Milestones

We had a fantastic and eventful Christmas Holiday, both away up into the Oklahoma Blizzard and here at home with the kids. Dd and her fiance spent a lot of time both before and after Christmas with us to celebrate the holidays, fiance's 21st birthday, and making wedding plans and shopping together. I find it hard to write it all out, because this is more a journal of memories than it is a "how-to" post. I could make it an advice post about wedding planning, but I am not as inspired to write that all out at this moment.

I could share my spreadsheets that I made, one for our daughter and one for the Dread-Pirate Sparsebeard (Hubby) and myself for getting on with all the details and doing them in a timely manner. Those are constantly being updated, though, and one got tomato bisque over half of it when daughter's catty-whampus, wobbly planning table (aka cheap card-table ;-) collapsed beneath her and sent everything but her mac to the floor!

Perhaps I can take a picture of one of the charts, and post a few photos of ideas we are working up for the BIG DAY.

The engaged, young-adult kids are back to work and so headed back to the city to their respective rental homes, and I am missing them. However, we got so much accomplished while they were spending days upon days with us post-Christmas. Daughter helped me to clean around the end of my bed where things tend to collect on the antique trunk. It took a couple of hours to make sure we had sorted things appropriately without losing any family photos or important papers, but it is such a motivator to see that area clutter free now! It had grown and grown after I had hand surgerys years ago. I could not lift or do anything for six months after the first surgery, and only a couple of months after my second surgery in the second half of that year. I also had to deal with the physical and mental/spiritual issues of my new reality. I know...shoulda, coulda, woulda dealt with Mt. Doom before now, but...for some reason it was difficult to make time for dealing with it in our busy, busy day. Often, it is just the "Tyranny of the Urgent that stands in my way, but I have tried to tackle this mount before.

Every time I tried to face Mt. Doom in the past year or two, it brought back some sad, faded memories of a season-gone-by. With new inspiration from daughter, who may be moving very far away soon, we faced this mount together. I am grateful to her and was surprised to find some happy things in that mountain, along with the other things. How like God and such is life for that to happen.

I am inspired to get the make-shift row of books and notebooks along the wall beside my bed all cleaned out and given away or thrown away now. Atop that row is piled a plethora of other things, home-made dolls, pillows, bag of wedding flowers, bookbags, you name it. It is another hot-spot, catch-all that is easy to ignore.

I mentioned this on the phone to a friend recently and she shared a similar story of facing her bedroom corner which became a catch-all during her time of fighting breast cancer and being stuck in bed and in recovery for months and months. Two January posts in particular really fit what I was also facing, but I did not know it until she pointed me toward her blog, which I had not read since before the Thanksgiving and Christmas hustle and bustle. Waltzing in the Closet of Redemption and Clod-busting with Hosea are worth your read. The Titles alone are inspiration themselves.

While I should be climbing the mountain of Spanish grading to be excavated, I am more inspired to excavate (deep clean) other hot-spots and repairs in the house...and to come up with better titles for my posts in the new year, haha!


Till later,

Javamom, sneezing through the dust as I bust up the mountain boulders