To articulate, babble, broach, chant, chat, chatter.......

Communication is something God has really laid on my heart, mind, and soul lately.

I am by no means a relationship expert or marriage genius or anything at all. I just try to understand situations I am in, and others are in as best as I can. I do like to live life vicariously, learning from others' mistakes if I can.

I cannot stress enough that communication is key to a good relationship with anyone, whether it be your Mom, Dad, Siblings, Children, Husband, Relatives, Friends.... with anyone - you have to communicate. It takes a lot of work too.

Especially in a Marriage relationship (or one potentially heading towards marriage). If you and the other person involved do not tell each other the little things in life that make you happy or sad, your wishes and dreams, your opinions, likes, dislikes, political views, religious views - whatever! You are not going to talk about those "big things" when they come around. Big things like marriage, children, and money.

Relationships of any sort (worth-while ones) must be a two way street. It has to be a "give and take" thing. HAS to be. If there isn't communication, there cannot be joy, peace and compromise.

Many wonder why there has to be compromise and the answer is really quite simple: You are two DIFFERENT people. It's a beautiful thing to be different than the person you love, if you were the same it would be just another "drone" relationship like something out of hollywood that has been done 100 times already. When you are different people you will like different things than eachother: He likes Action films, she likes soap operas. Both hate the others favorite - so you meet somewhere in the middle when you want to do something together. Like a sorta chick-flick with a lot of guy humor, or something silly like that.

If there is no compromise on both sides it is inevitable that one person in the relationship will always be "giving" into what the other person wants and that will in the end create a bitterness that will not turn into something good, and will take a long time to "fix." The other person will always get their "way" and that just emboldens them to continue on - leaving everything horridly lopsided/unbalanced and things will sooner or later come to a head and explode like Old Faithful - without fail.

This is especially important when bringing a child into the mix. Something I didn't realize when I was pregnant. I had no idea that having a baby would cut into our "talk time" SO badly! I didn't know that actual communication other than - "how was your day?" "Rylee didn't take a good nap all day" "She had 3 poopy diapers today and has diaper rash" "I got all the laundry done today!" "so, tell me about the job you worked on today-" - was going to be all that we were going to have anymore. When we started getting genuinely mad at each other over stupid things like dirty carpet I realized that the problem we had went much deeper than the dirty carpet and I agonized over it for the next couple weeks. Finally figuring it out we confronted it and moved on - because we communicated about it... ...finally. It took awhile, though, for me to realize that the lack of real talking about issues, struggles, wants and desires was really at the heart of our recent issues.

When a new baby is going to be thrown into a already rock situation it seems a lot of couples think that they'll "come together" over the baby. I've got a news flash for you! It doesn't really work that way! Babies are SO much work. You WON'T sleep. Your judgment will NOT be at it's best because of your lack of sleep and hard work through the days. You WON'T talk, especially when you realize that everything that comes out of your mouth is mean - because it's all that's in your brain from your severe sleep deprived state. Things don't just "get better" when the baby comes. How will you continue to live and act as that baby becomes a toddler? They learn behavior quite early, you know, what is it you want them to be really learning?

Communication needs to happen every day whether it be simple things like telling your love you appreciate that he goes to work every day even when he doesn't want to. Vacuuming 4x a day because it makes your love happy. Having dinner on the table when he gets home because he'll feel special. Good old fashion talking, gestures of love - that's what's really missing in so many homes today.

I love my husband and so thankful he's willing to talk to me - so long as I let him know it's what I need at the moment! Thank you, Jesus, for my Husband!