It’s early April of 2015. My wife Katie and I are on one of our leisurely drives around town looking at random houses while dreaming, critiquing, and scoffing at the sites. I am not sure if this is a normal thing couples do, but when we have nothing better to do some evenings, we like to hop in our late 2011 Nissan Rogue and drive through neighbourhoods. Sometimes when we see a beautiful house we even slow down, take pictures as the SUV crawls by, and then speed away before people call the cops on us. So far we have not had any jail time so I’d say we are professionals.

On this particular night in April, we were on our way home and we were having a somewhat civil argument. Before I get into details of the argument I will give you a quick run down of our history. I do not want you to think our relationship is doomed because of a silly fight which turned out to be one of the best nights of our relationship (oh the suspense, I know!).

I met Katie in high school in a town/ suburb/ city/ (who knows what the fuck to classify the shit hole where I grew up). Google: "Sack-Vegas" and the first hit will give you a good idea of my roots. Yes that is a "Welcome to the Wonderful Sack-Vegas" sign and yes it was actually a real sign placed by the highway leaving town, which made the local news before it was taken down. Go to YouTube and search: "Lower Sackville Promo" and you will find a wonderful video with a very accurate description of my hometown (the narrative is to die for). You know what… screw searching for these things… it is 2016 and I am not a moron (some might disagree) so check out the link and embedded video below. I can just see my aunt Juanita saying:

"Evan, you said to Google Sack-Vegas and now all of my Facebook friends see my new profile picture of what looks to be a nice, well-formed pair of breasts in the latest Victoria’s Secret bra until they click on it and reveal a hairy, obese man’s ass-crack in a pair of polka dot bros (Seinfeld reference)."

Or my mother Ethel saying:

"Evan, you said to look-up Lower Sackville Promo on YouTube and now a man named Zahir from Windows said my computer was infected with viruses and I no longer have a left kidney."

I’ll save you the trouble…

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Story of the Sack-Vegas Sign

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YouTube: Lower Sackville Promo

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Sorry about that tangent, now back to the main story: we met at Sackville High. I was fresh out of a relationship and my friend, who never knew how to stay away from the "friend-zone," devised a new (failure) of a scheme to pickup a lady-friend whom he had eyes for. This lady-friend turned out to be friends with my now current and only wife. All he had to do was tell me I was on the list of who she found cute in high school and I was like "BAM! Cat in the bag!" Triple date time with two of my good lads. It was Halloween night and we went out to see one of the worst movies to franchises in existence: "Saw." You know, the first one, the one where the guy uses a jig-saw to cut off his hand to escape the game. My 4 year old nephew can act better than that for a Klondike bar. The movie went well, my two buddies bitched out and went home afterwards, and Katie had a fabulous idea to keep the night young. "Let’s go trick or treating." (to many of my friend’s and families’ dismay my trick or treating went on until I was into my early 20s).

So here I am stuck with Katie and two other girls, by myself, trick or treating (I know, rough life, eh?). Problem was I did not have anything to wear, come to think of it, none of us did. We started at Katie’s house and she rummaged through her things and whipped together four costumes. I only remember her costume and mine because obviously they were the two best ones. Katie’s costume was a simple pair of white long john’s and rubber boots and mine ended up being a dress with a tight, pointy elf hat (go figure…). In retrospect the next thing that happened turned out to be a short and meaningful moment in which I will never forget. On our way out to bag ourselves a good bounty of candy I had my first interaction with Katie’s father. Her mother loved me right away, but that is just the type of lovely and personable person she is. Katie’s dad on the other hand is a more reserved individual who believes in the more old school ways of father son-in-law relationships. Truth is he loves his two daughters more than anything in the world and if anyone hurt them they would probably be shot (he has even shown me the collection of guns and bullets he owns and loves to take me to the shooting range, just he and myself and no witnesses). But hey, now that I am a father of a beautiful innocent baby girl, I can completely understand. Now that I have made it into the inner circle I know most of it is a front and deep down he is a big softy. Any who… I think that was anther small tangent… maybe I have a problem. So this moment I will never forget was when I came out of Katie’s room with two of her girlfriends, wearing a green (I think floral patterned) dress with a tight red and yellow elf cap. As I was walking out of the house I walked past the master bedroom where Katie’s father was laying down watching a show. At the time I did not think anything of it because I had no idea who this man was, but in retrospect I am lucky I have been around this long. It is nerve-racking to meet the girlfriend’s father in the first place, but try doing it while dressed up like an idiot, with sweaty palms and a goofy smile on your face. Luckily there was only a quick, "Who the fuck is this dumbass?!" moment, where he was caught off guard just as much as I was and all we could both muster was a quick: "Hey!" with a nod. Come to think of it, I got off easy with her father on several occasions over the last decade due to catching him off guard. Asking him if I could marry his daughter was another one of these occasions, but I will spare you another tangent and mention that in a future blog post. I know, pretty insignificant and small moment there, big guy… but if you guys know Katie’s father or if I described him well enough, I am sure you get how huge that split second was. I doubt in that moment he thought he was seeing the man of his daughter’s dreams.

The rest of the evening went very well. Katie was the first down to earth, funny, sexy girl I had ever met. I was beginning to think that a girl such as this, in Lower Sackville (Nova Scotia, Canada), was a unicorn (see one of my favourite videos describing a unicorn below).

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YouTube: The Hot & Crazy Matrix

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To be honest, I only went on the date as a favour to my "friend-zone" buddy as I was not looking for anything serious at the time. I think the moment I knew this girl was worth a second glance was while we were walking up to our first house for candy. As we were walking, I did not realize (sorry Katie and your family), but I was staring at her perfectly formed, upside-down heart shaped booty being cradled by the tight long-johns like a mother holding a baby in each arm. I realized I was in a trance when Katie looked back at me and boldly said:

"Well if you’re going to stare at it you might as well grab it."

To which I giddyingly © obliged. At that moment was the first time I had realized I met my match.

Skip ahead 11 years, past many many more stories, trials and tribulations; back to April 2015. Don’t worry, I am sure the many details of those 11 years will come out in future tangents. Here we are again, arguing about when and if we will ever be ready to start a family (and this is not the first time we had this argument, but it is a memorable one for sure). Truth is, there is never a perfect time. I have known my whole life that I wanted to start a family someday. I would even have 15 kids if it were financially and mentally feasible (when you are not living on a farm). Katie definitely wanted a child or two, but was a little more apprehensive about it than I. You already know my wife has a very endearing potty mouth, but one other thing you do not know is that she has OCD (or C-D-O as she lamely likes to call it because that is alphabetical order). She likes to have every detail planned out and organized. The problem with this and having a child is that they clash. If you are truly serious about diving into the wonderful world of being a parent then you need an ounce of impulsiveness and faith that everything will be alright. When you are up at 4 am, after 4 weeks straight of your baby screeching, whilst knowing you need to be up in an hour to drive to your place of work (so that you can muster out a good zombified 8 hours of bullshit), you definitely need to have faith that everything will be alright. This lackadaisical demeanor is a lot easier for a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants type of guy guy like myself, but not so much for a OCD planner. Needless to say, we had some clashing of opinions about when this family thing was gong to start and this night in April 2015 was no exception. We didn’t get anywhere in our argument that night. We ended up storming into the house together and going into separate rooms. I was beginning to wonder if I would be needing Viagra by the time she would be ready, but also knowing I would make that a reality if I kept pushing. I am out in the living room watching a show when I hear Katie having a maniacal laughing fit in the bathroom and calling out my name. After I check that all of the knives are in the knife block and my gun is locked away, I cautiously walk towards the bathroom. She whips up a pregnancy test (in which I dive out of the way of, in fear of urine landing on my face) and there are two blue lines. Oh and you know she ain’t leaving it at one test with all of the false positives running around out there. She opens a drawer and out fall ten more tests all with the same two blue lines (ok, ten is a slight exaggeration for effect, it was probably only one more, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she had a drawer somewhere).

All is forgotten of the aforementioned argument that night, we hold each other with tears in our eyes and laughing due to the irony of what just happened. I may have mustered out:

"guess we have no choice now."

As I look nervously over her shoulder at the pair of scissors behind her back…

Just kidding (about the scissors)!