The Magic of Summer

Summertime a time filled with  lazy, colorful days. A season abound with beauty, wild flowers, rainbows, lightning lit skies. A time of chasing dragon flies, butterflies, and lightning bugs. The time of year for picking berries, flowers, and searching for seashells in the sandy surf. Lemonade stands erected by children, pools filled with laughter and splashing, yards littered with outside toys. Marshmallows on sticks over open fires, ice cream cones dripping faster than they can be eaten, dandelions, and the quiet buzz of bees. Summertime!

Summertime brings peaceful rest to the generally hectic life of the rest of the year. The days are longer, the sunsets prettier, and somehow we find this time of year a time to refresh. We notice the fluffiness of the clouds and suddenly we see the shapes in them. We hear the crickets, the croaking of frogs, and yet we miss the sound of the mosquitoes until they land on us. Life is no less hectic, no less stressful we just think it is because summer does that for us.

Summertime is magical!

Tadpoles to frogs, caterpillars to butterflies and the again caterpillars. 

Rainbows fill the summertime skies after the rains more vibrantly colorful than those of other seasons. We remember the fable of our youth about the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and we pass that on to the generations following us.

Summertime wardrobes are simple, pajamas and bathing suits. Flip flops and bare feet. And ponytails!Sun bleached hair and sunburned skin. The season scent is Hawaiian Tropic or Coppertone, with some aloe and baby oil scents as well, and we can't forget the vinegar for those sunburns we always end up with.

Summer begins and it seems like it will last an eternity, then all of a sudden one night we discover it is dark before 9. When did that happen we wonder? The days start to get shorter, back to school sales sneak up and before we know it summer is coming to an end, much more abruptly than it began.

 The country celebrates its birthday.....each summer.

And as suddenly as summer arrived, it is gone. Lazy, carefree summer days quickly become the busy days of autumn , bringing with it the new school year. Quickly reminding us how our lives are fast forwarding towards shorter days, longer nights, and we discover yet again, the seasons stretch from one to the next.

Letter"s to Heaven

When I came home from the hospital that early morning of June 11, 2006, I was no longer who I had been just a couple short hours earlier. I walked into the hospital with my husband, I was a wife, a mom, the other half of a couple. When I walked out I left with my oldest daughter Martha on one side of me and my cousin Linda on the other. I was a widow, a mom, and the remaining half of a couple that was missing the other half.

The first hours were spent with phone calls, people coming and going, and though I remember every single detail, it was spent going through the motions of living in a robot type way. The first night came slowly and quickly at the same time, and though there were people in and out all day, the night was spent with just fve young children and me.....their first night with no daddy, my first night as a widow. You could still feel the presence of Kenny, you could still smell his scent all over the house, you could pick up his clothes and the lingering smell of his cologne that even washing them didn't  remove was there. Part of me felt like I was dazed and groggy from a nightmare that though I had woken up from  the feelings and effects hadn't quite gone away. But my heart knew what my brain was trying to deny.This nightmare was now my life. I now had five children ages 3-13 that were my responsibility all by my self. I had to somehow allow them to grieve, yet convince them this was okay. We had to move forward through the days, with hope, love, and optimism.

The first days turned to weeks, then to months and during that time I wrote letters to Kenny every day, sometimes many, many times a day. I accumulated 24 notebooks of letters I wrote to him. They began as ways to tell him about my day, the kids days, the obstacles we faced or endured. Gradually they became letters about us, our life together, some of our dreams, some fulfilled but many shattered that fateful early June morning. I recall thinking I am supposed to be strong, Kenny expects me to be strong, be optimistic, readjust the plan, keep going forward. I must do this for him. He taught me how to live with the glass always half full never half empty. These notebooks will belong to my children one day, when I am gone and hopefully they will give them some idea of who their dad was as a whole man, not just as their dad. I tried to put some of his youth in these letters too, things he had told me of his childhood that he would have told them had he been here to do so. I tried to share some of their daddy's history and life with them. I found work, I tried to keep the family together, constantly believing with all I was that we would be closer, stronger, better people because we had not only gone through this, we had not only survived this, but we somehow would be  a family despite it all,

I remember rushing home and grabbing my pen and current notebook of paper and writing everything to him. I knew in my brain it was not as if I could mail these letters to heaven, but my heart kept hope that he knew. It was that hope that kept me putting one foot in front of the other daily. It was that hope that made me wake up everyday and strive to do more than just go through the motions of being alive. It was the knowledge that Kenny expected me to raise the children to be happy people, who looked forward to the future. Their futures were still waiting and though the greatest part of who I was and who I am died with him that day, though my future was altered by his death, though my dreams for my future were snubbed out in one breath, somehow he also expected me to remember that I too had a future to create and build, to plan, to want.

I remember the moment it hit me that there would be no more memories made with him and somehow I was to make new memories with these young people, because of him.

I no longer write these letters. Days, weeks, months, and years have gone by and I still cry. I smile, I laugh, I yell, I do things, go places, make plans, but I still cry. I remain partly that broken woman that walked out of Bayonet Point Hospital that morning. I have remarried, yet I am still a widow.

If I were to write a letter to heaven today, it would be a letter of apology. I know now in my heart that despite my best intentions, I failed him. I was not able to do what he would have wanted, I was not able to create what we dreamed and planned. I tried but with me being only half of us, I failed.Life continues to throw its rocks at me, hitting me almost every time. Though I still get up every time it knocks me down, I no longer do so with much pep. I have discovered as the years went by half full is half empty.

The Road Already Traveled

I am in the season of my life where hopes and dreams of my younger years have come and gone, and are giving way to smaller hopes and less dreams. So many goals unfulfilled, so many dreams shattered, so many hopes squashed by life's circumstances. I stand amazed at the way age maturity changes the total outlooks of us as the years of our youth fade into mere memories.The discovery that we have gone steps beyond, now being halfway through our life and the knowledge that we are somehow all of a sudden in the last third of that life, that we long ago thought was somehow going to be everything we ever dreamed and hoped it would be.
More and more I find myself having to face that my earlier dreams were founded by not only youthful innocence but even more so by the ignorance of youth.

As time has gone by I have learned much to my dismay that the road traveled in our life does not become less bumpy and smoother as we continue our steps forward, but the road tends to lead us in circles, merely a culd-de-sac that we follow around and around and around yet again.

That discovery may well become the most disappointing factor of life that I must not only accept, but somehow I am to do so graciously and thankfully.

As a young woman or perhaps it is  more fitting to compare myself to an older child, I began my journey through motherhood, filled with the misconceptions that I could and would create a family where all would be perfect in my child's world. I grew up in the era of clean family television shows that depicted perfect homes, perfect families, perfect children and like so many in my generation I bought the media propaganda hook, line, and sinker!

In my life I have lived in my share of the too small houses, tripping over the array of children's toys dreaming youthfully of the day that I would live in a home where we had room for everything and all would then be perfect.I daydreamed of the spotless house, for years. Everyone would have their own room and all their belongings would be in it. The day finally came where everyone had their rooms and for a brief moment in my life history I had a living room that did not look like a storage area for children's toys. And then at some point in time , I can't even recall when it happened their stuff start moving into every available empty space. Suddenly all the things they outgrew moved from their rooms to someplace where I would again trip over an array of unwanted toys and an assortment of their belongings no longer wanted but not willing to be completely parted with. Sadly I also discovered I too had an assortment of those items of my own. Knick knacks that moved into boxes, broken items glued together so many times they were basically made of glue now. Life seemed to continually have me moving from enough room to not enough room.

 I have driven my share of clunkers anticipating the luxurious days to come of having the American dream of the perfect car. I have even had my share of perfect at the moment cars.And yet somehow that "oh what a feeling" seemed to elude me. Today I am finally living in that big house and yet I still find myself tripping over an array of children's things. There is finally room for everything and yet nothing seems to have changed. I have had compact cars, family sedans, mini vans, and trucks.I dreamed of having cars we would all fit comfortably in not realizing they don't make those when you have large families, because by the time we add in the sports gear, and the other must have items to the space of the car we are all still cramped into the car. I am now driving a truck that seats 7 with over 200,000 miles on it and dreaming of a day when I can again afford to buy a small car.

I am learning that as we travel along our life's road it keeps taking us to all the same places that we have already been. Much like the way we get in our car and drive along the same roads to go to the same stores, we seem to sit in the passenger seat of our life and take the same roads over and over again.

In the not so distant future I foresee a smaller home and again I will face the living room storage space syndrome. I also anticipate the collections I have gathered through my years being downsized to accomodate what will become yet another start over in the road of my life. Some may say that is the pessimistic side of my nature. My late husband would sometimes say that to me, and my rebuttal was always the same, I am not being a pessimist, simply a realist.

The course of life, the challenges faced seem to also travel around and around the same block of road.

Family DInner

Decisions, Decisions! Mashed Potatoes in one hand and sippy cup in the other. What to choose!!

 Playing with food= FUN

 On the other hand though cup chewing is pretty good too~

Michael is just two days shy of eight months old. Not sure how that happened so fast, but it has. Now he enjoys sitting at the "big" table with everyone else at dinner time. Perhaps more for the attention he gets than actually for the dinner part.

 For some reason mommy thought she could convince him the cup is for drinking from, but he seemed to prefer the idea of it being something to chew on!

 Hey nana......look, look here at me!

I couldn't resist a side view of those chubby cheeks!

Watching him at the table tonight not only prompted me to get up from my dinner and grab the camera, but it also took me briefly back in time 21 years ago when I too put food on a high chair tray for his daddy. Michael will never know his grandpa, but tonight brought back a memory of him as well. The day I plopped applesauce on Michael's daddy's highchair tray, his own daddy stood there with a serene smile on his face just watching his son and me. I sat there looking at him as he said that was one of the things he loved about me. I responded with a what? He said most people would not want to be bothered with the mess this was going to cause. For me I just wanted our son to experience the texture, and feel of the food. Not only did I put spoonfuls of it on his high chair tray, I used my fingers to draw pictures and designs in it to get the baby's attention to it being all over his tray. It is strange how something so fleeting can come back to you to be relived briefly.

Grandchildren can keep fresh memories of days long gone while new memories are being made as well.

Sunrises and Sunsets

The birth of a child is a personal sunrise.

The loss of a sibling is definitely a sunset in life.

The reaching of a goal you have spent years dreaming about and working towards achieving is one of life's sunrises.

Family is what fills the time between sunrises and sunsets.


Our lives are filled with sunrises and sunsets and the last few months have brought that back home to me over and over again. Not just the sunrise of each morning, or the sunset each evening, but the personal life events that can be referred to as our sunrise or sunset.

In the last six months, we added a new member to our family with the birth of my second grandson Michael. That birth of a child absolutely counts as a sunrise in life. But less than a month from his birthday we lost my youngest brother, the death of a loved one counts as  a sunset in our lives.

It never ceases to astonish me how a family can be filled with joy one day, and the next day sadness sweeps in and the total family make-up has changed.

This has been a joyful and yet disheartening few months as we smile at the astounding changes in a young baby over such a short time, and at the same time we cry at the thought of the ones he will never meet and who will never meet him.

Sunrises and sunsets are daily fixtures in the world, they are two of the most beautiful and simplistic wonders of the world and still two of the things we simply just think are supposed to be, so we often miss the wonder. Birth and death are much that way too, we take for granted that they will be, are supposed to be......and they are. But birth and death like the sunrise and sunset of each day, though much the same are still very different. Each birth represents something different to each individual whose life it touches, and death does the same.

The birth of Michael brought changes to my personal world. I get to watch my third oldest child be the parent now, and though our thoughts and views on children are at times alike, they are also very, very different most of the time. But this is his turn to have a sunrise, and my turn to just enjoy the scenery.

The death of my baby brother, though he was a grown man, was a sunset in my personal life. A reminder that the sun will set on more people in my daily life, and in an odd way I am supposed to also find a way to enjoy the scenery of the sunsets. I am still muddling through that part, and have been for several years as I have had more and more sunsets in my life the last few years. I will at some point discover the beauty of them, and at times I think I actually have glimpsed it.

Seasoning Our Lives

We begin every new year with new hopes, new dreams, new goals. Some of us have resolutions we make for the new year, new to do lists, new bucket lists. As the year goes by we find ourselves disappointed, frustrated, and feeling like failures because those resolutions didn't work out the way we planned so we give them up in February anyway!

About 18 years ago I made one last New Years Resolution and it was to NOT make any more of them. That is the one New Year Resolution I have found myself keeping year after year since. About three years ago I took on the concept of creating my own bucket list for the year and even that I didn't seem to be able to complete as I thought it should be, so last spring I began to develop several smaller bucket lists for my life, a new bucket list each season of  the year. My springtime bucket list consisted of things I enjoy, things I wanted to do in the spring. Things as simple as a new garden, a trip to the zoo. Things that were fun and things I knew were within reach and doable. I began to realize that the seasonings in my life are added by me, and if I was going to be disapponted because reality is there is no way I am going to be able to go on an African Safari and see the giraffes, maybe I needed to readjust the goal. I could still see the giraffes I so love by putting a trip to the zoo to see the giraffes on my spring season bucket list. Not only would I then see them, but I would feel gratification and validation of something that I enjoyed. It felt great to accomplish the things on my bucket list, so I carried the concept into the summer, adding things as simple as fresh flowers in vases regularly. I was amazed at how simple that was to do, all that was required was cutting them out of the flower garden that was also on my bucket list to have.

Life is full of good things and though there are many not so great moments mixed in there, the seasonings we choose to add to our life can make all the difference. Just like the cook adds seasoning to his cooking, we have the choice to add seasoning to our lives. Some times we make the decsion to add a little too much of a particular seasoning, sometimes we don't quite add enough, but each day gives us a new chance to adjust our personal recipe.

The old saying "when life gives you lemons make lemonade" is a great saying. The problem most of us have with that is either we tend to add either too much sugar in our lemonade or too little. I discovered we tend to go a bit overboard with the other seasonings we add to make our life more appealing as well. Perhaps we add the wrong seasoning at the wrong time.

This year my winter bucket list began with more ways to give me more simplicity in my life, more self reliance, and more ways to save money for other things on my bucket list. Now I still will not be able to go on that African Safari, but that has long since been edited and revised, and deleted from my personal bucket list.

January represents to our society a new start, so I began my new start here on the homefront and decided I would be able to afford more of the good seasonings in my life if I adjusted some of the basic recipes. I won't save enough for that African Safari, but who knows maybe one day if I can see the giraffes at Busch Gardens rather than the Lowry Park Zoo, either way though I can still feel the joy of watchng them and really isn't that the most mportant part?

More Downsizing from 2011

As we continue to seek ways to downsize our lives, we are also finding that by doing so we are downsizing some of life's stress as well. I have always thought that much of our so called technology, invented to make our lives so much simpler, actually added to our stress levels. I am even more convinced of this as time goes on.

Somehow it seems we go to great lengths and spend incredible amounts of money for the luxury of convienence. I remember rotary dial telephones and party lines, and now they have cell phones that cost as much as my first car. Not only can we be on the phone in the car, in the store, while we wait for our doctor appointmnet, but we can check our facebook, myspace, email, or play games on the very same phone. WOW! I still carry a book with me for those waiting rooms, I keep one in the car at all times, as well as paper and a pen in case I want to write a letter instead of send a text. I have my cell phone with me too, after all they have some good purpose as well. If we have broken down we can get hold of someone, if we are going to be late getting home, we can prevent those waiting for us to arrive, undo worry. It used to be we had to call from a payphone, but these days we would truly be hard pressed to find one, and if we did chances are it doesn't work.Then on the slim chance it did, would we even have any change, since plastic debit cards rule our spending?

What families spend in gasoline alone for the convience of drive thru restaurants with daily deals, is amazing.In our house we have stopped doing fast food, so we have been striving for other ways to use our fuel money more efficently. Often that means we wait until one son gets off work, before we make the trip home from sports fields, as they are all located right next to his job. We keep footballs, basketballs,etc. in our car for these times so we have ways to occupy oursleves. That save us 10 miles round trip, makes our day a bit longer for some, but also at the cost of gas saves me over $2.00 every time we just wait it out rather than go home and head back out in an hour or two. The simple math adds up and by the time we have done this ten times we have saved roughly $20.00.

As I said in my earlier blog about downsizing, we gave up the microwave. No expensive prepackaged meals in our house. We do use the crock pot often and I am not above freezing the left over bowl of this or that, and packing it in my husbands lunch box. Ah yea another thing we cut out, buying lunch. That alone saves $5.00 or more a day, and he gets a homemade desert almost every day.We quit buying Oreos, Chips Ahoys, etc. even when they are buy one get one.

Now if you remember there are ten kids and two grandkids,one son in law, and three significant others, as well as one set of parents, in our family here. That brings to our mind ways to downsize gift giving to an affordable concept. My children and I have done the hand made kind of gift for years, but this is a failry new concept for my husband. He is catching on quickly though, especially considering I am the one doing the making of gifts! However it fits our lifestyle and our bidget much better than the mall does. This year I learned to quilt and there are several on our gift give list that will be receiving handmade quilts. Others will receive other hand made items, that we create. Some of our "date days" this year have been to the local and some not quite so local beaches to collect shells, to use in our gift making for Chirstmas this year. Some receive homemade jams, applesauce, baked goodies, but none will be receiving store purchased convienence based gifts this year. A few years ago I made all the Christmas cards I sent and this year I plan to go back to that again.
Scrapbboks are wonderful gifts, and a great way to give the kids some of their childhood pictures and make a little extra room in our own closets. You can make them without spending much at all just by decorating the pages with old cards sent to you and saved, or little drawings, the ideas are endless. Yet it allows a person to spend time doing something fun and constructive,creative,relaxing, and make a priceless gift no mall or WalMart sells. I am not a big shopping fan anyway,with the exception of thrift stores.

Thrift stores are another way we have downsized from the high tech world. We find name brand clothing, shoes, purses,as well as any household item anyone could want or use, at a fraction of the cost. We check the items carefully, and have really had great luck buying things for our home, kids, and selves this way.Why would I pay almost $30.00 for a pair opf Levi jeans when I can get them for under $5.00, for the same $30.00 I can have siz pairs instead of one. Works for me.

Last year was the first year my husband ever strung popcorn and cranberries to make a garland for the Christmas tree, after Christmas we hung it in the trees in our yard and the birds feasted. This year we will do that again, but this year instead of some homemade gifts, our goal is to have all our gifts be that.We have every intention of making every single gift we give. We strive to return to the days where Christmas was not a commericialized, money making event, but one of remembering why we celebrate it at all, and of sharing love, memories, talents,and hope with those we care about. There will be no game systems,no cell phones, no high tech toys under our tree this year. There may be puzzles, books. a lego set, and a toy car or two, but that will be it as far as store purchasing. Last year (our first year) of trying to super downsize Christmas by making some not all gifts, we did Christmas for right around $300.00 including a huge Christmas dinner we cooked. This year I hope to cut that by 50% by making gifts. What about the cost of making them you say? Well fabric can be bought off clearance for $1.00 a yard,thrift stores also get sheets, blankets, and fabric scraps they sell for pennies.