Are BJs a Cure-All?

Things have been heating up around my house lately, and for once I'm not talking about in the bedroom. No, I'm in hot water with my husband for crossing the overshare line with my candid posts about our sex life and refusing to end each one by telling you how well-endowed he is. That must mean it's time for me to address the relationship side of this blog about sex and relationships after kids.

A couple days ago an obnoxious and juvenile post from a mommy blogger I follow arrived in my inbox. I won't insult your intelligence by linking to it, but the gist was that women bitch about their husbands too much. We need to stop being nagging harpies and give our men more blow jobs. Did you know that blow jobs are a magical panacea? What a novel idea. I think every 17 year old boy on the face of the planet has that in his arsenal. After I threw up a little in my mouth, I wondered how many blow jobs it would take to restore my thyroid to working order. How many to cure the post-partum depression a couple of my friends suffered from?

Can blow jobs keep my house clean? Hm...

I think you get my point. Sex and oral are amazing gifts two people can share; they certainly can elevate one's mood and smooth over little irritations. I can get behind the idea of not sweating the small stuff, but when's the last time an argument about the dishes was actually about the dishes?

When there are other tensions in a relationship just closing your eyes and thinking of England isn't going to fix anything. Suggesting that keeping your husband happy by putting out is going to solve anything for you sounds like this: "My shoes are too tight so I'm going to buy my husband a bigger pair." "Oh, you have cancer? Well I'll just get radiation and you'll be cured in no time." See? Crazy.

Everyone who is committed to making a relationship last knows that marriage takes hard work. During a difficult time in my marriage I discovered that I didn't really know what that meant. What exactly does that "work" look like? I didn't feel like I was doing anything differently, but my husband and I weren't connecting and resentment and anger were building up.

We went to counseling and were assigned a concrete task to complete. Each of you writes out a schedule of the weekend in one-hour increments, filling in all the things you have to do, as well as the things you want to do. We each did one in Google Docs and then shared with one another. Then you make any necessary adjustments in order to balance the things you have to do with the things you want to do individually, just the two of you, and with the kids. This seemed silly and too simple to change anything, but it really did help by getting us to work toward a common goal that didn't involve our kids. Over the course of doing that exercise every week, we learned that our communication skills were a little rusty and that most of the discord in our marriage came from feeling off-kilter from a lack of balance. In my limited experience, both are common difficulties for couples. We still do a weekend schedule when it starts to feel chaotic and like we aren't getting enough quality time together--a lack of balance between what we want to do and what we have to do.

Oh yes we did schedule sex.
It was probably more like 6:00-6:11 am

Problems in a relationship are best solved out of the bedroom, in my opinion, and the sooner the better so you can get back to the awesome bedroom stuff with an open and trusting heart. The weekend schedule is just one example of a way to work out difficulties without it feeling like you're doing a bunch of unpleasant work.

So, how do you and your partner keep your relationship healthy? Lay it on me!

Have a sexy weekend!

The Seven Year Gift Itch

This November we will have been married 7 years and I'm already in a gift rut with my husband. Gifts for men are interesting; they assume men are drunk, cigar-smoking, NFL Sunday Ticket obsessed sofa surfers whose movements are limited to golf, grilling, and the ones that happen in the bathroom.

The cocktail set from the alternate reality where
Marty's mom marries Biff is a
one-of-a-kind offering from Brookstone.

It only took two years to redenvelope him to death. A guy only needs so many cuff links, especially when his job calls for a more casual wardrobe, he's not a golfer or a cigar smoker, and I don't really understand what whiskey stones are for. The amount of stemware we already have makes pint glasses etched with our monogram or his favorite sports team's logo too ridiculous to contemplate. He's a great cook and griller, but one of these would just end up on someone's butt.

Grill Brand or DIY Tramp Stamp-er?

A search on Pinterest returned three measly pins. I never imagined it would be possible for Pinterest to fail me, but I guess Pinterest is 99% wedding ideas pinned by 17 year old girls. Maybe in 20 years there will be some anniversary pins. On the bright side, there's a spat in the comments on this pin.

One of the best gifts I ever gave him was a memory book I made. I wrote a really cheesy but heartfelt letter commemorating our first date and the things we liked to do together. I divided the letter into 21 parts and wrote each part on one page of the book, which was decorated with a corresponding picture or scrapbooking sticker. I gave him one page every day leading up to our wedding, when I gave him the final page before we went our separate ways to prepare for the day. That was a special gift for that time of our life, but I'm pretty sure he'd rather have a new bike this year. That's too bad, because there's a moratorium on big purchases till we get wood floors.

Got any gift ideas for me?

Oh, brother. I didn't marry an effing hipster, thank you very much.
Vintage distressed typewriter key copper cuff links from here