Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Memory Exercise

Cornbread's cousin, Amy, has this on her blog and I enjoyed reading it and thought it would be a great memory exercise for me - since I have such a poor memory:)

I am not going to look back at my calendars to figure this out - just straight from my head...

Today - December 19, 2007:
Christmas shopping is done, presents are wrapped, cards are in the mail, cards are being received and taped to the backsplash in the kitchen. We've celebrated Christmas with my in-laws already and are looking forward to a pretty relaxing celebration weekend with my family. We'll be celebrating with our friends on Monday night, setting out cookies for Santa, making reindeer food and waking up on Christmas morning in our own beds to see what surprises are under the tree. A full day of just our family playing games by the fire - I can't wait!

Emotionally, right now, I am restless. I feel like I should be doing greater things, but then struggle with the fact that being a mom is a great thing. I'm looking forward to moving on in life - to all the girls being in school so I can go to school and start working. Yet, I'm trying to balance that with enjoying them in the moment right now. I think the best word for me right now is Restless. Trying to discern what God is calling me to do - is He calling me to be content as a SAHM right now? Or am I using that as an excuse to indulge my introverted tendencies to hole up in my house and stay home?

Nora is 5, almost 6. Ryann is 3 1/2. Georgia just turned 2. Each one is adorable in their own way.

Nora LOVES school and riding the bus and has so many neat stories of things they do at school. She has gone to one birthday party and has been invited to another one. It is fun to hear her talk of her jobs at school and the friends she is making. She is living her own little independent life away from home for 3 hours a day.

Ryann loves her school, too, although I don't have a very clear picture of what goes on while she's there:) I can't tell if she's making friends or not. She is definitely the most shy and introverted of our three girls. She often tells me that she played with "nobody" at school - and she's not upset about it, its just a fact. And somehow it doesn't surprise me. She adores one of her three teachers and talks about her often. She is becoming her own little person - not just the tag-along to older sister. She initiates play with Nora or Georgia and does her own imaginative stuff - not just copying what Nora does. She is obstinate and hard-headed and the thing that infuriates me the most about her is that when I'm scolding her she isn't listening, she's trying to talk over top of me "Mom, I have to tell you SOMEthing." I can't stand it:)

Georgia brings me to my knees more than any one of the three. Prayers begging for patience, for calmness and certainly just as many thanking God for the little surprise He sent us:) Our friends have decided that there are a few natural disasters in the world: Hurricanes, Tornados, Earthquakes and Georgia. She is a human wrecking ball and can destroy anything in a matter of seconds, turn around give you the cutest look and make you laugh at the horrible thing she's done. Right before she turned 2 someone flipped a switch in her and she started talking like mad. She doesn't pronounce things very well and I keep telling people that she's british - she says things without the middle consonants like: Da-Eee (daddy), Mon-Ee (Monkey), Mar-Er (Marker), Na-In (Napkin). I think its hysterical and I try to speak British, too. She is very snuggly and loves to give kisses and hugs - and its a darn good thing she does, because it may very well save her life one of these days LOL!

The Woof just turned 8. His life expectancy according to dog experts is 21 years. His life expectancy according to me is about 8 1/2. He was almost banned from our house a couple of days ago - he took off out of the house right as we were leaving for preschool. I won't go into the story, but lets just say a phone call was made to Cornbread with me telling him that we no longer had a dog and I wouldn't be looking for him. He also steals cereal dishes off of the counter and table on a daily basis - and while he tries to be gentle and graceful in the process, he always flips them over and I end up cleaning a HUGE milk/soggy cereal mess off of the floor every day. You can ask my why I don't do something proactively to prevent this and I will remind you that I have 3 kids, one of whom needs her diaper changed which means the other two are not being supervised and can leave their dishes at the table without me telling them to move them away from the edge... all this to say that his days are numbered.


1 Year Ago - December 2006:
Nora was almost 5, Ryann was 2 1/2, Georgia just turned 1. Ryann was potty trained at that time and I think we were still struggling to get her completely potty trained. We had gone to Memphis for Thanksgiving and came home to our water heater transformed into a fountain. Cornbread's car had died that fall, too which was another large amount of money spent. We were very overwhelmed with the additional large expenses at that time - seemed like his job was going well, but we just couldn't get ahead because of these huge one-time, non-negotiable expenses. I remember talking to my dad, the mechanic, our friend, Cornbread numerous times about what we should do about that car - fix it or bite the big one and get a new one. We decided to spend the money to fix it. It was hard to spend that kind of money on an almost 10 year old car and have faith that it wouldn't break down again 6 months later. As it turns out, it stayed solid at least that long and within 6 months, friends of ours asked if we knew of anyone who needed a 1995 Toyota Camry... We DID! They gave it to us for bluebook value (which was next to nothing) and we were able to give our car to our friend who would be getting his license in August. God surprises us again.

5 years ago - December 2002:
Wow - only one child at that time! Nora was almost 1 and we were celebrating her first Christmas. It was exciting and was filled with lots of useless toys that probably never got played with:) The holidays took on a dramatic change that year as we now got to look at everything through the eyes of a child. The snow looked different. The lights looked different. Presents were fun to open again. Cornbread was in midst of a good career at his final mortgage company. He was finally at a company where he felt like he could do what he wanted to do in order to create and take care of business. We had moved to our current home that summer and he was actually trying to move his business from our old area to our new area. It was a huge challenge that involved a lot of trial and error in terms of advertising and marketing. He was also looking for a way to get out of our house as Nora was becoming too difficult to work around. She was a total daddy's girl and wanted nothing to do with me, unless she had to. My feelings were hurt many times by this, but things eventually changed.

10 years ago - December 1997:
This is hard:) We were in our senior year at Calvin. We were engaged and I think we celebrated that year in Aurora with Cornbread's family. No children on either side of the family yet. I was basically done with school and I was getting ready to start looking for a full time job. I had to take one class the following semester in order to graduate, because my internship counted for both of my majors and counted as the credits that I needed. I registered for a night class given by a detective that I worked with in my internship at the Kentwood Police Department. I had all of my days free which gave me the time to work during the day. I had quit my job at the gas station and was also finished working at the police department. We had a date chosen for our wedding and most of the major stuff planned and couldn't really do anything more at that point. Cornbread was looking at a terribly busy semester which included almost no time to work and earn money - which meant that he had no money to spend on cigarettes... which meant that he needed to quit. That was a tough couple of weeks.

15 Years ago - December 1992:
I was a junior in high school and was in a long, serious relationship with my one major high school boyfriend, Ben. We had been dating almost 6 months at that point and would date another 6 - until the day after our 1 year anniversary. I had a job at a local gas station, which I just loved. I was getting college brochures by the handful everyday in the mail and no intentions of even applying at Calvin. I was pretty set on going to University of Michigan for pre-med. I believe it was around this time of year that me and my friend, Becky, decided to go to Honduras that summer for a mission trip - this was ultimately the thing that ended my relationship with Ben.

20 years ago - December 1987:
This is a stretch... I was in 6th grade. I was entering the most treacherous period of my social life. Sixth grade was rough and junior high was worse. I had the worst teacher of the three in our grade, but I made life fun for myself by goofing off with whomever I was sitting near in class.

30 years ago - December 1977:
I was 1 1/2 years old. Obviously, I have absolutely no clue what was going on in life at that time. I'm going to take a stab and say I was walking and following my sister everywhere she went;)

1 comments:

Anonymous 12:36 PM  

what a great idea! i might have to try this. :)_

  © Blogger template 'Ladybird' by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008

Back to TOP