Family stories and history

My mom and dad and grandparents have all passed away.  Their stories of growing up and meeting and living their lives are only left in my memory.  I wish I would've written down their stories.  I wish I would've paid more attention.  Now, how exactly did yall meet?  And why did you move down here?  And what made you quit college?

My dad was an amazing story teller.  He did write down some of his anecdotes, thankfully. But I still have questions that I wish I would have asked.  I still wish I would have listened a little closer.  But as a kid, it's just the same old stories that mom and dad tell, blah blah blah.

But as I get older, I am curious.  I don't remember my great grandparents at all.  But I'd love to know their stories.  My mom documented all the family genealogy. For that, I am grateful.  But they are just names.  Dates of birth, dates of death, counties of marriage etc.  Who were they?  Why did they fall in love? What were their triumphs? their defeats?  their life changing moments?

I'd love to pass some stories down to my kids and grandkids.  But I'm sure they are about as interested as I was at their age.

That's part of the reason for this blog.  My social media posts will be lost to history someday.  FB and Instagram will be as obsolete as Myspace.  But hopefully, the stories I've written in this blog can survive.  And hopefully, someday my descendants will stumble upon them and know a little bit about who I was.  I wasn't just a date of birth and date of death.   Maybe it will shed some insight onto their own journeys and personalities.  Who knows?  

So ask your living relatives now their stories!  Video them!  Write them down.  Save for your posterity. You might not be interested in it now.  But someday you will and you don't want that moment to be lost forever.

The Love of the Library!

I grew up surrounded by books.  My dad was an avid reader and always had a book in his hand, or laying on his chest during naps. hehe.

We had this set of encyclopedias that I was just enamored with.  Back in the day - the encyclopedia was our internet.  If you wanted to know about something, anything, you'd either read an entire book on the subject or you could find the encyclopedia that started with the letter you needed and read a short entry about it.

While my dad was a reader, my mom was a researcher.  She had the genealogy bug and we would spend a lot of Saturdays at the library.  (Now you know why I'm such a nerd 🤓)

Some of my best memories are just being "let loose" in the library.  We could roam around and explore.  Which book caught my eye?  I could just walk up and down the aisles and browse or if something peaked my interest, I'd head over to the card catalog and look up some books on that subject.

Oooh, the smell of the books.  The perfect organization of that card catalog.  All those type written cards, and numbers all perfectly labeled and ordered.  My OCD was in hog heaven.

While my mom was going through the microfiche machine and scouring old newspapers and death certificates,  we were reading. We were learning.  We were learning to love the library.

So when I had kids of my own, I had to introduce them to one of my favorite places! We went to the library at least once a week.  I would let them have the same autonomy and roam the aisles.  Although, there weren't any more card catalogs, and computers and entered the scene, the kids still had just as much fun as I did in the library.

We would take home heaps and heaps of books and I would lay them out on the coffee table for random reading sessions.  I would read to the kids, they would read to me, and sometimes I'd just curl up on the couch and read my own book, or something the kids had picked out.

Now all my books are via Kindle.  I still love a good book in my hands though.  I just started reading this book that is about a library fire!  It got me reminiscing about libraries.  It brought back a lot of great memories.

I hope my grandkids are readers.  I hope to introduce them to the library someday too.

New Year in progress!

This is a new year.  

Really every day is a new day.  His mercies are new every morning.  No matter what choices we've made, we can make new ones.

Sometimes it seems so overwhelming.  How do I eat right, read my Bible, do the dishes, be a good wife, drink all the water, fit in my 12, 000 steps, close all my rings, oh and be a good person???  How???  Every. single. day???

It's tough.  I get it.

I've always told my kids, how do you eat an elephant?  

One bite at a time.

Not that elephants taste all that great.

But you get the gist.

Take one step.

Do the next right thing.

Read the ingredients.

Put back that cookie.

Open God's Word.

Say a kind word.

Take a drink out of that cute cup you got.

Just one thing.

Then another,

then another

and before you know it, you are doing all the things.  Just wake up and do one thing again and you got this!

You can do it!

Sometimes, you'll take a step backwards, but that's ok too.  Just start over.

It's a new year!!  New you!

The GOOD of 2020 Year in Review

We all know what a weird year it has been.  So for this year in review, I'd like to tell you all the GOOD things that have happened this year. (in no particular order)

We got to go to Amsterdam before everything shut down! (one of my bucket list places!)

Fun girl/sister trip to Cabo!

We had a beautiful kitchen/bath/floor remodel

Lots of great aerial yoga classes with my sister!

Took a trip to North Carolina to see family!

My sister took me on an adventure course!  Terrifying but fun!!

So many fun concerts, outdoor music, hooping times!

I turned 49!!!😜

I learned a little bit of the ukulele!  So I can learn new things! haha!

Got to vacation in Dominican Republic!

I had my 2nd grandson born (my 4th grandchild)!

Many trips to go see grandkids!

So I guess it wasn't such a bad year after all!  Like the old song goes, "You've got to accent the positive and eliminate the negative and latch on to the affirmative and don't mess with mister in between." 🎵

Here's to a great 2021!!!!  

🎉🥳😘💗🙏

Lamentations 3:23-24 

"Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, Because His compassions fail not.They are new every morning;Great is Your faithfulness, “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,“Therefore I hope in Him!”

Couple more Christmas stories!

 Couple more Christmas stories...

Once when we were kids, we woke up Christmas morning to find 2 strings beside our bed.  We followed those strings around the whole house!  Under couches, under beds, through the backyard, under bushes, around trees, back into the house, down the hall, under doors, when we finally made it to the end.. there were 2 nice presents!  I think I got a stereo and my sister got a bike or vice versa...can't remember.  But I remember following that string around the house!  

Here's a fun one:

When we lived in Colorado one Christmas, my parents mailed the kid's gifts up to us.  We stuck them under the tree and waited for Christmas.  Larry came home that week and said, I have good news and I have bad news.  What you want first?  Me-bad news of course.  He said, I lost my job!  Yikes!  What's the good news (he's a glass full kinda guy)  We get to go to Texas for Christmas!   

So we packed up the car, and the unopened gifts that my parents had sent and made the 14+ hour drive down to Dallas for Christmas.  While we were here, we got to talking about what to do next since Larry was out of a job.  We decided, hey let's just move back to Texas!  We talked about it all the way home (put the presents that my parents had sent back in the car!)  By the time we got back to Colorado, we had decided! Yes we'd move back!  

FIVE days later we were packed up in a moving truck (along with those presents!  which at this point had gone from Texas to Colorado to Texas to Colorado and now back to Texas)  and off we went!  

It was the year of Y2K so, we waited till that morning to see if the world had ended and since it didn't, we drove down to Texas. :)

The Slim Christmas

 Another Christmas story....

Larry works contract a lot and it seems like in the past, right around Christmas, he'd get laid off.  So one Christmas, he lost his job and money was kinda tight.  I didn't know how I was going to get Christmas gifts for the kids.  They were big enough that they'd realize if I chinzed on Christmas... so what to do, what to do??

Well, I scoured the house for anything I could sell and had a huge garage sale!  I thought, whatever I made, I would use that for the kids' presents.

So after all the smoke cleared from the garage sale, I had a whopping $150.  

That was going to be tough to spread between 3 kids!

Somehow, I managed to find sales, bargains, and other such treasures and got things wrapped.

It seemed like a skimpy Christmas and I needed something to make it more fun.

So I made a Scavenger Hunt for Christmas Day!  

I hid the presents all around the house and made clues for each and every gift.

Christmas morning came and we had the most fun!  The kids loved finding all their presents (almost more than the actual presents!)

It was a wonderful Christmas after all!

Reminds me of one of my favorite Christmas movies:

"He puzzled and puzzled till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. Maybe Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more!"

Christmas time is here

Christmas is one of my all time favorite holidays.  I have so many wonderful memories as a kid with my grandparents at Christmas.  

I'm going to share a few stories the next few blog posts about some of my favorite times.

We used to go to my grandparents for our Christmas break.  They lived about 2 hours away.  We would drive an hour and they would drive an hour.  We'd meet halfway at the Dairy Queen, grab some burgers and a dilly bar and load up in Mamaw and Pop's car and head to their house.

When we got there, the Christmas spirit would begin!  My mamaw would have several small wrapped presents for us to open each day heading towards Christmas.  Now, they weren't wealthy by any means.  But she would find the simplest little things and wrap them up.  I remember we'd always get a tiny Hallmark calendar (that you'd get for free at the store), and some pens, and just little trinkets that we thought were just divine.  My love language is gifts so it was especially nice for me!

Then Pop would say, let's go get a tree!  🎄We'd go in his back woods and us girls would want the biggest tree.  Pop would say, "How about this one (kind of a small sgraggly thing that he could actually drag back to the house)."  We'd get excited and bring it in.  Mamaw would put it in a nice pot and put it up on a table.

When we'd get to decorating!  We didn't have store bought decorations.  So we'd pop corn and string cranberries, make paper chains, and cut pictures out of magazines! It was the most beautiful tree!!

Christmas morning we'd wake up before the sun was even thinking of coming up! We wanted to  go open our presents so bad!  After several, "Go back to bed girls-it's too early!!", they'd finally relent and let us get up!

                                        

Paper and boxes would be flying as we opened all kinds of goodies!  My pop would put on a roaring fire in the fireplace (no matter if it was 80 degrees!) to burn all the paper and boxes.  We would always lose our instructions to the new games or pieces to stuff because Pop was cleaning up and throwing stuff in the fire just as fast as we could open it!  (hmmm, wonder where I get that cleaning bug from!)

Meanwhile, Mamaw was in the kitchen making everything yummy!  Little mini pecan pies, ham, fresh veggies, those rolls! Yummmy!!  

We'd all enjoy a nice meal, and play with our new stuff and enjoy each other's company. 

Lots of laughter and good times.