Progress

Each night after dinner this past week found me hurrying to be outside. I've discovered a great and wonderful desire in myself to be outdoors busily snapping photos of flowers about our yard. Hugo follows close behind. I realized how very much I look forward to this time of day. How I can't wait to walk about the yard and check the progress of the plants. Have they changed? Have they grown? Anything new popping up? This practice of walking and looking and describing things to Hugo is very calming and soothing at the beginning of the wind down to our day. It also allows me time to think things over and sometimes even offers a little peek of inspiration brewing and sprouting inside me.

Every so often Cesar and I seem to take a step back and look at our relationship, evaluate it. Where are we? Have we changed? Have we grown? Anything new popping up? A few years ago I thought I was pretty smart. That I had finally pegged exactly what I wanted for us. A goal. I said to him that I wanted to find a way to be The Best Couple we knew. Cesar looked right at me and said that we were the best couple that we knew. Okay. That's nice, but I guess I wanted more. The problem was my goal I think. Too big. Too vague. We needed an outline. An outline to serve as a lifelong goal to become The Best Couple we knew.

Well, nothing happened. I didn't do much myself about this new smart idea goal of mine. Things were quiet for us. Not much change, growth as a couple, or things popping up.

Tonight I read my monthly Relief Society Newsletter. I found that parts of the message held great meaning for me. Alissa Madsen wrote of the Lord blessing us daily with tender mercies of simpleness, sweetness and constancy to fortify and protect us in troubled times. She shared a recent example from her own life and encouraged us to do the same with a friend or loved one.

I'd like to share openly here in this blog of mine, my gratefulness to my husband Cesar. Last night I hosted a sleepover for eight teenage girls. We made pizzas, took a faith walk through the woods at sundown, enjoyed a fire and sticky, yummy smores, and watched two movies. I headed up to bed sometime after 3am. The girls? Sleep??

But what of my gratefulness to my husband? When the sleepover was originally scheduled I thought Cesar wouldn't be home until late, late that Friday night. He would arrive about the time when the girls would be quieting down and would only have to suffer through their endless trips in and out of the bathroom in the morning. They would be out of his hair by 10am. Things turned out that Cesar 's schedule changed. He called with the good news that he would be able to join us for our pizza dinner. Uh oh. My well thought out plan had a wrench in it. I was nervous. He'd had a busy and long week and now his home was filled to the brim with three extra adults and eight hyper teen girls. How was Cesar going to react?

Here is how my gratefulness played out. My husband smiled, chatted, made the rounds and introduced himself to a few new faces. He helped with Hugo. He hugged me. He sliced up pizza hot from the oven. He split wood for our bonfire. He hooked us up with much needed flashlights for our walk in the woods. He found Bella after she got lost in the woods. He bathed Hugo, read him stories and put him to bed. He vacated the TV so that the girls could watch the movie The Village.

He made my night so much easier. His simple gift of sweetness of spirit and his tender backing of my needs inspires a fullness of love in me for him.

A second part of the RS Newsletter which spoke to me were the words of Elder Jeffrey R. Holland.

"Like all gifts 'which cometh from above,' words are 'sacred, and must be spoken with care, and by constraint of the Spirit' (D&C 63:64).
"It is with this realization of the power and sanctity of words that I wish to caution us, if caution is needed, regarding how we speak to each other and how we speak of ourselves. There is a line from the Apocrypha which puts the seriousness of this issue better that I can. It reads, 'The stroke of the whip maketh marks in the flesh: but the stroke of the tongue breaketh the bones' (Ecclesiasticus 28:17).


Words. Cesar doesn't know fully how I feel about his help last night. I haven't made my feelings known to him through a clear use of words. I did say thank you but didn't expound what my simple "thank you" meant. He'll read this entry at some point. He'll know that I let everyone who reads this know about my goal for us. Most likely he wont like it. He wont like me sharing intimate details about our relationship with so many. About my love for us. He already assumes that my sisters know everything and now he'll have a thread of truth to his argument.

I wish to share the best of myself with this man whom I love. I don't always do this. I need reminders. I need to better acknowledge the positive progress of our growth as a couple. To document here and more importantly, in my mind and heart, our actions of goodness and the use of words of sweetness with one another.

Have we changed? Have we grown together? Anything new popping up?