Notes for my sister

Let's start with a fun list of opposites, skipping the usual favorites like hot and cold, and day and night. Instead here's a handful of spectacular rivalries.  Adobe and Apple Young Living and DoTerra McDonald's and Burger King Pepsi and Coke BYU and Utah TX Longhorns and OU Mercy and Justice Today my thoughts are on justice. Recently I took my girls to the dentist. My youngest doesn't love to brush or floss her teeth, she loves sugar, and hadn't been to the dentist in almost two years. After hearing good news that went something like, "Yay, good job everything is looking good..." Five minutes later I learned that there's six cavities with two more teeth that need silver caps and it will cost over $800 to fix everything. I was so miffed! Why get my hopes up before looking at an x-ray, and send them crashing down to earth after seeing the details more clearly?  When I die and go to heaven, I hope justice is Nothing like what I just experienced: I thoug

  My favorite quirk about my neighborhood is this: at Halloween all the skeletons come out of the closets. This one made me laugh out loud the other day. I was mad about something, it might have been the shenanigans going on around me or in my kids' schools or I might have been miffed about all the &*&%$ going on in the Middle East or South America or whatever. But when I drove past this skeleton, it just illustrated my current view of humanity. "Got my butt in a jam," with a skeleton literally stuck in a trashcan. I love my neighbors for their creativity, for loving the kids and for wanting to give them a fun Halloween season. I love the empty nesters for storing all this crap all year long, so that during October we can drive past and see something that makes us smile. Some of my favorites this year: I think that they're trying to illustrate that a good kegger might lead to trouble. ;) The skeleton wedding makes me smile almost as much as that gorgeous blue

You know when you want to eat cereal for breakfast and there's no spoons? Today's deep thoughts are a twist on that idea. Months ago I was talking with my sister about school and how she was ready to drop a class. She'd been super sick and was dealing with a lot of tricky stuff, so she emailed her professor and said, "I'm all out of spoons." Amazingly, this was a psych class + the professor really wanted her to pass + worked with her to finish a bunch of assignments = it wasn't necessary to drop the class. But the metaphor for spoons stuck in my brain. When a person says, "I have no spoons for this," it means that they're done. Their energy is gone and their capacity to handle any more details is gone. Let's rewind a bit, shall we? Spoon Theory  began when a woman with chronic illness was trying to describe her life to a friend in perfect health. In a nutshell, we each begin the day with a finite amount of energy. A person who is dealing

  Every fall Norm participates in a yearly convention, a networking event for professionals within his industry. Sometimes they go cool places like Quebec or Kawaii. Last year was virtual, but this year they were excited to meet in Maui. We bought a plane ticket for me to tag along too. A few weeks ago we were really disappointed to learned the convention was not happening in Hawaii, but doing it all virtually instead.  We cancelled our flight reservations. I'd known in the back of my head that we might not go, but I needed a break from the routine, from the crazy fall schedule, and from my kids. Rather, I needed a break from my job as a parent. I love my kids, but I love them even more after I've been gone for a few days. ;) And Norm and I needed a chance to go on a date and hang out together. I highly recommend  Marriage Maintenance  for every couple in every season. That said, it's incredibly tricky for us to get time away together in our current scenario. I'd known

  The best camping memories of my life happened in the Rockies. (This first photo is actually in Utah at a cute place called Tinney Flat , but they look similar.) My dad had lived and hiked those mountains for years and climbed many of the Fourteeners as a young adult. During the two years that we lived in Boulder, he took me and my older brother along on some of these amazing hikes.  We’d camp overnight and wake up early to begin the ascent. The first mountain in my story remains nameless because I can’t even remember. But the detail I’ll never forget; after hiking for many hours we arrived at a field of slate or shale. These rocks were dark and shiny, jagged. There was no trail. We picked our way up and through kinda like billy goats.  In case you scrolled past that super fast, look one more time and there's my brother hidden behind one of the rocks. There you go. After what seemed like forever, we reached the top of this pile of rocks, and happy day, the view opened up and I c

 Do you ever have days that are just rotten? Yup. I know you can relate. This was Monday morning when I opened my daughter's backpack and went to make her lunch for school. "Oh yeah, I forgot to look through her stuff Friday afternoon when she came home." After the weekend, the orange peel and the frozen peas had long since lost their luster.  My purpose isn't to gross you out, or to dwell on the negative. But sometimes moms have days that are: grumpy gritty frumpy frazzled feisty And I'm here to tell you and me both, that's normal. Sorry, but we all have our warts. One of the women who has inspired me is Shawni from  71toes  and I especially love her disclaimer. She writes about a mothers' retreat where they talked about what makes moms spiral into depression or negativity. "The big answer from a whole slew of moms was that blogs are the problem." She writes:  "Despite my attempts to "keep it real" on this blog, somehow some peopl