Friday, August 28, 2015

Summer 2015 Memories

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It seems that no matter what trials and troubles may come our way, there's always plenty of fun and blessings to go around, too. So, here's to some of the memories during our summer of 2015. For my family . . .


Kicking off summer vacation with a trip to Boyce Thompson Arboretum State Park with my sweet girl and our friends.


The end-of-spring flowers were just gorgeous there!


Lots of Catan!


Girl trip to Glendale to see my grandpa.


Book Club meetings


Baking and hanging out with friends


Just mom and me trip to Carlsbad


All the cousins together



Father's Day


Shiloh turning double digits - 10- yikes!


Mullin's first time to go on a trip without us.


Amazing Jakes fun


My chalk paint class with my friend :)


End of summer day trip to Tempe to see a cool cave.


My prayer for you all is that you will always take with you all of the good memories that our family has made together! I love you. Mom

Monday, August 24, 2015

A Journal-Type Entry to Get Me Going Again

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Well, it's plain to see that I pretty much took the entire summer off from blogging. After a cray cray May and a rough start to summer vacation, I had zero desire to write. My early June beach retreat did little to lift my spirits as the abiding gloom in the sky and persistent chill in the air only mirrored the bleakness of my hurting, confused heart. And so began my 2 1/2 month bloggy break. I guess I feel the need to back track and catch myself up to the present. :)

*This will be about as boring as learning about polynomials, so just ignore this post. It was something I had to do for myself, though, before moving on.

Spring for me is always a time of working hard to wrap up yet another year of homeschooling and of making plans for the next year. It's a time for readying garden boxes, planting seeds and flowers, and looking forward to lazy summer days. I absolutely love watching the season change from "death" to "life." I admit, the change from winter to spring in the desert is more subtle than in other parts of America, but spring is still my favorite and gets me all giddy inside. :)

This particular spring, as I basked (or baked as my hubby would say) in sun's warmth and delighted in yellow-flowered breezes, I pondered my family's future. I knew change was coming once again; I just didn't know how much change. And I certainly didn't know how icky it would be.

Seriously, by mid June I was exhausted from feeling jerked around like some lifeless marionette! Why? Well, that change I mentioned earlier that I knew would be coming was because I was aware that my husband had been job hunting for a little while. Even though I am a stay-at-home-homeschool mom, I know full well that a new job change for the hubby can mean, for good or bad, change for me, the wife. ;)

In about a 2 week time period as I was wrapping up homeschool year 2013-2014, my emotions had zig-zagged from here to the moon and back. Hubby did accept a new job offer, and after I'd had a few days to wrap my mind around my hubby starting a new job - one that would be a huge financial stress and one that would require about a 3 hour daily commute - a different job opportunity presented itself.

So, second job opportunity was much better on the financial side, however, it went from being a remote position to maybe having to move sometime in the future (to Colorado) to no, we do for sure have to move by summer's end back to being a remote position in which we can live wherever we choose. Whew! When I thought we were for sure moving, and this was before May was even over, I went through the grieving process that usually accompanies a big move away from all that is familiarly wonderful. I cried with my mom on the phone and spread the word to all I knew. Extreme sadness with a tiny bit of excitement thrown in were my constant emotions for a few days.

Icky change, unfortunately, didn't stop there. In the midst of all that new job craziness, our family became church orphans overnight. At that point, I think my strings snapped, and my little marionette self crashed to the floor. I felt like I'd woken up in a thick fog and had no idea which way to go. There was so much stuff to process that I think my brain turned to a blank blue screen.

I was emotionally spent and found myself in a place of not knowing where we were supposed to live or where we were supposed to go to church. Very unsettling. Instead of looking forward to light-hearted, lazy summer days enjoying just being my kids' mama and not their teacher, I entered summer extremely heavy-hearted and burdened to the brim on so many levels. (I'm not even really going to mention the parenting funk I'm going through, too, right now.)

Praise God for friends and the support they offered during our trial. Praise God for the desire to "just keep swimming" even though some days I felt like giving up. Praise God that even though I don't understand His ways, He has everything under control.

I did do a lot of zoning out this summer, mostly by playing Plants vs Zombies 2 and reading lots of books, but our family did manage to have some fun and make memories in the midst of my basket of emotions! And that's what I am going to highlight hopefully next for my family's sake. After that, I think I will feel all caught up and be able to move on with regular blogging. I do kind of miss it. :)


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