37 more hours...

On Wednesday at 12:30pm, my little girl will turn six.  I can hardly believe it.  She is so smart and so caring and so sensitive and so beautiful.  It humbles me that I have the privilege of being this amazing girl's mom.

You know what?  During my pregnancy, when I found out I was having a girl, I cried.  And not tears of joy.  I'm ashamed to admit it now, but I thought I was having a boy, I already had a boy and knew what to DO with a boy, I wanted another boy.  A girl?  What do I do with that?  We're talking hair clips and bratty girlfriends and hormones - oh Lord.  Of course, that's water way, way under the bridge now and if any of you ever tell my daughter that, I will deny it to my dying day!

K is a girly-girl who loves princesses, dresses, shoes and nail polish.  She asks just about every day if she can wear make-up and wants to grow her hair as long as Rapunzel.  She is also a little bit of a tomboy and loves Super Mario Brothers and playing sports.  She loves kittens and horses and stickers and books.  She sings and dances in the dark listening to Taylor Swift and gets embarrassed if you catch her at it.  She is bright and sweet and wants everyone to be her friend.  She has her daddy's brown eyes and his sense of humor (hello?  Three Stooges marathon??) and her mama's soft heart and sensitive nature.  She is my little girl who is growing up faster than I can stand it. 

Happy Birthday K!  You light up our lives, baby girl.

Spring has sprung!

I realized when I signed in to my blog the other day that I never published this post from last month!

I always hate to coin phrases like "they always say ______" because, really, how annoying is that?  Who are "they" and why are "they" always right????  However, I need to make an exception.  THEY always say if you don't like the weather in Texas, wait five minutes and it will change.  Some of you who don't live here might think that's an exaggeration.  It's not really.  My cousin once commented on a photo of mine on Facebook.  He wrote, "I'm pretty convinced you have the craziest weather on earth in Abilene."  Yeah, that about sums it up.  The picture he was commenting on was a piece of hail the size of a ping pong ball that fell one morning.  We left the house and it was sunny.  By the time we got to school two miles away, the sky was lit up with lightning and it was POURING hail.  I'm not kidding - the school yard looked like it was covered in snow.  The temperature that morning was a chilly 45.   And just two days before that we were having summer weather - sunny and 90+ degrees!


Anyway, this blog post today is not going to be about the weather.  Well, it's not supposed to be.  I kind of went off on a tangent.  I wanted to start off saying that I'm not a big fan of spring.  I know it's a favorite season for a lot of people (my mother).  Everything is new and green and blooming and getting warm.  Here in Texas it is still dry and windy, mostly hot with an occasional cold day thrown in.  Give me fall and winter with football, Christmas music, turtlenecks and fuzzy socks please.  We don't have grass, we have weeds, so even in the springtime our yard doesn't look very pretty.  The only trees we have are mesquite trees, so big deal.  Where are the magnolia or dogwood or any other pretty flowering trees?  Certainly not here.  However, there is one thing I have come to love about springtime in Texas.  Bluebonnets.  They are the state flower and are so, so pretty, but you have to be careful because if you blink, you might miss them.  When the time is right, they pop up out of nowhere and, seemingly overnight, you have fields upon fields of blue.  Then, about a week later, they are wilted and fading and then just gone!  


Ever since J was a baby, I have made it a tradition to venture out into the field of bluebonnets and take pictures.  Everyone always loves these photos, and in ten years, we've only had two springs when I didn't get any.  One year was unusually warm or wet or something, and the few bluebonnets that did pop out weren't very picture-worthy.  Last year was such a crazy winter that we had NONE.  Zip, zero, nada.  


Apparently this year Mother Nature decided to flaunt her awesomeness, because they were EVERYWHERE!  Bluebonnets had been out for over a week, so most of them were already past their prime when I went to take pictures.   The big field near my house that we usually go to, though, was still overrun with them, and an occasional pretty yellow flower thrown in.  Surprisingly my kids were even cooperative about the photo op.  

Struggling...

Romans 5:5 ESV 

And hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Today I really needed to read this verse.  Lately my hopeful and optimistic spirit has been dampened by circumstances out of my control.  Not by anything disastrous or life-threatening, nothing like that.  But my ability to see the best in people & give them the benefit of the doubt is beyond me right now and I need some encouragement.

Unfairness is one of my biggest pet peeves.  Maybe it indicates that I live in a dream world with my head in the clouds to admit that I think things should be done the way they are supposed to be done.  That they aren't always, even when pertaining to something unimportant, is abhorrent to me.  Why do people lie to each other?  Why say one thing and do the opposite?  Why make poor excuses instead of owning up to the truth?  I wish I had the answers to those questions, because right now my faith in other people is low.  Saying what you mean and meaning what you say shouldn't be so hard!
 

I don't have a perfect moral compass.  I don't always make the right decisions.  I like to think, though, that I always, always try to do the right thing, even when it means stepping way out of my comfort zone.  Recently I did that in defense of someone who needed defending, and all it got me was attacked in return.  In my experience, people will lash out and accuse when they have a guilty conscience.  I very rarely speak out on anything, so if I do and someone gets defensive or evasive, I tend to believe that they are in the wrong.  There is defensiveness and evasiveness flying all around me.

I once read somewhere that you should beware of half truths, because you might learn the wrong half.  So true!

Ella Wheeler Wilcox said: 'Tis easy enough to be pleasant, when life flows like a song. But the man worthwhile is the one who will smile when everything goes dead wrong.

I am trying my hardest to smile in spite of things going wrong.   However, I would prefer to open my own eyes, rather than have them opened for me by other people and their actions.  Unfortunately, as the saying goes, life is not fair.  Sometimes it's not even the end result but simply the process or the journey that isn't fair.  That's what I'm struggling with right now.  Other people's selfishness in serving their own agenda has put a huge dark cloud over the pleasure and enjoyment I've known for weeks.  It's not the agenda itself, but the way certain people went about it, that has upset me.

There are two ways of meeting difficulties: you alter the difficulties or you alter yourself meeting them. (Phyllis Bottome)

I am glad that this struggle revolves only around me and my expectations of others.  My husband and my kids are somewhat affected by the outcome, but the problem in dealing with it is all mine.  There is no way to alter these difficulties, so I must alter myself.  I'm trying.  I actually told Hubby last night that he hasn't been able to do it in twelve years, but I wish he could finally teach me how to let things go.  It's so incredibly hard for me to turn the other cheek when I know someone is wrong.  I want it fixed, and in my life right now, I have no tools to fix it.  I'm on the outside looking in and my humble opinion means next to nothing.  Hubby has this amazing ability to mask his feelings until he gets over it, which normally happens fairly quickly.  He can hold a grudge with the best of them, but very rarely does he.  He's able to see what truly matters in the grand scheme of things.  I need to learn to follow by his example and not let my soft heart and my logical mind bring me down when life isn't careful with them.  People tend to stomp on soft hearts and ignore logical minds.  Thankfully I married a man who protects the first and appreciates the second.  

We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope. - Martin Luther King, Jr. I want to feel hopeful again.