Blue Hawaiian

Round 35: September 2041 (Spring)

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Hamilton-Novak 1 household profile

Amar Hamilton is 40, Adrienne Novak is 34 and Beau is 3. 

(Miles is 38, Matilda is 35, Zane and Chloe are 30, Austin is 20 and Phoebe is 4)

Narrated by Adrienne Novak

Right now, I don’t have to go into work until late but I tend to get up early anyway and hang out with Beau for a bit.

Even three years later, I still feel like Amar is better at all this stuff than I am but I do okay. 

At least Beau is old enough now that I can leave him alone for a few minutes and trust he won’t get into too much trouble.

Actually, if he’s playing with his blocks, I can almost guarantee that he won’t be interested in anything or anyone else for a good while. He loves his blocks. 

We set up the table for him because we thought he might have inherited an artistic gene from Amar and me - we’re both very creative people. But that kind of thing doesn’t interest Beau at all.

I'm so curious to see what kinds of hobbies Beau might pick up as he gets older. He’s starting pre-school next year, so I guess we’ll get to find out soon enough. 

He’ll be the only pre-schooler in the class but we’re not worried about him. He loves going new places and he’s a very outgoing little kid. 

Amar takes him into work with him every now and then and he loves it. He’s made best buddies with Austin, one of the other photographers. 

At the very least, he’ll have Phoebe with him. When he starts pre-school, Phoebe will start kindergarten and they’ll be in the same classroom. 

They see each other all the time, because it’s a good excuse for me and Matilda to catch up. We live so close by that it’s so easy to just meet at either one of our houses. 

Matilda and Miles are about 95% sure they won’t have any more kids, so they've been trying to stop Phoebe from turning out too spoiled. 

She has a tendency to be a bit demanding as it is, so it’s good for her to spend time with other children, so she knows she can’t always get her way. 

She’s usually pretty good when she comes over to our place but Amar wasn't too thrilled with her when Miles and Matilda brought her to his studio for a photo session. Amar doesn't really do that sort of photography any more but he did it as a favour to Matilda. 

Apparently, they took quite a while to get going, mostly because of Phoebe and her tantrums. 

They got through it in the end but only after Matilda flat out bribed her with the promise of ice cream afterwards if she would just sit still and be good for half an hour. 

When Amar got home, he said sessions like that were exactly why he does fashion photography. Models are much easier to work with, he says.

Yeah, I'm sure that’s the only reason. Nothing to do with Amar also getting to look at beautiful women all day. 

I know him way too well. We've been exclusive for ages now but I don’t expect he’ll ever stop looking and even flirting sometimes. 

Amar and I have been engaged for two years now and we still haven’t actually tied the knot!

Zane asks us about it all the time. Being 10 years younger than Amar, people probably wouldn't have expected Zane to be the one to get married first. 

It does seem a bit strange from the outside but Amar and Zane lived their 20s very, very differently. It all makes sense to anyone who actually knows them 

But now, Amar and I do actually want to get married. We've been taking steps to get there but it’s been difficult.

Amar has been really busy setting up his studio. He moved to a bigger location a while back. It’s all done now but that was a few months of pretty hard work for him.

I'm now a team supervisor at the design firm. Coming in a bit later and having an extra day off is a perk but I've taken a bigger workload at the same time. I'm expected to do a fair bit at home when I'm not working as well. 

I enjoy it but it’s definitely one more thing taking up my down time, which is fairly limited at the moment. 

And then of course we both have work to do here at home, with Beau. He takes up the majority of our “down” time. 

He’s a pretty great kid but he’s still only three. Toddlers are hard, even well-behaved ones.

We have, at least, set a wedding date but until recently, we weren't sure if we were going to postpone it again or not. 

We decided on February next year, in a nice park close by. By then, it should still be warm but not insanely hot and it would be a beautiful venue, with plenty of space for the kids to run around as well.

Then I got pregnant. It’s an unexpected but a wanted baby but it meant I’d be about 6 months pregnant at the wedding, which isn't ideal. 

It’s still a bit early to announce anything but I did float the idea of postponing the wedding to Mum, without mentioning that I was pregnant. 

I thought she’d be okay with it, because she’s pretty laid back about that kind of thing but instead, she asked if we really had to. 

Grandpa has apparently been really, really looking forward to the wedding. He’s been so down since Grandma died and Mum has been worried. 

She was hoping the wedding would give him a little boost. It was something Grandma had been looking forward to (and nagging us about!) as well, so she thinks Grandpa would appreciate that as well.

Well, I didn't really feel like I could go ahead and postpone after that! 

Amar was happy to leave the decision to me, seeing I’ll be the pregnant one. So I guess, when I finally get married, I’ll be walking down the aisle with a rather sizeable belly!

It’s not really how I ever pictured my wedding, I have to admit. Then again, nothing in my life is quite the way I might have imagined it and I think it’s somehow all worked out for the best in the end. 

Notes:

• Title is from Blue Hawaiian by Pavement.
• I kind of kept forgetting Adrienne and Amar were even engaged but I figured I might as well get them married off anyway! I'm going to stick with February 2042 and will be adding it to the schedule when I get a second to do so.
• And Baby Hamilton #2 will be joining us in May 2042, just a few months later. I am on the lookout for maternity bridal gowns as we speak! I haven't had a pregnant bride since Aphrodite Nihill (who was Adrienne's great aunt by marriage), so I'm kind of excited too. 
• Amar's new photography studio is this lot by blissful_indigo but redecorated a bit. I never install lots with CC these days, so I just downloaded the window sets and put in my own stuff elsewhere. I love the lot - so much bigger than Amar's old studio (which was a teeny 1x1 lot!)