For today, the little things

Although my energy hasn't returned, I had a rare bout of motivation today. I was able to clean more than I have cleaned since we have lived here. Even more rare Grant told me that the house looked "GREAT", and he thanked me for doing it! When I was working out everyday and in great shape the house was an afterthought to me. Now that I am here all the time I have time to clean and organize. The energy would be helpful, but I would rather have motivation if I had to choose anyway. As these recent days have been dragging by I have drawn my focus onto little things, that some people probably wouldn't even notice.
*I love watermelon, but not as much as I do now that I watched Kara cut it. Remember those little number cubes for counting in math when we were in kindergarten and first grade? It is as small and as perfectly shaped as that. Every bite is perfect size. To keep it crisp and fresh drain the watermelon juice off of the watermelon for as long as it lasts.
* Do you ever notice the more things you get rid of the more free you feel? I went through our things before we moved from our old house to here (the home we care take for while we are building our home). We eliminated about 75% of what we owned. It felt good. Once we got here, I watched as our things still seemed to bog us down. So, I have slowly been eliminating more things. Every time I pick something up I ask myself, " Do I need this, is it special in some way that nothing else could replace, if I lost this would I even realize I had lost it?" If I answer no, then into the trash, or off to donations it goes. I hope to go through our storage out back and do the same here in the next month.
* Ted and I are getting ready to celebrate our eighth wedding anniversary on Tuesday and in October we will have been together for 11 years! I still feel that I married the best man for me and I am so excited to be building our dream home together. We got our church newsletter in the mail and found that even though we were married in that church with that minister and my husband and his family were all members there at that time, we did not make it under the anniversary's. I'm kind of bummed.
* Jake really lies a lot lately. He says that he is scared of Mommy- but he says it to me. I say, "So, you are lying to Mommy because you are scared of Mommy?" "What do you think Mommy is going to do??" I repeat over and over so he gets it and Grant does it as well- there is a rule in this house that I feel strongly about.
"Bad things might happen, but tell me the truth right away so I can help you fix it or show you how do do it differently the next time, but if you lie to Mommy you will be punished. Your punishment will always we worse when you lie to me!"
Grant will say, "Just tell Mommy the truth Jake, you won't get in trouble, just tell her....tell her, awww, now you are going to get in trouble, why didn't you just tell her Jake?" And Jake just stands there with his lying face on. He isn't even a good liar.
* We sent our final request to the builder today and once he adjusts it we have to make all of the smaller choices like, windows, cabinets, flooring, etc. All I can think about is the boys room and the tree house of all tree houses I plan on building them.
* I had to get a tetanus shot today from all the injuries- none related; that I sustained after a days work of my cleaning job and trimming trees and yard clean-up. Dang I forgot how annoyingly painful your arm gets from those!
* I started cleaning carpets tonight. I started with the ones the farthest from the boys and blocked it all off. I will have to do a lot of planning to clean all of these carpets, move furniture, dry the carpets, and keep the kids off of them until they are dry.
Wow this blog entry sure is amazingly interesting (sar.) I just was really emptying out my brain before bed.

Updates

I was going to write, but I just don't feel like it tonight. I am so tired these days. I don't even workout anymore. I haven't been to the YMCA in almost 2 months! I feel muffled, slushy, slow-motion: like every movement I make is inside a jello mold. I can't remember anything either. I started to think I was getting early onset Alzheimer's it is so bad. I'm not sure when it all started, all I care about is how fast it will leave. It popped in here like an uninvited stranger. I went to the doctor because I felt less tired than this before the discovery that I had to have that radical hysterectomy due to that evil stuff. He decided that we had to rule out depression and anxiety for now considering all of the stress we are under. Yet, I feel that if this is depression/anxiety were going to begin would have hit as soon as we started this process: last October. I suffer from Chronic Depression anyway and have dealt with it since I was 12 or 13. I know what helps and what doesn't. It is those times in your life when you are unable to do the things you need to help yourself get out of your depression, you fall the deepest. Simple things: sleep regularly, eat regularly, exercise, focus more on those around you than yourself, provide order and regularity to your life, strategically place people in your life who don't give up on you even when you have had a bad three months, six months, or even a year....
Well, with that being said, the doctor would like to see me back in a month to see if I have been able to rule out the possibility that it could be anxiety and depression. I simply do not know if it is for once so am going to do my best to force myself into the very things I want to avoid right now. I think it is a vital experiment- if it isn't simply my depression and anxiety- then we need to do that scan I never had done. The one I was never told I needed until much later. Lets not wait any longer and see.
So, I will simply start with baby steps of sleeping more, eating better, doing more yoga and relaxation/meditation, I will start with a slow one mile walk, keep focusing all of my energy on the boys and Ted and all of my other family and friends who don't give up on me just because I may not be chipper all of the time.
Well, I didn't think I wanted to write tonight but the keys of this keyboard became a shoulder that I may lean on and I decided that I wanted to share this part of my life with my readers as well as the happy and silly times.
Love and Blessings, and thanks for reading my blog, it means so much to me that people care what I have to say. I honestly thank you.

Under Construction

I apologize that my blog is in the middle of a trial and error redesign session. I am fully aware that it looks dumb. I don't have the time to fix it right now. Keep checking back eventually I will have a better edited and more visually pleasing blog coming soon.
cheers

Pee

I can't breathe without coughing
I can't cough without sneezing
I can't sneeze without snot
I even used the netti pot
I can't drink enough green honey tea
and now...
I can't stop going pee

Blueberries

Have you ever picked blueberries? Have you ever seen the crazy parallels blueberries have to our lives?.... yes, I did say blueberries! OK sit back and let your mind think less literally and more symbolically for a moment:
There is a giant blueberry patch out there. You begin to walk down each aisle trying to find the best place for you to settle down and harvest blueberries. The first one you are drawn to seems too small so you move onward. The second one you are drawn to is filled with too many unripe berries, so you keep moving. The third one you are drawn to looks perfect and as you set down your bucket to pick those perfect blueberries, you realize that the whole backside of the plant is filled with a web and rotting berries. No one wants to stick their hand through a web to pull out the berries so they turn bad before they can be harvested. You are tempted to stay, but you move on anyway. The next bush you are drawn to is perfect. It is filled with clumps of ripe berries. The bush is currently in the shade while the others were being scorched by the 93 degree sun. The time is now. You set down your bucket, sit on your knees and begin to grab the clumps of ripe berries this bush has to offer. You learn your first lesson. As you were grabbing all of the largest clumps of berries, pulling off your best berries, and tossing them into the bucket to see that among those clusters of beautiful ripe berries there were tiny, unripened, berries that had now been also picked too early. You thought you were grabbing the best so you quickly grabbed without looking, and now those little berries won't have a chance to grow. Your first lesson was this:
Don't ever let your carelessness halt the growth of another.
You continued to pick your berries with more hesitance and grace than before to make sure that you didn't make a mistake like the last one. Instead of grabbing and pulling the berries off by clumps, you begin to pull them off a few at a time and holding them inside your hands until your hands are so full you must empty them into the bucket. This seemed to be working when on the third attempt your arm hits a branch and you fall backwards. You instinctually reach out to catch yourself from falling when all of your blueberries in both hands fall into the tall grass below. Your first thought is frustration at all the work that went to waste, then your second thought is all the blueberries that hit the ground would be impossible to find and that you must just move on without them. Those blueberries will have to be wasted.

You learned your second lesson:
Don't ever overfill your hands so much that you are not able to handle the load carefully. My Grandfather, whom I used to get to pick blueberries with, used to tell me that one should choose a couple of things to do. Do them well-better than to try and carry "too many loads" and do a poor job at all of the things one is attempting.
So you continue to pick your blueberries with even more hesitance and grace with growing wisdom. Things are making more sense and starting to flow with ease like the ease that comes with age.
As you continue to pick the berries careful to not overfill your hands you pop one into your mouth because it seems to look like the most delicious berry you have seen yet. The bitterness fills your mouth as you wish you could just spit it back out on the ground. You swallow your mistake and try and figure out the reason why the most visually perfect berry had the most bitter taste. The thought consumes you and you are drawn back to the thought of the bushes you had past in the very beginning when you were trying to find your first bush. You were quick to judge. You begin to walk backwards, the first bush you come to is the bush with the webs and rotten berries on the one side, yet all the perfect berries on the other side. You grab a berry and taste the sweet and sour taste of the blueberry. There were wonderful berries this bush had to offer, just because the one side was less than desirable, it did not determine the glory of the berries on the other side.

You learn your next lesson:
We are quick to judge a place, group, person, etc. by the visual ascetic's it has to offer, but will it be bitter and will we wish we could just spit and run once we realize it? Will we have passed up the valuable people, places, groups, etc, in our lives because they didn't "look" like what we thought we wanted? If we go back and accept them for their individual flaws, will we find the beauty they hold for us and the world?
You think about the bush you passed before the last one. The unripe berries may have seemed unusable to you so you walked past them. You looked down and the weeds around the roots of the bush were overgrown. You reached down and pulled the weeds out by your hands, so that they could get more of the water and nutrients that they needed to grow. While they had no berries to offer, they could teach you something.

You learned your next lesson:
There are people we pass in our lives that are underdeveloped: (children, uneducated, poor, ailing, loss of faith), while we may feel as if there is nothing we can do, maybe there is. In this case you lifted them up. You gave them nutrients to ripen.
Finally you decide that you must go back to the very first bush you past as you entered the blueberry patch. It was "too small" you thought and you didn't even try to see if it had berries to offer. As you approach the bush you see more berries than any of the other bushes. They are ripe and healthy. It is bountiful and ready to be harvested. There was nothing wrong with this bush except for your judgement of its size.

Here is you last and final lesson:
When we start out in our lives, we think we know what we are aiming for. We want something huge and grand. We want something like a masterpiece. All the small things in our paths seem too little for our attention. We keep walking past and learn through our mistakes that we don't belong where we are going and that our place is really the one we past up long ago. We thought we were going somewhere else. We come back to this "smaller" place of belonging and achievement and find that it has the most beautiful, bountiful, sweet, and glorious gifts to offer. This place, this bush, was meant to be ours all along. We are meant to be right here. It isn't that we shouldn't keep an eye on the other bushes and the health and bounty of our own, but we cannot eliminate the simplicity of the idea that our glory could be right here and right now in this tiny little bush.

What Size!?

I was in a store at the mall looking for a long white dress suitable for bible school so I could dress it up to the Egyptian theme when a saleswoman quickly approached me. I had my hands on the perfect dress, I thought, but I just needed to find the right size. I moved faster as she grew closer and closer. Darn it, I didn't find my size and it was perfect. She says in an almost degrading tone, ma'am, these clothes over here in this section would fit you better. I looked up to see that I was standing in the 14-21 sized clothes and she was directing me to the juniors! I was caught in quite an interesting situation. I was irritated that she was so offended that I had found a dress that I had liked in the 14-21 sized clothes and asked if she could find me that dress in the juniors, making sure to say "juniors" in the exact same tone she had used with me to tell me that the clothes in another section would fit me better.

She couldn't find the dress, I knew she wouldn't be able to. The juniors dresses barely cover your butt. The cleavage would show, it would be too tight....basically they make most of the juniors dresses totally inappropriate!

I was thinking while I drove home from the mall. What if I had been shopping in the juniors and a rude employee redirected me to an area she thought suited me better. What if she took me to the sizes 14-21? It wouldn't be any different than the assumption she made by taking me to the juniors. Society will always find it okay to tell someone they are smaller than they think they are, that they are too skinny, that they shouldn't be wearing misses, 14-21 women's, 0r clothes made for the women with curves. Yet, if someone were to tell a customer the complete opposite, it would be completely unacceptable. "Oh, ma'am you would find more clothes suitable for your larger body in this plus size section hidden here in the back of the store, the junior size is much too small for you and we put that in the front of the store so that we can make the rest of the population believe that the majority of society fits into the sizes of teenagers." Would it ever be okay to tell someone they look beautiful because they don't fit into those tiny little doll clothes? If I ever had a store I would put mannequins in the front window like this: A plus size mom next to her junior sized daughter, with a misses sized mom next to a plus sized daughter. They would look smashing hot and beautiful. By the way, I don't think I will go back to that store. I am not a junior. I would like to look and dress my age. I am thinking that reasons, such as these are possibly the answer to the question of why I hate shopping so much. I did finally figure my outfit out and I was proud of myself. I basically held it all together with staples and safety pins. I think it turned out beautiful.

Who they are

I am sitting here on this rainy Sunday morning and traditionally I find Sunday's to be sad. It began with my family growing past the ages where all of my cousins and aunts and uncle would meet at Grandma and Grandpa's for lunch after sunday school and church. The Sunday gatherings withered away and ended. We all grew up. Grandpa passed away. As I grew older pieces of me began to fall away like leaves fall away from a tree in autumn. Until one day I found myself long past the Sunday family gatherings, without a church family, in a different town, my husband at work, my kids running circles around me and a lingering loneliness that nothing like a Sunday could bring. I was a naked and bare tree with roots growing deep. It was then I decided that I had to start going to church if not simply for that one hour the kids would be in a nursery, but for the possibility that I could begin my own traditions and begin to grow my leaves back. If the boys are ever going to stand in the shade of my leaves and the comfort of a tradition of their own I have to start them. I missed my life so badly that I forgot that I was instrumental and often souly responsible for who they will be and the memories and the love they have for their childhood. I want them to have something to aim for when they too have their own families and potentially find themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon longing for the days of their own childhood. I find it funny that two of the most valuable places in this town to me are places I avoided for so long. If the boys hadn't been born I might still be avoiding them. The YMCA and the church I belong to become solid standing grounds for me out of a desperation. I would love to say that I wanted to be healthy so I began going to the YMCA. Yet, to this day I laugh that I got myself to start going daily by telling myself that they had a nursery and I had one hour without the boys if I went. I told myself I could sit in the locker room if I just went. I started going and I began walking, then running, then lifting, then pilates, step class, the boys started classes, and funny enough...I have never just sat in the locker room! I told myself the same about church. I didn't have to listen or get involved, I just needed to go. I didn't attended for long before I started teaching Sunday school and helping with the youth, etc. I would love to say I am a better person and I wanted something better for my children initially, but to be completely honest they came into my life to teach me something too. We don't just have kids and raise them into wonderful people. The relationship goes both ways. Our children help us see the things that no one else has or ever will be able to teach us. I'm learning everyday. My job is to do the best I can. I have grown my leaves back and I provide shade and protection even on rainy Sunday's like today. I know there will be some times when a storm plows thru and strips me bare, but, I now know how to get them back... and I am happy to say that I thank God for who they are...If not for them I would still be bare.