For Christmas I bought the kids matching bowties. Thank you, Amazon. The boys were so excited to all wear them to church and then to include Adelle for the pictures she came up with the idea to wear one as a headband. Clever sister. Cute kiddos.
In scrolling through my pictures on my phone this past weekend I've recommitted myself to my blog. The big events I will need to catch up on, and I will. But the everyday thoughts and lessons are what I miss the most. The little, simple, things that make up our beautiful lives. The moments. The smiles. The tears and fears. The lessons. There was a time when I was so good at documenting all of it and those memories, which I did forget about, mean more to me than all the money in the world now.
This past year two of my avid blog followers passed away. One was my best friend's Grandma. She read my blog for years and I would often write directly to her, knowing that she always read, and imagine her in her home, reading. She had lost her husband years before and lived by herself on a farm which she no longer ran. She found comfort in my words, in the new life that was blossoming around me amidst the chaos that I was often feeling. I would write of our days and feel motivated to keep going because I knew the experiences were blessing the life of a sweet grandma who was past her years of tending to little ones, but who had been there, and was joyous in the recollections.
The second reader who passed away this year was my dear Aunt Angela. If you look back in all my posts and years of blogging, she is there. Usually behind the scenes, hiding for the camera, but always there. She was the one who we lived by for most of our married life this far and whose house we commonly walked to and where we rode our bikes. It was her roof that Jeff and Brent replaced and her lawn where Braxton mowed. She was the one who stopped by regularly on her way home from work to give me a neck massage or help me thicken the rouge for dinner. She would drop by with gifts for the kids or spending money for me to treat myself. She would babysit my children and spoil them. She would hold them and love on them like no one else and constantly tell them how cute they were, what good kids they were, and how much she loved them. My aunt was a dear friend, a confidant, and in lots of ways more like another mother. She was wise and selfless and didn't expect anything from anyone. I loved her so much.
She read my blog too. She read it, and commented, and typically also texted me and told me how much she loved what I wrote or how much she loved the scenario I described. I knew she loved me and I knew she found joy through serving my family. The joy she felt from reading the blog was also real and in a way it was me showing my love back to her. Sharing with her the sweet moments of my life.
If anyone else reads the blog still it's a bonus but I will keep at it as a tribute to life and the responsibility I feel to record it. The responsibility I feel to remember the simple abundance I have and to share with later generations. The duration of my time with my kids at home in this stage is fleeting and I adore it. I want to remember it and I want to share it and to be frank, I want the blessing of looking back in a few years and re-living it through these accounts.
