My man

1. Who is your man? Casey
   
2. How long have you been together? Since Jan 31, 1997...10+ years
   
3. How long dated? 3 and half years
   
4. How old is your man? 29
   
5. Who eats more? me...he's such a light weight!
   
6. Who said "I love you" first? He did...we were on my driveway and it totally caught me off guard but I felt the same way
   
7. Who is taller? Him, by about 1/2 inch. I was practically barefoot for our wedding!
   
8. Who sings better? well, to say me feels boastful but I was a vocal major and his singing mostly consists of making fun of a song. He does have a really good voice, though.
   
9. Who is smarter? Depends on the topic...music, entertainment & pop culture are all me the rest I would say are him
10. Whose temper is worse? Mine :o(
    
11. Who does the laundry? Me
12. Who takes out the garbage? He sees a full trash can as an opportunity to shove just a little bit more into it. I usually bag it up and he takes it out.
    
13. Who sleeps on the right side of the bed? Him
    
14. Who pays the bills? Me
    
15. Who is better with the computer? I love my Computer Geek! I'll give that one to him since he does it for a living
    
16. Who mows the lawn? He does, but I've been known to be pregnant and frustrated that he hasn't gotten around to it and will rev up the mower myself for the sake of getting it done.
    
17. Who cooks dinner? Me
    
18. Who drives when you are together? Him. It's my job to tend to the kids in the back seat
    
19. Who pays when you go out? He does
    
20. Who is most stubborn? We take turns with this one
    
21. Who is the first to admit when they are wrong? We both work really hard on this
    
22. Whose spends more time in front of the mirror? Ummmm...me. He did have long hair for a while and would spend an superfluous amount of time coiffing. It made me laugh!
    
23. Who kissed who first? On our third date, I asked him if he was ever going to kiss me. He smiled and finally did. Man was I pushy!?
    
24. Who asked who out? He came into Grapevine Books where I was working and asked me out.
    
25. Who proposed? He did. On a beautiful fall Thursday in Nashville's Centennial Park where we'd go to study. I was on a bench and he got down on his knee.
    
26. Who is more sensitive? Me and my hormones
    
27. Who has more friends? Me
    
28. Who has more siblings? We both have 1 sister
    
29. Who prays at the dinner table? Maggie
    
30. Who wears the pants in the family? Literally or figuratively speaking? :o)
    

Home from Work

I need to enlist some help from some of you other stay-at-home moms.

I love my job! I get to be the first-hand observer of my kids' learning and growing everyday and maybe even play a part in that learning. I love that my daughter's favorite thing to do right now is to have me sit and do 200 piece Princess puzzles with her. Rory just likes to find me in the middle of the laundry room and bear hug my legs. I couldn't imagine a more rewarding paycheck at any job.

But...(did you see that coming?) why is it that when my husband walks in the door, all I want to do is the proverbial kid hand-off and go have some quite time in a different room of the house.

This bothers me for a couple of reasons:

1. Am I sending them the message that I'm tired of them or that I don't love them anymore come 6:00?

2. I feel like our family is run in shifts instead of the ideal partnership that I had always envisioned when I thought about being a parent.

3. My husband works so hard so I can stay at home with kids. Isn't it totally unfair of me to ask him to work all day only to come home and take over my job the second he walks through the door?

Casey has only recently taken his at-home business to an office so this is fairly new for me. We used to all be home all day and so dinner and bedtime was merely an extension of seeing each other all day long. Now, I feel like I get about an hour with him after the kids go to bed and we're both too exhausted to get into meaningless chit-chat about the comings and goings of our day.

How do you and your family handle this? I think I just need some other "Mom perspective" to make me feel like this is normal or a way to cope with it better.

Sweethearts

I have had the discussion several times recently about how Casey and I really did go to my High School Prom together! We started dating the January before and have now been married for 7 wonderful years. I love him more and more each day and felt like he wasn't very well represented on this "O'Quinn Family" website. So here are the ever-so-glorious pictures of us in our youth. Enjoy!

Prom-1997

Engaged- 1999

2000

2007