This Friday JJJ aka: Depends on my mood.
What I love:He looks good in a cowboy hat or a business suit and wears them both daily. But not together, that would be creepy.
Hobbies: Building furniture, remodeling homes, playing sports with our kids, laughing with me. Seriously. and I will celebrate five years of marriage, hence the Ooph logo.  I spent some time Sunday looking through our wedding photos and reminiscing about the day we got married.  I know I am biased but it was an insanely fun wedding, complete with hay bales, cowboy hats, Budweiser and margarita popsicles to help our guests cope with the hot September afternoon.  I have only looked at the photos one other time right after the wedding and then promptly shoved them into a box in hopes of eventually finding the time to arrange them perfectly into a photo album.  Yeah right. That’s as likely to happen as me knitting matching Christmas sweaters for all three of my boys.  Besides why the box hate? 

I couldn’t have been more surprised when J asked me to marry him if he had asked me the first day we met.  Mostly because getting my husband to commit was about as easy as birthing triplets, drug free, alone, while driving a car 75 miles per hour down the highway and explaining to your teenager via cell phone that NO you can’t take him over to a friend’s house because you are busy giving birth to his three new siblings and would he mind not rolling his eyes just this once PLEASE even if you can’t see him.  Also, because we weren’t dating at the time, but I am getting ahead of myself.

His fears of commitment ran deep. Add to that my two children and an ex-husband and well, enough said.  Then again, it could have all just been an act to put me through sufficient hell for metaphorically kicking his teeth in the day we met.

It was a sunny June day at the beach in 2000 and I was riding a white horse along the shoreline, hair flying behind me in the wind and in the distance I saw a handsome man practicing his jousting moves.  Kidding.  We did meet at the beach in June of 2000, but it was beer and volleyball not fairy tales, which suites me just fine because I am not the kind of girl that believes in fairy crap. 

I had come down to the beach that morning with someone that I started dating the week before.  He introduced me to his large group of friends and then a couple of hours later had to leave to pick his mother up from the airport.  My boys were with their dad for the weekend and I didn’t have anyplace else to go, so I decided to stay and get to know everyone better.  I hadn’t lived in San Diego long, was working full time, a single mom and I was in desperate need of some friends.  How lucky for me that I stayed because that is precisely where our story begins.  Well, sort of.  It did begin, but it also ended.  It would start up again, but not until a year later.

I am not one of those people that believes in love at first site, but chemistry is a different story and SWEET SUMMER NIGHTS did J and I have chemistry right from the start.  There was something about him that day (and still to this day) that took my breath.  He was so confident and comfortable in his skin, though not at all arrogant.  There was a kindness about him. He was charming and OMG so sexy.  There was that cowboy hat, the Texas charm (minus the accent) and you got the immediate impression that his mother had raised him to treat a lady like a lady. And he was FUNNY.  We laughed and laughed together that day and then laughed some more. Still do.

We spent an hour or so chatting, playing volleyball, flirting, joking and getting to know each other, when it suddenly occurred to me that I needed to pack up because I had a date that night to meet the mother of the guy that had originally brought me to the beach. I excused myself and started packing up while J wandered around talking to other friends. 

Just as I stepped off the beach my date called to confirm dinner with his mother at 6:00 P.M. that evening.  That is where it all went south in a hurry.  I said my date’s name as I was ending the conversation.  Something like, “Yes Fred I will be there at six and am looking forward to it”, then I hung up. I turned around to see that J had jogged over and was standing next to me.  Here’s the tiny little problem.  Actually there were two.  One, my date was a friend of J’s and two, J had jogged over to ask me out. It was clear as I looked at his face that the pieces of what I was doing at the beach were all clicking into place and that I had just gone from a potential prospect to a bitch in about two seconds flat.

In my defense, which I have stated OVER AND OVER, for eight and a half years, I thought he knew that I had come to the beach with a friend of his.  How could I have known that he wasn’t part of the group when I arrived?  There were TONS of hotties in trunks and bikinis and the girls all seemed so smart and FREAKING SKINNY.  It was all so overwhelming for a girl from Indiana that was just trying desperately not to say something stupid like, “So do you all match the color of your socks to your sweaters out here in California too?”  Not to mention, that sucking my stomach into my spinal cord for five straight hours had left me with an oxygen deficiency.  I TRULY believed we were on the same page and harmlessly flirting.  WRONGO. 

I left the beach that day thinking of him and his face when I turned around.  I still think of it today and it gives me a pit in my stomach.  Probably less because I feel bad all these years later and more because I know if I am fortunate enough to live to be 102 my husband will NEVER let me live it down.

It was the following summer, almost to the day, that we would again sit and laugh on the beach together.  It was no accident.  I had thought of him often over the last year and I was now single and had done some checking and learned, much to my pleased surprise, he was as well. I also knew he was going to the beach that day. I packed my bag, grabbed a posse of gals and headed down to the beach with high hopes of seeing him. 

I had no idea how he would treat me when he saw me.  The one brief encounter I had with him over the past year started with me walking up to him with a smile and saying hello and him grunting out the word, “hi”, and walking off. But, when my girlfriend leaned over and whispered, “He’s here,” those same butterflies started flying around and one look at him told me that it was worth the risk of embarrassment to try again.