Thanksgiving thoughts

Here are a few things I'm thankful for:

• I'm thankful for my God
• I'm thankful for the love of my husband and children
• I'm thankful that my mom and I are the best of friends
• I'm thankful to had my dad in my life for 24 wonderful years, and that he was alive to walk me down the aisle and meet his first grandchild
• I'm thankful for my Indiana family
• I'm thankful for good friends, especially for those who have dealt with me on a bad day.
• I'm thankful for the roof over my head, food in my pantry, clothes on my back, and the financial security of having a job, insurance and money in the bank.
• I'm thankful for my health and the health of my loved ones.
• I'm thankful for my education and life experiences I've been granted.
• I'm thankful for the arts - books, movies, theater, music
• I'm thankful for my freedom (this should be much higher on the list)
• I'm thankful for my cleaning lady.
• I'm thankful for chocolate, peanut butter, Japanese food, Video Entertainment Systems in vehicles, LL Bean slippers, and the nights when my husband cooks dinner.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all!

Note to Boilers - be sure to watch the BEGINNING of the Macy's parade.  The All-American Marching Band is the first band on Thursday morning!

It Was a Boilermaker Weekend

So what was meant to be a pretty relaxed weekend turned out to be full of excitement and adventure!  I unexpectedly got tickets to Saturday's Purdue football game and had to navigate the wonderful world of finding a babysitter, last minute. But, it all worked out in the end.  The only way it could have been better was if it weren't raining and cold.  Oh yeah, and if the Boilers had won.

The best part about the game was that I took my 5 year old daughter,6 year old niece and my mother-in-law.  Hubby and the Big Man were already going and had tickets elsewhere.  But as we walked to the game from the parking garage, I got to experience a Purdue football game and all the hoopla that goes with it through the eyes of a young girl.  I've always loved all the fanfare, but now I know why.  I'm a kid at heart.  The softball team was giving out black Boiler Beads.  The girls LOVED that the big Boilermaker statue was wearing clothes.  And just as we got to the crest of the hill, here came the marching band, twirlers, color guard, World's Largest Drum, and the Boilermaker Special. We remembered to bring four pom-poms from home, and the girls stood on the curb marching in place and cheering as the band walked by.  I'm a little embarrassed to say that I got choked up.  THAT is why I love college football.  All the hoopla that goes with it.

Thank goodness there weren't too many people sitting near us.  Those pom-poms were flailing about through the whole game.  And with all the rain we had, it was more like sitting near two girls flinging wet mops at your eyes.  They had fun and that's all that mattered.

Day Two

Wow!  I'm humbled at the comments and new followers.  This is great!  I find it hard to believe that anyone cares what I have to say.

Today I will show a little restraint.  I have one heck of a day, with lots of frustrating events, but I refuse to have 50% of my postings be a sob story.  So I will try to see things in a positive light and how I've grown - just today.

I mentioned we're building a new home.  Everyone asks if it's stressful, if it's causing marriage problems, etc.  Everyone is surprised (almost to the point of disappointment) that the answer is no.  We started the process back in April of 2007, and I have learned that nothing happens overnight.  We're going about it in a way that we decided what we want, and we've saved until we could afford it.  Now, three and a half years later, it's become something tangible, and it feels great.  Delayed gratification.  Who knew.

So today was a fun day at the house site.  Today was the day they poured the front and back porches to the house.  I was so excited to get home from a crappy day at the office and check out this progress.  I pulled into the drive and invited the kids, one at a time, to walk up with me and inspect the work.  Hubby wanted me to MMS him pictures so when it was Big Man's turn to look at the porch, he brought my BlackBerry with him.  I instructed him with a firm, "Whatever you do, don't touch the concrete."  I snapped the picture and as I was typing in Hubby's contact info, I heard Big Man's steps inside the front door.  I realized very quickly that he had walked ACROSS THE WET CONCRETE!!!  It had been poured early on in the day. so it was pretty well set, but OH YES, there were definitely indentations and scuffs where six of his size 5 shoes had been.
 
Oh boy was I was angry. I told him to go to the car (through the house, not the porch), and really tried to bite my tongue the rest of the night because I knew that he felt bad. My concern was that this is not the first time his lack of listening has caused problems.

You should have seen me gently patting the concrete around the mark, trying to smooth it out and hide the marks.  I have an incredible respect for concrete workers now because nothing I did was going to undo these footprints.

So my positive view on the whole event is that someday, maybe as soon as we have our first visitor - but more likely the day he graduates high school, I will look at those footprints in an endearing way.  As it cures, it's very likely that it will be less noticible, but in the moment it happened, it felt like it was the end of the world.  And just a few hours later I'm considering how I can skillfully place welcome mats, furniture, and potted plants to cover it up.  I fully expect to have a section of concrete with the kiddos' hand prints and the year, but I did not intend for it to a statement as someone enters my home.

I'm happy to report that Big Man and I had a 15 minute conversation before bedtime that brought us both to tears regarding love, listening, and how I will always stick up for him.  God teaches us to forgive, and that kept going through my mind this evening.  That's exactly what I'm going to do.  I just hope Big Man can do the same thing for me when he recalls the mistakes I've made as his mom.

I'm New At This.

So after a long lunch with a couple of colleagues, I've decided to give this whole "blogging" thing a try.  It's a good way to record the funny things my kids say, vent some of my frustrations, and have a way to hold myself accountable to things like dieting, exercise, and having some "me" time.

I'm not saying this will be an everyday thing, but I'm hoping that I can re-visit posts and get some insight into what I was thinking at certian times of my life.  Even if no one reads this, I promise to have fun in the process!

So a little bit about me.  I grew up in Colorado - about 1,100 miles from my current Indiana home.  People always ask me, "Why on earth did you move to Indiana from Colorado?"  My canned answer is that I came to Indiana on a sports scholarship to Purdue University and met my future husband.  He happened to be a farmer and "farmers don't move".  That's how I got here.  They ask about the transition from city to country.  It was not nearly as dramatic as you might think.  I went through culture shock when I moved out here for college.  My stuck-up-18-year-old-self thought that no where on earth could be as good as where I came from.  Then I experienced my first Indiana fall.  There were actually COLORS and it was beautiful.  I loved it here.  Then I experienced my first Indiana winter.  Not so beautiful. My first January in Indiana, Purdue cancelled classes because the windchill was 30 degrees below zero.  I distinctly remember snot freezing my nostrils shut.  As many hills as I have skiied down, that never happened to me when in Colorado. We'll talk more about that transition in another post.

I'm the mother of three children.  The oldest is 8 years old and for the sake of his annonimity, let's call him "Big Man".  Then I have a beautiful 5 year old daughter we'll call "Sis". Then the "Little Man" of the family is now 14 months old.  Most of the posts, I can imagine, will be about the older two.  But the Little Man has been a source of some serious laughs these days.

Backing up a few years, I should introduce my husband.  He's a third generation corn and soybean farmer here in West Central Indiana.  He is part of a partnership with his two brothers and together they have experienced some great opportunities to build their business in the last few years.  I've learned A LOT (ok - I've learned everything I know) about farming from my wonderful husband over the last twelve and a half years.  We've been married for 9 and a half years now and finally feel like our relationship is clicking on all cylinders. 

We've got a few exciting projects happening in our lives right now.  Our family is building a new home, we're traveling back to Colorado for the holidays, and we're nearly done with the harvest of 2010. 

I look forward to any comments you might share and insights in how to deal with my city-girl-turned-country blunders.  I won't be posting too much about cooking or cleaning, since those are two of my least favorite things to do.  So thank you Denise and Mary Beth, and Happy Blogging!