Sunday, April 05, 2009

Good Times

For each year of our boy's life, and even through the process of becoming parents, I've gathered all our many pictures and videos and put them to music on dvd. I swear they must be the most photographed children in history; it would probably take a good 6 hours to watch all those dvds.

Yesterday they were off with their grandparents and so I decided to start on the 6 to 7 year video. A couple days ago Brian told me this song was his "favorite song ever, because it's Icelandic" :-):



Which is cool, because I like the song too. So I started out with that and then looked to add our pictures. I found that the first photos from that month just happened to be from our legal marriage in California, last August.

Remember that? How nice that was before we knew how the story would progress?

This year will forever begin in our family record with that wonderful weekend.

It made me laugh, looking over those photos again. What a great couple of days; it seemed like we'd finally made it over the hill and time would quickly take care of the rest. We were actually in a place where, if something happened to me, I knew my family would be treated as family should be treated. Sure, it wasn't the whole load off, but it was some relief, and I felt I could let down my guard.

And it didn't end there. What a great month: married in Ca, helped my cousin with her art exhibit in Helper, attended a nephew-in-law's wedding in Moab, and had our huge family reunion in Sun Valley. It was a near perfect month, made all the better by the fact that I knew my husband and kids had this added bit of legal protection.

I'll put the video of August I have below, though you'll have to imagine in the song (Not yet in my life have I violated copyright law, and I'm kind of hoping to avoid it just to see if I can :-)).



Anyway, that's what I want to get back to. I finished putting this video together from our August marriage to our February Hawaii trip and it really put what has happened this year into condensed perspective; each snap shot fading in and out in seconds jogs the memory of weeks.

I watched this video as it makes it to November and past, and read those two posts after Proposition 8 won (or, heck, most of my posts since) and can see this sense of being pathetically unable to protect my family take hold in me, and I feel I'm just now getting a hold on it, even though I naively thought it'd be a matter of days back on November 5th. So, yeah, thank you for your patience :-). It's taken too long but I will reassemble an optimistic sense of fairness, my sense of the public's standards of evidence, and my sense of what to expect from strangers. I'll reassemble where I was 8 months ago.

If Ca doesn't decide soon, maybe we should just head off to Iowa; speed up the process :-).

5 comments:

Java said...

I thought of you when I heard the Iowa decision. I know you're itching to get out of Utah (well, off and on) and move to where your family will have at least better legal protection.

Hidden said...

Thank you so much for this post.

The video of Modest Mouse did not bring tears to my eyes - this did. Because your family is so amazing, and so cute, and I'm soooo jealous. I know not everything's perfect for you, there are still battles, and stress, and struggles, but you have so much to be grateful for. You children are so beautiful. Thank you again.

Unknown said...

I could never picture myself living in CA... Iowa is pretty tempting for me though :)

I loved the silent video. I have said it once, and I will say it again: I'm jealous. Thank you for being an example.

El Genio said...

The longer we have to wait for a verdict, the more likely the judges are to decide in our favor. I think their knee-jerk reaction was to uphold prop 8, but the passage of time seems to indicate that there is some intense debate going on behind the scenes. Fingers crossed!

Scot said...

It will be nice Java; it will be nice.

Thank you Hidden; I do have a lot to be grateful for, and I regret letting prop 8 get to me.

Evan: "I could never picture myself living in CA... Iowa is pretty tempting for me though :)"

You just have to find the right place in CA :-); we loved where we were in in San Diego but could never see us living in, say, LA.

And El Genio, man, I sure do hope you're right.