In just over a week, it will be my birthday. Again. I swear I just had one. No joke. But here it is again. And as I look around at celebrities who melt down at the idea of getting old, at my kids that are no longer babies and at my face that is screaming ‘stop cheaping out on the eye cream!’ I realize that birthday’s will probably keep coming as long as I am here. That’s a good thing. I like birthdays. But it is tempting to start to get a little antsy about that number that will always keep getting a little higher. This year, I have had the privilege of meeting 2 amazing women. And these women, they could strike you as being completely different. They are. But only through time. The first is an incredibly sweet 20 year old girl, a newlywed married this year with a baby on the way this summer. She is scared and excited and every once and a while I get the impression that maybe past the nausea and the stress, this whole thing feels a little like playing house. Oh, I get that. So much so I get a little nostalgic every time I see her. She is bold, nervous and honest, with her young soldier husband who is just starting out a promising career. She’s holding on to a faith that God will grant her the grace she needs for each day even when there are hurdles bigger than she imagined. She’s filled with plans and ideas and wondering what is coming for her tiny growing family. I love spending time with her, she’s a lot of…
I’ve written something like this before, here. It was called ‘Seeking Understanding’. Cause, well, we all crave that, don’t we. Someone who ‘gets us’. Then yesterday, my Social Media lit up with a blog written by an American Army Wife who decided to call out one of the other branches of the Military for not being worthy of being compared to her husband’s branch. In fact, she went so far as to say they had no right to call themselves Soldiers, or for their wives to be referred to as ‘Army Wives’. I’m not going to give her blog any more traffic with a link. (Doesn’t that make my blog sound all important like the traffic it would generate would be enormous!) The truth is, this post is more about realizing the ways I act like her instead of just taking her on. She’s entitled to her opinion and mine are probably not going to change them. I can only imagine how she feels about Canadian military calling themselves Soldiers and Army Wives. I mean, we don’t even have our own Drama on Lifetime. Instead, I will say that as Military Wives…. or lets be honest, as human beings, we do this in other, much less obnoxious levels all. the. time. Check out any forum of people with similar experiences. “You were only in labour 4 hours? Oh honey, I did 92 hours of hard labour and have 110 stitches and I still left the next day and walked 5 miles home with my baby in a sling. With. No. Drugs.” “You just have…
Up here this week, it got a whole lot colder really, really quickly. To explain again for those of you in the southern USofA, Cold is when it’s nearing -50 degrees with the windchill and your exposed skin can get frostbite in less than 10 second. Cold is when you get a ‘weather warning’ on your phone, and it’s just to tell you that it’s going to be dangrously cold. Cold is when you can freeze your actual eyeballs (okay, so I googled that and you can’t actually do it. But if you could, you would here this week) That’s cold. So, it’s cold here. And inevitably, people say things like “I can’t believe how cold it is!” Really? You can’t? If you moved here from Miami this summer or were born this past year, than you can be excused for thinking that it wouldn’t get this cold. But if that is not the case, I can’t help but ask “Were you here last year? Or every year before that?” I admit, even I (who tend to take the ‘this is Canada and it gets cold here so suck it up’ road) am willing to admit that -50? That’s friggin stay inside under the blankets and wait for spring kinda cold. But, well, cold weather happens here. It happens every winter. Sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes it lulls you into a false sense of security at +5 before biting you in the ass with -35 a day later…. but it happens. And on my way home today as I…
There’s understandably a lot of talk about New Years Resolutions. On my social media, they tend to be in two different varieties. On the one hand are the people who are making resolutions about their health. They are going to a gym, working out, dieting, eating better, etc. http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/47a92385-a9e9-4c27-82c9-e9d994130b2f.jpg On the other hand there are those who already live a pretty healthy life who are annoyed by all the new ‘heathy people’ crowding out their equipment at the gym with their ‘doomed to fail’ resolutions. As I have mentioned before, I lost some weight this past year. About 50lbs, to be exact. So while I was on vacation visiting my parents and in-laws, I got a lot of this: “wow, you look amazing, what did you do?” “Holy crap, you’re tiny. Good for you. How’d you do it?” or my personal (un)favorite “Holy! Where did your boobs go?!” For the record, I did not work that hard all year for the majority of people to point out first the drastic change in my bust line. That being said, almost everyone wants to know my ‘secret’. How did I do it? What can they do for the same results. And they are almost always annoyed by my answer, “I eat less. And I run and work out. Mostly, I eat less”. Then they always ask “Well, what do you eat?” “Less. I eat less. I didn’t cut one thing out or switch to shakes or start a program or take a…
If you were to spend this Christmas season with us (and I’d invite you all to, if I could) you may have overheard… “If we can’t open presents before Church, can we at least eat all the candy in our stockings?” ~Drama “Is a turkey even supposed to look like that? Maybe it’s upside down…. what kind of grown woman doesn’t know what a turkey is supposed to look like?!” ~Me “And that’s it. Short and sweet, just the way I like it” ~DH (when ending the Christmas Morning sermon he gave at our Church Service “We’re not wishing adult Jesus happy birthday. We’re wishing Baby Jesus happy birthday. Cause he was a baby when he was born!” ~my dear friend explaining why Jesus Birthday Cake said ‘Happy Birthday Baby Jesus’). “You’re not allowed to cry (Monster), Christmas is about JESUS” ~Drama “But…. I don’t have a 3DS……” ~Freckles (after opening the game for the 3DS before the actual 3DS his uncle gave him). “DoyouthinkIwillpoisoneveryonebecauseIthawedtheturkeyincoldwaterinsteadofthefridge?WhatwasIthinking,whatifIdid’tcookitrightandeveryonegetssickandIruinChristmas? WhatifIgivethepregnantgirlfoodpoisoning?WhydidIthinkIknewhowtomakeChristmasdinner?” ~Me at 3am Christmas Morning to DH who was unfortunate enough to wake up during my panic attack. “How did you get it on the COUNTER?” ~DH, when coming across Monster’s unfortunate incident in my in laws bathroom. “It’s ok, I gonna clean it all up” ~Monster, when the unfortunate bathroom incident was discovered. “It’s a Christmas Shoe Miracle!” ~ Me, when opening my wonderful friend’s gift Christmas Eve. “…
Well, 2011 is almost over and I promise, when I get back from Vacation, stuff WILL be written! But until then, I saw a pretty good idea to post the Top Read Posts of the year. This year my blog grew a lot. It became something that some people out there actually read. So many of you weren’t around when some of these Top Posts were written. Honestly, I didn’t think anyone would read my blog. I was encouraged to write it as part of an interview I did years ago and since then, it became something fun I wrote for family and friends until all of a sudden, most of the people reading it I didn’t know, actually, in person. How cool is that? So here are the most read posts of the year. #3 I Hear Nunavut is Pretty in the Summer… #2 Don’t Leave Me Alone With the Keyboard #1 Why I (Attempt to) Run This Christmas I have been infinitely blessed, by my friends, by my family, mostly, by my Savior. I pray the same for all of you! …
(If you read here, yesterday, feel free to skip this lengthy explanation. Cause it’s the same. Unless you would like to be astounded again today by my writing genius. Your call…) Here’s the thing. I am lame. I like to do lame things that make me feel good. One of those things is do something nice for people randomly and out of the blue when I feel like they did something cool. If I was rich, I would love to be the kind of person who was like “You are awesome. Here’s a new car.” But I am not, so it usually looks like this “You are awesome. Here’s a coffee/card/mug/baking”. It’s almost as good as a new car. And the truth is that it probably makes me more happy than the person(s) that I give it to, because for whatever reason it makes me all warm and fuzzy to point out to people that they rock. So you can think I’m really nice, but I’m mostly still being a little selfish. I can spend a LOT of time focusing on why people suck. And I think that our society is quick to write letters of complaint about employees who are incompetent or speak to the manager when we are mad about the service, but when do we ever do the opposite – speak up when someone does something great? Hardly ever. At least I don’t. So I TRY to go out of my way and tell people that they are amazing that day. I say try because it was a conscious…
(If you read here, yesterday, feel free to skip this lengthy explanation. Cause it’s the same. Unless you would like to be astounded again today by my writing genius. Your call…) Here’s the thing. I am lame. I like to do lame things that make me feel good. One of those things is do something nice for people randomly and out of the blue when I feel like they did something cool. If I was rich, I would love to be the kind of person who was like “You are awesome. Here’s a new car.” But I am not, so it usually looks like this “You are awesome. Here’s a coffee/card/mug/baking”. It’s almost as good as a new car. And the truth is that it probably makes me more happy than the person(s) that I give it to, because for whatever reason it makes me all warm and fuzzy to point out to people that they rock. So you can think I’m really nice, but I’m mostly still being a little selfish. I can spend a LOT of time focusing on why people suck. And I think that our society is quick to write letters of complaint about employees who are incompetent or speak to the manager when we are mad about the service, but when do we ever do the opposite – speak up when someone does something great? Hardly ever. At least I don’t. So I TRY to go out of my way and tell people that they are amazing that day. I say try because it was a conscious…
(If you read here, yesterday, feel free to skip this lengthy explanation. Cause it’s the same. Unless you would like to be astounded again today by my writing genius. Your call…) Here’s the thing. I am lame. I like to do lame things that make me feel good. One of those things is do something nice for people randomly and out of the blue when I feel like they did something cool. If I was rich, I would love to be the kind of person who was like “You are awesome. Here’s a new car.” But I am not, so it usually looks like this “You are awesome. Here’s a coffee/card/mug/baking”. It’s almost as good as a new car. And the truth is that it probably makes me more happy than the person(s) that I give it to, because for whatever reason it makes me all warm and fuzzy to point out to people that they rock. So you can think I’m really nice, but I’m mostly still being a little selfish. I can spend a LOT of time focusing on why people suck. And I think that our society is quick to write letters of complaint about employees who are incompetent or speak to the manager when we are mad about the service, but when do we ever do the opposite – speak up when someone does something great? Hardly ever. At least I don’t. So I TRY to go out of my way and tell people that they are amazing that day. I say try because it was a conscious…
I’m going to set myself up for failure by attempting to write a blog a day for 10 days. Here’s the thing. I am lame. I like to do lame things that make me feel good. One of those things is do something nice for people randomly and out of the blue when I feel like they did something cool. If I was rich, I would love to be the kind of person who was like “You are awesome. Here’s a new car.” But I am not, so it usually looks like this “You are awesome. Here’s a coffee/card/mug/baking”. It’s almost as good as a new car. And the truth is that it probably makes me more happy than the person(s) that I give it to, because for whatever reason it makes me all warm and fuzzy to point out to people that they rock. So you can think I’m really nice, but I’m mostly still being a little selfish. I can spend a LOT of time focusing on why people suck. And I think that our society is quick to write letters of complaint about employees who are incompetent or speak to the manager when we are mad about the service, but when do we ever do the opposite – speak up when someone does something great? Hardly ever. At least I don’t. So I TRY to go out of my way and tell people that they are amazing that day. I say try because it was a conscious choice to try and do this a few years ago and while it’s becoming…
