Meet Effie!

This is Effie, our new baby! She's a dilute calico/domestic short hair mix, and a rescue from the Look What the Cat Brought In shelter.

That's the Professor's Wife in the background. 

We picked her up last night. She's about nine months old, and she is as sweet and outgoing as can be. When she's not cuddling with Mom or Dad, she loves playing with her toys, scratching her post and running crazily from one room to the other. Granted, that last one is probably mostly dear-lord-where-am-I behavior, but it's still cute.

She's been adapting wonderfully to our home, and since I'm home this morning, I've been able to hang out with her and start figuring her out. Some things I've learned so far: In typical cat fashion, she loves sitting on my keyboard while I'm trying to use it. Any typos in this post will therefore be blamed on her.   She loves drinking out of people cups and will try to squish her face down into one, no matter what size, in order to get what's in it. This means I'll have to be much better about cleaning up my wine glasses. She also loves to sniff the Professor's shoes and spent quite a bit of time this morning exploring his half of the closet. And she's an excellent cuddler. After the Professor left for work this morning, Effie finally got tired of knocking papers off of the desk (they say the first night is the hardest) and climbed up into the bed with me, curled up, and napped there for an hour. She purrs in her sleep.

Can you tell I'm in love? The funny thing is, I've never been a cat person. We've always had dogs in my family, and because of allergies (including mine) we never had cats. The Professor and I had been talking about adopting a pet, and when we walked in and saw Effie we both loved her right away and it wasn't a tough decision to bring her home. So while we have to deal with the allergies (we stocked up on Claritin and Visine), we already feel like we got really lucky with Effie. She's great in a kennel in the car, she eats well and has already gotten used to the new litter box. It's like we were just waiting to find her, and she was waiting for us.

So now I have to interject and tell you what cute thing she's doing. I have my water cup right next to my computer and she's squashed her face down in there to get some, but every once in awhile she'll pop up and put her paw on my hand like she's helping me type.

I am totally turning into a cat lady.

-The Professor's Wife

An Introduction

This first post, and possibly the blog’s initial motivation, is a product of my frustration with the Pinterest Era.

Now don’t get me wrong – I love Pinterest. I interact with Pinterest on a daily basis. This is simply a post relating my misgivings about the hundreds (maybe thousands) of Pinterest Wives and Moms who have sprung up on the internet, touting homemade this and DIY that. Now, I’m not a mom yet, but I’m a busy, working, full-course-load-at-university wife, and I have to say: I get really discouraged. Browsing blogs of SuperWife and SuperMom who own their own successful businesses, are raising and homeschooling six kids and are adopting another, have twice-weekly date nights with Hubby who is, oh my god, SO amazing and supportive and never ever EVER does ANYthing that isn’t one-hundred-percent amazing and supportive, and don’t own a single piece of furniture that hasn’t been personally refinished by “Yours Truly! Giggle!”

I’m convinced that most of these women, let’s ballpark 70%, are robots. The rest are lying.

The thing is, my life is great. I love it. I love my husband, I love his family, he loves mine, we have a wonderful house with two wonderful roommates in a wonderful neighborhood. We live in what I consider to be one of the best parts of the country, we have good jobs and great friends and we are solid in our commitment to one another’s lives. We work hard on our marriage every day. We support each other and challenge each other. We also fight. We argue and cry and we have a lot of off days where we can’t seem to figure each other out. This is something I’m not ashamed of and something I think is normal. We haven’t been married very long, but we’re getting the hang of it – the point is, we really, really love each other and we’re ready to stick it out. But we slip up frequently and we’re not, oh my god, SO amazing and supportive one-hundred-percent of the time.

While the blogs of these RoboWomen do not necessarily speak condescendingly of other lives, it’s implied in many of them that their way of life is superior. I agree that making everything from scratch with totally organic ingredients and materials, and doing 36 hours worth of life in 24 hours would be really, really nice. I’m just not sure it’s for everyone, and I get tired of feeling like a second-rate wife because I had to throw a frozen pizza in the oven a couple of nights this week.

I have a confession to make. I haven’t gone grocery shopping in three weeks. I haven’t sat down and planned my next shopping trip with maps and footnotes, and I certainly haven’t clipped any coupons. Actually, I totally forgot to even go out and get the paper from the driveway last Sunday.

What I’m saying is, I heartily admire the love-fueled super-awesome love-fest that the SuperWomen enjoy. I admire their furniture re-fab skills, I admire their commitment to their families, and I admire their ability to squeeze more hours out of their days. But I can’t always be one of them. 

I do have my Pinterest Wife moments. But generally they’re a whole lot of work to achieve and the payoff is too small to justify setting aside all of that time – especially when I have homework laying around waiting to be done and a husband who would rather eat a frozen pizza so we can spend those hours laughing and talking together instead of prepping a five-course gourmet meal.

I use a Crockpot. I don’t drive my dream car. We got most of our furniture from Ikea, Goodwill and gracious family members and no, I haven’t refurbished any of it. My closet is unorganized and it vomits daily onto the bedroom floor. We don’t have a golden retriever, or adorable perfect babies or kittens. We do, however, have some pretty cool tattoos.

We’re doing our life together, with the help of God and our family and friends, and I defy the Pinterest Wives to prove they’re happier than I am.

So now here’s our blog! It’s a chronicle of a life that is not totally homemade, not super adorable. It’s busy and hectic, but it’s ours and it’s incredibly fulfilling.

Welcome to our lives!

-The Professor's Wife