How "Amberly Place" was born

But before I get to any pictures (which take time, that's why I'm stalling), a little story.

This morning I was doing my paper routes and thinking about what I was going to blog about. I realized I haven't read a lot of my friends' blogs in awhile. I have a bit of a photographic memory, so as I'm thinking that in my head I'm picturing my blog and in my mind I am reading off some of the names of my friends' blogs on the right side where the list of them are. I'd noticed this before, but some of you have sort of self-deprecating names for your blogs, which I think is funny and clever, but it gets me thinking about the name of my blog. I realized that I'd intended to, but never did tell the story (at least I don't think I have, remind me if I have) about how that name came to be.

When Mike and I were dating...back when we were still in La La Love Land, we drove around in Mike's Blazer a lot. One time driving around randomly in Port Orchard we came upon a street sign for Amberly Place. We considered stealing it but I wasn't sold on the idea because it wasn't Amber Place, and as you know Amberly isn't my name. So Mike says that he likes to thinks of amberly as an adjective, like "Think of an amberly place." I'd secretly always wanted a street sign with my name on it and even knew of one in Sequim that I'd always plotted to get someday, but this was even better because now it had a sweet story attached to it. So we did steal it and we still have it. I should say that I realize now that the fact that we broke the law does taint it a little and I obviously wouldn't do that now...but I think we thought of ourselves as being on the cusp of being stupid kids and responsible adults (or at least I can use that excuse since I was only 19...Mike was 24 so he was probably pushing it :-), but his allowance comes from his Peter Pan syndrome that he had at the time...even though he was 24 he seemed to think and act like a 19-year-old. I think the Peter Pan in him left the day Adrienne was born. :-)

So that's the story, the bit of shame I feel about it keeps me from telling it very often, but I do like to remember how lovey-dovey Mike used to be toward me, and that story is one example (there are others, but I'll spare him further embarrassment for today). Not to say that he's not lovey toward me anymore, it's just different with time and kids and all. ;-) So when you read the title to this blog you have to think of Amberly as an adjective because this is my place on the internet about all things "Amber." ;-)

p.s. I didn't know if I needed to spell it out for people what was sweet about "think of an amberly place" but it's a play on the phrase from Peter Pan (how funny!) "think of a happy place," so for Mike his happy place was an amberly place.