Two dates down

I haven't talked about where we are in a while. So I thought I would do an update. We are still attending counseling. That seems to be going ok. Last week we had a week off so we did date number two.
Now you might be asking your self why am I numbering our dates. It is because we are following a book that was suggested to us through the {in}Courage community.

You can get it here

The book lays out a pretty easy recipe to bring communication back into your marriage. Now I know we are not that far into but so far we have really gained from it.

Chapter one talks about your past and remaining positive. Before each date the book provides a group of questions you are to fill out. For this chapter it asked about remembering good things from your past. Then it asked three question on the present. One thing I really liked is that on the one question it asked what was something I could do better. I thought this was good that each person had to answer about themselves instead of throwing blame at the other person. Steve and I realized we need to provide more family time into our schedule from this date. So we cleaned out the storage ottoman in the living room from unused toys and put all of our board games in it. Now, I will be honest, we haven't utilized it as much as we should be we have a few times and that is more that we were. Small steps...

The second chapter was on feelings..wait.wait..come back! I know, believe me I know.. that normally makes me turn away to. And I will admit some of the chapter and one of the questions had me rolling my eyes. But chapter one was so good that I wanted to give this chapter a chance too. I still rolled my eyes at giving a list of feeling words I am comfortable with. And "I'm Fine" doesn't cut it I guess. But the part I like about this chapter beyond getting to have some scheduled alone time again was that it asked some questions that we didn't have answers to. It gave a list of How does this make you feel when your spouse says (insert positive message here), and then we were to answer with our feeling words. But what I realized is that even though I might realize that Steve has sacrificed things for me, I haven't always acknowledged it. And though he is proud of what I have done he has never told me. These are areas we now know we need to work on.

I hope chapter 3 is as good as the first two. We are reading another book to, but that review is for another post. 

*All images were found through a google search**

**This is not a paid endorsement of the book, it's not even an unpaid, just wanted to get the info out there for others that may need help**