Ten years ago tonight, I was in my apartment getting ready for the biggest day of my life.  I was going to get married to the most beautiful woman in the world.  My friend and best man was in town and staying in my apartment as well.  He was writing out his speech for the reception after the wedding.  (In hind sight, I should have insisted on reading it beforehand.)

The very next day, a gorgeous woman walked down the aisle to me and said “I do.”  Our lives changed.

Over the years, our family has grown.  We’ve had happy moments, sad moments.  We’ve had angry moments and scary moments.  We’ve gone through our share of highs and lows.  Still, there is nobody I’d rather have by my side during all of this than my angel, B.

Our lives may have changed drastically in the past decade, but in many ways they haven’t changed at all.  I love B with all of my heart and look forward to spending the rest of my life trying to make her as happy as she has made me!

Happy Anniversary, B (a day early), from your Long Island Love!

Yes, I know this is a day early, but I just couldn’t wait.  Click to see it full size.

For all those of you who would like a copy of this for your kids to give out for Mother’s Day, here’s a PDF you can print.

Today is the last day of Chanukah, but there’s something even bigger to celebrate.  Today is the birthday of the most beautiful woman in the world: My wife, aka B, aka TheAngelForever!

In some ways, it’s hard to believe that she’s only been in my life for 11 years.  It feels like forever… and I mean that in a good way.  I can’t imagine my life without her.  I love being around her and every day I watch the clock slowly tick until it’s “go home to see B and the boys” time.  (I love my job, but my coworkers just are no match for my family!)  I love spending lazy weekend mornings in bed with her, seeing how long we can lounge around before the boys storm the bedroom demanding breakfast.

Every day, I try to do everything I can to make her happy.  I only hope I’m making her as happy as she has made me.  She’s a wonderful mother to our kids and wife and friend to me.  Although she’ll deny it left and right, she’s also extremely sexy.  Sorry, B, but despite your protests, you are sexy and I don’t mind shouting it to the world.  MY WIFE IS SEXY!!!!!! 

Happy birthday, B.  I love you with all of my heart.

Time for a serious blog post. For the last several months, B and I have been rather quiet about something that has been going on behind the scenes. What started with an innocent Tweet back to someone we didn’t know has now escalated into much, much more. I’ve become nauseous over this entire thing.

An individual believes that we are someone else, someone she knows. Thanks to this, she will not leave us alone. We have blocked her on Twitter and gone to other precautions to safeguard our family.

I can not go into a lot of specifics, but I wanted to let my readers, PR professionals, and companies that I have worked with know what is going on in general terms. Why now? Well, this individual has been threatening to contact you. Via blog contact forms and comments, along with other tactics, she has stated numerous times that she will be notifying you of our so-called "lying ways to get free items."

B and I have worked long and hard to build trusting relationships with everyone on our blogs and beyond. We hope that you will work with us while we try to get this matter taken care of.

Thank you for your support.

On Saturday night, after our first pumpkin carving, we left the kids with B’s parents and had one of those rare, wonderful moments called Date Night.  Somehow, despite repeatedly saying how we should do this more often, we never get around to it.  Illnesses, scheduling conflicts and life in general seem to conspire to limit our date night to a handful of times.

When the prospect of date night is mentioned, I envision going out for a night on the town.  Dinner, maybe dancing.  Definitely someplace elegant that has as small a kids’ menu as possible.  Worries (money, kids, etc) would be tossed out the window for the evening and we would just enjoy each other’s company.

The reality of date night wasn’t *quite* like this.  It started out very nice.  We chose a restaurant we had a coupon for and had a blast.  The food was exceptional and we even saved half of our portions for lunch, thus saving more money.  (Is it bad that I feel old with all of these “saved money” references?)

Afterwards, we decided to shop at a local Hallmark store.  On the way there, we remarked about how some kids looked like they were up to no good.  (Again, “kids these days” reference… I feel OLD!)  The Hallmark store was closed so we went to a local grocery store and stocked up on food essentials.

Wait.  The grocery store?  Our big date night out and the best we could do was dinner and shopping for food?  Where’s the dancing?  Where’s the movie?  Where’s doing something fun together that doesn’t involve a shopping cart and a produce aisle?

During our date supermarket run, I joked that we had forgotten how to date.  We’ve been parents for so long and so focused on running the household smoothly, that I fear we’ve forgotten how to put the “parent” portion of our lives on hold and just be “two adults who are in love with each other” for a few hours.  Our dating life seems in some need of some help.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: Do you go on date nights regularly?  If so, where do you go and what do you do?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the McLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #62

On Sunday, it will be October 10th, 2010, or 10/10/10.  The geek in me couldn’t let 101010 go by without a special post.  Since I don’t post on Sundays usually, I made my Tuesday post: Plus or Minus 10 Years.

This marked 3 firsts for me.  It was my first Linky and the first post I created a button for.  Most significantly, though, it was the first time I really apologized (in a public fashion) for something stupid I did when B and I were engaged.  You’ll have to read my post to see what it was.  (Hey, you didn’t expect me to just tell you, now did you?)  Needless to say, I thought I was doing the right thing at the time but hindsight (being 20/20 and all) has shown me how wrong I was.

Thus, my Aloha Friday question for today is: Have you ever done something that affected a loved one that you thought was the right thing at the time only to realize later was the wrong action?

After you answer my Aloha Friday question, stop by my LuLu.com Photo Book giveaway and B’s CardsDirect $50 gift card giveaway.

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the Linky there if you are participating.

Aloha #58

With all of the Rosh Hashana and blogoversary stuff, I almost forgot another anniversary. The anniversary of B and me. Not of our marriage. That was in June. This anniversary was of the first time we met. Yes, it was 11 years ago last night that B and I first met. I remember it like it was yesterday… or at least like it was a flashback.

*wavy flashback lines*

The date was September 12th, 1999 and I had just come back from Rosh Hashana services. I signed onto my computer, after being offline for 2 days, and decided to browse through the Yahoo! chat rooms for a bit before heading to bed. A few weeks prior, I had edited my profile to include the line “Nice, Jewish Guy Looking For Nice, Jewish Girl.”

Meanwhile, B was online, but had forgotten to close the chat window. She noticed it open, looked at the chat room, noticed me in there and decided to look at my profile. That line I had added a few weeks prior caught her eye and she contacted me. Right from the start, I knew that something was special about this “angel.”

We chatted for hours that night and many nights afterwards. Late night online chats turned into late night phone calls. That turned into meeting in person which turned into a long distance relationship. Before I knew it, I had fallen helplessly in love with my angel and have been stuck there ever since. (No rescue attempts please. I’m happy being stuck here in love with my angel!)

Happy Meeting Anniversary to My Angel Forever!

As you probably read on TheAngelForever.com, we saw Toy Story 3 on Sunday. It was a powerful movie and it is quite amazing how Pixar keeps topping themselves. I keep thinking "There’s no way they’ll beat this" and then they go and beat it. I won’t spoil anything but I don’t think that it’s a spoiler to mention that the movie is about Andy going to college and what happens to his once-beloved toys when he goes. The toys long for playtime and Andy just keeps them in a toy chest, forgotten and unplayed with.

A few days ago, I looked through my office. I have quite a collection of toys, momentos, pictures and other assorted items that I’ve collected over the years. Most of them have some sort of sentiment attached to them. Let’s go on a tour, shall we?

Starting from the left and heading right is the head of Dilbert’s boss. This is actually a "silly slammer." You hit it and it says things like "I’m the boss. It doesn’t have to make sense!" Then there’s Tigger and Pluto from our Disney World honeymoon. Behind them is Humphrey the Bear who was given to us by a Disney World tour guide upon finding out we were newlyweds on our honeymoon. Behind him is a canner penguin from a trip to Montreal we took prior to being married. Behind that is a Long Island Ducks rubber duckie. The Ducks are a baseball team near where my parents live.

Moving on we find the characters from Lilo and Stitch, another Disney movie I loved. Behind them is a Homer Simpson Pez dispenser, Mickey in a car, Dilbert and Dogbert. After them is a stuffed Hershey bar from when we visited Hershey, PA. The photos are B at our wedding and B and I with Mickey on our honeymoon. Finally, there’s the M&M guys from a trip to the M&Ms store in Las Vegas just before finding out B was pregnant with NHL.

Here we have a Mickey/Minnie wedding couple. You can wind them up and they dance. We got them at Disney during our honeymoon. Then there’s Winnie the Pooh in a cow costume. He was handed to us with Humphrey. In the back is Dr. Evil and Mini-Me along with Dr. Evil’s cat. Next to them is a box with Thing 1 and Thing 2. Besides being Dr. Seuss characters, they are also one of our nicknames for the boys. B and the boys gave me this. In the front are various snowglobes and momentos from trips to Mystic Seaport, Boston, Sesame Place, Hershey and Niagra Falls. There’s also a Disney World photo holder from our last Disney Trip (currently sans photo) and a Yoda/Darth Vader mirror toy. (You look in one end and it’s Yoda, look in the other and it’s Vader.)

That crystal and the little "eye guys" are from our trip to Howe Caverns while B was pregnant with NHL. Behind them is a penguin keepsake from our trip to Montreal. Next to them are my Farscape guys: John Crichton, Zhaan, Scorpious (with shrunken Hynerian head), Chianna, and D’Argo. They’re joined by Gandalf and Shrek. Quite the combination, huh?

Not pictured (mainly because he hasn’t been dusted in far too long) is a Spiderman toy perched on a Gargoyle affixed to my wall.  A web head covered in cobwebs is irony not laziness, right?

On top of my computer resides an Easy Button, Super Grover and Oscar from our trip to Sesame Place, a talking C-3PO that I picked up from a going-out-of-business KB Toys, Photographer Goofy from last year’s Disney World trip and a couple of DRDs who wandered away from the other Farscape guys.

Finally, there’s the front of my desk where I have my "Judge Me By My Size" Yoda from our most recent Disney World trip, the first photo of B that she sent me (along with the note she wrote me after we were engaged) and a pinscreen.

And that concludes my tour of my office toys/momentos. Getting back to Toy Story 3, I can’t help but wonder, when I shut the lights off at night, do my toys come alive and have parties?

I still remember the first time I met B. It was just after Yom Kippur ended and I signed into the Yahoo chat rooms. I had planned on simply killing time until going to sleep. I was soon contacted by “The Angel Forever”, though. A message in my profile (one that I only added a few weeks prior), had gotten her attention and we began to talk. The more I talked with her, the more I knew there was something special about her.

We talked well into the night and many nights later. Soon we decided to swap photos of each other. I nervously opened the photo she sent and was greeted by this gorgeous woman.

I didn’t know if I was falling in love with B at that point, but I certainly did want to get to know her better. Over the next few months, we would meet in person and visit each other as often as possible. The more I knew B, the more I fell in love with her. Before long, it became apparent to me that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.

I came up to visit B one hot weekend early July. Her parents’ AC had broken and B had passed out on the floor. I snuck away and asked her parents for her hand in marriage. The next day, I had planned to take B out to a nice dinner and then for a walk around her block where I would propose. Unfortunately, the restaurant I wanted to take B to was closed. We searched for an alternative and settled on Friendly’s. Not the romantic dinner I envisioned, but we made it do. Then we went back to her house where she plopped down onto the couch because of the heat.

I told her I wanted to go for a walk with her and she declined. I all but dragged her outside. As we rounded the block, I imagined what I would say to her. I tried to work up the nerve to ask her to marry me. I saw her parents’ house getting closer and knew that I was running out of time. I walked in front of her, started to go down on one knee… and saw a swarm of ants right underneath us! I shifted over a foot or two and then dropped to one knee.

B started to tear up and she realized what I was doing. I told her how I wanted to spend every day of the rest of my life making her as happy as she has made me and asked her to marry me. She couldn’t speak but nodded yes. As we walked in, she said that this didn’t get me off the hook of asking her parents for permission. I told her about my little sneak off the night before and, as we walked in the house, she told her parents they were DEAD! (Apparently, they had already informed the rest of the family of the upcoming proposal. Good thing I didn’t lose my nerve!)

On our wedding day, I was truly greeted by an angel and had the great pleasure to call her my wife for the first time.

It always amazes me how, just when I think I can’t be more in love with B or find her more attractive, I’m proven wrong (in a very good way). Over the years, we have become parents, home owners, parents again. We’ve had high points and low points. Moments of great joy and moments of great sadness. We’ve argued and made up. We’ve had special moments and mundane moments. B is my wife, best friend, lover and mother of our two great kids. She’s also – despite her protests – incredibly sexy. (Yes you are, B!)

B, I love you with all of my heart. Thank you for 9 wonderful years of marriage and here’s to the many, many wonderful years ahead of us.