A Team

I started this blog entry a few days before Shawn's first follow-up appointment at Mayo. Before the bottom dropped out. (http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/shawndeboer) I was intending to tell the story of what's been going on in our lives lately, but I never got that far. Ironically, I think what little I have, is even better. 

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Children can be consuming. They absorb time, money, attention, space and especially love, en mass. And while they're earth-shatteringly amazing, it's equally important, I think, to remember how these tiny little creatures come to exist in the first place. In Team DeBoer's world, it reads a little something like this:

Boy meets girl…

girl ignores boy and pretends he doesn't exist…

girl then spends the next year chasing after boy until he finally agrees to go out with girl…

boy and girl date, then marry, then move to Minnesota…

boy and girl buy a house and a hound, and shortly thereafter, decide to pull the goalie…

after seven years of dating, six years of marriage and five-and-a-half years with just a dog…

a child is born. 

It goes so well that just a short time later, another child is born and the rest, as the cliché goes, is history. 

Shockingly simple. While my family's story can be cutely, albeit crudely, summed up in seven lines, it's important to emphasize how it all began: with a boy and a girl. Literally. Shawn and I were just kids when we started "going out." (That label always slayed me … going out. Out where? We couldn't even drive. Well, I could, but still. Where the hell were we going to go? Casey's General Store?) We've grown up together, we've endured a lot together, we love each other now more then ever and I can confidently say, we still genuinely like being around each other. It sounds like I'm surprised because sometimes I am and I even say so to Shawn. I think we're a bit of an anomaly and that makes me smile.

From being kids to having kids, one thing has been constant, we've been a team. A team of two…

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While I don't particularly care for Valentine's Day and all the hub-bub that follows in it's wake, I will honor it's existence in that I will take the time to say a few extra "I love yous" to Mr. DeBoer today. Today, tomorrow, the day after that and the day after that and so on and so on…