Archive for June, 2012

Committed: The Ties that Bond

with Angella Dykstra

I'm a mom of three, a professional accountant, and an amateur photographer and writer. I am not a marriage expert. But my husband and I take "Til death do us part" seriously, and here I'll be sharing how we keep our marriage strong while we both do that insane work-life juggle.

Check out my Work It, Mom! profile and my blog, Dutch Blitz.

Do you and your spouse need an interpreter?

Categories: communication, marriage

2 Comments

My husband and I were in our kitchen the other night after the kids went to bed; We had dueling laptops on the table as we both had deadlines to meet, and we sat back to discuss a few things. I’m not sure what happened exactly, but I’m pretty sure that he started speaking Klingon and I started channeling Beaker and then we were in the DeLorean and I don’t even know what happened after that.


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How often do you go away together?

Categories: holidays, marriage, travel

3 Comments

A friend and I were chatting over lunch about wanting/needing a weekend away with our respective husbands. She commented that it had been far too long since they went away together — it’s been almost a year. They have a great support system and a lot of family nearby, which means that they can leave their kids in good hands and enjoy time away together.


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What do you do on the weekend?

Categories: dating, marriage

1 Comment

Weekends are when we recharge. Well, except for the three hours we spend at soccer EVERY SATURDAY MORNING. (This Saturday is the last day of soccer! Cue the fanfare!)

Aside from soccer, our weekends are pretty wide open. Friday nights are “pub night” (homemade pizza and appetizers) and Saturday nights alternate between family time and date night. Date nights are a necessity for us in order to keep us connected.

Sunday is church in the morning and we try to keep Sunday afternoons pretty low-key. We play outside, we go on hikes, we eat a steak dinner, we recharge before Monday rears its ugly head.

What do you do on the weekend?

Who manages your finances?

Categories: communication, finances

4 Comments

I am an accountant by day and a writer by night (Do i get a cape?). Because I am a numbers girl, I managed our finances from the beginning of our marriage. Budgets and spreadsheets and mortgage payments, oh my!

Then I went back to work full-time when my husband was working part-time, and I released the reins. Long work days plus an hour commute meant that I simply did not have time to stay on top of everything. He stepped up, and has been on the ball with bill payments and budgets and all of the things a non-accountant only does because he has to. (We have always talked about everything and where we’re at financially, but someone has to do all of the banking/budgeting.)


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Did you have a ‘friendly’ divorce?

Categories: Uncategorized, divorce, family, marriage

3 Comments

While I have never been divorced, I am a child with divorced parents. They have each been divorced a couple of times over, and I wouldn’t call their splits ‘friendly’. Well, except for my Dad’s divorce from his third wife, who I call Mom (It’s complicated). It was a rocky split at the beginning, but they have worked out a pretty good system for parenting their four kids. They are in no way BFF’s, nor do they hang out, but they don’t harbor anger and vent it in front of the kids.


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Do you have good friends of the opposite sex?

Categories: friends, marriage

1 Comment

Aw, @RileyArmstrong is in the (my) house. Memorieeeeeees.My oldest child is in fourth grade, and this has been the year where he branched out from his usual posse of BOYS to have a posse that includes boys and … GIRLS. He’s asked a number of times if that was ‘weird’ or ‘okay’ and I assured him that having girl friends doesn’t mean that they are your girlfriends. I told him that I had/have a lot of guy friends and that Dad had/has a lot of girl friends.

Granted, most of my current guy friends are husbands of my girl friends, and it’s not like we go out to movies or hang out without our respective spouses all together. My husband works with a bunch of women and while they are friends and get along famously, it’s not like they call each other to just chat or go out for dinner or anything. While some people may have friends like that, we just think that steps too close to a line that could get you into trouble.


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How old were you when you got engaged?

Categories: marriage

10 Comments

Miley Cyrus Got engaged to Liam Helmsworth, but you probably knew that.

The Internet is all in an uproar because she is nineteen and he is twenty-two. THE HORROR. Except that many of our grandparents married at that age, if not younger, and I have many (MANY) friends who married that young and are still going strong after twenty years.


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Do either of you have a green thumb?

Categories: family

3 Comments

We're having a garden party this afternoon. Herbs, planted!I grew up with a Dad who loves to garden. Before he switched to condo life, he had a greenhouse and would grow anything and everything. Even now, the large deck of his condo is covered with a lot of greenery.

Back when I was a young girl living in the big city, my Dad would bring me potted plants or mini rose bushes and I would inevitably kill every single one. I even killed ivy, which is pretty much impossible to kill. It’s something to do with the plants needing to be watered regularly? Or something?


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Was your marriage proposal public or private?

Categories: marriage, wedding

5 Comments

I wrote about the night of our engagement a few months ago. Dinner out with his parents, feigned car trouble, then a proposal on a dock in the town we have called home for the past eleven years.

It was romantic and amazing and PERFECT. I would not change a thing. Yet, I love to read or see about other proposals and all of them get me weepy and full of snot because LOVE, MAN.


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