I’ve told the story on this blog a few times before how Shea and I technically got married three times (with the related joke that most men can’t keep track of one anniversary and I have to remember three. Or, flipping that, I have three chances to remember it!)
To recap…
Our Three Weddings
* Feb 6, 2003 – legal wedding in our living room in Calgary with two witnesses and the cheapest JP I could find in the entire Calgary Yellow Pages (and yes, I called them all.)
* Mar 5, 2003 – married on the beach in the Mexican Mayan Riviera in front of just over a dozen guests. (This is the one we generally “count” as our real anniversary.)
* Aug 3, 2003 – we planned to have a “mock wedding” in front of guests at a reception in our small town but some guests were late, our bar man was already drunk, we didn’t have time to do a rehearsal plus the karaoke machine was warming up so we skipped it.
Anyhow, even though the March date is the one we “count”, today is a pretty significant as it’s our 20th wedding anniversary (legal version.)
And even though only one family member remembers it (and that’s because I think she gets notifications from MyHeritage), I figured this is a good song (a rare Music Monday re-post) to commemorate a pretty meaningful day:
“If We Were Vampires” – Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit (the song is even more powerful when you know he wrote it for his wife who happens to be the fiddle player in his band)
Shea and I are fortunate to have gone on about a dozen hot holidays over the years to Mexico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Hawaii, etc.
But we couldn’t always swing it so one winter, we decided to go to…Winnipeg with both sets of parents for a family getaway. The temp in Regina was -42 and the temp in Winnipeg was -40 so I joked that this counted as a “hot(ter) weather holiday”. 😉
I talked to a twenty-something young man the other day who had never heard the term “Sandwich Generation”.
Basically, the idea is that anyone who has kids (whether they’re young or older but who still need financial support and/or who live at home) and also elderly parents who they are responsible for caring for is part of the “sandwich generation.”
This is an increasing reality for a variety of reasons: people having kids later in the life so still having to support them when, in earlier times, those people might’ve had kids by age twenty and those kids would be out on their own, possibly with kids of their own, by twenty as well. Also parents living longer due to advances in science and health which means that their kids might end up caring for them longer than they would’ve in earlier generations when lifespans were shorter and/or families were larger so the caregiving was divided among multiple children instead of just one or two.
Of course, although it can involve a lot of stress and strong emotions, it’s not that being part of the sandwich generation is a bad thing – grandkids benefit greatly from having grandparents who are still alive; grandparents are able to also give support in various ways – financial, babysitting, or even providing baked goods on occasion!
I have many fond memories of regularly going to the Ness Creek Music Festival, a hippie festival in Northern Saskatchewan, when I was in my twenties.
I can’t remember their name but one moment of perfection was a band I’d never heard of but that ended up being a reggae band who brought a little Jamaica jammin’ to the festival.
So good and so perfect under the northern Saskatchewan moonlight on a hot summer night.
