Good-bye 2017! Hello 2018!

 Well, the ball has dropped and the new year has been properly rung in by most of the world.  We Greers spent the holiday weekend tiling our kitchen floor and then watching Fixer Upper until almost midnight.  After a balmy Friday in the 70's with an afternoon of adventures in the park, the world froze solid for us and this California girl was overjoyed to see our first snow!!!  It was a lovely, drifting snow with beautiful large snowflakes, covering everything with a light blanket of white.  I think we got maybe an inch??  It was far too cold to go out and make a snowman though, with temps around 5 degrees.  It would have been all right if we'd had the correct clothing for the job, but this warm weather family hasn't accumulated that essential collection of snow boots and mittens yet.

The beginning of a year has always been a time of reflection for me, remembering old times and looking forward to the new.   I used to read through all my old journals every new year's, but after it grew to over a thousand pages I got bored and now I sift through to find the interesting passages, LOL!  Another reason this is a time of remembrance for me is because it will be TJ's and my third wedding anniversary on the 10th, and it's always so fun to remember that wonderfully exciting time in our lives!  It's been three years already?!!  Wow.  I am still working on the story of how we got together, and hope to finish in time to finally post it for our anniversary.  

Last night I decided to stalk my husband online for no reason at all, which was a lot of fun because we have a lot of history together!  His mom used to write a blog Five Greers about ten years ago, and it gave me lots of feels reading her posts because I had a major crush on TJ at the time (which never went away, ha ha!) and  lot of our memories overlapped.  As we were all relaxing with TJ and me on our phones, Bella was very interested and wanted to see the pictures of Daddy!  She recognized his young self easily (oh how handsome he is!) and wanted see them all, commenting on them as we went along.  I found a picture of TJ with one of the young ladies he had courted many years ago (after I turned him down the first time!) and showed it to him, and he countered by fishing around online and finding a picture of me with the same young lady!  We laughed a lot and talked over old memories.

I think it would be fun to invite you back in time with me, and copy and paste a few journal entries over the next few days leading up to our anniversary.  Here is an entry from May 12, 2006, the first time I got to know the Greers for themselves (they had been a nebulous family floating around the fringes for a while, seen at group gatherings but I hadn't really noticed them particularly before!  They decided to visit us for a weekend.)  I will edit out boring details and add in comments as necessary. 

May 12, Friday

Leah (then 6, now 17) on TJ's shoulders
Andrea (then 9, now 20)

Late this evening the Greers arrived from San Diego to spend the weekend with us.  We only saw them occasionally at Pilgrim School, so we didn’t know them very well; but our families have a lot in common and we hit it off great!  Mr. Greer is short and balding and has a dry sense of humor.  Mrs. Greer is fun and outgoing, and not shy at all.  Ben, almost 20, is very friendly.  T.J., age 17, and my brother Nathan really hit it off and had a good time.  He liked playing games with the little girls, especially Leah (6) and Miriam (3 years old).  Mikki (12) is a little know-it-all.

Tonight when they finally arrived at 10 p.m., we had been playing Scrabble.  Turns out the Greers are avid Scrabble players, and we had many fun games over the following couple days!  Anyway, tonight we all sat around the table and talked, and the boys started making miniature forts with the Scrabble pieces, and shooting each other’s forts down.  That game got pretty wild and hilarious as the pieces went flying all over the room and we had to pick them up!  The Greers gave us a beautiful picture from China made of inlaid wood.

May 13, Saturday

I spent this morning doing chores, then we all took a walk to the cherry orchard nearby.  Then the guys spread an astonishing number of knives, of every shape, size and hue, from toad stickers to tiny pocket knives, all over the table, which made a friend of Heidi and Nathan forever.

My little sister Miriam

After lunch, the boys cheerfully cleared the table without being told, and I found to my amazement that T.J. loves washing dishes!  Mrs. Greer said he washes all the dishes at their house, and actually enjoys it.  I never heard of such a thing before!

Then Ben set up their iPod and played us some songs.  But I liked when they sang for us as a quartet!  They were really good with their different parts.  [They sing Southern Gospel music and barbershop quartet, Gaither style.]  We all got out our instruments, Mom on the piano, Katie on the violin, me on the flute recorder, and TJ on the guitar, and played and sang hymns together.  It was really neat!  The funniest part was the last hymn we did, “Wonderful Grace of Jesus.”  As T.J. tried to reach that last high note and squeaked, we all collapsed with laughter.  I could not play the recorder, I was laughing too hard.  The second time we tried it, he was laughing so much himself he couldn’t do it, but on the third try he actually got it!  Mr. Greer said that T.J. loves to sing loud, and they bring bungee cords so when he gets in that mood in the car, they can tie him on the roof!

T.J. playing ping pong with my brother Nathan

After supper, I was almost done washing dishes, and T.J. came into the kitchen.  “Need help?” he asked. “That’s OK, I got it,” I replied.  He stood there watching me for a minute, and then exclaimed, “Hey, that’s filthy!  Give it to me!”  And to my astonishment he took away the dish I was washing, and proceeded to finish the dishes for me, all the while giving a detailed lecture on proper dishwashing technique.  I could have laughed if I hadn’t been so annoyed!  Then I began to enjoy the humor of the situation—a boy “teaching” me, a girl with 15 years of dishwashing under my belt, how to clean kitchen ware!  Then he proceeded to cover every aspect of kitchen work, including sweeping and cleaning the stove, criticizing my work mercilessly and telling me how it ought to be done.  The Lord knows I need to be humbled! (T.J. isn't like that any more, LOL )

When the “ordeal” was finally over, we--Heidi, Nathan, T.J., and I--discovered that everyone else had left on another walk to the cherry orchard. (Moment of confession: I didn't "discover" this at all. Fact is, I was hoping to have T.J. all to myself for a bit, and inconveniently little sis and bro decided to stay behind too! I was already liking him very much, because he talked to me like a real person and didn't ignore me like all the other boys in my life. I'd never had a boy tease me before!! He had the most mischievous, merry, laughing green eyes. My teenage girl's heart was fast slipping away from me! This was both a pleasurable new experience for me, and a very distressing experience at the same time because I had been taught that having a crush on someone was sinful!)  

We decided to catch up with them, and search for Nathan’s knife he’d lost while we were at it.  Nathan and T.J. fenced with sticks they picked up off the ground, and I was surprised at how adroitly T.J. brought Nathan to point.  One time T.J. said something that was supposed to be funny, but nobody laughed.  So he put his arm around Nathan’s shoulders real nice and said, “Sorry man, but I have to beat you up!”

We lived near a cherry orchard.  Left to right: Leah riding on T.J.'s shoulders,
Katie, Mikki, Amy, Miriam, Mom, Andrea

“Why?” Nathan wanted to know.

“Because the girls didn’t laugh at my joke, so my feelings are hurt, and I have to take it out on you!”

In the evening, when it was dark, we sat out on the lawn and watched the boys try to kill each other.  Nathan really enjoyed having boys to wrestle with for once!  Nathan was really strong.  He couldn’t beat the Greer boys, because they’d had years of practice wrestling and he hadn’t—but one time when Nathan couldn’t get T.J. down, he picked him up instead and carried him off, running!

May 14, Sunday

We all slept in, this morning.  I was so tired!  But I woke at 6 a.m. and went on a walk.  Lord, keep my mind and heart pure. (Yeah. Trying to deal with all the feeeeeelings! I look back on my poor self tortured teenage self and shake my head. You know, Jenna ten years ago, if you DIDN'T like boys that would have been more of a real problem!!!)

 Before the Greers left we took a group picture.

Greer and Stoeppler families, May 2006

I can't stand my writing style from back then, but there you have it. The first time I got to know my husband as a friend. The rough edges are all polished smooth now, and he is one of the most selfless and considerate people I know! But back then it was quite interesting being friends with him. At least the Greers didn't have the same rules my family did about girls not being allowed to talk to boys! I was very stunted in my social skills because of that rule, and was awkward around the opposite gender at all times. But T.J. and Ben didn't seem to notice, and laughed and talked to me like I was an actual person and didn't treat me like I had the Black Plague!