Real Life Reflections

When our oldest child celebrated her tenth birthday (over eighteen years ago - ugh!), it hit me like a pie in the face: more than half of her years with us were now in the past. That realization formed a new resolve in me. "No regrets" was my new motto of motherhood. I determined that when her adult years came, albeit way too soon, I would be able to look back and say with utter confidence that I did absolutely everything I knew to do in the best way I knew how to do it and with all my heart and strength. That's also when I began to pray for the man she would some day marry (and the woman our son would some day wed). It was a simple prayer. I prayed for the two most important things to be found in a spouse: that the man Ami would marry love God and love Ami. Nothing else really matters, although I have to say that we got much more than that in our son-in-law (and our daughter-in-law). In many ways, he reminds me of my own husband: he has a tender heart, he values honest...

Last week I went on an adventure. Typically one would not describe their attendance at a wedding as such, but when one travels via plane to attend said wedding with a (almost) twenty-month old, an adventure is exactly what it is. It was altogether stressful and wonderful by turns. My grand daughter is at that stage where everything is new, and she wants to know the name for it - and then talk about it for the next half hour. One such moment came as we looked out the window of the airplane. We saw the beautiful, crisp blue sky ("bwoo sky"). Twenty minutes later as I tried to distract her from the fact that we couldn't let her get down ("DOOOWWWNNN"), the blue sky was gone. All we could see were clouds. I told her the blue sky was hiding behind the clouds. For the next half hour, intermittently, she told her Momma or me by turns, "bwoo sky . . . hide" and bobbed her head up and down in ferocious agreement with her statement. I'm sure no one can ...