Welcome to our first blog!

Now that we've settled into our lives as much as we can given that we've got three kids, school, work, a dog, and four fish to wrangle, Esther and I have decided it's time to share our collective insanity wisdom with the world. We don't yet have a theme for the blog. As it is, we'll just share the musings that arise from the madcappery of a newly minted, blended family. Mmmm, blended minty things...

I, Ben, the husband of our married unit, am the one beginning this blog entry. After five seconds of painstakingly flipping a coin, it was decided I'd go first. I'll be discussing the where's, when's, and how's of things going on in our little corner of the universe. Esther will be doing whatever it is Esther tends to do on these things. I find it best just to stay out of her way and not ask too many questions. My husband brain, though more enlightened than most husband brains, tends to short circuit when I try to fully understand what goes on in my wife's infinitely more complex (and interesting) mind.

As most of you know, we are indeed a newly wed couple fresh off of our honeymoon. Considering we'd spent the last four months scrubbing, scraping, patching, sanding, painting, scrubbing some more, moving, planning, and moving some more, it stands to reason that, come our honeymoon week, we would collapse into a heap. We essentially spent the week like two teenagers on a sleepover. We ate copious amounts of junk food, rented every new release we could find, and played games for hours together. In short, it was glorious. (And NO, it wasn't just my idea. I KNOW what some of you are thinking and she's got gaming lust just as badly as I do, so it was with collective joy that we played our hearts out).

Anyway, after nine days of being accountable to and responsible for no one, you can imagine the shock when we took the reins of our blended household officially for the first time. It was akin to leaping onto a fast-moving treadmill holding a tray of hot cups of coffee. Bus schedules, impromptu school clothes shopping trips, and digging up pill bugs late at night were what awaited us upon our return. Gone was the sleeping until the mail lady clanked our mailbox; past was the time of calm, carefree days in which we mused about silly things and ate like royalty. No, we'd been handed a rifle and a helmet and were pushed out into the front lines. Our enemies? School forms that asked the same question over and over and over again, never-ending supply lists, and the oh-so-fun bug-digging assignment. Our dutiful kids pull their weight as much as they can, but in the end, it is we, we happy few, who must hold the line.

I shall now turn the reins over to Esther.


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I, Esther, am the wife of this married unit.  And I've discovered already that nothing can prepare you for marriage - not the well-meant advice/horror stories/anecdotes of other wives, nor libraries of books on marriage, nor even a previous marriage.  More on marriage later, if I don't forget.

Speaking of the way minds work, let not my husband convince anyone that my mind is more complex or interesting than his.  Mine is pretty straightforward, for a woman's.  It likes to focus on one and only one thing until -- butterfly!  Conversely, Ben's mind likes to start the morning with lists, spreadsheets, and pie charts, and by mid-afternoon is ready for a rollicking game of Task Juggling with breakout sessions of trivia.  By evening his mind dutifully revisits the morning's objectives and checks off accomplished tasks with satisfaction.

By that same evening, my mind has traveled from butterflies to cheese to insurance copays to cheese to iambic pentameter to gas prices to earrings to cheese to Shakespeare to coffee to what's-wrong-with-society, before finally settling in a confused jumble of where-did-this-day-go.  You see why the "who's going to start this blog" discussion took five seconds.  But I digress.

People have asked me about our honeymoon, and I scramble each time for a grand or at least respectable answer, but Ben speaks the bald truth: we slept.  We gamed.  We ate.  We watched.  And okay, that doesn't sound like a glorious honeymoon, but if you can look back into your adolescence and remember a long sleepover with your best friend in which the hours stretched lazily before you, every suggestion met with excited agreement, and every activity was pure joy - then you'll understand when I say it was perfect.

But now real life returns, with its bills, homework, and errands, and we will begin to see this play out on a daily basis, this hilarious mix of shocking similarities and stark contrasts between my husband and me - not only in our marriage, but in our parenting and family dynamic.

Like Ben, I don't know what to expect from our blog.  I only know that I must write, and he must write, so we write together now.