coffee brain that putting in the effort to make unique and good lunches each day is really that important. It’s so very easy to fall into the habit of packing the same thing day in and day out. I rarely get complaints from the kids so I can’t be doing to bad and it is always nutritious even if sometimes monotonous.

Of course each and every year and several times throughout the year I vow to start making lunches before heading off to bed even though it never actually happens; or at least not for more than a few days. I always find by the end of the day I’m just too tired to bother. I keep going back to doing it half asleep and semi-focused in the morning.

One part of lunches that I’ve enjoyed the past couple of years however is writing the girls a little message or drawing a little picture and sending it in their lunch.  I’ve done this many different ways on little slips of paper on the edge of a juice box, in the skin of a banana or any other way I can think of.  They are very simple notes of love and encouragement or a silly little joke.   

After hearing from both girls how disappointed they have been to not find any notes in their lunch kits so far this year I’ve realized just how much they have come to love them as well. I also found out that E has saved most of the paper ones I’ve sent and just how much she loves the little joke cards.  She apparently likes to share them with her friends.

So it appears there is one more thing I need to remember to send.   So I decided rather than try to remember each morning, when I dont' remember much I would make a stack of little note cards to send them over the next few weeks rather than do it every day.  Joke ones that flip up to show the punch line for E and very simple pictures and notes for A.  

Hope it keeps them both smiling.