The Blessed Life of a Single Mom

Most people see 30 rounding the corner and freak out. I, on the other hand, am sitting here rubbing my hands together thinking "Bring it on!". I am looking forward to my 30th birthday like a kid looks forward to Christmas. As of Sunday, I hit the "3 months til my 30th birthday" mark. November 25th. I decided that I needed to set some goals to achieve by 30. Several different areas came into that "goal setting" place. Now I just have to decide what goals for each part of my life I need to make. Faith, family, fitness, focus, food, and home. "So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ." Romans 10:17 " Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth. " 2 Timothy 2:15 Faith. I have been slacking off in my spiritual life. I let being busy and other things take the place and time of reading the bible, prayer, devotions. R...

After I put the girls to bed tonight, I turned on a Pandora station to help them fall asleep. Later on I was working on laundry in my bedroom when I heard this song come on in the living room. I stopped everything, went in, sat on the couch, and wept. Caleb really liked this guy, and we played this song at the calling hours. It's such a fitting song for where he is now. Someone told me it was like Caleb sent me that song tonight to know he's doing great in heaven. Unfortunately now I cannot stop crying. It's like it broke open the flood gates and the pain is flowing out. My heart is breaking, and I can't make it stop. I can't fix it. I can feel the ache in my heart. I keep remembering the last good visit I had with Caleb in the hospital, and how we just didn't see it coming. Bitter tears over one person's careless actions that took his life. I know, I KNOW that if it wasn't Caleb's time to go, God wouldn't have taken him home. But it still hu...

Sometimes we need a little break from being "Mom". I thoroughly enjoy my breaks, even if it means I'm working. But sometimes we just need to sit back and remember why we love being a mom. So here are a few things I just had to share tonight. 1. Dance Parties. We have the best crazy dance parties in the kitchen. No restraint. No cares. Just loud music and dancing in whatever style we feel at that moment. I don't think I have any talent in the form of dance. . . until the girls and I start dancing around. No one to criticize, no one to laugh at how stupid I look. Just unrestrained dancing fun. 2. Singing. We sing it all. We know most of the words. We sing loud. We LOVE singing in the car. Tonight on the way home we sang along with Sara Bareilles and OneRepublic like pros. I hope they always love singing in the car with me. It's the best place to sing. 3. Picking them up after work and having Courtney bury her face in my shirt and breathe in deep. She loves the...

So, I'm sitting here eating my failure at a great lunch. All because the mixed greens I bought for my salads tastes like dirt and grass. Not like spinach and other yummy green leafy things that I love. So, I picked out the grilled chicken, pecans, dried cherries, and green onions that I had put in it and left the disguised dirty grass on my plate. I was so excited about making my salads and now, *pouty lip out* I either have to suck it up and eat the nasty stuff or just wait til I go to the store again. So, we got home from a VERY intense workout at the gym today. I came home soaking wet with my legs shaking. . . and I'm still trying to not be inappropriate with it, but it's just so funny! Anyways, great workout! I'll be feeling it tomorrow for sure. The girls had to read their Bibles for a little bit before they could play. They then came out and informed me that Courtney was now Jenna, and Jenna now Courtney. They even switched clothes. This will last until about 5 ...

I have all kinds of motivation starting to plow it's way through. It's taken a little while, but it's back before I thought it would be. The problem is what "project" to start on. We start school on Monday. EEK! and YAY! The school year brings more structure to our lives. It also brings lots of it's own frustrations. I need to make some meal plan ideas. I need to get the books from last year mailed back (yes, I procrastinated with the best on that). I need to get the girls school areas set up. I need to sort through clothes that don't fit, are ruined, are too big but not in the totes for that size. I need to figure out where to put the $2 yard sale book shelf for school books. I need to work on editing pictures. I need to do this, I need to do that, I need to decide where to start! My brain is in organization idea overload. I'm going to really dig my teeth into a good Bible study. I have wanted to do one with friends, but that just didn't work t...

Caleb's funeral was today. There were so many emotions going. It started out okay. People coming in, greeting them, trying to find where my girls were running off to with friends and cousins. So many people came to support us yesterday and today. We were so blessed and so thankful to all who came. It was a great funeral. The music, the message, the friends who got up and spoke. Some of the things said that really meant a lot to me were: 1) Anyone who says that someone physically handicap has no quality of life needs just to look at the life of Caleb to be proven 100% wrong. He lived life to it's fullest. He was a great man of God who studied theology, he wrote wonderfully, and he loved people. His lifelong battle with Duchenne's Muscular Dystrophy never got in the way of his faith, family, and friends. He didn't complain about his handicap. He lived strong in spite of it. 2) Anyone who knows my family knows what trials we have faced. One friend said: All of you ou...

Today we had the calling hours for Caleb. It was a long day, very long, but it's over already. I'm so very tired. And hungry. Sadly, I'm only hungry for one thing, and I'm not going to get it. Papa Johns Pizza. Why? I have no idea. I just do. I look in the fridge, in the freezer, the cupboards. . . and think "Nope. I'm only hungry for that pizza." No idea what's up with my brain. Probably stress and hormones. We had an overflowing amount of love today from everyone who came to the calling hours. We all handled it pretty well. Not a lot of tears from us. I think some people were searching deep for that tear in my eye that wasn't there. I'm not going to lie, it was kind of awkward. It's hard though, to be on either side, because what do you say? There were a lot of hugs and "Thank you so much for coming". I was trying earlier to figure out what to say, and thank you so much for coming just seemed to be what I gravitated towards. I...

It is so strange to sit by and watch the world continue to go on like normal around me. Lives going on around me like nothing happened. So surreal to be sitting here with my heart hurting so badly, reading my friends facebook status updates that are just normal day to day things. I'm thinking "Here we are going through this, and the world around is just going." It's not an angry or upset thing. Just noticing how strange it feels. I realized why I have been going non stop since Friday. I decided that we would stay home for the most part today and just rest. Catch up on laundry. And I sat down to eat lunch and just cried. I need to eat, but I'm not hungry. I just want to curl up in bed. I feel useless, like functioning normally is foreign. I would be perfectly content to sit and stare at nothing for the rest of the day. That's all I feel like doing. I read through my most recent blogs regarding Caleb's hospitalization. It feels like it was ages ago I wro...

My amazing, wonderful, Godly, and dear brother Caleb died on Friday, August 9th, 2013 at 10:35am. My parents 33rd wedding anniversary and the day before Courtney's 9th birthday. My heart is crushed. I know that he is in heaven, and I am praising the Lord at this. I have peace and joy. But right now I am mourning his earthly departure. I miss him so very much. I'm straining my memory to hear his voice. I'm helping my daughters grieve. I'm watching them try to process and deal with this, and it is breaking my heart. Some things I am learning about mourning. You really just don't care about things. Like laundry. I realized I desperately need to do laundry. I also don't care. Maybe I'll do it. Maybe I'll just not. Although I REALLY need to do it. Eating is another one. Or really just remembering to eat. Or making myself eat. I forget that I'm hungry until my stomach hurts. Or I'm just not hungry at all. I made myself eat dinner last night, an...

Today was a long and hard day. I feel like I need to just get it out so I can rest easier tonight. It started with a text "Why is Caleb in the ICU?" Ummmmm???? So I called Dad. Caleb missed several beats in a row, and was in heart failure. His kidneys were failing, or pretty much had failed. He had been moved into the ICU (just the other side of the cardiac wing) in the middle of the night. They were trying to get his heart settled down. To hear my dad start crying on the other end of the line really just sunk me. I cried quietly hoping to not wake the girls. I started figuring out what my plan of action for the day was going to be. Then Dad called to say Caleb's heart was settled down and they were going to start him on dialysis, which would take a while to get going. THEN Dad called to say he was heading over and wanted to know if I was coming with him. So I took the girls to a friend's house and went to Children's to spend the day with Mom, Caleb, Danielle, Da...

I started this blog so I could write about how I'm feeling. So I could share silly and interesting things in life. Share my thoughts. Right now I'm sharing my heart, but keeping it simple. Just getting some things out. Things with my brother, Caleb, are getting more complicated. All kinds of things are going through my head, and none are good. I'm scared. Caleb is my childhood best friend. We played in the mud together. We got into trouble for playing in the haymow, mud, chicken house, barn, woods, and all kinds of other things when were weren't supposed to. We decided one night, we were probably 6 and 8, that after mom and dad were asleep, we would get up and play quietly. We did wake up and get up to play. We ended up turning on a light by dad's desk right outside of our bedroom, laying on our stomachs talking about what we wanted to do, and then decided to go back to sleep. We made mud pies, fished for grass in the mud puddles. We walked to Grandma and Grandpa ...

I really just want to bury my head in the ground. I am just mentally exhausted. My brother Caleb, who is 31 and has Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy ( http://mda.org/disease/duchenne-muscular-dystrophy/overview ), is in the hospital. My family had just hired a new night nurse that had claimed to have had done care on "thousands" of picc lines. If you don't know what a picc line is, check this out:  http://www.ivnc-usa.com/PICCDefinition.aspx . Well, just over a week ago she was changing the dressing on the picc line, and didn't wash her hands, didn't wear gloves, used a random pair of unsterile scissors that she found on the dresser, and used dirty pliers. The nurse was fired. Needless to say, the line was contaminated, and now Caleb is in Children's Hospital (because they specialize in childhood diseases such as DMD) being pumped with antibiotics for a picc line infection. They identified 2 different bacteria that are thankfully in the same family, so they can be ...