Every time I visit Texas (for the last 10 years) it rains.  I always feel lucky, since rain is such a treat here in these parts!  My long weekend trip was no exception- there was even flooding!  I took my almost 7 year old with me this time, the trip was to celebrate her birthday and my mom’s birthday (happy birthday mom!).

Yes, she wore the crown everyday of our trip…even on the airplane ride home!  You’re only seven once I say- so live it up!

My only new years resolution this year (I’m not a fan of new years resolutions in general, I feel if you notice something in your life that needs adjusting you should take care of it right away, rather than wait for some silly day to start! ) is to keep track of all the books I read (my mother suggested I quantify even farther and keep track of how many pages each book has).     Today is the 11th and I have already finished 2 books (hooray!).  I’ve decided to keep track of them over here- on a page devoted to books!  I’d love to hear from you, add a comment and recommend a book, or tell me what you thought about one of the books on my list.

In the last week we’ve celebrated Christmas and 2 birthdays!  Next week we’ll celebrate our wedding anniversary and the following week we have one more birthday!  We really know how to make the most of the season, no?!

Christmas was celebrated by the entire Hales Family, first time since ’06.  I remember as a kid feeling like Christmas was that much more magical if we shared it with more family around.  I hope my kids will grow up feeling that way….  I’ve started the “annual post holiday purge”, so far I’ve made 2 trips to Goodwill and I suspect there will be more.  Do you clean and reorganize this time of year too?

I am now a whopping 34 years old.  I feel too young to feel as old as I do.  While stitching the embroidered bookmarks my fingers began to ache….I think the family arthritis may be rearing its unpleasant head.  I haven’t slept on my left side in over 2 weeks due to some strange shoulder muscle pain…I mean really, 34?!  I’m too young for this, especially since I exercise regularly….I could eat better I suppose (I typed this while eating a 7-layer bar).

My elmo adoring baby turned 2!  I swear at each age I say “oh this is my favorite”, 2 is no exception.  She is really the best little baby (yes, I suspect I will call her that until she is 18), and most perfect companion for my days.  When she throws temper tantrums (like she did when I wouldn’t let her have an elmo cupcake until AFTER dinner), I usually ignore her tears for 10 min or so, then I pick her up and tell her “all done, it’s time to be all done crying”.  People, 90% of the time IT WORKS!!

As I get ready to bid adieu to 2011 I find myself looking backwards, to see how far forward I have come.  It has been a year of growth, a year of stretching and a year of tremendous support from those around us who help make this beautiful life take shape. On a micro scale there are days that really tugged at me, days where I couldn’t seem to separate the good from the bad.  But through the blessed macro lens, it is so good.  So good and rich, to the point of bringing me to my knees in humility.  One of the biggest lessons that will stay with me from this year is: Compassion.  There is no such thing as too much, for others & most especially for our selves.

It’s raining in the desert today.  The skies have been grey and wet for 2 solid days now, I could not be more pleased.  @mother nature- BRING IT ON!

I’m recovering from last weeks massive fundraiser at the kids’ school and a few other things.  These grey days have been perfect for curling up on the couch…which of course leads to massive amounts of deep reflection (you to?!).  I read a book yesterday that caused a serious rift in my glorification of the 1950′s & 60′s.  Its called Cotton Queen by Pamela Morsi, and it was a light piece of fiction- easy to read and a story that isn’t quite as predictable as I thought it would be.

I am not naive to the plight of women through the centuries, I took the prerequisite Women’s studies classes that all enlightened and educated women take in college.  I was fascinated with Women’s suffrage at the tender age of 17 and wrote a history report all about the movement and the key players.  While I intellectually understood a lot of freedoms that were not available to women- even in to the 1970′s and 80′s, this book helped me to feel it, for the first time.

The thought of living through the 60′s feels like a horror movie to me. I want to kiss the ground of every woman who walked before me and paved the way for me to enjoy the freedom to: educate myself at some of the best schools; to climb as high as I am willing to on the corporate ladder; to raise my children how I know to be best without the ramification of a narrow social view.

My grandmother was a divorced mother of 6 (!!!) in the early 1960′s, I can only imagine the social isolation she must have felt and the lack of social structures to help her both care for her children and feed them.  She managed to come out on top, though no doubt it was a hard battle.

My mother became a single mom of two little girls at a tender age and at the beginning of the 1980′s.  Women were just starting to be offered the same jobs as men at that point, but the pay was no where near equatable.  I can only imagine the fear in her heart as she had to decide what to do to support my sister and I…the isolation that comes from being a single mom when all your contemporaries are young college co-eds.

I am glad that our mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers paved the way…I hope in my own way I too can make the world a better place for my daughters.  I am grateful that they will have choices; but with those choices comes a great responsibility.  I hope they will grow to be strong, capable, and compassionate women.

(taken at Lynx Lake near Prescott, AZ)

In our early marriage I think my husbands mantra was “have an attitude of gratitude”.  Guess what?  He’s right, life is better with an attitude of gratitude.  Because when you are grateful, it makes that what you have is enough.

Here is the short list of what I am grateful for (in no particular order):
-this blog and the ability to express myself through written word
-family, for the shared past and the hope of a shared future
-amazing friends
-my husband and beautiful children
-life…the ability to experience all its highs and lows and the lessons I learn
-for my brother-in-law who agreed to cook the turkey this year
-that I have food and room to share this thanksgiving

May your day be filled with warm food, great conversation, and help in the kitchen!

xo

(source: tlcreations)

About a year ago I decided to take up biking.  My plan was to loose some baby weight without going to the gym and having to leave baby in the nasty gym daycare.  In my mind I thought it would be a little less mundane than walking on the treadmill.   My hopes weren’t high about this being any fun.

Here it is a year later- the baby weight is gone and I.LOVE.RIDING!  Who knew?! I bike between 18-20miles a week, which might not seem like much but its a lot to me!  I actually found an exercise that does not make me roll my eyes and groan.  I ride 3 mornings a week with a girlfriend, we tow our respective babies behind us, me I’m pulling about 50lbs, she pulls about 100 (2 kids).  Which is great training for the nights….

The nights when the day has been long and I really need to clear my head (who knew exercise could help you relax?!).  I bike alone.  I ride hard and fast and the music is LOUD.  Without the 50lbs of baby and trailer behind me I can FLY.  I swear it grounds me.  I love the endorphins.  I’ve heard runners talk about how a good run can clear their mind, but this is me and running.  We don’t mix. I’m so glad I found something that does!

I’ve been riding the last year on my husbands Trek, but I think I’ve proven (to myself) that this is not a passing fancy.  Which means its time for my own bike.  My riding partner also rides on a Trek and really likes it, and I do like my husbands Trek…but I wondered if anyone else had any recommendations for a good bike?  I adore the beach cruiser as much as the next girl, but I need a really good riding bike.  Anyone want to shout out about how great their bike is?  (Any bike company out there want me to test out their bikes?)

Any suggestions for some music I should add to my playlist?  I’ve been listening to a lot of Blue October, Silversun Pickups, Imagine Dragons, and Neon Trees….just to give you a feel for what I like.

A few weeks ago a friend from chuch asked me if I would take her family photo this year.  At first I think I laughed.  I explained that I am not  a photographer at all, I like to pretend online, but that’s just it, I pretend!  She insisted that she loved my photos and that both she and her husband wanted me to take them.  I agreed to do it after fully disclosing again that I only pretend to be a photographer!

Today was the day…I wanted to pee my pants with all the anxiety!  I flipped through the camera manual and read a crash course online of portrait photography and hoped for the best.  I still don’t have a prime lens (I vow to buy one with my next paycheck!), so I shot with my kit lens (boo!) and my old hard body 1.4/50mm lens…from the 70′s.  I so heart the images that lens can produce…only problem is you have to shoot blind.  Since it isn’t a digital lens you have to manually focus and there is no light meter and you can’t shoot on auto (which I try to avoid anyway).  I took about 200 photos, and thought I would share 2 sneak-peek out-takes for the family.

The blond, she is full of personality, she and my daughter love to ham it up together!!  The above photo was taken with the 1.4/50mm lens, oh how I adore the DOF and the clarity of the family.  I really really heart this lens.  HOWEVER, because I am not great with manual focus many of them did not come out. boo.

I just loved this shot, it captures the fun personalities of these two!  I gave it a bit of a cross-processed edit, to add to the urban feel the family wanted to capture.

Now, let’s all cross our fingers and whisper to the photography gods and hope that the R-family will be happy with the results!

I really enjoy Sunday.  Even the ones where I spend 2 hours in a room with a dozen two-year olds (insert yesterday!).  Sunday is a day of rest over at our place.  Don’t get me wrong, we are great at holding meetings, meetings about meetings and while sometimes a large chunk of my Sunday is spent in meetings, it is still a restful day for me.

I take a break from work.  I do not work on any projects that I am being paid for- and I do this GUILT FREE!  We don’t go places on Sunday- unless its to visit family or take a drive.  Naps are the icing on the cake for Sunday afternoons- followed by a old fashioned Sunday dinner.  We may spend the evening playing boards games with the kids, or the kids play scrabble while we nap!  It is a vacation of sorts from my busy run here there and everywhere daily life.  I look forward to the calm that comes from a Sunday afternoon spent on the couch and a late afternoon spent in the kitchen.

I feel grateful for the command to rest from our labors on the sabbath, I would never have guessed how much I need it!

Wednesday my son had been acting not quite right…I thought he might be coming down with something as he didn’t have much of an appetite either.  When I asked him how he felt, he said he was fine.  I shrugged and kept an eye on him.  After racquetball I told him to shower before getting ready for scouts, when he got out of the shower he was hanging out in the bathroom for a while, I went in to hurry him along when I noticed his upper arm was red and swollen.  His skin was warm, but I attributed that to the shower.  His skin was tight and very red.  He got dressed and I whisked him off to Urgent Care.  I didn’t know what it was (I had some ideas, and was wrong), but knew it wasn’t good.

Turns out it is a very serious condition called cellulitis, most likely caused by the big, bad, ugly, Strep bacteria!  Bacteria lives all over our skin, some good- some not.  They wait for a break in the skin and then start invading the body.  As seen in the swelling of my son’s arm.  This picture represents what his arm looked like about 36 hours after it started to swell (our trip to urgent care was about 24 hours post swelling).  He was put on an antibiotic that night, for a 10 day course.  Today, Friday morning, his arm is still swollen and the red rash has spread almost down to his elbow.  After 4 doses of the antibiotic I thought I would see a decrease in the swelling, so I am going to call the Doctor today and ask more questions.  Thankfully he does not have a fever- as that would be a really bad sign.

The reason I wanted to post this was to help other parents to see what it looks like.  Our kids are always getting bumps and bruises and sometimes its hard to know if something is serious or not.  After I got home from the Urgent Care I googled all I could on Cellulitis and most of the pictures I saw were of much worse looking rashes/swelling/sores.  If I had used those to guide me, I would have thought my son was fine! So, consider this my PSA for the day, the early stages of Cellulitis.

We made it home thursday night and hit the ground running!  I had the suitcases unpacked before I went to bed and started the laundry early Friday morning.  Whew- what a weekend!  Throw in a baby shower, a Sunday full of church meetings, bizarre nightmares (people dying, people accusing me of being a petty criminal, etc) and some not-so-nice kid behavior and you get a sense of how things have been around here the last few days!

Here is the little shower gift I whipped up the night before…I just love corduroy on babies, and you can’t go wrong with ric rac!  I was really stumped at first what to make/bring.  Then I remembered my friend Kate, in college she and I would always bring (well received) receiving blankets to baby showers.  Kate’s were always way cuter than mine, as she had access to KC fabric stores (and is a more skilled seamstress than I).  I highly recommend blankets as shower gifts (one-ply around here!)- they are so simple to make (less than an hour!).

I have no good transition here…but I wanted to share this.

The kids played scrabble this afternoon…and I cracked up at some of the words they used.  Especially the word on the far right.

Today, I am grateful for the mundane problems of my life.  I got all hot and bothered this morning about the snack policy at my children’s school.  Yes, that’s right.  For whatever reason it had me really upset…I even let it ruin a good chunk of my day.

This afternoon however, it occurred to me that in the grand scheme of life, if all that was bothering me today was a silly snack policy at school…my life must be pretty good.  I can honestly say I am grateful for the mundane of my life, because I would rather have silly mundane problems than life altering ones.