Category: My Life So Far

Sometimes I just want to write down what’s happening in our lives.  I want to be able to look back when I’m 102 and feel that pang for things that were.  I fear that if I don’t get them down on paper (or the internet) I won’t remember the day to day things that are so important to recall.

Here, in no particular order, are some random things that I have been pondering lately.

A.)

I envy the mommy bloggers.  They are memorializing all the little day to day things that I know are forgotten from when my kids were small.  Some things stick out in my mind, but so many others are just….gone.

I know that part of the reason that I’m feeling this angst is because Denton and I are literally living out this last season with children at home.  Hayden is at our local community college and Liv is finishing up her last couple of years of high school right now.  I can feel that thread with them stretching thinner and thinner.  And if I let myself think about too much, it’s a physical pain.  To know that we are going to have to allow it to break, so that they can go out and make their lives the way they are supposed to do.  My God how brave our parents were/are.  I don’t know how they stood it.  I was twenty two when I got married.  I had never lived away from home.  I honestly do not know how they stood back and let me take that flying leap.

2.)

In other, less depressing news, Denton and I are making more of an effort with date days.  Apparently we are old (according to Liv) and date nights are not our thing.  Date days though, that a thing for us right now.  Denton laughingly told me that his and my versions of dates are profoundly different though.  The last two weeks we have spent them either at Lowes picking out things for the house or meeting strange people from Craigslist and buying other things we I want.  I can’t wait to show you what I got for my birthday.  Here’s a hint:

C.)

Other thoughts that have crossed my mind lately are: how do you live out love?  Example:  At Christmas with my family, which was at Thanksgiving, hahahaha, I sewed buttons onto one of my brother’s shirts for him.  He had just casually mentioned one day while we were there that he had a brand new shirt that he couldn’t wear because one of the buttons had popped off.  I told him to bring it up to our Mama’s the next day and I would sew it back on for him.

One of the kids said, “Can’t you sew it on yourself?!?”.  That let to an interesting conversation.  Why yes, my brother can sew it on himself because I used to make him sew blankets for my barbies when we were little.   LOL.  I didn’t remember that!  The point though, to me, was this.  He is a grown man, perfectly capable of sewing his own button back on his shirt.  BUT, while we were home, sitting around with one another and having great conversations and time together, this was something tangible that I could do for him to show him how much he means to me.

4.)

Have you heard about people’s word of the year?  I had never heard of this phenomenon until Crystal at the Money Saving Mom mentioned what hers was a few years ago.  It still didn’t really mean anything to me.  This year she chose SLOW as her word.  That’s when it finally clicked in my brain why she was choosing these words each year.

Once our kids got to be about thirteen or so, that’s when we slowed things down at our house greatly.  We deliberately chose not to…. – I don’t want to use the word force here, but it sort of fits – …..encourage them to join everything.  By this time, all of us felt like they knew what they liked and didn’t like.  Both of them knew they didn’t want to invest the time and energy and money into soccer.  So we took that off our schedules and wallets.  When they were little we wanted to expose them to so many things that they could possibly be interested in, but once they got so old, they had definite opinions about what they liked and disliked.

I have to say it felt so good to slow down.  Hayden honed in on his music, piano particularly and Liv has her art.  They have both grown into their love for each of their things in ways I don’t think they would have if they had continued to do MANY things.

So I get it now!!  I don’t have any idea what I would choose as a word for my year.  But, I’m still liking SLOW.

Save

Boy, getting back to real life after nine days of vacation seriously sucks, doesn’t it.  Appointments, errands, the food – oh the food from New York – and just daily life in general is a shock after having so much excitement and leisure time off.

But we are alive and enjoying it!  Here’s what happened in my life so far this week.

Don’t you love the Kroger fuel points for discounted gas?  I shop at Kroger because I love their sales, and Friday freebies!  And they turn around and reward me for it by giving me a discount on my gas.  Woo-hoo!  This started out at $1.93 a gallon and with my $0.50 off I paid $1.43 a gallon.  Win, win.

Oh New York pizza, how we miss you.  Everyone at our house was so, so disappointed to not have access to 937 choices of New York pizza.  Denton refused to even eat it, and he had Popeye’s chicken and mashed potatoes instead.  Insert sad horn sounds from The Price is Right.

On a more upbeat note, Liv and I saw this on Friday.  I love people who use ingenuity to get things done!

I also took Liv to one of my haunts, a Goodwill Outlet Store.  Keep in mind when Hayden goes with me on my thrifty foray’s, he refuses to go into this store.  Liv had the same reaction, but for a different reason.  Hayden doesn’t like the tight space with the frantic, end of the world feeling that the shoppers give him.  Liv almost had a meltdown over the state of the book section.

In this outlet they put EVERYTHING in giant bins.  These are the things that have been for sale at local Goodwill’s and didn’t sell.  Some of the patrons – and I use that word very, very loosely – are less than respectful to the merchandise or other shoppers to say the least.  Every single time I’ve been in this store, I see throwers.  You know who I’m talking about.  They are shoving, pushing, and literally throwing everything in their path.  Sometimes people included.

Liv just couldn’t take it.  She asked to leave immediately.  It just hurt her to see books treated so callously.  She loves going to thrift stores with me, but she said after we left there, please Mom, don’t ever make me go in that store again.  A promise easily kept.

Earlier this week I needed to run into our local Wal-mart.  What should have taken me 10 minutes tops, turned into almost two hours.  Our Wal-mart has one entrance.  Across railroad tracks.  At a red-light.

I quickly ran in and grabbed the stuff I needed, hoping to beat the rain.  That was a big failure.  I had no more than grabbed my last item when I heard the deluge start.  I checked out and slogged my way to my car, when I heard an enormous boom and a flash of lightning.  This is normal during a severe thunderstorm, so I proceeded to leave the shopping center.

I got in line, and noticed the traffic backing up around me.  A tree had fallen straight across the two lane road right behind the stop-light.  Stopping all traffic completely.  Keep in mind that there are three restaurants, a liquor store, and four other shops not including the Wal-mart in this spot.

Who planned this out?  One way in and one way out?  This is insanity.  It took them an additional hour and twenty minutes to get a crew down there to chop up the tree and load it into a dump truck before we could all get out.  Crazy town!  I called Denton at one point and said he should bring his own chainsaw down and take care of it.  I felt sure that things would have happened way faster that way!

Lastly, Liv and I met with the Oral Surgeon who is going to remove her wisdom teeth.  Because, after putting $6,000.00 into her teeth we definitely don’t want them being shifted around by teeth she doesn’t actually need.

He decided to just do the lower teeth for now and monitor the upper teeth because they haven’t descended enough to make him happy.  They are also resting on the roots of her back molars right now.  Liv was fine with it.

Also because of her food allergies, he said he didn’t want to turn her into a test case, so he isn’t going to put her to sleep.  The IV medication they use for that is soy based, and even though she isn’t allergic to soy anymore, he wants to be absolutely certain she won’t have a reaction, so he’s going to use Nitrous Oxcide and numb her locally.  She was perfectly content with this choice.  She is the child who had to have a baby tooth pulled, which shattered and subsequently sat through 2 1/2 hours of teeth shard removal at the dentist a few years ago.  She is a trooper.

That’s what happened with us this week.  What’s happening in your world?