I love you til the end of time!

I love you til the day I die!

I love you til the universe is no more!

I love you til the there is nothing but lore!

Seriously, I want you to know that I am thankful to have you in my life.  I am continually amazed by your talents, skills and generosity.  You inspire me to be a better person.  When you are not around, my world is gray. Addicted to you? Definitely! For Life!

Michele

Not only do you have to work and carry on your normal routine, but you have to be extra jolly or you are a Scrooge.  You have to be extra giving or you are a Scrooge, damn the budget!  You have to be extra helpful and happy, damn the work and family sickness or you’ll be labeled a Scrooge!  No one wants to be a Scrooge, right?  He wasn’t the richest person in town for nothing you know!  He worked!  He made people pay their bills!  And man oh man, do I hate to pay my bills!

I’ve come up with my own Top Ten version of surviving the holidays.  I hope this is helpful and inspiring!

10.  The month before Christmas spend all the extra money you have on eliminating wire-eating squirrel habitats.  This will help your stress load when it comes to spending money on gifts.

9.  After Thanksgiving, have your child get very sick.  There’s always the extra money for the medicine and the retired mother-in-law will be perfectly willing to come to town to stay with him.  This will build good relations with family and give your child time with his grandmother when he is feeling his worst.

8.  After the retired mother-in-law contracts an unknown illness from your child and is miserable,  rely on her for future help.  This will also build good family relations.

7.  After your child is well and back in daycare, have your husband come down with a horrible illness that the doctor says is highly infectious.  The doctor won’t know what it is, just that it’s horribly infectious.  This will help you after your long days at work with the nightly childcare duties as you have to keep father and son apart.  This will help you sleep at night too.

6.  While your husband is home in bed horribly ill, have your child have a recurrence of his previous sickness, only worse.  Since your mother-in-law is now ill and work is not happy that you’ve been taking time off to take care of your husband, you sick son will have to stay with your sick husband who can barely stand.  Have your sick husband take your sick child to the pediatrician as well.  This will leave you guiltily at work and your sick husband will take on all the responsiblity.  It’ll build his holiday character.

5.  Have your pediatrician forbid your child to go to daycare.  You will now have no option to stay home because your office is tired of you taking off, your husband will have to go back to work because it is a new job and he has a ton of work waiting from being out sick.  Your retired mother-in-law has still not recovered from the bug she caught the last time she was here so that will leave you to think of the only person left, your mother.  Perfect!

4.  Have your mother beg favors from her co-workers and take time off from her work so that the guilt mounting is much greater than normal for using/abusing her free babysitting.  This will build that good morale fiber so necessary to becoming something other than Scrooge!

3.  Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas and the family getting sick be sure to do all your holiday shopping.  Take lots of time in the two hours you have free each weekend to think what gift would be especially relevant and wonderful for the person you are getting it for.  This will make everyone around you realize that you aren’t Scrooge but a wonderful, creative and talented gift-giver that everyone looks forward to seeing at the holidays.

2.  Exactly one week before Christmas realize that you have had this weird sinus infection for over a month and it isn’t going away.  Contemplate getting sick on your holiday vacation as your body will wind down and everyone else will feel better and want to play. 

1.  One week before Christmas realize that you haven’t properly prepared for the Christmas meal yet.  That will mean more shopping and of course money that wasn’t exactly budgeted for.

*Extra tip:  In the month of December, be sure to read and watch all the daily news as it will inspire and help you to have that wonderful Christmas spirit.  The Scrooge in you will surely be put to rest then.

~Life as Mom

I’d love to hear your holiday Scrooge-fighting tips as well! 

These are the things I look forward to next weekend when we go to Old Edwards Inn and Spa in Highlands, North Carolina for our annual Fall trip to the mountains.  Unfortunately it will only be for a very short weekend but it was the only time this Fall that we could get away to enjoy the leaves change.

We are leaving the child at home this year.  We could take him and we are going to miss him terribly but the short weekend and long drive there and back would make for a very cranky Mom, not to mention kid.

Our aspirations for the weekend are to visit Dry Falls where Kevin asked me to marry him and to sleep as late as possible in the feather bed.  Then get up and go take a nap in the huge soaking jetted tub.  Then get back in the lovely feather bed for another nap.   Maybe go out and view the Fall leaves.  I know the color won’t be at peak just yet but as long as the weather is cooler than Florida I’m a happy wife.  Did I mention the heat index is at 105 degrees today?

The challenging part of the weekend will be in how many times we call Aden to see how he is doing.  This will be our first long weekend without him.   If it wasn’t Old Edwards, it might not be worth leaving him behind.  But Son, when you read this, this place was worth it to Mom and Dad to leave you with Noni. 

We love this place.  Luxury in an old english style way that makes us feel absolutely wonderful!  I can’t rave about this place enough.  Definitely worth the visit.  From the champaigne arrival to the stocked butler’s pantry, this place is the epitomy of service and style.

And yes, I do smoke cigars.  Rather, a cigar.  I get to smoke one about once a year and not every year.  Obviously for special occasions with a wonderful wine and NOT in front of the kid.  He’ll be traumatized enough from seeing us run around the house naked that I wouldn’t want him to remember us smoking cigars as well.  Although, Kevin likes to smoke a pipe.   That really smells a lot better than my old smelly cigar!

I can’t wait.

~Life as Mom

So with happiness and the health of our core unit in mind,  we are trying new things, doing things that we have talked about and dreamed about.

Kevin got to try his hand at acting and found that he totally loved it.  We also wanted to try some churches in the area in which we can raise Aden.  We are looking for a church that will expand Aden’s social network and that will teach tolerance.  A rare thing among Christians.

As a Christian society, there are certain morals and life codes that most Americans live by.  Not everyone of course including myself, but most of the American society is generally Christian.  I want Aden to understand that background.  As he gets older, I will want him to explore other religions that are not Christian.  The goal would be for him to conciously choose a religion or a way life that suits him.  I do not want him to blindly follow a religion just because it was the way he was raised.  I want him to question all aspects of life and make decisions based on informed choices not because that is the only way others are doing things.

My own personal fulfillment has come out in writing and photography.  I tend to tell myself that my work isn’t good enough, but I am hoping to work through that this year.  I am hoping to sell my photography and continue developing this blog.  As an artist, which I have tried not to be my whole life, I need outside validation that what I like to do is worth it.

As Aden gets older, I want him to know that his parents pursued life with nothing held back.  I want him to look back on our lives and be proud of us, that we lived pursueing those things that made us happy and that we exposed him to a variety of ways to live life.  I want him to know that we took his wellbeing as our sole concern and to support that we kept our own health and happiness as a priority.

~Life as Mom

Aden at the Park

We were at the park to attend a friend’s daughter’s first birthday party.  Not Aden’s first birthday party as he has many friends that are older than him.  All girls I might add.  There aren’t any boys in our set so Aden will have lots of girlfriends or be really into purses.

~Life as Mom

So, I do my own form of praying.  I talk to the Universe (or meditate if you so wish) and ask the Universe for what I want.  I have to say that I have not been let down when I am being true to myself.  When I am wish-washy, the Universe doesn’t know what to give me.  This part of Life, I have down pat, I understand.  The part I don’t understand is the happiness part.  When all is right with my world and I feel happy and I have things going the way I want them, something unwarrented or unwanted happens to dissipate my happiness.  It almost seems as if I am being punished for being happy.  So the question is, is happiness harder to come by the closer we get to it?  Is that a lesson for stay the goal?  Studies say to fake it till you make it, but is making it for that fleeting moment the goal or a continual state of bliss?

I find that I am at my happiest when I am pursuing those things that matter to me most.  When I say pursueing, I mean pursuing with every fiber in my being.  In some cases it is merely a positive action forward.  In the case of our son, we merely said yes, this is what we want to happen.  In the case of my personal legacy, what will I leave him?

~Life as Mom

So the other night I got my script book and I am busying myself learning song lyrics and lines. Here is one, War is a Science, which good soldiers appreciate recall and recapitulate, before they go to decimate the other SIDE! Sounds good right? Well, I will not be knocked for not trying. The show Pippin is a musical comedy and it has some pretty funny lines in it. I am so excited to do the show.

~Life as Dad

This next year will be a fun-filled year and I know you will enjoy it!

~M

~K

Just getting out the house today was such a nice treat. We went to IHOP for breakfast then drove down our favorite country roads and then went to the mall. Kevin totally indulged me today, he bought me a new pair of shoes – how great is he! We oohed and aahed over the fall merchandise at Yankee Candle. The wonderful aromas of pumpkin and cinnamon really brought home for us our favorite season of the year. Florida does not have a fall season unless you count the hurricanes blowing down the leaves. Somehow it’s just not the same. We were married in the fall and our wedding theme was fall leaves. Every October since we met we have gone to the mountains in North Carolina to watch the splendid fall color. This year, the first in four years, we will miss that because of the baby.

~M