“ The unexpected can take you out. But the unexpected can also take you over and change your life.”

~ Ron Hall

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It’s been 516 days since my last post, and the concept of taking things one day at a time has never been truer than it has been over this past year and a half.  
In a nutshell…

The blogging stopped because of that one thing which causes indolence in people of all ages: as Ovid once wrote, ‘If any person wish to be idle, let them fall in love.’  Having spent the greater part of my late teens and early twenties blanketing my belief in notions such as true love and forever – and even, to some extent, the one – under a shroud of stolid scepticism and cold impassiveness, I had decided to take some time out in Australia, away from the distraction of failed relationships and comically disastrous first dates. In fact, my post on February 5th last year pretty much sums it up. My plan was to trundle down that road to self-discovery along with all the other wayward, hopeless, directionless, jobless young twenty-somethings. What I unintentionally discovered on my little journey, despite my mulish refusal to ‘‘fall in love’ in such impractical circumstances’, was my one.

If I didn’t have eyes for Damien when we first met, my younger (male) cousin certainly did, noting the unusual colour of his eyes and his potential as a model.  It wasn’t long before those steps which lead to a committed relationship began to take place.  First there was the Facebook friend request.  I sat in my room with they cursor hovering over the ‘add friend’ button, before eventually dissuading myself from clicking – it was far too soon, we had only just met, it would make me appear desperate and a bit stalkerish. But at least he didn’t seem to be in a relationship.  I closed my laptop and decided to sleep on it, which turned out to be a good idea as I woke up to a friend request from Damien.  Next was the casual invitation to play Words with Friends.  Before the days of Facebook and MSN Messenger and ICQ chat, boys used to have to make that nervous first phone call or shyly suggest ‘grabbing a coffee sometime’.  Now they make their interest known in black and white through 13 bytes displayed on my screen: ‘Fancy a game?’ Why, yes I do quite fancy a game, actually.  As it happened, my lexical abilities were proven to be far superior than Damien’s.  I can now confess that I did, from time to time, turn to an online anagram solver to secure my victory. Sorry, Damien. For me, it was all about the game; for Damien, it was only about that little chat window in the corner that allowed him to message me all day and through to the early hours without even having to request my mobile number. 

So one round of word play led to another, and eventually we went on our first date.  He took me to a steak house, and won my love for him through my love for large quantities of rare meat. It has since been made known to me that Damien did not listen to a thing I said that day.  He merely nodded cluelessly in response to my every word, and it would seem our relationship continues to progress with my speech constantly falling in vain on his deaf ears. Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before we got serious, and I brought him home to England so he could meet my parents.  


With my dad’s blessing we got married in January, on a warm Australia Day, and spent our wedding night blissfully eating KFC and Nando’s in our deluxe hotel suite. On May 31st, our gorgeous baby girl came into the world and immediately began to fulfil her filial duties of providing us with sleepless nights, dirty nappies and moments of helplessness as we were thrown into parenthood.

Ok, so those who can do maths will have realised by now that, no, Eva was not exactly planned.  Two little pink stripes on a pee stick led to a hurried ‘proposal’, and four months later I was walking down the aisle, only days before my protruding tummy became obvious.  A year ago, who would have thought that I would now be sitting here typing with one hand and cradling my sleeping three-month-old with the other?  Things did not happen as we had planned, but sometimes reality is better than dreams, and sometimes these unexpected situations are just what we need to mature.  

What started out for me as an egocentric ‘road to self-discovery’ back in February last year has brought me here to the beginning of the rest of my life.  I didn’t find what I was expecting, and I haven’t become the person I expected to become, but I have been given much more than I could have anticipated.  Not only have I been given a beautiful daughter, but I have found security in my husband, in my family and friends who have been generous and supportive beyond words, but most importantly in my God, who has taken what was intended to kill and destroy, and turned it around, undeserving as I am, to give me a life fuller than I thought possible. 

So, here I am after all these months, ready to share my day-to-day life with you once again. It’s good to be back!

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