First, I must make a confession … I’m on Pinterest (find me here). Yes, to my men friends … you may want to take my man-card, BUT to this point … Pinterest has been pretty good to me. Let me explain…

Towards the end of the year, my wife was spending a lot of time on Pinterest and finding new ideas, recipes, and other things on it so I had to see what Pinterest was. If she found something that interesting, I wanted to know what it was. After looking around on Pinterest, I realized it was a female-dominated website that I thought I might bring a little testosterone to. So I joined. After joining, I’ve enjoyed “pinning” man-stuff, running stuff and other things that deal with hobbies of mine. I also noticed that Pinterest had a lot of things that dealt with marriage (of which I’m very outspoken).

I soon found an idea on Pinterest that had to do with a year of romance and monthly dates. I quickly showed it to Lea and said, “Hint, hint.” She took the idea and ran with it.  This morning I got up and found this by my coffee pot. It’s a folder full of ideas, plans and fun for the month of January.

There will be a envelope showing up each month that contains pre-planned activities just for us. Some dates will take place at home, some out on the town.  All 12 envelopes are different. Here’s a little of the contents from this month.

I love it when Lea is willing to be proactive in our marriage. If you’d like more information on the envelope system, where it came from, how to get it, etc … you can CLICK HERE and it will take you to the site where we found them.  Lea also joined The Loving Wive’s Club here, which gives creative ideas and printables each month.

Try it out. Bless your marriage. Be proactive

Intimacy is both physical and emotional closeness in marriage. Being physically intimate is what leads to emotional intimacy and is what God talked about in Genesis 2 when he said, “… and the two (husband & wife) shall become one flesh.” Intimacy should be one of the strengths and cornerstones of your marriage. One of the struggles of our marriages is how to keep intimacy strong and how to keep intimacy killers out of your marriage.

The “serious” intimacy killers that do the most damage are things like…

1. lying
2. technology
3. loss of trust
4. inability to express your needs and feelings
5. not listening
6. daily separate lives
7. being self-centered
8. angry arguments
9. lack of touch
10. lack of time

Lea and I always laugh and say that our 10 biggest intimacy killers are the following …

1. Children
2. Kids
3. Offspring
4. Babies (Thankfully we’re past this.)
5. Toddlers (Past this one, too)
6. Pre-teens
7. Teenagers
8. Niños (if you speak Spanish)
9. Taylor, Parker, Connor & Cooper
10. Yes, you guessed it, children.

Okay, just so you know, we do believe our children are blessings in our lives and not burdens. We love our children with all our hearts, but at the same time, we work extra hard to have “us” time in our marriage. Here are a few things that have helped with the “children” intimacy killers …

• We work hard to eat together by ourselves several times a week.
• We have a lock on our bedroom door.
• We’ve always encouraged our children to sleep in their own beds … not in ours.
• After our children leave for school, we take a little time every morning to drink a cup of coffee together.

Those are just little things … but very important things. God is sure good to me to put Lea in my life. I definitely married up!

I’m curious … does your “intimacy killers” list resembled ours?

I was riding around with my two youngest boys a while back when they said …

“Dad, can we get a hot tub … we never get to hot tub?”

My response was, “Boys, we don’t need a hot tub … we’ve got something better … we’ve got friends with hot tubs. Wanna go right now? The ‘Smiths’ are out of town until tomorrow and they’ve said we’re welcome to come anytime.”

“Dad,” they said, “That’s an awesome idea, let’s go get our suits,”

Thinking it’d be fun to teach my boys a bit about my childhood … I responded with confidence, “Boys, when I was a kid and we found a swimming hole, we’d just strip down and go. We don’t need a swimming suit … besides its almost dark and I’m not going all away across town for suits when we are 2 blocks away.”

A little apprehensive, they said, “You sure, Dad?”

“Sure,” I said, “No worries.”

A few minutes later we were enjoying a nice relaxing tub when … you guessed it … out the back door walks “Ms Smith.” Yip, they decided to come home a day early from their vacation.

I just hope my boys learned a valuable lesson that day … don’t listen to Dad when it comes to things like skinny dipping.

The Morgan family had a great Christmas break. Two full weeks of playing, eating, visiting and having fun. As my kids get older, I’m beginning to realize that what makes Christmas special is not the gifts, but everyone getting to be home.  We were blessed to get to have Taylor home for a full 16 days … and we enjoyed every minute.  Tomorrow we take him back to the airport so he can go back to basic training for another 8 weeks. Here are a few pictures…

Everyone enjoyed having Taylor home for Christmas.

We had lots of company during the holidays. Taylor’s and Parker’s friends were all over and they asked that I fix them biscuits and sausage gravy for supper one night.  When you’re feeding a bunch of hungry 20 year olds … you better have a lot.

Two big pans of sausage gravy.

They cleaned up 135 biscuits.

I hope your holidays were good too. Many blessings … ~ Trey

1. Spend more time together. Make a commitment to spend more time together this year. One of the best things you can do is commit to a weekly date night with your spouse. This may take you sitting down together with your spouse and planning out your schedule.
2. Brag on your spouse regularly. Any old lame critic can pick out someone’s faults; instead focus on pointing out your spouse’s strengths.
3. Be more sexual. Touch, flirt, hug and have sex together. Make your marriage sizzle, and as one author put it, “A married couple’s sex-life is a great measuring stick of how their relationship is doing.” A healthy sex-life most often equals a healthy marriage. A wise wife will MAKE the time to do this … the foolish wife will just WISH there was more time for this to happen.
4. Pray together. Men, this is where you MUST step up and be a man. Take the lead on this and do it. Your wife will love you for it.
5. Don’t be historical. Fight fair. Don’t bring up past hurts and things you’ve already forgiven your spouse of.
6. Check in. It’s respectful to check with your spouse and let them know where you are, what you are doing and when you might be home.
7. Have one meal a day together. Turn off the electronics and just visit with your spouse and your children.
8. Don’t go to bed angry with one another. Simple enough.
9. Love Biblically.Here’s where you find the definition of love … Biblically.
10. Forgive. The key to being successful in real estate is location, location, location. The key to being successful in marriage is forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness. Marriage is made up of two imperfect faulty people. We make mistakes … so learn to forgive.

If it’s alright … I suggest you pick 2-3 that you are NOT already doing and start doing them this year.  Bless your marriage.

Pin it‘Twas the night before Christmas and up before the sun, was Trey Morgan to get his morning run. The rest of us Morgan’s were all snug in our beds, while visions of the World Series still danced in our heads. The year 2011 brought lots of change and fun, and the Morgan Family found themselves always on [...]

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