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.

It's a zoo out there!

Last week was spring break here in Texas.  Does it matter that it wasn't even officially SPRING yet?  Apparently not.  Anyway, since kids happy to be at home = mom NOT happy to have the kids at home, we all scramble to find something fun and interesting (and cheap!) to do. 

We decided to visit the Forth Worth Zoo.  If you've never been there, I highly recommend it.  It's easy to get to (just over 2 hours away and two turns off the interstate) and very inexpensive.  Adult admission was $12 and the kids were $9, parking was $5.  In the DFW area, that is almost unheard of.  I do not, however, recommend going during spring break.  Apparently this particular zoo sets ATTENDANCE RECORDS that week.  Lovely.  Fortunately we went on Monday, and not half-price Wednesday, so it was only slightly crazy instead of total insanity.

All kidding aside (ok, I wasn't kidding), we had a great time.  We packed a lunch and had a picnic on the grass outside the parking lot before we went in because I'd been told the food was the one expensive thing at the zoo.  The zoo is very pleasantly landscaped with a lot of nice walkways, shade trees (we don't have those in Abilene) and even a handy little train that takes you from the back of the park to the front for only $2.  That was nice when the kids were tired of walking after seeing everything!  We saw hippos, elephants, flamingos, tigers, leopards, turtles, horses, fish, birds, penguins, bears, monkeys, and so many more.  The only bummer was we couldn't find the cheetah - we found the exhibit, but NOT the animal - and that was the one big cat K was so excited to see.  Oh well, there's always next time.   But NOT during spring break!


Parking lot picnic!

  
I'm not sure what animals were behind us, but it made for a nice backdrop for the photo!

The tigers were LAZY!

The mountain goats were NOT lazy!  They were playing on the rocks and giving us quite a show!

Sharks!  (they were small)

J sat on his perch much more easily than K!

Happy train riders!

The girls each picked out an animaland animal to "make".  J picked out two bags of rocks.  Yeah.

Another photo op?  C'mon Mom!!!

I don't think the 10 yr old in the way back ever slept, but this is what the zoo did to these girls! 

Not feeling the love

Do you ever have days where you are not necessarily in a bad mood or upset with someone, but certain things are just pissing you off?  That's me today.  I feel good.  I slept good last night.  I exercised this morning.  I enjoyed lunch with my kids.  There was nothing bad that set me off, so I'm not cranky.  There are just these.... annoyances.... that have been gathering in the back of my mind, and I'm reaching the point where I have to let them out.

• This God-awful-blowing-dust-everywhere-making-breathing-difficult-strong-enough-to-rock-my-CAR wind.  I am SO over it.  I have lived in Texas for eleven years and I think the wind has gotten progressively worse every year.  Last year was the absolute worst.  Everyone says "Oh, the March winds".  HA.  March?  Try February, March, April, May, June.... you get the idea.  IT.  NEVER.  ENDS.  I don't have the kind of hair that looks good after a wind storm.  I have stick-your-finger-in-a-socket kind of hair that is barely tame on a good day.   Baseball caps are a fashion requirement for me in the spring and summer.   I also have very sensitive eyes, made worse by allergies (or so my optometrist tells me).  My eyes water all the time.  See a Visine commercial?  Watch my kids practice crossing their eyes?  Bright sunshine or a slight breeze?  My eyes water like crazy.  40mph winds are NOT my friend. 
• My sixteen-year-old cat refuses to stop pooping on the floor.  She only does it at night when she's in the laundry room (where she has slept for the past eleven years).  I've noticed lately that if I put an assortment of boxes, rubbermaid lids, etc, over the carpet where she is going, then I don't wake up to any surprises.  Until now.  She  outsmarted me.  Last night I put out my anti-poop tools all over the floor, only to walk out there this morning to find a present on the OTHER carpet in front of the washing machine.  Damn cat.   She gets yelled at and her nose shoved in her droppings when she's bad.  She gets heaps of praise, love and treats when she's good.  You'd think she could figure out which is the better deal.   Little does she know that she's pushing me to the end of my rope.  My next step is putting her in the garage for the night.   She can bunk down with my car on the cold concrete floor and see how fun that is.
• Fox.  I am not a big tv watcher.  In fact, during the day I don't even turn it on.  I'm the anomaly in my house, because when my husband and kids get home, the first thing they do is turn on the television.  There are very few shows that I like to watch on a regular basis.  American Idol is one of them.  Unfortunately, that show airs on Fox, which my Dish Network no longer offers thanks to a dispute in price.  Seriously.  I live out in the boonies so there is no other option.  We can't get cable.  We switched from Directv because we had to PAY for local channels.  Now that we have free local channels with Dish, they proceed to drop one.  Trying to hunt down American Idol the next day online is frustrating, and watching the show on my laptop is not my idea of a good time.  Good thing I don't ever want to vote for the singers.
• The current craze over grown-ups reading young adult novels drives me crazy.  I love books, I am a dedicated reader and my tastes are pretty varied.  However I have no desire to read about teenagers!  The whole Twilight thing?  Ick.  I have nothing against vampires or love stories.  In fact, one of the best books I've read lately is Darker After Midnight - a book about vampires.  But they are ADULTS!  I don't care how good the story is or how talented the author is.... I just can't get into a book about children just a few years older than my son.
• People who preach about the evils of flour, sugar, carbs, artificial sweeteners, etc.  I get it.  You are a food nazi and you are skinny.  You also can't be as happy as this bread loving, french fry eating, Diet Coke addict.   I know that people who rigidly control those items in their diet maintain a ridiculously healthy weight.  Good for them.  I can't and I won't give them up.  If that means I'm ten pounds heavier than I want to be for the rest of my life, so be it.  I eat healthy.  I love salad, fruits, water, tea.  I will take chicken over red meat any day.  My blood pressure is perfect and my cholesterol is fine.  I walk three miles several times a week and I can ride eight miles on my exercise bike in thirty minutes.  If I want to eat a Dove chocolate or twelve, leave me alone.
• Speaking of fitness.... I want to say I will NEVER become a runner.  I don't know how many people in my life have told me recently that they always said the same thing, and now they love to run.  Bully for them.  They obviously didn't stick to their convictions.  I. AM. NOT. A. RUNNER.  If I had to run two miles to save my life, I'm not sure I could do it.  I don't have a runner's body, I don't have the stamina you need, and I don't enjoy it.  It's torture.  I would rather walk ten miles than run half a mile.  Talk it up all you like, you will never convince me that I will learn to like running.   
• When do you think someone will realize that we have taken the whole reality show concept too far?  I will admit there are some good reality shows out there.  I watch some of them.  My husband watches far too many of them.  So many people do.  I don't get it.  Why would I want to watch a show about hog hunters or whatever they are called?  Or Swamp People?  I'm sorry, but if you need subtitles for a show that is broadcast IN ENGLISH, that's not my kind of entertainment.  Alaskan troopers, Cajun Pawn, Gold Rush.... the list goes on and on.  Hubby's (and J's) latest obsession?  Finding Bigfoot.  This show is beyond ludicrous.  These seemingly sane adults are standing in the woods at night, they hear a crash, and immediately they announce that it was a sasquatch throwing a rock at them.  It couldn't have been a branch falling or a deer running through a bush, right?  Maybe it's the unbelievable factor that makes these shows so popular....  millions of people sit around their tv saying, "I can't believe they made a show about THIS!"

I know I have more rants and raves in me somewhere, but my mind is tapped out for now.  That should relieve enough steam that I won't boil over into a PMS-clone anytime soon. 
Happy Wednesday everyone.

A mother's love (and a daughter's love)

I have a little framed artsy-looking saying on my dresser that says something like "The best thing about being mother and daughter is one day you realize you have turned into friends".  I am too lazy to walk into the bedroom and read it so I could post it word for word, but you get the gist of it.  I wish every mother and every daughter could live out that sentiment.

I know there are mothers without daughters, and daughters without mothers.  And some of the ones who do have each other sometimes (or all of the time) wish they didn't.  Sometimes all of that femininity and estrogen just clash day after day and the relationship just doesn't work.  And sometimes even the best mother-daughter relationships will have struggles.  There are some of us, though, who are blessed to truly be friends with our mothers.

I don't mean to paint a picture rosier than it actually is.  Mom and I have had our differences.  I was not always the easiest teenaged daughter to raise (or the easiest twenty-something daughter).  There were times when I loved my mother and times when I really really resented even the idea of her.  I knew what I wanted and what I was doing and how dare she say otherwise.  I'd like to think that every child, male and female, feels like that at some point, though, so I don't have to look back and think how exceptionally rotten I was.  I believe I'm going to remove K's bedroom door before she turns into a teenager so I can avoid the "go to my room and slam the door" fiasco that most girls perfect at some point.  I know that every fight and every tantrum and every mom/daughter battle in our future will be worth it if K and I turn out to have a friendship like I have with my mom. 

I think that maturity, as well as motherhood, have made me a better daughter.  I appreciate my mom, I have fun with her.  I like her.  Do we always see eye to eye?  No.  Do we want to be in each other's back pocket?  No.  But today, on the eve of her leaving after a ten day visit, I am feeling the warm & fuzzies toward the lady known in this house as Grammie. 

If you are blessed to have a loving mother-daughter bond AND you are able to spend a lot of time with your mother, consider yourself lucky.  I would give a lot to be able to erase the 2000 mile distance between my home and my mom's.  Thanks to technology (and her recent addiction to texting), we talk every day.  I spend time in her home every summer and she spends time in mine every spring and fall.  But I don't have the option of calling my mom and saying "Want to go see a movie?"  and I certainly don't have the option of sending my kids to the safe haven known as Grammie's house when I am at the end of my rope and need a break. 

My kids adore their Grammie.  They are closer to her than most kids are to grandparents who live right around the corner.  They love spending time with her.  They make her laugh and she showers them with love.  I am not ashamed to say that it is a vacation for me when my mom takes HER vacation here with us.  My kids generally want nothing to do with me when she is around.  It's exhausting for her, but a very nice bonus for me - I get to spend time with my mom while giving my kids a rest from THEIR mom!

I know tomorrow I will have a tearful goodbye at the airport when Mom leaves, and my kids will not be happy campers at school.  Tomorrow evening this house will be full of long faces and it will take a few days to work off the post-Grammie stupor.  I pray for safe travels for my mom, and I am thankful for the time we are able to spend with each other.  I'm even more grateful that we ENJOY that time, and we are all already counting down the days until our next visit with Grammie.

Where's the maid?

Cleaning the bathrooms is the bane of my existence.

I get that my "job" as the homemaker is to keep the house clean.  No problemo.  I don't always have shiny floors or clean baseboards, but I am anal enough that eventually the mess will bother me and I keep the house presentable.  I like to vacuum, I have been on a "get rid of all of the junk" kick lately and in my house everything has its place.

However, I think bathrooms, more specifically the toilets, should be an exception to that rule.  Why?  Because the women in the house are NOT the ones who make the mess.  When we pee, it goes IN the toilet.  By process of elimination (pun intended), the gross yellow STUFF that ends up under the outside lip of the toilet, all down the back of the toilet, on the floor behind the toilet, can only be blamed on the men in the house.  Since we women tend to sit and face forward when we use the bathroom, it would be pretty tricky indeed to somehow get some substance from our bodies onto anything behind us.  Correct?

I am so thoroughly grossed out that even the end result of a clean bathroom isn't enough to give me the "job well done" pat on the back.

Give me dishes, laundry, even mopping any day of the week, but please please PLEASE don't make me clean up after you in the bathroom.  Gag.

Music's biggest night

Some things I've learned while watching the Grammy Awards tonight:

1. If there was any question about why I do not like pop music, tonight explains it.  Back in the day when I was a fan, pop music was Madonna and Bruce Springsteen and Bryan Adams and yes, Whitney Houston.  Rock music was the Eagles and Def Leppard and Bon Jovi.  I loved it all.  Lady GaGa, Nikki Manaj, Bruno Mars, Foo Fighters... why are talent & success measured on a weirdness scale???
2. Jennifer Hudson gave a stunning, emotional tribute to Whitney Houston.  Not bad for an American Idol reject.  Ha!
3. Katy Perry is my hero.  If I could rock blue hair and a curvy body in a painted-on gold outfit I would! (not really)
4. I will miss Whitney Houston.  I admit I haven't listened to her or even paid one bit of attention to her in many, many years, but her songs were a big part of my childhood and she was a beautiful, talented lady.  Her Super Bowl performance of the Star Spangled Banner is my very favorite - ever.  That her life ended up the way it did is such a tragedy.
5. Glen Campbell is the ultimate rhinestone cowboy.  Out of all the grandpa performances tonight, his was the most endearing.  Sometimes, people, you have to know when you ain't got it anymore (McCartney, Beach Boys).
6. Adele is the bomb.  I don't live under a rock, so I know who she is and could even name a couple of her songs, but I can't say I've gone out of my way to listen to her.  She was phenomenal tonight, though - a brilliant vocal performance which also happened to be one of the most NORMAL of the entire night.

After speed-watching tonight's show (thank you DVR), all I can say is thank God for country music!

The mind is the first thing to go...

My son got this really neat clock for Christmas.  It has a picture of a football field/stadium as the clock face, and every hour on the hour, it plays a sound like a crowd cheering for their team.  Cool, huh?  The only problem is that it scares the CRAP out of me EVERY. SINGLE.  TIME.  It's not loud, and I know what it is when I hear it, and yet I still get startled.  As a stay-at-home mom, it is my job to be home.  Whenever I'm not out running errands, I am usually at home by myself.  I rarely watch tv, so the house is quiet.  Until this clock goes off.  I immediately jump, look around as if to find out who is breaking into the house, and then settle back down once I realize what that insane noise is.

The worst part?  I'm the one who put the batteries in the clock and I'm the one who put it up on his wall.  Not to mention that *I* am the genius who bought the darn thing.

Happy 39th birthday to me!

Mornings are for the birds

 

Are you a morning person?  Yes?  More power to you, I say.

 

My mother is the most "morning" morning person I know.  She wakes up at 5am without even needing her alarm clock.  Sleeping in for her is staying in bed past 6:30.  She wakes up in a good mood and happily goes about her day.  Of course, this also means that she's dozing in her chair by 8pm every evening!

I inherited a lot of things from my mom, but that is not one of them.  I despise mornings.  Alarm clocks are my enemy.  I don't want to sleep until noon every day, but being able to wake up by myself at 8:00 or 9:00 would be bliss.  Having to get up at 5:55am every weekday simply because my son wants to ride the bus does NOT make me happy. 

I would gladly stay up until the wee hours every night, reading, catching up on tv shows, just enjoying the peace and quiet of the house.  Unfortunately staying up late means I'm even MORE tired and lazy in the mornings, so the occasions when I  do that are few and far between. 

My mother and I have passed on these morning traits to my children.  J is the morning person like his Grammie.  He is always all smiles when I wake him up, regardless of what time it is.  On weekends when I don't wake him up, he is still wide awake by 7am, busily building with his LEGOs or playing a video game.  K, on the other hand, is my morning twin (although I don't think even *I* am that grouchy!).  She is a beast to wake up.  She doesn't normally sleep late (maybe 8am on weekends), but whenever she has to get up before she is ready, watch out. 

In my little world, midnight is a much happier hour of the day than 6am.  I wish I knew how to wake up and embrace the morning, like my mother.  If there is a secret, she hasn't shared it with me, so I guess I'll continue to glare at my phone when the alarm goes off and do my best to drag myself to bed at a decent hour.

Out of the mouths of babes...

This week our school district is working on a fitness grant and all of the students who want to participate were given a pedometer to wear for five days.  We are supposed to record their total steps each evening, as well as keeping nutritional logs for each day (they are going to LOVE my kids' nutrition... ha).

The school sent home a paper last week explaining this, but I had forgotten about it until Monday afternoon when the kids got home.  J and K ran up to the house from the bus and K proudly announced, "Mom, I have a thermometer!" 

Persistence or ignorance?

If you are a parent, then you know that children sometimes (ok, often), get their days and nights mixed up when they are babies.  Those endless hours when your child is awake needing SOMEthing when the rest of the house is quiet and you are desperate for sleep are excruciating and can seem like there is no light at the end of the tunnel.  You can try to nap when your baby does, but there's not really anything that makes it fun to be up at 3am when you really just want to sleep.  That new baby smell and the soft, sweet snuggles only take you so far.

Why am I writing about this when it's obvious I am not a mother of a new baby, you ask?  Apparently my 15-year-old cat thinks she is a newborn.  Ever since Pumpkin died, Shadow has been annoyingly clingy and desperate for attention.  I understand she is lonely.  He was her buddy for a dozen years.  I miss him too.  But I do not sit up and cry all night long. 

She is driving me crazy.

We have always put the cats in the laundry room at night to sleep.  That is where their bed is, where their food is, and where their bathroom (litter box) is.  This has not changed in all the years we have lived in this house.  Shadow has made it perfectly clear that she does not like to be in there by herself.  AT ALL. 

My bedroom is at the opposite end of the house from the laundry room, and hubby sleeps with a fan on.  Despite that, I can STILL hear her howling.  All.  Night.  Long.

Seriously.  She never stops.  She starts meowing the second we put her in there, and she's still at it when I wake up in the morning.  She doesn't stop until we open the door, and then she follows me around the house meowing until I've paid sufficient attention to her.  Talk about needy.

If it were up to me, I would just go to bed with her happily snoozing in her recliner.  Maybe then the all night performances would quit.  On the other hand, she tends to be more of a pest than anything, so she'd probably keep coming in our room and bugging us.  I keep telling myself that she will calm down, that she'll get used to it, that eventually she will give up.  In this battle of wills, though, my cat may prove to be more stubborn than I am!

Ring out the old...

and ring in the new!

How do you feel about New Year's resolutions?  Millions of people make them (usually the same one over and over) and not many of those millions actually keep them.  In a way I feel that new year's resolutions are kind of corny.  Why do you have to pick something you're going to change or you want to change, just because it's January 1st?  On the other hand, I'm sure there is something in everyone's life that they would like to stop, start or do differently, and picking a day to put that plan in motion seems like a good idea.  The start of a new year is sort of symbolic in that way.... starting "fresh" and all that.

I have never really come out & said "My new year's resolution is _________".  I don't plan to this year, either.  That doesn't mean there aren't things I'd like to change about myself, and since everyone else is passing out their good intentions, I thought I'd mention a few of the things I want to focus on:

• I want to exercise more and eat less.  That could be a huge problem because I love to eat and I hate to exercise.  Once the kids are back in school, though, I hope to get back on a more regular walking schedule and actually use my exercise bike for something other than a dust collector.  I try to eat relatively healthy and I'd succeed if I didn't have such a sweet tooth.  I can bypass the chips and the ice cream, but if there's chocolate anywhere near me, you can forget it.  If I need to have a goal, it would be to lose ten pounds, but as I have no intention of stepping on a scale, I'll have to judge my success by how my clothes fit!
• I want to say yes more often than I say no.  Admittedly I am a creature of habit so when someone else suggests something, my first inclination is to say no.  Not because I don't really want to do it, but mostly because it wasn't my idea and I hadn't given it any thought.  This is also true when it comes to my kids.  Is it a huge deal if K wants to set up her room to have a concert or if J wants to build a Lego set on my kitchen floor?  No.  The clutter and chaos will bug me, but sometimes I just need to relax a little.  I want to be someone that people want to be around, and that includes my friends, my children and my husband.  
• I want to do a better job keeping in touch with my friends.  A lot of my friends do not live near me, and it's SO incredibly easy to let life take you away.  Getting caught up in everyday wife and kid stuff is not an excuse to put aside the people who mean so much to me.  A ten minute phone call or an email every few days is not that hard and I want to do better!
• I want to be a woman my husband could fall in love with.  Talk about getting caught up in everyday life.  After ten years of marriage and two kids, it's ridiculously easy to forget to put forth the effort to make him feel special.  Hubby is a really good guy and he has enriched my life in so many ways.  I don't want him to take me for granted or feel like I'm the roommate who helps with homework and washes his socks.  Twelve years ago he fell in love with me, the woman, and every now and then I'd like to recapture that in love feeling with him, whether it's a date night or a loving note or doing something special for him.

I hope that 2011 was a good year for you.  I hope that 2012 will be even better. 
Here's to good health, laughter and love.  Happy New Year!

Tis the season

It's no secret that this time of year is hectic.  We are all busy, running errands, buying gifts, mailing cards and packages, all on top of the everyday stuff like work, school, chores, etc.   All craziness aside, I adore Christmas.  I love everything about it:  watching the holiday tv specials, decorating, the challenge of finding JUST the right gift for someone, listening to Christmas music.  If I could start celebrating Christmas in September I would, but Hubby refuses to acknowledge anything about this time of year until Thanksgiving at the earliest.

I don't really have any rhyme or reason to my thoughts for this post, so I'm just going to write down some random musings and you can make of them what you will.

I am OCD enough to keep track of gifts on a spreadsheet so I know exactly who I have to buy for and how much I spend. 

I still do Christmas cards the old fashioned way - using actual cards with either a photo or a Christmas letter inside, not just a printed photo card. 

Thanks to my daughter's prompting, I started listening to Christmas music weeks before Thankgiving. 

Much to Hubby's dismay, I insist on putting up a real tree every year.  Even though I no longer live in an area where we can go and cut down our own tree like we did when I was a kid (what fun times those were!), to me there is nothing like walking through the trees until you find just the right one.  The smell of a fresh cut tree is so "Christmas-y" that they now sell ornaments that are scented like real pine or fir trees.  Why not just get the real thing, that's my question!

I am one of the few people who actually likes wrapping presents.

My sister-in-law is undergoing treatment for breast cancer and she is facing it with such strength and humor.  I told her tonight that she is my hero.  Thanks to chemo, she started losing her hair this week.  Instead of a 'woe is me' cry fest, she not only smiled the entire time her nephew shaved her head, she posted pictures on Facebook of her before, during (loved the mohawk!) and after, along with her new hairdo (a wig that looks GREAT).  Good for you, S!

Putting aside the feel-goodness of this time of year, I want to mention that my thoughts and prayers go out to a certain family I know.  Their lives were turned upside down this week, right before Christmas, and as a mom, my heart hurts for them as I know they are hurting.  I pray that God gives them hope and strength and that the spirit of Christmas touches them even a little bit. 

a week late...

Happy 10th Birthday to my charming, smart, funny, caring, creative son!  He has had the birthday that just won't quit.  We spent Thanksgiving in Las Vegas at my brother's house, where we had a mini-party the day before J's birthday.  We had cake and J hauled in the loot, coming home with more money from Vegas than we did!!  He had a present waiting here to open on his birthday when we got back (from his Grammie).  Then almost a week later we had yet another party with our family here.  Two cakes, presents and more money than any ten year old needs.  Happy Birthday indeed!

J, you are one of the brightest lights of my life.  You will always be my baby boy.  You are funny and fun to be around.  You love video games and Legos and football.  You have the sparkliest eyes and the longest eyelashes of anyone I know.  You are a wonderful boy and I'm proud to be called your mom.  I love you!