Self-assessment

Sometimes what I think about myself isn’t very accurate. Sometimes I think I’m not bothered by things when I really am. Like all the calls I’ve been getting from Creepy Guy. I mean, I knew it was bothering me, I just didn’t realize how much until I was sitting by the landline phone yesterday and jumped when it rang. And then I refused to pick it up…even though I was sitting right there.

“It’s not going to be your phone stalker,” Andrew told me, “He uses your cell phone number.”

But he walked across the room and answered the phone himself, anyway, because he’s nice like that. I thought it was funny that I reacted that way to hearing the phone ring since I know Creepy Guy only has my cell phone number so whoever was calling our landline wouldn’t be him.

**As a little update, he’s calling less and less frequently. He only called six times yesterday and twice today. And my phone doesn’t ring when he calls so it doesn’t really bother me that much.**

Then today at the doctor’s office, Dr. Omar asked us how many children we had when he found out we we Latter-day Saints.

“Just Rachel,” we told him, “And one on the way.”

“Have you been married long?” he asked.

“Well, yeah,” we said, “It will be four years in December.”

“So you haven’t been married very long at all,” he said, implying that we were newlyweds still.

Almost four years really doesn’t seem like “newlywed” to us. We were talking about it on our walk home from the doctors office. In our branch we joke that if you visit more than one week in a row you’ll be asked to give a talk and if you stay any longer than that you’ll be given a calling. The turnover in our branch is about as frequent and dramatic as the BYU student wards. It’s a new branch every year.

Being married is kind of like that. You’re newlywed for a week or two and then you feel like you’ve been married forever. Of course, both those examples are over-exaggerations. Although we don’t consider ourselves newlyweds anymore, we certainly did for the first year or two. And it took us more than just a couple of weeks to adjust to living with each other. Now we can’t imagine life without each other and it seems like we’ve just always been together.

But then I was talking with Sister McCallister on the phone this evening about a Crockpot the Lewises left behind when they moved that we thought was hers and she thought was ours.

“Do you know anyone trying to get rid of a vacuum? Ours gave up the ghost and I missed all the move-out giveaways this year… First our Crockpot, now our vacuum. I guess after five years things are just starting to go.”

President and Sister McCallister have lived in Cairo for five years! Andrew and I haven’t even been married for five years! We haven’t even been married for four years! We haven’t been married long enough for a Crockpot to die!

Maybe we really are still newlyweds, although I have already killed one vacuum in the short amount of time we’ve been married so surely we can’t be considered newly newlyweds.