Reality Check

Reality slammed me in the face today.  I was talking to my husband and we've both been having a time of it with work and I've been dealing with all the various forms of crisis at home and it's getting to the two of us.  He was sharing his complaints with me about how we shouldn't be having the problems with our eight month old refrigerator that we're having and his three week old car isn't working correctly and has to go in for service and, and, and when I said it could be worse.  I told him that my cousin's wife had died and she was younger than me and they had four children.  Suddenly all the gripes we both had didn't matter.  I don't know my cousin, he's my father's cousin even though he's my age.  I met him as a child when he came up to my grandparents' house with his parents and siblings and I'm sure I probably saw him at other family functions over the years and I saw him again at my wedding but the news this weekend that he lost his wife hit home.  It's so easy to complain when work is hard or things break that you rely on but in reality life is shorter than we realize and we are blessed to have family, blessed to have work, blesssed to have those things that clutter up our lives.  Tonight I'm going to stay up late, watch my children sleep and thank God that he has blessed me so richly. 

Learning more about what I have

It's been a crazy week here. The boys are back in school, I'm back at school, it's back to sports, events & general craziness here.  I'm sitting here on my couch with my Soft Square Dessert Bowl that previously held a little bit of queso dip but is now apprently a fat cat magnet beside me and thinking about the things I learned the hard way this week.  There's so much that we take for granted until for some reason it doesn't work or we don't have it.  Last week we geared up for Earl, the storm that wasn't..  This week we're undoing all we did to prepare for Earl.  I didn't know we could stack all our patio furniture on top of the table.  I didn't remember the lesson about how much I depend on electricity until last night when I lost the power to the outlets in my bedroom and all power to my bathroom, closet and several outlets.  We always think it's there when we flip the switch but it's very frustrating to flip a switch and have nothing happen when you can clearly see the lights on in every other room in the house.  Then the worry sets in about waking up on time in the morning since there's no alarm clock working in the bedroom.  What did we do without cell phones?  I got my first one way back in the dark ages, 1995, and I had a ton of minutes per month-10!!!!  I never used it but flashforward to 2010 and 90% of the time my cell phone's at my side and I'm lost without it.  How will my boys reach me if something happens?  What if a customer has a question and I'm not home?  How about being out with my mother and she wants to go to another department store but doesn't know where the nearest one is to where we are? Take away that phone that 15 years ago I never used and I am lost.  There was a time when things were simpler.  When I saw my neighbors in person instead of waving as we drive by or talking on Facebook (another thing I can no longer do without!) When the things I bought were most likely made here, in America, not in a foreign land that I've never seen. It's time for me to take a step back from life and appreciate all that I have and not let all the things that don't matter get too important.  Maybe that's something we all should do more than just on the fourth Thursday of November.

The Beginning

Welcome to my new experiment, blogging.  A little bit about me & what inspired me to do this.  I'm a wife & mother of two teenage boys and lots of furry girls.  We're a military family which means we've moved our fair share over the years and haven't been lucky enough to live near our family which can make things hard at times.  The upside to moving all over the country is that we have made lifelong friends from coast to coast. I've been lucky enough to be home with my boys while they were young and since they've been in school I've been lucky enough to teach part time at a small private school that I love. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?  Orders could come through that mean we'll be on the move again but we've managed to get our boys through school (so far) in one school system since they've been in elementary school.  That doesn't happen very often when you're a military brat but we made it work. 
I hope you'll keep reading to hear lots about the craziness here and get a few laughs with me along the way.