Just Me!!

            I am so glad I was able to make this Reunion! I have four girls at work covering my shifts. I love the driving to get where we are going, love family time, love hanging out with this side of the family and love playing competitive May I games! Mark has some incredible family members and I am soooo blessed to have had them as my family for the past 23 years. I enjoyed spending Saturday "shopping day" with all the teenagers. They are always so much fun and easy to please. We ended up shopping at Goodwill, Fred Meyer, another local Thrift shop and a cute Tea Shop in Sandy Oregon. We all met up later that day at Calamity Janes for lunch. Saturday night started the May I tournament after shopping and golfing was over. Andrea won the Abston Cup in Golf, Joe won the shopping trophy and overall trophy, and Melanie won the May I tournament. Saturday night we also took a moment and celebrated our graduate 👨‍🎓.            C...

   The sun was out this weekend and so were the fairies! We took all the girls to the Lakewold Gardens' (always wanted to go there) Fairy Festival. We found 35 different fairy houses all over the property and 6 fairies, which allowed the girls to earn their fairy wings and their fairy names! The grounds were beautiful and the house in the middle of the property was gorgeous. It reminded me of the Huntington Beach Gardens and house outside of Los Angeles but on a smaller scale. These fairy houses were made by volunteers. I wish we could've made of helped make the houses 🏡. It would've been so fun constructing a fairy house. Maybe we will make one for our backyard. Charlie's name ended up being Rainbownest Bitterhorn. Lanie didn't like her name so she kept switching it around to find one she liked. Afterwards we went to Trader Joe's for groceries and Roundtable for salads. Great day with lots of sunshine!        

                 Mom moments either happen spontaneously, planned or at night when all three of my children come lay on my bed and laugh, giggle, and good around before bedtime. I love mom moments. Charlie and I made a mom day of it just recently. We got our toes done, her choice, shopped for dresses, lunched, and had time to finish the Lemony Snickett Series of Unfortunate Events on Netflix. Ethan loved these books as a kid and saw the movie made years ago but then Netflix decided to make it a mini series and oh my goodness it is so good. Mostly I think because of the narrator (Patrick Warburton) and Count Olaf (played by Neil Patrick Harris) and Mr Poe (K. Todd Freeman)! Excellently Funny. I haven't had too many chances at mom moments with Valerie. Her schedule is jam packed between school, testing, drivers ed, driving days for drivers ed, preparing for graduation (she is creating the slide show presentation) and socializing. I will ha...

  We made it through a year. A year of missing my brother in law. A year of grief watching the kids achieve milestones and dreams without Mike on the sidelines. A year without my sister having a partner, friend, and soul mate to share life with. A VERY hard year. She is such a graceful griever. She has taught me so many things this year...Grace being the biggest! Grace with my co workers, Grace with my spouse, and grace with my brother. I may not always heed her advice at first but I'm diffusing faster than I use too. No use in keeping grievances because enemy, foe, family, or spouse we will ALL end up here. Truly you can't take anything with you! My mom and I made sure no one would have to go a dirty gravesite on a Tuesday that week so we went and cleaned everything up on Sunday. We bought a new flag, a "Believe" stone, some flowers, and mom even bought presents for the kids and left them there. I cleaned, polished, and waxed the stone shiny! Mom left her favorite be...

           Multicultural Night at FPHS was a blast. We saw tons of different cultural dances, cultural poetry, cultural celebrations, and even a cultural eating contest that Valerie participated in. It was called a balut! Wikipedia describes  A  balut  (spelled standardized as  balot ) as a  developing  bird  embryo  (usually a duck or chicken) that is boiled and eaten from the shell. It originates and is commonly sold as street-food in the  Philippines . Valerie's friend Peach told me that this is a very common thing to go to the marketplace in the Philippines and as you're shopping to buy two or three of these for a yummy lunch or just one as a treat. Valerie did say after completing the contest,  that it was definately satisfying and tasty. Isn't it crazy how many different cultures that include different food, dance, lifestyles, celebrations and yet we all live in the same small area of Midland, Washingt...