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Let’s say, hypothetically speaking of course (cough, cough), that you were a complete idiot and lost your engagement ring.

Thankfully the insurance gods smiled down at you and accepted your claim. Now you have a pocket full of money and a shit ton of options as to what to do with it.

Would you…

A. Create an exact replica of your lost ring? Why?

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Hi everyone! My name is Maggie, and I’m thrilled to join the ranks of fabulous women over here on EAD Living!

If my mug over on the right looks familiar, that’s because I recently recapped my May 2009 beach wedding for EAD Weddings. (Do campaign logos, red and blue patterns, and DIY crafts galore ring a bell?) I also hang out full-time at The Freckled Citizen, so you might know me from that red- and blue-splashed site, too (what can I say, old habits die hard).

Now that wedding madness is behind us (although admittedly, we have yet to print a single wedding photo… not quite sure what we are waiting for!), I’m a busy girl. There are work demands, sure, but there’s also kitchen adventuring, weekend getaways, girls’ nights out, and that ever-present question: What’s Next?

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(image via Flickr)

A few weeks ago, my husband went on a business trip for a couple of days. I was dreading sleeping alone again; J hasn’t been deployed in quite a while and I’ve gotten used to spooning before we drift off to dream world.  To my surprise, the first night he was gone, I had the best sleep that I can remember having in a long time. It was one of those sleeps where you wake up in the same position in which you fell asleep. I didn’t toss or turn or wake up in the middle of the night. I experienced a blissfully deep slumber. Was it because I was alone in the bed?

According to a recent study by Dr. Neil Stanley at Surrey University, sleeping in a separate bed from your partner can be beneficial to your relationship and to your health, as sharing a bed can lead to harmful sleep disturbances. “Poor sleep is linked to depression, heart disease, strokes, lung disorders and accidents,” says Dr. Stanley. Plus, if you’re tired, you’re more miserable, he explains, and that can lead to divorce. Divorce caused by sharing a bed?!

Unlike this writer’s husband, J has never unintentionally punched me in the face in the middle of the night. However, he does sleep smack in the middle of the bed, leaving me with less than half of the mattress’s surface area to claim as my own space. He radiates heat in the summer and steals the blanket in the winter. But he’s the best at cuddling before we fall asleep and the first person I want to see when I open my eyes in the morning.  So what if every night I don’t experience the best sleep of my life? I think I’d be more miserable if we slept in separate bedrooms — or worse, in separate twin or double beds in the same room. So near yet so far! Although there is something to be said for having a room of one’s own…

How does sleep affect your marriage?

At the wedding I shot on Saturday the DJ leaned over as I was signing the guestbook and asked “When are you getting married?” He inquired, of course, hoping that I was in the middle of wedding planning and looking for someone to provide some music for the big party.

Why would he ask this? Because my left hand still looks like this.

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Do I mention a lack of time in all of my posts? When I was pregnant and dreamed of being a stay at home mom, I thought I’d have all this time to make dinner and when my husband got home from work I’d meet him at the door wearing my high heels and beautiful dress with my delicious meal waiting on the table for him. The baby would be peacefully napping and the dogs will have been fed and snoozing on the floor. But I don’t live in Stepford and I’m not perfect.

After we got married, we were pretty much on our own every night for supper. I got home a lot earlier than my husband did and I was usually ready to eat well before he ever came home. He’d come home around 8:00 p.m. and not be too hungry, so he’d eat a bowl of cereal. Unless we went to a restaurant, we usually weren’t eating together. But when the baby was born, I wanted to make family dinners a priority.

I have cooked one meal since the baby was born. One. To my credit, our friends brought meals to us for twenty days after the baby arrived. We didn’t have to think at all about what we were going to eat. It was just there.

Now that he is two months old, it’s about time I figured out this time management thing. Now, I’m not going to say anything to stir up a debate about who has more free time between stay at home moms or working moms, but I will say that I’m busier than I’ve ever been in my life. My free time happens when the baby takes a nap. I know it will get a little easier as he gets older and is able to play more and entertain himself for a few minutes, but right now he needs me every second of every day.

Meal planning is the answer to my Stepford dream. On Saturday, I make a list of the meals that I want to prepare during the week and the ingredients needed for each meal. On Sunday, I grocery shop for everything I need and on Sunday night, I begin the preparations for Monday night’s meal. Having the necessary ingredients at hand is essential. I definitely don’t have time to zip down the street to the grocery store to pick up the green onion that I forgot.

Because there are only two of us, we can eat leftovers for at least one day. There’s no need for any food to go to waste. I’ve got a stack of some good recipes that can be split into two casserole dishes so one can be frozen for a later date. So while the baby naps, I get dinner started and I finish up when my husband comes in from work. As he progresses with his milestones, I will have a little more time to get back into cooking and will be able to move away from casseroles and back into fixing delicious pork tenderloin and fresh vegetables.

How do you make it work for your family? Do you manage to get dinner on the table every night?

A month later, the cat is out of the bag. I got married and I didn’t change my name. (*insert shock and awe *) I will come right out and admit that it I find it rather insane that in 2009, people still assume that I changed my name just because I got married. Honestly, in the last month I have found myself outright stunned by the large contingency of people who are taken aback upon learning that, no, I did not in fact change my name. How is it that such a thing is still somehow shocking, surprising, perhaps even a little taboo? As if retaining my maiden name somehow makes me less married than had I forfeited my name to take another. So, I’m just going to put it out there - no, I didn’t change my name. And honestly? I think it’s one of the best decisions I ever made. Not that this was a decision I entered into lightly. It was a source of great debate and personal reflection, but in the end, the decision was clear.

{Source unknown}

My great debate about whether or not to change my name was not something I publicly discussed nor blogged about before I was married. In fact, it took me a while to figure it out myself. I had a lot of mixed emotions at first, but in the end it was a surprisingly easy decision. I debated changing my name, but keeping my maiden name professionally. I debated taking my maiden name as my middle name. One thing I didn’t consider was hyphenating - it would have required far too many syllables for my taste. Ultimately, the only thing that felt right was making no change at all. So that’s what I did. Nothing. I have yet to have a friend get married and not change their name, most being outright gleeful to do so, and so I understand that this lodges me firmly in some kind of minority category. I’m ok with that. Ultimately, this was a decision I made for myself, in consultation with my then fiancé, and it wasn’t a decision that required the input nor approval of anyone else. Which, is good, because I haven’t received approval from very many people, most of my largely conservative family included….despite it being their name I was unable to part with. The irony, huh?

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To the married women out there: do you ever wonder if you and your husband would be matched on those dating websites? I mean, don’t sites like E-harmony and Match.com make each person fill out ridiculously long questionnaires to help identify key traits, similar tastes, and common goals? I met my husband in college but sometimes I catch myself wondering if the internet fates would have aligned us together unknowingly, should we have needed to go that route. Do our personalities fit together on paper as nicely as they do in real life?

There are so many ways that we are literally the same person, but just different genders. We’re both first-borns, both leaders, and we’re fairly outspoken ; we are active, competitive, and incredibly stubborn; we both feel satisfied helping others, thus the exact same career choice in health care; we’re both sarcastic brats who put on a tough front while being tender-hearted on the inside; you get my point, I’m sure. But this post is about one big fatty difference we have. I wonder if the dating websites have a question that reads, “Would you rather die by heat or by cold?” because if they do, we’d never match up as potential soul mates.

Nate was born in Wisconsin which boasts extremely cold winters. I was born in Missouri which boats extremely hot and humid summers. We are both products of our environment, without a doubt, and for some reason this is just now hitting me after 2 years of marriage and 7 years together. It was obvious way back when, just by looking at our younger selves in college.

Picture this: it’s a cold and snowy day as college students walk to and from their classes, all bundled up in coats and gloves. Then you see this one girl literally running across the quad with her gigantic winter jacket pulled securely around every inch of exposed skin, hood and all. She does not stop to say hello to her friends, for she has her eyes on the prize—getting into the next building to shelter her from the cold. She becomes a mega-biyatch when the temperatures dip below freezing so you might as well let her run from class to class just to avoid her wrath.

Then there is this adorable Wisconsin transplant who decided to attend college in St. Louis. Neither he nor his northern parents had a clue what STL summers would be like, but they found out quickly as they moved their beloved son into the dorms in August (the hottest and humidest month eva). Said WI boy calls his mother after 3 days in a non-air conditioned dorm room and begs her to ship a window AC unit to him. He might die without it. He really might. He has now decided that Missouri summers are his own personal hell and he honestly does not know if he can survive four years in this heat. (Of course, it’s all worth it in the end when he meets that crazy biyatch who sprints around to avoid the cold. He’s glad he stuck it out in St. Louis, don’t worry.)

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Memories are very important to me. When we found out that we were expecting a baby, Todd got our family a Canon Rebel. Then we purchased a pretty good little video camera after he was born. We don’t want to miss a second of his life and want to make sure that we capture the important little moments for him to look back on later.

Scrapbooking used to be one of my biggest hobbies. In college, my roommate and I would pull out all of our scrapbooking materials on a Saturday morning and sit and watch movies while scrapbooking for two days.

I love to scrapbook and have high hopes of putting together some gorgeous albums for Hudson that will be his someday. Here’s the problem: I don’t have a lot of free time! Scrapbooking requires space, making a mess, planning, and cleaning up. It could take 45 minutes to complete one page. That’s the extent of nap time some days.

My other option is to get some beautiful leather albums where I can just slip the photo into the sleeve and move on to the next one. I still have some scrapbooks from college that I haven’t completed and would like to finish before starting a new project. I have found some beautiful leather albums that can be engraved with his name and the year.

I guess I just have some dreams of being the super mom that scrapbooks her child’s entire life and gives it to him as a gift at his high school graduation. (I had some friends whose mothers did this for them in high school and I was seriously impressed—and jealous.)

How do you store your memories? Photo boxes? Albums? Scrapbooks?

Do you set aside entire Saturdays to catch up on your project or do you just find a few minutes here and there to work on them?

I will fully admit that I love to eat out. With the plethora of fantastic restaurants in Las Vegas, I could eat out every night. We don’t of course because of the expense, and Nick prefers eating at home. I do enjoy cooking and learning new recipes and techniques, but most days I don’t have the energy for it after a long day of work, so I take the easy way out. In attempt to change my ways, I’ve decided to start planning out our meals weekly again.

Last year before wedding and moving madness took over our lives, I freelanced exclusively and enjoyed planning a weekly meal plan. Nick and I would grocery shopping for the majority of our meals on Sunday before or after mass and I’d pick up perishable (or forgotten) items every other day or so. I used the What to Eat notepad from KnockKnockthat I purchased from Anthropologie for a while, and I’ll be breaking it out again.

Image from KnockKnock

To keep myself interested in cooking, I like trying a new recipe or two each week. Weeknight dinners have to be quick, easy, and somewhat healthy. My current sources for recipes that meet these requirements are:

• Everyday Food and the Everyday Food editors’ blog, Dinner Tonight
• The Pioneer Woman Cooks (Okay, I’ll admit not always healthy, but almost always easy – I love Ree’s photos that show every detail, leaving no room for error!)
• Back issues of Every Day with Rachael Ray (I am somewhat over these. I have my go-to recipes, but after a while all of the recipes seem to be the same. I’ve stopped buying this magazine because of that.)
• Better Homes and Gardens (The quick, easy meals section is great.)

On the weekends, I enjoy busting out my Martha Stewart cookbooks and creating a feast or making more complicated recipes from Smitten Kitchen and other food blogs. While I like the blogs and/or magazines I currently use for weekly meal planning, I’m always searching for more sources so I have more recipes in my repertoire.

So now I want to know – what are you favorite resources for easy, delicious weeknight recipes?

Several inquiring minds have asked about my favorite items received off our registry and, while this may seem like a post more suited for the EAD Weddings, I decided to run with it over here in hopes that ya’ll like sneak-peeks into other folks’ homes just as much as I do!

Warning: I’m skipping over the items that I would guess 95% of American brides register for - we all know we love our colorful Kitchenaid mixers and our china pattern (if we went that route), and I would bet that most couples get great use out of their Calphalon / Le Creuset / All-Clad, etc.  So I’ll be concentrating on items that (a) surprised me with their usefulness and/or quality, or (b) are a bit out of the ordinary.

First up… a Good Quality Wood Cutting Board

We have the Artisan Cutting Board from Williams-Sonoma and I freakin’ love this thing!  Its big enough for a decent work station yet unobtrusive enough to leave out on the counter all the time.  Its light, making transfers to pots on the stove a snap.  And its good looks enable it to work double-duty as a serving platter (great for a cheese display).  Synthetic cutting boards definitely have their place in my kitchen, but I use this one every day and never put it away.

Basic White Dinnerware

If you know me, this one probably comes as a shocker because I love color!  I have candy-apple-red appliances, citrus-colored Le Creuset pieces, and the only thing in the “whites” laundry pile at our house are Evs’ undershirts and my athletic socks.  Even the china on our registry features a bright turquoise pattern.  But for some strange reason, my practical side took over when it came to everyday dinnerware (we chose Pottery Barn’s Great White Coupe collection).  I had half-convinced myself that we would end up taking all of it back in exchange for something more vibrant like Fiestaware (which I still adore), but food just looks so nice and clean and pretty atop the blank canvas of white dishes.  Plus, I love mixing these dishes with my collection of funky table linens and appetizer plates.

California Poppy Collection at World Market

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