One Year

Many people think about their past year a little closer to New Year's Eve or New Year's Day.  The Christmas rush will have come and gone, the beginning of a whole new year is near, thoughts wander to all of the things that were accomplished (or not!) in the previous 365 days.  But this year I found myself thinking about the last year today.

One year ago, my parents were in a car accident.  It was an accident that could have been deadly; their car flipped several times, heavy things flew about (just my mom's purse was bad enough, there were also a computer and many quarts of frozen brunswick stew...any of which could have killed them), their vehicle even slid up the side of the street on its side after crossing a few lanes of traffic.  Miraculously, no other cars were involved in the wreck (except the car that hit them; they didn't hit any other cars as they flew willy-nilly through the air and across the highway), and they were able to walk away (after climbing out of the side - now the top - of the car) with minor injuries. 

I spoke with my mom and dad earlier today; she appreciated that I remembered that December 21 marked one year since that event and said,"It could have been such a different year."

It sure could have.  A sadder year.  But instead, we have so much to be grateful for, and so many more memories were made. 

We celebrated birthdays

We watched Dad get more seven-letter words in Scrabble

We Sudoku-d

We celebrated retirement

 

We visited D.C. (I love it when they hold hands)

We played in the sand

We got artsy

We smiled (a lot)

We took a walk on the wild side (or maybe just the putt-putt course)

We laughed (also a lot)

We caused trouble (and suffered the consequences)

Did I mention we laughed a lot?

I have to say, it's been a good year

I love you, Mom and Dad. 

And thank you, God, for giving them to me (and us).  And for letting them be with us a bit longer.

Growing Pains

You know how we all experience growing pains?  It's just a part of life; we get bigger, and in our growing time the muscles and tendons, all the hidden inside parts, and our skin and eyeballs, and ears, and all of us is stretching and pulling and getting used to itself all over again.

I feel that way about my life right now.  I am having growing pains.  I don't want to grow up.  I told Mike Saturday, during a sadness that I couldn't shake, that I didn't want to be an adult.  The next morning I sat in on the 11:00 sanctuary service (it's one of the traditional ones) and the pastor said in the middle of his sermon,"At one point or another adolescents have to learn to be an adult, and being an adult means doing whatever God asks of us, no matter the cost."

Seriously?  Yes, seriously.  God is seriously in our business, is He not?  He knows us in a very particular way.  Embarrassingly so, it sometimes feels like.

Like a stubborn child, I have been digging in my heels.  I procrastinated with packing to the point that Mike will have to do most of it when he returns from Florida.  I have said out loud, to people who ask about our move, how wonderful it is, what a blessing it is for everyone involved (that our friends didn't have to put their house on the market, that we were able to find a house without even really looking, that it is a home that has been cared for and loved) but in my heart I was crying.  I don't want to move again.  I feel like it was just yesterday that my parents were here walking our furniture around the corner on dollies, driving boxes of dishes around the block, running around town buying towels and shower curtains and regular curtains.  And now we have to do it all over again.

I am going to miss a lot about living here.  (Not the roaches, mind you, but they seem to be under control at the minute.)  The twists and turns of this house, the big, open rooms, the old, warm smell of the wood (it reminds me of my grandma's upstairs in the summertime).  I'll miss how close we are to the church.  I'll miss the lovely neighborhood we live in.  I'll miss living four blocks from Chick-Fil-A.

If I'm being very honest, I would have to say that there are a lot of things about this house that drive me totally crazy.  It has a lot of characteristics that annoy me to no end.  But, I have come to think of it as home, just in time to have to say that is no longer our home. 

I have been thinking a lot about how weird I am with houses.  I've never really been happy in any of our homes.  Of course, early on we always knew we weren't staying in this or that particular place for very long, so there wasn't a strong attachment.  The last three houses, however, I have been a malcontent for the entire time we lived there, until the end of our time in said house, at which point I longed to stay there forever.  Or at least a little while longer. 

The truth is, though, that deep down no place feels like home.  I think it's in part because I keep holding on to this small hope that we will move back to the East Coast, much closer to my parents, and Mike's family, too.  I haven't said goodbye to my childhood in some ways.  I haven't grown up.

Now instead of being just someone's daughter (two someones, in fact), I am a wife and a mother.  Mike and I have a family and I am just now really realizing that it is my responsibility to be the wife and mother in this family.  I have felt for a long time like I was a kid playing "grown-up".  I am not a kid, though.  I am an adult, with responsibilities.  People depend on me for stuff!

That's hard, dude!  I'm good at being selfish, but not so good at being, genuinely, unselfish. 

This has been all over the place, I'm afraid.  What I'm trying to get at is that with this move, buying a house, with a plan to stay here for, possibly, the duration of the rest of Eliana's childhood, I am forced to get real with myself.  I can't keep thinking,"We'll go home one day."  I have to start thinking,"How can I make this our home?"  I have to grow up.

And it hurts.  The stretching and pulling...hurt.

I suppose in the end we have to do it, though.  Just like we can't say to our bodies,"Stop stretching!  You're hurting me!" we can't tell our lives to stop changing because we want things to stay the way they are, or even go back to the way they were.  It just isn't healthy. 

And so the last few days I have been sad, and I have been crying, and I hope that as I mourn the fact that this chapter of our life is coming to an end, I can still find joy that the book has not come to an end.  Indeed, there is another chapter.  And hopefully many more after that.

Maybe minus the changing of where the scenes are taking place, though.  That would be really great.

Rambly

I have half-hearted, half-written posts backed up in my head, and while I want to write about stuff, it feels as though there were a traffic jam inside my brains.

I do have brains.  I know!  It sounds crazy, but listen to this...Sunday after church I washed up and tossed our leftover pizza onto a baking sheet to heat up for an easy lunch.  I set the oven to 350o and opened the door.  As I bent down to stick the pizza in there I noticed a dark shadow.  I realized that there was a baked potato sitting on the rack.  I had baked potatoes exactly one week earlier.

See?  Now that's a lot of brain power!

The truth is that we're leaving for Christmas, the house is majorly not packed up yet, and I am not ready for this trip or this move at all.  As I came home today from dropping Eliana off at school, I opened the front door and thought to myself,"This is one of the last few times I'm going to do this...walk over to the church, walk back and open this door."  It was a moment of saying goodbye to what has become familiar.  It was out of the blue, too, and it took me by surprise and even hurt.

I know that there are so many positive things about moving for us.  But right now it feels like something is pressing. 

Um, that would be time! 

I could write about what a wonderful opportunity change affords us, and how we should let ourselves be molded into better people by this experience, and about the beauty of new beginnings and the excitement of this new adventure in our lives.  But the words would be empty.  I'm not there yet.  I'm still in the struggling stage, the worried stage, the I DON'T WANNA GO ANYWHERE! stage. 

I haven't even taken much time to enjoy our tree, and honestly, I can't remember a Christmas that was so fraught with fighting, fussing, bickering, picking, and even anger amongst my children, regarding specifically Christmas related things like the Advent activities as well as decorating the tree.  My guess is that they are also having trouble with this move (which does not make me Nancy Drew...the two older ones told me today, respectively,"I don't want to move!" and "Do we have to move?") and their emotions are all over the place, just like mine. 

This seems like a downer kind of post, and I didn't intend for it to be.  I actually had a fairly productive day (if only the last month and a half had been so!) and got most of my china cabinet packed.  It's only the tiniest dent, though. 

Switching the subject...our tree-trimming went on for days, as we had trouble coordinating our schedules.  I fully intended on doing the lights myself; I really enjoy that.  But, apparently I let the kids help with it last year (I forgot), and they were quite offended when I mentioned I was going to add the lights all by my lonesome.  What is it they say about famous last words? 

Oh, yes, I think I remember now.

I let them do it.

Our tree looks like it's doing the hula.  Like it's sticking its hip out.  It's a bit funny.

Also funny?  Seeing Eliana's contribution, mainly all in one place.  There are about eight ornaments all huddled together, trying to keep warm this chilly Texas winter.  (It's been in the 30s and 40s!)

I really should do something like laundry, so I best be going.  Thanks for reading along.  I know I rambled, but...sometimes that's how it is, you know?

I'm sure I'll post over the next two weeks.  Enjoy this Advent season!  It really is lovely.

You Know You've Eaten Too Many Doughnuts...

...when you can see them clearly outlined on your thighs.

"Just When I Thought You Couldn't Possibly Be Any Dumber...

...you go and do something like this . . . and TOTALLY REDEEM YOURSELF!"

I think I should be scared that quotes from Dumb and Dumber are often quite applicable to our life (mine in particular).

I had this idea...since we were going to be gone around Christmas Day, it seemed wiser to get a smallish fake tree, set it on a tabletop, make it pretty, and call it done.  We haven't ever had an artificial tree, and the year that we didn't do a real tree, we made one out of paper and stuck it on our wall.  Talk about easy clean-up.

A week or so went by, and I figured that the fake-tree thing wasn't going to happen; then the other day Mike called from the office and said I should take the kids, or we could all go later in the day, and look for a pre-lit tree to enjoy until we leave for Florida.  I was surprised, since we are leaving a bit before Christmas and the kids and I will be gone for a couple of weeks (Mike has to preach, so he will be around here).  We packed ourselves into the van and headed to Home Depot.  Mike had seen a good deal on a decent tree online, and it said they sold them in the store.

Of course, they had about twenty 4 foot trees, about twenty 6 and 7 foot trees, and zero 5 foot trees.  Guess which size we were after?  Well, of course...the 5 foot tree, which apparently everyone in Dallas was interested in, as well.

Undeterred, Mike said we ought to go out and look at the trees outside.  As in, the live trees.  We checked out the small ones (3 foot trees) (Why am I saying "foot"...should it be "feet"?  All this talk about feet and trees is making me feel crazy, like it's just wrong.), and they were even more like Charlie Brown's tree than Charlie Brown's tree.  Mike walked all through the taller trees, and held one up (it had been leaning with a ton of other trees along a fence) and said,"What about this one?"

Waht?  I mean, What?  I was so surprised that I still can't even spell.  So, while we went out to get an artificial pre-lit tree, we ended up with

something made of a lot less plastic and a lot more wood.  And pine needles.

This has excited the kids to no end, and while I feel mildly (read:  extremely) stressed out about how little I've packed even though we're moving in ABOUT A MONTH, I know it will be fun to decorate the tree and enjoy it for the next few days.

I think.

No, no.  I know it.  I just know it!  Also, I know I get to put the lights on.