Are we forgetting to be thankful?

A friend posted a question on Facebook yesterday asking, “Where did thanksgiving go? Are we not thankful anymore?”.  Wow.  I think it’s a great question!  Are we thankful anymore?  It seems like being thankful has given way to being gluttonous and not just on Thanksgiving either, but all holidays.  I can’t think of one holiday we have that hasn’t been over-commercialized. 

Thanksgiving has morphed from a time in which we gather with our loved ones to be thankful for our nation and for our freedom and for each other into a day dedicated to stress, football and fights over when to start and where to go.  In fact, Black Friday has eclipsed Thanksgiving in the minds of many.  Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Black Friday, but it’s all a little ridiculous.

Christmas has been over-the-top commercially for decades now.  No longer do children make a list of their favorite things and make secret wishes for Santa in hopes they will get just one of the things they want.  Now, mountains of toys are expected and often given. 

This year we aren’t able to buy presents for everyone in our families, only our kids.  And this really bums me out!  I love gift giving but I have to remind myself that it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of life.  I would rather shower someone with love than with tangible gifts.

I invite everyone to take a step back to simpler times.  It’s hard that it often takes a nationwide financial crisis to get people to remember what they love about the holidays and often, it means the company and friendship and love of their family and friends.  Scale back.  Simplify.  Be thankful.  And Happy Holidays!

My Smart Kids

We just finished parent teacher conferences and guess what?  MY KIDS ROCK.  They are smart (ahead of the curve in many ways), good team players, funny, helpful, kind and considerate children.  Is there really any better compliment for a parent than to hear those attributes applied to your children?  I think not.

Of course, I am biased.  I think my kids are awesome.  But it’s nice when others confirm your thoughts!  I think I am most proud of their compassion and kindness they show to others.  Reading, writing and arithmetic are difficult to teach, but teaching kids to love others when we are all inherently selfish, that’s really hard! 

So to the village of people supporting us, family, friends and church, I say THANK YOU!  You are helping us mold some great little people who will grow up to be great adults.

“P’s are boring, P’s are boring…”

And thus begins my daughter’s hatred of homework.  Usually, it takes a kid until third grade when the math gets harder that the whining and stalling begins.  But Elizabeth, she’s an early adopter of homework hate.  Tonight she was sitting down to practice writing her letter P’s, both upper and lowercase and out of her tiny mouth came a mantra of malicious mumblings about mathematics.

“P’s are boring, P’s are boring, P’s are boring, P’s are boring, P’s are boring, P’s are boring…” she sadly sung.  And her work showed her disdain.  Her P’s were terrible!  They were all over the place, in the middle of the lines, below the lines, huge, small, teeny tiny, P’s that looked like D’s, you name it, she had it.  Except for a correctly written P of course.  I looked over and saw her whipping through the assignment, writing P’s faster than Anna Nicole Smith’s doctors wrote prescriptions!  “Slow down!” I said.  “Work slowly so you can form the letters correctly.”    She sighed at me so I erased her ill-formed letters and made her re-do it.  She wasn’t happy but she re-did them to a satisfactory level. 

Pray for us folks, I think I just got a glimpse of our future and it has an attitude.

Blog Block.

Hi friends! If anyone even still reads this anymore, I want to let you know that I am, in fact, still alive and well and still intend on blogging.  I’ve been blog blocked for a while now.  Mostly because I haven’t had anything interesting to say and what I have had to say probably shouldn’t be shared on a blog.  Here’s the low-down.

Still loving being at home.  I enjoy cooking and having time to get things done and that spending time with the kids thing, yeah, that rocks too.

It’s definitely been hard to adjust to our new budget but we’re doing really well.  It’s hard prioritizing what needs to be bought first.  Things for the kids are no-brainers.  New shoes needed?  Check.  Jeans with no holes?  Check.  But new things for me or Kolin, well, that’s a different story.

One of the best things about the new budget and staying home is that my kids are starting to recognize the value of a dollar.  Both of them had birthday money to spend and some fun money from their Grandpa.  We went to the store and they realized quickly they need to weigh their options and account for taxes. Now, when I ask “what do you want for dinner?”, they ask for homemade food, not McDonald’s.  Slowly but surely they are becoming smarter consumers and that is awesome!

Well, that’s all I can crank out right now.  Check back soon.  I will try to update more often!

Out with the Old, In with the New

My life for the past several months has been all about change.  I’ve changed my job from a career woman to stay at home mom.  I’ve changed my lifestyle from one that involved spending nearly $800 a month on dining out (yes, this is embarrassing to reveal) to one a lifestyle that has us spending less, saving more and making better financial decisions with only one income.  Yesterday I embarked on a new change.  I was baptized.

Now anyone who knows me well knows that I was first baptized when I was 16.  I attended a Baptist church at the time and I had always grown up “Christian” knowing about God and Jesus.  But when I was 16 I decided to proclaim my faith and be baptized.  It was a nice ceremony.  My entire family was there because my cousins and brother, as well as me, were baptized. One of my best friends was there with her mother.  It was nice.

So why did I get baptized again?  Well, I have to say that after 18 years, I’ve had some different and challenging life experiences.  I got married, had two children, and experienced heartache, sorrow and disappointment that I allowed to wedge between me and God.  I was Christian in name only and barely that.  I didn’t know what I believed anymore.  I certainly didn’t have a personal relationship with God and many years I wasn’t “on speaking terms” with Him (I totally stole that phrase from someone on Facebook).  I felt as far away from God as I ever had.  Was I still “a good person”?  Well, I didn’t kill anyone, I didn’t cheat or steal, or dishonor my parents or my husband or anything like that, but was I “good”?  No.   I held on to anger, resentment, selfishness and disappointment and doing that, will rot your soul. 

Then the Greensburg tornado happened.  I went there as part of disaster relief response and met a woman who would help change my life.  She was the Methodist minister’s wife and she was awesome.  Her house was literally split in half.  Her daughter wasn’t home at the time and she and her husband and son took shelter in their basement.  For about a month before the tornado she had been doing a Bible study and had been learning verses related to God’s protection of people and His love for us and giving your worries over to Him.  She told me that as she and her family coward to the violent winds, they prayed, aloud, for God to help and protect them.  After the storm, she prayed for God to help their family through the process of picking up the pieces of their lives that had been scattered about the tiny town.  She told me that they would be all right because God was here to help them.  Her faith stirred me.

I began looking for a church for my family soon after that and settled in at Gracepoint, wooed by the funny, “Church Doesn’t Suck” billboards.  Once there my faith and my children’s faith began to grow exponentially!  I see my children becoming new, better people.  More kind.  More loving.  More compassionate.

In myself, I have seen and felt a tremendous change.  I am admitting something here I’ve never admitted before.  Before my relationship with God became real and Christ became the center of my life again, I would do nice things always in the hope that I would get a kudo or pat on the back. It makes me nauseous to write that.  But it’s true.  In the past two years I have learned to let go of that need to be selfish and have my ego stroked.  I am a new creation.  To commemorate my newfound feelings of rising from the muck and mud, I got a tattoo of a lotus flower on my back.  It’s a visual reminder to me about my faith and how far I’ve come.  But there needed to be more, which gets me back, FINALLY, to baptism.

My baptism is my declaration to everyone, including all my social media friends, that I am a follower of Jesus and because of that, I am a new person!  The shreds of the old, selfish Andrea sluffed off when I rose up out of the water yesterday.  A spiritual and symbolic awakening, a much needed, cathartic action for myself and my God.

So that’s me.  That’s my story or my “testimony” if you will.  I wasn’t strung out on drugs or alcohol.  I didn’t grow up in poverty or surrounded by gang violence.  My parents are divorced but not bitterly.   But my conversion feels just as relevant, whole and complete as someone with a more visible life change.  The change I’ve experienced the past two years is nothing short of remarkable and I am grateful to God for it.

Testing, Testing, 123

It’s amazing how much your financial situation can improve when you give up one income.  Since I’ve quit work, we’ve managed to save more money, pay more bills off and overall, not feel deprived.  We were pretty impressed with ourselves.  Then, it happened.

First, Kolin was in a wreck and it destroyed his ugly, but mechanically perfect little car.  We found a replacement car and paid with it with our insurance money and a very small loan from the bank.  But we’ve been having some problems with that car now.  We are taking it in next week to see what is wrong with it.  Hopefully it will be cheap and easy to fix!

Then, yesterday our dryer died.  Ugh.  It  just died.  We replaced the washer about a year ago and overall had the set over 11 years.  But  dang.  When it rains, sometimes it pours.

But this is only a test and I plan to pass it.  I believe it really is better for my family for me to be home.  Our house is cleaner our laundry is done (when the dryer works!) and our meals are home-cooked and delicious (mostly, hey, I’m still learning!).  Most of all, the stress and tension that used to fill our home has been seriously reduced.  I am happier and as the saying goes, “if momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy”.  So we are all doing well and I don’t plan on allowing anything to mess this up for us.

This is a test of the emergency faith system, this is only a test.

What I am Learning at Home

I have been staying home now for about a month and here are some things I’ve learned about myself, my children and life in general.

• My kids can fight about anything, even imaginary things. FACT: they fought in the car because Joe wouldn’t give Elizabeth back the imaginary cat she was petting. When I made him “give” it back to her, he “handed” it back and then said a few minutes later, “I STILL have the cat” as he stroked some imaginary feline’s head and back.  Seriously kids?  Yep. Seriously.
• Laundry can be conqured. Sure it’s a daily battle, but the war can, and has been won.
• People have asked me if I miss work yet.  My answer is No.  I certainly miss seeing my co-workers every day, but I don’t miss the stress and the pace. I am still very much enjoying being with the kids.  Even if they fight over invisible cats.
• I can cook more than spaghetti.  I have now tackled recipes such as beef stroganoff, fajitas and stuffed bell peppers to name a few.  I am trolling my Betty Crocker cookbook daily for inspiration.  I do enjoy it and usually have the kids right beside me, helping where possible.  One day they will need to cook for me and while I enjoy spaghetti, I’d like variety.
• After having eaten at home for long enough, when you do finally have McDonald’s, you realize how much everything there has the same aftertaste and it isn’t a good thing.
• Enough is simply enough.  By this I mean, I don’t need new this and new that.  I am content and it feels WONDERFUL.  When I worked I always found myself wanting more and more and now that I am home and we are pinching pennies, I am content with what I have. I have also taken to repurposing items and that feels good too. 
• It is possible to fall in love with your family all over again.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always loved them, but I didn’t appreciate how much they mean to me.  I took them for granted.  Now, all those little secrets Elizabeth shares with me are that much more precious.  Joe’s elaborate stories and explanation of processes (natural and industrial) bring a smile to my face because I take more time to listen.  Kolin’s snuggling up to me when he gets home so we can have some personal conversation without kid interruption reminds me of why I married him.

These are a few of my lessons learned.  I hope to bring more soon.

Sundays Then and Now

Three weeks ago my Sunday nights were different.  I would start to get anxious, nervous and not excited about going to face Monday.  I would regret all the things I didn’t get done at my house (cleaning, laundry, yardwork).  I would feel awful for all the things I should have done better or times I had to clean or do other chores while all I really wanted to do was take my kids to the zoo or something else fun.

Now, my Sundays start off with the same anxiousness but then I remember that I have time to do what I need to and the anxiousness melts away.  I take deep breaths and look at my lists.  I have two lists, one set (techinically there are more than just one of these) has my to-dos for the house – all the things I want to accomplish at home.  The other list, which I prefer greatly, is our summer fun list.  This is the list of all the things the kids and I want to do this summer like go to the zoo, camp out in the backyard, go on picnics, visit the library, etc.

I plan my Mondays and all the other days off these lists and it’s going quite nicely, if I do say so myself.

Saying Goodbye and Starting Over

Yesterday was my going away party at work. I had already been gone for two days, but I *had* to come back for the party.  My cake was a lovely strawberry creation from Bagatelle and it was wonderful but even more wonderful were the sweet things my co-workers said about me. 

Our unofficial singing group sang three songs for me while I sat in a chair in a princess crown they gave me (Elizabeth loved this part).  The last song they sang was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” with the lyrics revised and personalized (one of my co-workers is like the Weird Al of the Red Cross world).  This of course made me emotional.

My big boss cried, my COO cried, and then I bawled like Heidi Montag on “I’m a celebrity get me out of here!”.  I felt like such a dork, but I cry rather easily so I know they are used to it. 

Making the decision to stay home wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t difficult.  I mean, I know this is what I need to do for my physical, mental and familial health so in that way, I KNEW this was the right thing. But I was in my dream job and giving that up meant I left a piece of me behind with them.  If you’ve ever worked on a disaster or during a crisis situation you know how quickly you bond with people in those scenarios and these folks are some of my best friends in the world and I will miss seeing their sweet faces every day.

Okay.  Now TODAY is the first day of the rest of my life

I Get So Emotional

Right now I am thinking about my impending unemployment and I’m getting pretty emotional.  It isn’t that I’m not looking forward to spending time with the kids, because I am totally up for that.  It’s that this job – the Red Cross – has been a tremendous part of my identity for almost a decade.

When I think about all my time here I remember mostly good things like the fun employee activities we’ve had or the rush of adrenaline when I feel like I’ve done a good job on a disaster or when a newsletter comes back to me with just a few changes (LOL).  But today I’m a little sad.  Someone else is taking my place.  Someone else is going to be leading this PR mission.  And it’s good.  I know it’s good.  But today I feel a little displaced, like a fish out of water.  The world, and my job, are moving past me – moving forward and I am on the outside, looking in.

I’ve always had “a place” here.  I’ve known what to do and how to do it.  I fit in with the people who work here.  I enjoy them and the idea of not seeing them everyday makes me a little sad.  The idea of not “producing” something tangible makes me a little nervous.  I mean, what will people say about me?  What will they think?  I’ve already had people talking to me about being a “lady who lunches” and a “woman of leisure” and while I know that I will have more time to do things I want to do, I don’t think this will be a cake-walk.

I plan to work hard being a great parent and a great volunteer and I think that should count as producing something wonderful, even if it isn’t tangible.