While my immediate family was learning to adjust to a very different life than I had known, I became engaged to a wonderful young man I met at college and we were married in December of 1970. My Dad and the pastor of our local college town church performed the ceremony. We settled in a little trailer park in our first home while my husband completed his second college degree in Music Education. I worked for a local piano house to help with college and living expenses. Once the second degree was earned, we moved our mobile home to a coastal town in South Mississippi where my husband taught Junior High music and I taught pre-school at our church. We were content and busy newlyweds. We often reminisce about the low cost of groceries, rent, and gas in those days!
Another move took us to Florida where our oldest son was born. Mississippi beckoned to us again and there our youngest son was born. Two precious sons made our home complete. I loved being the mother of boys. I had as much fun raising them as they did being children. I was fortunate to stay home with them until our youngest son reached the age of four. Since we were planning to build a home, with many tears I began working outside the home. God provided a music teaching position in the small private school my boys attended and it was my joy to have them run up to me during break times or at recess and give me huge hugs and kisses. Later a position opened for me in the Christian school where my husband was employed as both Minister of Music and music teacher. God worked it out so that our lives were intertwined every day.
When my guys were older they found that having Mom and Dad at school was not necessarily a good thing as we parents learned about "school stuff" before they could even devise or at least soften their version of events! All in all this arrangement worked out well for us. Since my husband's father was a workaholic and didn't spend a lot of time supporting his sons, my husband made sure that he supported our sons in all their extracurricular activities. He drove the bus that carried the athletes to away games, announced home games, and made sure that his boys knew their Dad was rooting for them every step of the way. Both sons matriculated through both my and their Dad's music classes and auditioned choruses and have often talked about the musical education they received under our tutelage.
Office and ministry work for my husband continued during the summer months, but I took the summers off to be home with the boys. Oh, the bliss of those carefree three months! We have fond memories of outdoor play in the backyard pool, camping trips, biking, and just spending time together. One summer I had taped the musical, The Music Man, from PBS and we must have watched it at least a thousand times (or so it seemed). I concocted homemade chocolate icing and we spread it on crackers to snack on while we watched. I think the three of us probably still get an instant craving for chocolate whenever we hear or see The Music Man! On rainy summer afternoons when the electricity would suddenly go out, wild games of indoor hide and seek would instantly break out during which we each tried to scare the pants off the others.