Sunday, March 25, 2007

Pre-Cana and Procrastination

This morning, Dan and I had to get up early and go to St. John Neumann where we will be married to partake in Pre-Cana. For those of you that are not Catholic, Pre-Cana is required for all couples who want to be married in a church. Essentially, it is a meeting with other couples preparing for marriage where we discuss issues such as financials, children, intimacy and communication. The sessions are facilitated by other couples from the parish - some are newly married, others have been married for years. We lucked out and only had to go from 9:45-2:30. Some Pre-Cana sessions are 2 day events - my brother and sister-in-law had to go for a weekend.

I have to say that I think this was a pretty interesting and thought provoking day. Dan and I had to take the FOCCUS test online before the meeting and one of the moderaters e-mailed us our results so that we could talk about them before we came to Pre-Cana. While Dan and I have discussed many of these things already, there were a few that we had not tackled yet and we were able to discus them in private which was nice.

There were about 13 other couples there - we all had to stand up and introduce ourselves and tell about how we met and when we were getting married. Everyone seemed pretty nice and excited about getting married. Some of the guys seemed antsy but I suspect they were hoping that we would get out in time for the Final Four games on in the afternoon.

One of the moderators was my brother's 4th grade teacher who is gorgeous - she always was. She is married and has two kids of her own. She told the story of how my brother pushed her, fully clothed, into our pool at the 4th grade end of year party - yes, Anth, she has yet to forgive you for that.

The funniest part was the Natural Family Planning book that our priest handed out to us during our talk on "intimacy." The intimacy part was actually about achieving more of a spiritual intimacy with your future spouse so we got spare the awkward sex talk but the booklet is hysterical - especially the diagrams - can anyone say cervical mucus?

Now we are home. Dan is dutifully painting our guest bedroom while I try to do my assignments for this week...clearly he is the one being more productive and for that I am so thankful that someone is not wasting away their afternoon like I am...sigh...and so I say goodbye for how, my Human Development textbook calls.

1 comment:

yeager36 said...

The team was very thoughtful to us March Madness viewers, Home by 3 for the start of games. At one point during pre-cana, they lined all the couples up to shoot free throws, if you missed you had to tell a joke. I offered to paola to take the shot,but she gladly smiled and handed me the ball. we made the shot and didnt have to tell a joke, which is great because i am not very good a telling them. all in all the day was very helpful to the both of us.:-)