The Deli Family

I've been working in the same supermarket deli for 8 years now. I first started out as a bagger but was quickly transferred to the deli after 5 months because the paper bags would irritate the skin on my hands and arms severely. After one year, I met Redbeard there. He had just moved to Vermont and he was a part-time night person and I was an almost-full-time day person. Every so often our hours would overlap, and we met and worked side by side. One day when he was coming into work and I was returning from a break, I caught him at the stairs and told him I had a confession to make. I told him me and my friend M thought he was cute. He was stunned and didn't know what to say, but he played along and our friendship grew.

Shortly after, at the end of M's shift, he asked her out to a movie. Initially she said yes, and she left. 10 minutes later she called back and said she couldn't go on the date, something about her parents (she was 19 at the time and living at home with very protective parents).

The very next day, which was a Monday, he came into the store in the middle of the day on his lunch break to buy some salads. He got a seafood salad and a ham salad, and he also got my number. My mouth dropped to the ground like dammmnnnnn.... M came in later that day for her shift and I told her about Redbeard (back in those days, he didn't have a goatee) and she got extremely upset and said that's my man and called all sorts of nasty names.

I got home later that afternoon, and he wasn't working the deli that night, so he called me. We talked for about an hour, and I enticed him over to my place (still 22 and living at home with my dad) with a big screen tv, a hot tub, and playstation 2. We hit it off immediately and that first night we had some fun, after being friends for a couple of weeks. It wasn't much later that I made a man out of him. He quit a couple of months later because of M and her sorry attitude, but no biggie, we were moving in together soon.

Just over a year later, he asked me to marry him on Christmas morning 2002 in front of my mother, after we had opened up all our presents. It was then that he said "Santa Claus isn't done, he has one more present for you." He turned around to face me, took something out of his pocket, got down on his knee and asked me to marry him! He was so nervous he almost forgot to kneel, I halfway said "aren't you forgetting something?" We were married in May 2004.




Sierra came along 2 years later. Now I just work weekends and stay at home during Redbeard's work week and weekends are Sierra's daddy time.

Now every time we take Sierra shopping with us at my store, it literally takes at least an hour because everyone wants to stop us and talk to us and see Sierra. They ask the same questions over and over: "Are you back to work again?" "You off today?" "How old is Sierra now?" "She's getting so big, I can't believe she's two already!" It really makes us crazy and it takes all our strength to restrain from rolling our eyes. So, we cheat on our store and go shopping the next town over so it doesn't take five years to do the shopping!

So that's how we became "The Deli Family."