you have the right to remain silent

i dated t.j. for 5 years before marrying him and had never farted in front of him once. on the night of our wedding after the reception we drove to our new house for the first time together. he was having a really hard time getting the key to go in the lock properly and i was getting impatient. in my wedding dress i yanked the key from him and said "here - let me do it. geeze." then proceeded to bend over reaching for the handle through the darkness and ripped one.


it's stories like that that i want to make sure i put in writing for roz before i forget. that is the point of this blog; i will one day put all of these posts with their accompanying illustrations and make a book for her. a lot of kids live their entire lives not knowing who their parents were before they were 'mom' and 'dad.' i think she should know about who me and t.j. were pre-roz.


i showed up at t.j.'s house when we were dating and he has the horrible open wound on his nose.
"tj! what happened to your nose?!?!" i demanded.
"huh... um... what? what is it?" he sheepishly replied.
"what do you mean 'what is it?' have you seen yourself in the mirror?!?!?!?!? my lord!" i screamed.
after going back and forth for a while, he finally confessed: t.j. had used one of his mom's biore cleansing strips. since he was a dude he felt that his blackheads were more badass than what the 8 minute application period could handle. after the self-imposed 20 minutes of biore cleansing action, t.j. damn-near ripped his entire nose off of his face.


t.j. and i actually spent 12 years together before rozzy made her debut. that means i have 12 years worth of stories stockpiled in my memory, not to mention my 18 years on earth before t.j. and i started dating. of course she doesn't need to know about the time we ran from the cops on purdue's campus - or the time we ran from the cops on ohio state's campus, for that matter. she doesn't need to know t.j. stole a wallet from j.c. penny's or the time that i stole my dad's car with kelly to buy a pack of smokes when i was 15 years old - with my 9 year old brother in the backseat. she could do without the tales of me and t.j. getting kicked out of the fairfield commons for mocking a beefed-up mall cop, or how after drinking too much at a restaurant i decided that the plates were so nice that i needed to take one home with me.

I'm still up in the air about sharing the funniest night ever with her. maybe when she is 30 i will tell her about me and t.j.'s infamous night at the fox and the hound. we had both had too much to drink. as we got out to the car, i told t.j. that maybe it was best that we called a taxi because it would be the responsible thing to do. well, t.j. had a better idea: the car parked next to us apparently belonged to a volunteer fireman, as evidenced by the nice set of siren lights affixed to the top of it. t.j. figured if we could transfer the sirens from that car to ours, that we'd be safe. a cop wouldn't pull us over if we had lights on top of our car, right? well, what transpired over the next 15 minutes is indescribable. it was one of those things you would have just had to be there and experience if for yourself. i'll do my best to describe how t.j. got into a tug-o-war match with those sirens that had an electrical cord attached to them that went through the passenger-side window that was rolled up around it. at one point he had his feet on the side of the door and was hanging from the cord.

well, when i saw my husband hanging from a set of sirens i laughed like never before. anyone that knows me knows that when i laugh, my entire body laughs. i jerk around like i'm being electrocuted - well the electricity zapping me during this laugh session caused me to slam my head on the steering wheel - causing the horn to honk. this honking scared t.j. so much that he fell of the sirens he had been holding onto for dear life. when he fell, i peed myself.

on second thought... maybe she doesn't need to know that one, either.