Goals we've set

Before we're married, we want to read at least one or two books on marriage. You can leave your suggestions in the comments section (we call them "hoorays"). We're already working on The Five Love Languages, and we've looked into other books like Just Engaged and Getting Ready for Marriage Workbook. We like the workbook format, but the Getting Ready for Marriage Workbook has some downsides for us, based on what we've seen in the bookstore already.

Our time is not all tied up with books and business. We love to have "geek dates" at Barnes & Noble where we go in and pick a section that one of us knows a lot about. The clueless one quizzes the expert, and the clueless one is always duly impressed with the knowledge on the other side of the fence! Panera Bread is one of our favorite places to eat in Macon (we LOVE Fazoli's when we can get it, though!), but Keith will probably tell you more about Panera Bread in a later post. We also like to do puzzles--we found out that we get so involved in the puzzle that we barely talk to each other while we're working! We enjoy the time together and the accomplishment we see, and we get to learn how the other tackles long term tasks. We're on our second puzzle now with plans for more later.

Besides dating and engagement, we're also committed to having a successful marriage, so we're talking about goals for those days already. We want to do some things together that keep us in shape, so we're planning to buy bikes to ride, and we'll probably try a series of sessions in martial arts to see how we like it. We really like both of those ideas because they are totally new to both of us. Another activity we hope to do when we're married is cook a new dish together once a week. If it goes bad, we'll be ready to go out! :)

Jennifer has worked a LOT of hours in the last few years, and she'll be cutting back to "just full-time" this year. So, she's not taking new tutoring clients, which will free her up for wedding planning and later for being home in the evenings. Also, being newlyweds makes teaching GHP unlikely, but Jennifer would consider going back for a few weeks or in special circumstances.

For more tangible goals in our marriage, we know that we have a house that turned out to be a fixer-upper. We're planning to redo the yard (Jennifer celebrates marrying Keith once again!), fix some problems that resulted from "deferred maintenance" by previous owners, and upgrade appropriately so that it's comfortable for us.

It turns out that we're two intentional people, but we're not "the ultimate planners." We have talked about our dreams as individuals (think career, money, and family), but nothing is concrete enough to post as a "goal" here. We are committed to helping each other achieve those dreams when the time is right.