By His Grace I Can.

I have to be in the right mental space to make exercise a priority.  There are so many other things I'd rather do with my time.  Unlike in high school, at 38, I don't mind my curves, but "the pooch" gets in the way.  Maybe it should be called a pouch.  It looks like I'm saving space for my baby kangaroo to come back. After a LONG time of not exercising, last Fall, my cute 7 year old asked if we could go jogging before school.  Jogging? This body hasn't done more than a hustled supermarket sweep before school pick up.  But we went and we punctuated our walk with 10 second bursts of labored "jogging". Afterwards I was doing some "sit ups" ( Malorie's doing the modified ) because I'm sick of this pooch getting in the way.   It gets in the way of wearing my favorite pants and skirts.  It makes bending down difficult.  I don't mind the reminder that my body carried and birthed 6 beautiful human beings.  I just don't want to wear ...

This morning my hubby pulled up all the blinds to flood the main level with warm sunlight.  It's been a gloomy and rainy few days, and it's a welcome change. Cleaning is a regular part of every day.  Yet, usually there are things that I rarely get to because I don't have the time or energy to conquer them.   But today my hubby is on a kick deep cleaning the kitchen and it has energized me to take on some other neglected projects. Cue our large pane windows. I set out spraying and wiping down the interior side then hit the exterior.  I came back in and saw the grubby finger prints gone, but only replaced with big smudges from my cleaning rag.   OK, take two. I started again to wipe down the interior sides then went back outside to try again.  As I was wiping the exterior side, for a second, time and looking through the two sides of the glass, I got to thinking. Does it ever happen that we are perceiving a situation through "dirty windows"? (Love th...

This week I've been making some modifications to a dress.  Let's be honest, I am not really a seamstress.  Yes, I can successfully "sew" something, but if you look closely or turn it inside out, you'll see the... umm, mess process that got me there.   It's often not pretty. That being said, I had been working on this dress, feeling OK about how it was turning out.   Then last night--  an emotional bomb with off and with it an avalanche of deceptions .   This morning I sat back down to finish my modifications, feeling upset and angry about the situation.   I put some pins in place, sewed away, turned things right side out just to find that I had sewed through several layers of fabric instead of just the two.  Insert face palm. I should have known.  Don't sew mad. Now I have quite a bit of unstitching to do, and am crossing my fingers that I won't rip the fragile fabric. {To make things worse, several months ago, my son g...

If you could jump back with me 32 years, I'd be meeting a little girl in Mrs. Barlow's first grade class who would quickly become and remain one of my nearest and dearest friends.  She has been like a sister to me over the years and has helped me weather many a storm.  Unfortunately after high school graduation, unlike our early dream of being college room mates, our paths took us far away from each other.  When she was in Utah I was in Idaho.  We were both in Utah Valley for a short stint, then I was in France then Canada.  When I came home to Utah, she moved to Canada.  Several years later, the week she moved back to Utah, we moved to St. Louis.  Since then it has been ten years since we've lived in any sort of close proximity to each other. Through it all we've remained DEAR friends, the kind that pick things right back up where they left off.   Inevitably our itineraries would overlap briefly over the Summers or holidays and we'd make eff...