It's always a little awkward when I have been absent for a while. Kind of like showing up for class after skipping for a couple of days. You hate to overdo the explanation of your absence, but you feel that accusing glare as you take your seat.

Here are some pics of some of the things we've been doing for a couple of months.

We built a chicken coop and were still nailing the wire into place on Easter.

These little ones are the latest addition to the coop. Austrolorps and I can't remember what kind the red one is. These little ones have grown quickly. One of them is very social and comes right up to us. It likes to stand on our finger. One of them is a rooster. He doesn't know it yet, and I'm not sure if we're keeping him. We really only need one...

These were the first bunch of chickens. The golden ones are from the same batch and are Buff Orpingtons. The smaller one is a lavender Orpington, and turns out he's a rooster. The lavender ones are more rare, and he's the one we'll keep if we can only deal with one rooster. They've all grown quickly, and I'll ad some new photos soon. I can't tell the golden ones apart except for one that still has some baby feathers around her neck. She is kind of unpredictable, and I named her Juanita. Each one has a unique personality.
We hope to have some eggs by next month.

These guys showed up and worked on our property for quite some time. We logged a couple of acres of the land, and cleared some at the back to open it up for sun. We want a pasture and hope to have a couple of pasture animals in the near future. No cows, though. I don't want any large pasture animals. Too much poo.

Dave and Jewel graduated from college this year, and I took a short trip to Tennessee to be there for the ceremonies. It was so great to get away and enjoy some time there with family and friends.

On  my last full day there we took a little trip to the lake house to enjoy a day on the lake. It was raining when we headed out, so we stopped off at Brown's in Hampton to look around and wait for the weather to improve.

We brought the kayaks and met up with Dave and Grace, stopped off at Chik-fil-A for a chicken biscuit breakfast, and were on our way.

It turned out to be a beautiful day and perfect weather for a day on the lake. I had never been kayaking and I loved it. I am already shopping.

I love this little girl! I had so much fun spending time with her. She is so precious.

Dave and I stopped off for lunch at Applebee's so I could say goodbye to Jewel before he dropped me off at the airport. She had to work that day. I miss them all already. Can't wait to go back.

A prayer for silence

Life is a series of lessons, and I try to learn from each one.  I lived through a very stressful and awful experience almost 10 years ago, and from that I learned how to pray.

Prayer was nothing new to me. I'm a Christian. But that experience was so intense and lasted for so long that I prayed each day, and sometimes I prayed all day. Everything I asked for was important, but maybe the most important was silence. I asked that God help me to remain silent when nothing needed to be said, and when I should say something that I would use His words and not mine.

Each thing I prayed for I received. I was so amazed by how I was led through that time that I have continued to pray for strength, patience, and silence. Sometimes I think my silence is misinterpreted for compliance or apathy, so I continue to ask for understanding to know when I should speak and what I should say.

I have been faced with a troubling situation that is a circular argument. No matter how I've tried to make my point clear it has fallen on deaf ears. I've tried coming at it from different angles, looking at the situation from the other point of view, and have consulted with a few outsiders to try to get a clearer picture. Though I have admitted some wrong doing in this situation, the other parties continue to insist that they have done nothing wrong at all.

The picture is clear, but my attempt to make my point has not worked. So instead of continuing to argue the same point and ride the merry-go-round of the argument, I decided to remain silent. It was so clear to me that it would not be worth my time and energy to try any longer.  I had to take control of the situation by not engaging.

I believe that truth will prevail, but for some reason they can't see the truth through me. It will take a different person to bring that truth back again and elicit some positive changes.

I decided to step away altogether and sever the tie. I am thankful for silence, for strength and patience, and for Chuck. He has been so loving and supportive while I've been dealing with this situation.

Grieving a short pregnancy

This post is about a past pregnancy. I'm not pregnant. I was not recently pregnant. Those who know me can relax now.

I know in the larger scheme of things this is not on the scale of other types of grief. I thank God every day that my preemie was healthy and is a normal boy today.

I delivered my first two children full term, and I couldn't wait to lose that baby weight and get back into my normal clothes. I lose weight fast after pregnancy so I was back in them by the time I went for my six-week checkup.

But when I had Sean at 9 weeks early I didn't have that same desire to get back to normal. I held onto those maternity clothes and wore them. In fact, I was really sad to put them away.
I mentioned this to the social worker who was assigned to us as he spent the next 3 1/2 weeks in the NICU, and she said she had heard of mothers of preemies who had experienced similar feelings. That was as far as that conversation ever went.

It has taken a long time for me to get back to this subject, but at the time I knew I wanted to get this out there. It is a real grief. I was sad.  And I felt guilty about feeling sad. Though I was worried that something could go wrong, I had a healthy baby. Other mothers around me were living through all sorts of medical problems with their preemies. I would walk by the chapel near the NICU and know that we were so fortunate to have our baby.

Maybe my feelings of sadness were worse because I had already carried two babies to term. I didn't experience that last trimester of gaining a lot of weight and looking as if I was ready to pop. In fact, I had gone with my mom to an appointment that week and her nurse couldn't even tell I was pregnant until I stood up.

We didn't have time to sign up for a birthing class. We didn't have time to get the nursery painted and set up. We didn't have a baby shower or even get to talk about one. When I could have been showing off my baby to family and friends, I was driving to the hospital twice a day to hold him. My time was consumed by pumping breast milk. I should have been excited and happy, but I was worried and sad.

Each day I would get up, get ready for the day and choose what to wear. I would pull on a maternity top. I did that for a long time. And I found myself wishing I was still pregnant, and wondering what was wrong with me.

These feelings eventually passed. Sean came home, and he was beautiful and healthy, and life went on. But that grief is real. There is something about an interrupted pregnancy that throws us off. I consider myself very lucky to have had a mild case of sadness.

If you are experiencing sadness due to an interrupted pregnancy, talk to your doctor. If you believe you need to talk to someone other than your ob/gyn please seek out a mental health professional. Sometimes it's enough to just talk to someone who understands.

Expectation or gift?

Expectation. One definition: A premeditated resentment.

So, after an unbelievably wonderful morning with my Valentine I was struck by how different our gifts were to one another.  I write. He is great at planning. I am good at communicating my feelings. He is good at being romantic. I am good at receiving his romantic intentions.

I recently read a list of the worst gifts women had received for Valentine's Day. Some of them were honestly bad. Like an ugly purse with a Valentine's Day card in it for the girl he was cheating with. That's bad. But some of them were obviously a failed expectation.

I wonder. Is the gift really about the gift?
What if we stop expecting, and just receive what we are given cheerfully?
People give what they are best at giving, and sometimes that is their whole heart. You just have to adjust your sights to see it.

Would you do it?

I read an article in a magazine while I was at the chiropractor's office today. It was about flirting, and it told the stories of several married people who were engaging in a flirtatious relationship with someone other than their spouse.
I expected the psychologists that were sources in the story to advise against this, but they didn't. Instead the experts said there should be boundaries set by the two who are flirting, and they should make a pact, basically, that it won't go any further, even if the desire is there to do so.
I thought about how many people I have known in my life (including my childhood), and how many of those people have either cheated or been cheated on by a spouse. And I couldn't come up with anyone I knew who had a "friendship" that included flirting and had kept it just that, flirting.
Do you think flirting is healthy?

I just want to get this thing settled

and get my damn money back.
Over the years I have heard a few recordings of prank callers and the poor folks who answer the calls. I was handed a cassette tape in the late 90's by a friend who warned me I should wait until I was home to listen to it. He had made the mistake of popping it in while driving. He said he almost ran off the side of the road because he was laughing so hard he was crying.

My copy was a copy, but the quality was pretty good. Turns out that tape was a bit of a plagiaristic endeavor because the real, original, hilarious recording was done by a guy in Maryville, Tenn. and I have a CD of that original. Funny stuff.

But the "Whoop Yer Ass tape," as we called it, included a lot of that phrase. It was actually quite famous among the 20 and 30 somethings crowd in several states across the south. The prank caller would call a business and have a complaint and end up saying, "I just wanna get this thing settled and get my damn money back." The business owner or manager would refuse, and the argument would ensue and escalate, and the caller would end with something about whoopin' somebody's ass over it.

Lucky for me I didn't have to take it that far today. Lucky for them too ;-) (I'm so scary. About 5' 1", 100 pounds.)
I got online to check my bank account to make sure my number in my head was the same number my bank had as my balance. Uhh, nope. I checked the history and found that a transaction with a company called Min Pai Shop.com in Beijing for more than $370 went through yesterday. I printed out my history and did a quick search online to find out if this place actually existed. It did this morning. I briefly saw a site that had some black T-shirts. I immediately drove to my bank to figure it out.

I don't have my money yet, and I had to cancel my debit card and get a new one issued to me. I had to fill out some forms, and now I wait. The woman at the bank told me Visa will investigate. I actually did have more than $370 in my account and thank God these blessed folks who so needed that $370 odd dollars didn't decide they needed more than that.

And when I went back online to take a closer look at Min Pai Shop.com it no longer existed. Hmm. Interesting.

In the car, on the way to the bank, I found myself thinking, "I just want to get this thing settled and get my money back." And I snickered as I remembered the line, "I'd hate to have to whoop somebody's ass over this. It ain't nothin' to me to whoop a man's ass. You mighta heard of me."

You probably had to be there.

Vaginas, Groundhogs and Hearts

Caught you off guard by the title of this post? Let me explain by telling a little story.
Once upon a time I moved from my very broke (as in no money) little life in the south to a starkly different country called California. I was just getting settled in, and I missed my home, my food, my family, my friends and pretty much everything in the south.

And then my Southern friend, Karen, said she was coming to visit me in California in February! We drove to San Francisco and stayed in a little hotel and spent three days intensely enjoying that city. We did the usual touristy stuff, like Lombard Street and Haight-Ashbury. We visited the Paul Frank store, went to the restaurant where one of the scenes in the movie "When a Man Loves a Woman" was shot, drove by the house where 90210 was filmed, did some shopping at the mall, rode on the trolly, ate at Bubba Gumps, and walked for miles.

The Vagina Monologues was in town, and on a whim we decided to try to get tickets. Yeah, right. Sold out. So we sat, looking sort of like homeless people, with hand-made signs that said "We Need Tickets" as others filed past us, tickets in hand, to the not-so-nice guy in the ticket booth who told us we could try to get tickets by making a sign, and then proceeded to try to make us move from our spot . Guess what? A guy walked up and offered to sell us his tickets. And they were, I think, second row seats! The show was great!

While we were in San Fran we found out that Boy George was going to be at Virgin Records, and we wanted to be there just to say we had seen Boy George. And get this, while we were meandering around we walked into a record store and happened to find a couple of Culture Club albums for maybe $1. We took those with us so we could get them autographed. I'm not sure what happened to my album, but I still have some old photographs of us getting those albums signed.

Our trip was packed with activity, and I'm so glad we did all of that. On the way home we stopped off at the Jelly Belly factory for a guided tour. It was such a great time.

So this time of year always reminds me of The Vagina Monologues, and Groundhogs and hearts. And Karen! She has been such a great friend to me for so many years.

I've never been a big fan of  Valentine's Day as an adult. Way too much pressure, but I love to decorate a little and celebrate it as a fun holiday for children.