Fun and Frolic With Long-Term Love

Edited to add - depending on how you have your screen set up - I posted several pictures of our handfasting ceremony in a previous entry!


Thanks everyone! It was a really nice ceremony, and PunkRock got very teary more than once. He says it doesn't count as crying though, because they didn't escape his eyes. :) So sweet! He did his vows to me from memory, which was also really awesome. Here were my vows to him:

Hey you!

Today, I affirm you as my partner. This declaration isn't just about making a commitment, you know that has already been done in my heart. Today is an acknowledgement of that commitment. It's more about taking action in a physical way that others can recognize as significant.

At the same time, I find myself not caring at all about how the rest of the world views our love. Tomorrow I will probably go back to caring just a little bit, but at this moment, all I see is you, all of you, the wonderful man who I love more than pickles.

So, here are my vows to you, my loobaloo:

I promise to honor your individuality and your independence, to support and encourage you as you grow and change. I will strive always to love you in a way that makes you more fully yourself, never less.

I promise to always stay silly with you, to talk about farts, to play games and to laugh uncontrollably together, to never completely grow up even when we grow old.

I will always make time to stay up all night talking with you, to tell you my hopes and dreams and fears, and to support you when you tell me yours. I also promise to eventually stop talking long enough so you can fall asleep.

I promise to commit myself not only to you, but again to our family, to recognize that our love is one part of a larger whole. I promise to do my part in making our home a happy one, filled with fun and laughter and love.

Without ANY doubt or reservation, I promise to love you as my husband for all the days of my life.

****

The officiant was really great and she was wearing a purple shirt, so she unknowingly fit into our color scheme! She complimented my chords multiple times and at the end of the ceremony she said that if I ever wanted to start selling them, she could flood me with orders! I told her I wasn't that creative, and besides the ones I made gave me fits. Lol it was nice of her to say though.

The photographer was also great, and I hope his shots turned out. He said it would take a week or so.

Gosh though, wasn't PunkRock handsome! I had the sexiest husband on the planet today, all dapper in his suit. We had a freak out at 10:30 am today when I realized his tie was back at home in Hagerstown. Totally my fault too! I left it. So he had to drive back, but DarkKnight was kind enough to meet him halfway. I was freaking out a little because he was the manpower to set up the stand to hold all of our chords and such, and also, I couldn't get dressed without assistance - corset, remember?

I chilled out though and took the stand up the hill myself (we ended up not having the ceremony on the dock because it had zero shade and the sun was crazy hot.) Then I spent the time he was gone, remaking my veil & fascinator. When he texted to say he was heading back, I popped into the shower and then did my hair and makeup. Then, when he arrived, he helped me into my corset and I finished dressing while he shaved and showered. Everything went well.
 
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Yaaaaay! Congrats! So glad you had a wonderful day, and the pictures are faboo! :D
 
Congratulations! Happiness! Joy! Beautiful!

Wonderful pictures, beautiful colors, happy people! Looking at your pics and reading your story made me teary. So much happiness! And oh yes, you look stunning in the pics, both of you.
 
Thanks again everyone! We are home again now, and I am SO tired. However, there is no rest for me, as I am headed up to NY tomorrow morning, first thing. My brother's baby mama is having a baby shower on Saturday, so my daughter and I need to make an appearance. :)

PunkRockAwesomesauce and I had such a wonderful time at our little marriage house (that's what he callls the place). I miss it quite terribly already, and I will miss us being alone. I had a lot of fun just snuggling with him, splashing in the hot tub, and playing Forbidden Desert. After we left the cottage this morning, we went shopping at a couple of antique-y type stores and walked along the main street shops. We bought a pecan pie to bring home, and some teas and treats for DarkKnight. I also purchased some FABULOUS earrings.

Sigh. I am not happy about being back to the daily meh. Still, I can't wallow - I just placed another grocery shopping order for DarkKnight to pick up tomorrow, so everyone left at home will be set. I paid some utility bills and messed around with the budget. Sigh again.

I seriously need to sit down and work out the budget through October, until my youngest daughter leaves for Nepal. I have to figure out exactly what we need to buy for her (including the plane ticket and remaining vaccinations). I also need to figure out what our fun money is for the summer, and pre-pay some camping trips or beach trips, concerts or brewery canoe trips. We absolutely are going to DC at the end of June, to finish out my daughter's American History class - we're using the Great Courses Smithsonian DVD series and we are going to visit the Smithsonian American History museum.

I also need to buy a new laptop, and I don't have much choice about that, since the one I am using is LONG past its expiration date - I seriously am always scared it's about to crash and burn and leave me without a way to get to my paperwork on my classes.

I think tonight I want to catch up on Game of Thrones (two episodes behind) and snuggle with DarkKnight, but maybe before that, he and I and Punk Rock go eat someplace special. We had talked about ordering in from the Greek restaurant around the corner, but I want to be with both of them, and feel supported and loved. Right now, like I said, I am coming down kind of hard from the excitement from the honeymoon, and I need some love.
 
Wonderful! So happy for you all!
 
Well, that was a quick trip to NY! My youngest and I left our home Friday morning and returned last night. After staying at my mom's for just one evening, I was in no way capable of sleeping there another night. So back home we went, after the baby shower.

Oh, I can't really even pinpoint why. The bed was horrible and I woke up terribly stiff and achy all over - at 4 am, when my mom decided it was time to be awake for the day. That was a huge part of it, for sure. She was very melancholy and that had me down, which was difficult after being so happy about my wedding all week. It was a big emotional drain for me.

Oh, my mom did ask to see pictures and she made positive comments, so that was good. I happened to talk to my sister on the phone prior to traveling, and she avoided the topic, so I asked her if she had seen the photos on Facebook. She was silent for a couple of seconds and then said she had decided not to say anything at all and would rather not discuss the topic. "I'm going to just say you're crazy and leave it at that." I laughed and said that was fine but she had to admit that the house and I looked fabulous. She said - holy shit the house was cute and she was jealous.

She showed up at my mom's house Friday evening with my brother in tow. PunkRock had sent my brother a really nice Zippo and I handed it over to him. (PunkRock was selling a bunch on Facebook and my brother said he liked the one, so PunkRock gifted it to him.) it happened to have PunkRock's initials engraved on it and when my sister heard the origin she started making disparaging comments and rolling her eyes - was our brother REALLY going to use this, especially if it had PUNKROCK'S initials on it - REALLY? I mean, HIS initials. My brother looked away and said, well, yeah. It didn't bother him, it was a nice zippo. I think he was embarrassed at how my sister was acting. As I said goodbye to him the next day, he told me again to tell PunkRock thank you.

So I feel like my brother and my mom are being more open and accepting and respectful, whereas my sister is just now finding herself with an opinion outside of everyone else's and trying to stifle it a little, but not really wanting to do so.
 
I am so freaking out emotionally today about all of the things I need to handle and get through this summer. The bad part is it is all GOOD things, FUN things! But it's work too, to plan.

Number 1 is setting my daughter up for her trip to Nepal. I am setting a goal to have all the research on vaccinations done by mid-June, so I can get her shots finished for her travels in the Fall. With the most recent set of earthquakes, I'm not sure if I should be considering vaccines for some diseases I had previously discounted. Like, there's no malaria worry in Kathmandu, at least there wasn't, but is there now standing water because of collapsed buildings, etc, so now she should get a shot for it? Stuff like that. I also need to purchase all of her clothing and items needed in the next few months. AND her plane ticket AND pay the room and board fee. Helllo, we are going to be so broke! :)

I also need to be buying my new laptop before the end of June. I am seriously done with the one I am using today. It is so slow and just falling apart.

I have a long list of wants for trips and adventures for the summer season from PunkRock and DarkKnight. So I need to start scheduling our events and making sure we can afford them all. High on the list for PunkRock and I is attending the DC concert with Metric and Imagine Dragons. We have a roller derby we are going to go watch next weekend. His game store in Glen Burnie has a birthday celebration coming up, and in July he wants to attend Historicon in Virginia with his friend. We want to go to another glassblowing session too - that was fun! PunkRock also requested some canoeing. DarkKnight really wants to go to a couple of theater productions this summer, and to go camping at least once. Also, possibly go to a retreat someplace alone together for a few days - he wants a break. All of us would like another trip to the ocean, but affordability is probably going to cause that one to be a no-go, unless one of my friends decides to go and offers an open invitation again like last year at Rehoboth. The three of us are going to go to the National Aquarium, and to the Smithsonian Museum of American History with my youngest daughter. So, yeah. I need to budget and schedule all of this, so our summer is awesome. :) And I can't have a proper summer without a few tubing trips thrown in at some point!

I am starting to stress a lot lately too about further future planning. My daughter is uncertain about where she wants to go to school, or if she will even go to college after graduation. I am not huge on pushing college as an option, and especially am not for my baby, because I really question her ability to handle that rigor of classwork. She has short-term and long-term memory issues, and her dyslexia really hinders her. The combination is daunting. She does very well with tasks that utilize her strengths - manual dexterity and imagination. We've had a couple of conversations about the local construction school but she's undecided. I think she would do well to become an apprentice as a welder, or a plumber. She is still interested in the police academy, but she will have to be 21, so she has some time to fill, regardless. PunkRock is taking her shooting often, and she has always enjoyed that. Anyway, her rough plan right now is to go to Nepal in October, come home and do whatever I tell her so she graduates next May :) and then enter some sort of schooling that Fall, while continuing to live at home for at least the first semester. We will then help her transition to an apartment and she will continue on with whatever her dream happens to be at the time. As long as she remains a dependent, she'll receive her adoption subsidy, so paying for an apartment while in school will be easy to accomplish.

I guess this should be more her stress than mine, but I love her and it occupies my thoughts.

This week I plan to work a lot more on Ancestry.com because my mom continues to be interested. I only paid for a month of the overseas info service, and it will run out shortly. My plan to to gather all of the information I can, and then make a physical book or document of some sort to give as a Christmas gift to her and my aunts. Well, to anyone in the family who wants to see it, really. My mom is excited about having a book - she was hesitant with looking at stuff online and would rather have it in her hands to fuss over, if that makes sense.

GAH! Speaking of physical things, I need to finish up my childrens' lifebooks. I have been scrapbooking since I first adopted them - oh hell, over a decade ago - and their albums are still all incomplete. I have made a commitment to myself to finish all 3 of them this year and give them as Christmas gifts. My oldest daughter REALLY wants hers in the worst way. The last couple of years I have not been as excited about working on these, and I need to just suck it up and finish. PunkRock and I went to Michael's last night and I bought some paper sorters at a DEEP discount. I am motivated at the moment to organize my crafting desk and get things ready to work on.

I need to do more paperwork surrounding our retirement plans - both PunkRock and DarkKnight will need more life insurance, and it is currently cost-prohibitive for the amounts I feel are required. So we need to figure out ways for that to happen. We also need to write wills. We have living wills, but that is different. We need to have another finance meeting in the next few weeks, honestly, to go over our budget for the rest of the year, as soon as I have a mind to do it.

I am hosting Zombicide tournament this Thursday at my house, and there are 18 children signed up. I have to make space for this and figure out what scenarios we are going to run, and how I will award prizes. I've purchased a few $5 gift cards and candy. This is going to be a lot of fun, but I have to get the structure finished. :)

I suppose I should stop writing and go get things done! :)
 
I made some progress yesterday with my tournament planning - I have the first game of Zombicide all planned out. I purchased the new mission book a short while back, and I'm going to run C14 on two tables to start out. My daughter and I each played 3 characters last night to check the timing, and though we lost, the scenario ran about 2 and a half hours, which is perfect. I contacted a friend and she is going to drop off her copy of Zombicide today, so I can have the same board set up on two different tables.

So I am glad to have part of the planning done!

Today I need to figure out what mission will be played on the third table, because I have both the Toxic City Mall expansion and the Prison Break versions I could set up - I just need to make sure the scenario's timing matches with the other two. This table will be for players who are new to the game. :)

After these "starter" games are played, I plan to start the huge "last survivor standing" mission with all 18 players on the board at once. This is super exciting! I have some design ideas, but I still need to nail down the final board - I will do that today too.

I also have one more gift card to purchase as a prize, and I can prolly get that done today as well.

My daughter is going to the movies with friends to see Poltergeist today. No thanks! I just went to see Mad Max with PunkRock, and apparently he went and saw it again while I was in NY with DarkKnight, on a bro date. I like that they can hangout like that.

OMG a minute ago, I just got an email that my wedding photos were done - squeeeee! I need to get on my laptop so I can view the low-res versions. Then I need to send the photographer $100 and I will get the high res versions. Freaking out excited right now!
 
I started a thread in a main section of this site, kind of as a how-to and to show others that they too can have a kick-ass commitment ceremony. Here's a photo dump, so I have these pictures here, too!

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I am so very happy with my life and my loves.
 
I can't help but smile, writing it. :) :) :) :)

I spent a chunk of time working on scheduling our summer, yesterday morning. I took our list of fun and actually researched dates and costs and now I have a more fleshed out list. It's actually fairly balanced between what PunkRock would like to do and what DarkKnight would like to do, so that was rather awesome. Now I just have to do the budgeting that will make it all happen. Not happening today - I am about to go shower and then finish cleaning and setting up for our Zombicide tournament. So psyched about that too!
 
Wow! Yesterday was full and busy and the tournament went wonderfully! I ended the evening thoroughly exhausted though, with an aching back, which ended up locking up twice while just laying on the couch. Then DarkKnight woke me up at 2 am, HOWLING from a nightmare. I couldn't get back to sleep for a while, and then when I did, our cat Gus decided it was time for me to be awake.

I awoke this morning at 8 am, still really tired with the realization that my cell phone was dead. I'm still too tired to want to go downstairs and grab the charging cable, so I am just ignoring that fact. :)

I hope to have some time today to work on budgeting for the summer. PunkRock spent part of his date night with me last night, talking about plans and I actually got the month of June all figured out. I am going to be able to go camping with DarkKnight and my daughter mid-July at a local state park - one of my best friends paid for the cabin rental as a surprise. We usually camp in a group, and there was only one cabin site left available, so she paid for mine to be sure I would be there. I was really shocked and surprised and very happy when she messaged me, because I was not going to have the funds to reserve the site until the 12th, and it could have very well been gone by then. My friends are awesomesauce!

So, the camping with DarkKnight is a go. Last night, PunkRock mentioned that he would like to go beach camping at Assateague this year.This means tent camping! There seem to be a few openings in August when we would be able to go, but we will see when I am ready to make reservations if there is still some availability. They are only $30 a night sites, but I still have to fit it in the budget.

The other good news with budgeting last night is that I was able to fit in purchasing tickets to go see Metric and Imagine Dragons with PunkRock at the beginning of July. I am REALLY psyched about this. Again, I have to wait a couple of weeks for that particular paycheck, but odds are there will still be some tickets available.

Also this month - I need to get our cat Gus to the vet for his checkup, I'll be hosting at least one other game club get together for the teens, and I'm going to the dinner theater with DarkKnight.

Today is fairly full. :) I have the budgeting to finish, and I have an orthodontic appointment at 11:30. I only have two more sets of Invisalign to finish! Though, I am due for xrays, which may suggest I need two additional sets. We will see how that goes! Anyway, my daughter has her teen book club to attend in Martinsburg, but I will be able to drive just over to Falling Waters and she'll go the rest of the way with a friend. Then tonight I have a mom's night out, which is this time just around the corner, and it's board games. I am sort of all over board games from the rest of this week, but if I have time I'm going to make wine slushies to take with me, and I am certainly not over those.
 
Wow, uh okay...Invisalign update!!! Exciting news. I went in for my appointment expecting to get my last two sets of aligners, but instead I had all sorts of things done.

First off, I was told that my teeth are awesomesauce at this point, and that I don't need my last two sets of aligners! They did give me a new top aligner but told me it was just for "refinements" and that I should wear my old bottom one until I come in for my next appointment, in two weeks. I had both an X-ray done, and a scan. The orthodontist will be meeting with the guy giving me the implant next week and see what the issues are and we will move forward from there. She is concerned that maybe I will need a new couple of sets of bottom aligners to move my roots apart a little wider. She said from what she can see visually, they look great, but the space under the gum may not be adequate.

In the meantime, they are ordering a temporary retainer for my top teeth, which I can pick up at my next appointment.

Oh, and they took off all of my attachments! If you remember, I had seven of them on my bottom teeth. They ground them all off and now I have zero. There was no discoloration or residue left behind, so that was amazing.

I made my second-to-last payment yesterday too. W00t!

What else yesterday? I dropped my daughter at book club in the afternoon and then met up with PunkRock for an impromptu lunch date around 2 pm. His work had him miss lunch during his shift (he's been working 4 am to 12:30 pm shifts) and had tacked on some overtime, so he was really hungry.

I ended up canceling my mom's night out and had a date night with DarkKnight instead. He hadn't been feeling well, but he wanted to spend some time with me: he had already missed his date night with me Wednesday since I went to game night at the store, and I felt bad for ditching him again. He told me not to worry at all, since he had two date nights on Sunday and Monday, but I was missing him at that point, so, well, fuck it.

We ended up seeing San Andreas at the movie theater, heading over to Boston Market to dinner afterward and then doing some grocery shopping. When we got home, I made a pasta salad for today's BBQ. He boiled the pasta and watched it while I went downstairs and woke up PunkRock, who had slept pretty much the entire evening away. My poor exhausted guy!

PunkRock is actually snoring right now beside me. I'm about to wake him up for sexy times because it feels like it's been forever. :)
 
Have I mentioned how amazeball awesomesauce my life is? I am so very in love, and my guys - separately and together - make me feel so special and cared for and just...yeah. Things are wonderful.

I'm not saying that we couldn't be better off financially, or that emotionally we all don't have work to do, or that things are so perfect that there is nothing wrong at all. Oh hell no. :) But the strength that flows through me from the partnerships I have just makes me feel like our lives are good, and right, and that we can reach every goal we strive for and every dream we focus on. Fuck, that sounds sappy, but it's where I'm at in my head. Life is great.

Ok, enough silly me for tonight. Tomorrow I plan on going to D&D most of the day and then PunkRock and I are going on a date to the roller derby. I've never been so I am psyched to do something so totally different. DarkKnight really wants to go, but he's still sick and he wiped himself out attending the BBQ today. He wasn't going to go anyway, but he needs to stay at home and rest regardless.
 
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