Jananas

I’ve read a lot of books this year, with a good balance between fiction and general life improvement/business books. One of the biggest lessons is that sometimes you just need to make a decision and run with it. You could spend hours or weeks or months or years evaluating options and agonizing over whether you’ve made the perfect/right choice. Or you can cut out all that worry (and wasted energy). Make a decision and GO.

We’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last few weeks talking about wedding stuffs and planning things. People seem shocked that we’ve already done things like reserve our venue and our caterer. [really folks, I'm a planner here!].

1 – If we make a decision now, we don’t need to worry about needing to make a decision. I’m hoping that it will mean less stress over the next year and more time for us to enjoy life.

2 - I’m trying to get decisions made now so that we can go back to being our normal, non-wedding selves. I really, really don’t want the next year of my life to be all about the wedding. Its important, but I don’t want to lose myself or our relationship if that makes sense.

3 – We’re 5 hours away from where our reception is going to be held and we don’t have free time to make multiple trips to view places/taste food. So we put a little faith into the universe and just went with some things sight unseen. The way I figure, even if we find a place that we 100% love and had visited and was perfect, etc. things can still go wrong the day of.

Instead I’m going to spend all of that energy loving Jason and having adventures with him. Sounds like a pretty good plan to me.

The cat is out of the bag. Jason & I are engaged. It wasn’t really a surprise. We’ve been together for three years and have spent lots of time over the last while talking about weddings and equally fun things like immigration. Jason had even vocalized that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me. (cue inner girl going Squeee!)

It was this weird in between space where we knew it was going to happen eventually, but I wasn’t able to be excited/start planning. Traditional gender roles would have us believe that as the woman I was supposed to just sit back and wait. And wait. And wait until someone else made a decision for me and for us. It was a position that made me feel powerless and weak and frustrated.

The only reason I felt that way though was because I’d allowed myself to discount a totally viable option. I bought into the limitations of traditional gender roles. I didn’t have to wait because I had the power to ask too.

So yes, I asked Jason to marry me. We were tucked into bed talking one evening and I just had to. The question was sitting in my mouth, taking up space and weighing me down. I knew that if I didn’t ask, I’d focus on it and drive myself crazy. So I asked and he said yes.

And because I’m me, I then asked if I could wear a ring that I adore. My father gave my mother this ring years and years ago. Its an opal surrounded by little diamonds. Its the only ring that I’ve ever liked wearing (this doesn’t mean that I’ll always wear it though because I’m really not a jewelry sort of girl) and in my head its always been a left hand ring finger sort of ring.

Now, for ring pron.

We made a day trip to Shediac on Saturday morning. It was all of a 20 minute drive from downtown Moncton. Sadly the weather was not cooperating at all, so we ended up trying to pose for photos in the rain. We did, however get some fun shots of the giant lobster (giant!!!).

It had some pretty awesome realistic parts – including mouth bits and giant claws. The picture below is of our friend Naomi, Jason, and I all looking out to see (even if we couldn’t see very far at all).

After playing at being a tourist, looking in the tourist shops, and taking photos we headed through a traffic jam in downtown Shediac. Finally decided on a place to eat and I tried lobster for the very first time, even if I wasn’t particularly adventurous and just went with the lobster roll.

Jason and I are suckers for roadside attractions. On our drive from Halifax to Moncton we saw signs for Mastodon Ridge – of course we had to stop. Turns out that its also a halfway point between the equator and the north pole which is sort of neat.

The Mastodon wasn’t that much to look at, but we did get obligatory pictures. First up, that Mastodon itself!

Next, Jason next to the Mastodon as a size reference.

There were also some fun little Stone Age / Flintstones concrete items. The first gives you an idea of the kind of car we were able to rent.

The last one just proves that Jason is too tall for the Stone Age.

The only thing that could have made this road side attraction better would have been a better information section (lots of it was down/not working). Oh, and if Mastodon had been playing.