Miscellaneous Monday….NEW stuff I gotta share

A fabulous post for a Monday! Love it!

Explore Newness

It’s Monday {again} :o)!  How do the weekends fly by sooooo fast?!!!  I even took work off Thursday and Friday, and the weekend still zoomed by too quickly!  Last week, my hubby and I traveled south, to Utah’s Dixie.  It was really nice and WARM there!  The red rocks, blue skies, and blooming flowers made for nice NEW photos!

We made it a very quick trip and was back home by Friday evening – then Saturday I attended a GREAT Family History Fair and took a few NEW classes.  Now I’m motivated to ‘get back at it’!  (I seem to I do genealogy in spurts :o)  I also recently noticed this family history blog:  DearMYRTLE’s Genealogy Blog …I like to visit once in a while, to keep myself motivated to do more researching – (because sometimes, when those brick walls pop up, I can get a bit discouraged).

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Things That Go Bump in Your Life

Fear has always been a ridiculously big part of my life.  As a kid, I had so many irrational fears that my parents monitored every single movie and tv show I watched, and every book I read.  “Goosebumps”?  Ha!  Forget that!  I could barely read “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” without having nightmares.  I was petrified of the dark, I was obsessed with the idea of a kidnapper coming in the middle of the night and snatching me.  I had nightmares of these two boys at church who were actually quite nice, but in my nightmares about them they had glowing red eyes … which I picked up from the “Care Bears Movie”.  I know, right?  The one movie you’d think would be totally safe for your children to watch and not gain any new phobias.

I was deathly afraid of heights.  Riding roller coasters was completely out of the question.  I went to Six Flags once with our youth group and our youth director MADE me ride one of the rides.  I’ve never quite figured out why it was such a big deal to him, but he forced the issue and I rode it.  It was one of those that goes forwards and upside down a bunch of times and then hits the height of its horribleness and does the whole thing again in reverse.  I nearly threw up on my youth director afterwards, and he stopped insisting I ride things.  I still feel it might have served him right to get puked on.

I’ve learned lots of things about fear over the years.  Some are easily conquered.  I thought I was afraid of bugs until I moved to the country and our house has various, harmless bugs in it all the time.  I’m more afraid of the toxic chemicals filling my kid’s lungs than I am of there being live june bugs around, so I put up with the june bugs.  Also, I have a weird aversion to the crunching sound they make when you kill them.  I still hate scorpions with a passion, and I would never crush one myself until I had kids.  You wouldn’t believe the stuff you can do when you think your child might get hurt if you don’t.  It’s a truly awful sound though.  ((Shudder))

I still squish every spider that I encounter.  Jason assures me that there are only two kinds of spiders in Texas that are dangerous, the black widow and the brown recluse.  So, I squish every spider I encounter just in case its a black widow or a brown recluse.  I mean, if you google images of brown recluse spiders, EVERY brown spider you’ve ever seen comes up!  No joke.  There’s no telling what these monsters look like.  Death to all brown spiders.  As a side note, you should never google “brown recluse spider bite”.  Trust me on that, you don’t want to know.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t even what they look like. There are six other spiders under this heading that are completely different. One is quite clearly a tarantula. Just sayin’.

The fear of unknowns in the future are always big with me.  I used to fear losing people that I love to death, or that my kids would get sick, or that I would die and leave them with no mom.  My mother reminded me of something very important that has helped me cope with this one.  She reminded me that God gives us just enough grace to be sufficient for what we’re going through right now.  Not the grace to go through the problems others face, or the grace for everything that will happen in our future … just right now.  But, when we need it, that grace will be there.  This has proven to be absolutely true in my life.  An unexplainable peace surrounds me when I’m going through something incredibly painful.  I remind myself of this quite frequently when I’m drawn into fearful speculation about the future.  Don’t rob what is good today just to worry over the future.

Most of my current fears are not that serious, but they can have a hugely negative impact on your calm.  Fear of what others will think of me … or my kids … or my husband.  Just whatever, it is immobilizing.  And kind of silly.  Here’s the deal, you can’t control other people’s minds.  Short of like, hypnosis or something, which my voice is not soothing enough to master, people can think whatever they want.  It’s an American thing.  We can say we don’t care what they think but we do, and sometimes we even should.  Not caring what anyone else thinks of you can get you into trouble.

I strive to have a healthy dose of self-awareness and leave behind the self consciousness.  I want to be presentable, to comb my hair, to not wear pants in public that were clearly meant to be pajamas … those sorts of things.  However, the self-consciousness thing hits me at the worst possible times.  One of my children throwing themselves on the floor and crying … in the doctor’s office waiting room, while two dozen elderly people stare at me like, “In my day, I never would have allowed my children to behave that way in public.”  Yeah, I think, but in your day CPS wasn’t really a thing either.  Instead of saying that, I calmly scrape my child up off the floor, threaten them under my breath and propel them through the door into the doctor’s office.

A little known fact about me is that just when I think I look like a dignified, put together person, I trip.  Literally.  I physically trip over my own feet when I think I’m handling this whole walking thing really well.  So now you know.  If you see me walking down a perfectly straight, completely obstacle free hallway and stumble headlong over thin air, you will know that was a moment I was trying to look cool.

This is how Lily faces her fears. She may be onto something here.

Facing fears is never simple, but we have to do it, or we’ll just walk around being perfect basket cases all the time.  I push aside my fears of the things I can’t control.  I swallow hard and close my eyes and ignore the sound of that scorpion crunching.  I simply avoid heights at all costs.  That’s a lot easier when you’re an adult.  People can’t force you to ride roller coasters any more when you hit your thirties.  Nice perk.  I actually get a little freaked out still to go grab something from the car when it’s dark outside.  Anything could be lurking in that black void.  You just never know.  As far as what people will think if you fail, no worries.  Edison, Einstein, Walt Disney, J.K. Rowling … all of them faced multiple and brutal failures before their success.  They still thought Edison was nuts even after he succeeded.  And did you know Harry Potter was rejected like 28 times before someone finally published it?  I bet those other jokers are pretty bummed out right about now.  I bet Jo Rowling is pretty glad she kept trying.

Fear is normal.  We all do it.  So dream big, lift your head high after you trip and smile like you did it on purpose, plunge into the darkness to retrieve the phone you left out in the truck … it’ll be okay.  Everyone is still afraid of the dark at 34 years old.  They’re just too cool to admit it.  Also, I’m NOT afraid of thunderstorms or clowns.  I just feel like I should get some credit for that.

I’m pretty sure this is what an actual brown recluse looks like. See what I mean? Totally different spider than the first picture!

You just went and googled “brown recluse spider bite” didn’t you?  I was right, wasn’t I?  Disgusting.  Told you so.

Plans and Other Futile Attempts at Sanity

Jason and I when we were just married

 Getting married was a hugely eye opening experience for me.  Not so much from learning how to live with another human every day, I’d been doing that all my life, more from finding out things about me.  Weird, I know.  You’d think it was revelations about HIM that would make the whole business upsetting, but he’s actually remarkably tame.  It’s me we all need to worry about.

So, here’s the thing about me that I never knew until I got married.  I want to be super jovial, go with the flow, happiness is stopping in the middle of your carefully ordered life to smell the roses.  I always thought I was like that and then Jason came along.  And I’m actually not that easy going.  Who knew?

My normal when I’m traveling somewhere is to have a carefully ordered itinerary in mind and charge ahead toward the destinations, plowing over whatever obstacles dare to get in my way.  The reason I always thought I was spontaneous and easy going is that I actually mentally plan normal stuff along the way.  There is a destination in my brain called “lunch” and “rest stop” and “historical marker”.  But don’t add random things in!  Now you’re just messing with my mind!  Jason’s idea of traveling is … well, enjoying the journey.  What?  Who even came up with this idea?  In my defense though, while It sounds great in theory, when the wedding is six hours away and you’re already running late, I’m not a super fan of stopping at every creek and river from Waco to Lubbock to see how the water’s flowing.  This is what I get for marrying a man who kayaked from Maine to Texas.  He just can’t pass water without looking at it.  Sigh.

 

I am a planner.  I love it!  I buy planners, I make my own planners, I make lesson plans that would be the envy of elementary teachers everywhere.  It’s truly something to behold.  I follow through on about 35% of everything I plan to do.  I know.  You all want to be just like me when you grow up.  By sheer volume though, of all the things I write down, 35% still turns out to be a lot.

These pictures do no justice to how detailed this planner is

If you think I’m uptight when traveling, you should see me at New Years.  I start planning my yearly goals a couple of weeks into December.  This is when I get a planner, or refills, or here lately I make my own.  Those store bought ones just do not have all the things I need.  By the time the ball drops on New Year’s Eve night I have categories and subcategories for every one of the months of the upcoming year.  It’s May right now.  I have no idea where that planner is.

So why am I not president yet, or at least, like, Secretary of State?  I mean, it seemed inevitable at the start of January.

Here’s the deal about my plans and my life.  Life is like the anti-plan.  It is the arch enemy of everything I write down in my carefully organized, personalized, categorized notebook.  I actually feel kind of cool though, having an arch enemy.  It makes me think I’m a little closer to being like Sherlock.  But anyway, back to my point.  You just can’t fit your actual life into those little plastic page protector things.  Trust me, if it was possible, I would have done it.  I love page protectors.  One of my favorite quotes ever is by John Lennon who’s song lyrics state “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”  My life in a nutshell.

You should have SEEN my plans at the start of this school year.  Jack should be doing quantum physics right now.  He should speak Spanish fluently and have had a thorough introduction to French and Latin.  A compulsive planner should never read “A Well-Trained Mind”.  It literally makes us crazy.  The other day we learned some stuff about graphing that was pretty fun.  And we played with play doh.

I know there are ways around these disruptions, because planning works for some people.  My friend Susan (name was changed to protect the potentially embarrassed), has a very orderly life and when she plans to get pregnant at a certain time of year so that it coincides with her teaching schedule, that is what happens.  Really, she even gets PREGNANT on a schedule.  It’s just wrong.  Also, using only the natural birth control known as the “Rhythm Method”.  If you’re unfamiliar with birth control, that method is 100% drug and procedure free.  It works beautifully if you want to have four kids in four years. My husband and I employed it with pretty much all of our children. And, it could actually work if you’re Susan.  So yeah, some people’s plans work out.  I’m pretty sure I’m just going to have to learn to deal.

So what do we do about plans that go amiss?  Personally, I take lots of deep breaths.  I remind myself that there is Someone’s plan that IS working out in my life and I don’t have the whole picture yet.  I remind myself that no one’s plans work perfectly, (even Susan’s) and that life is still good anyway.  Sometimes I cry too, and yell at people.  I forgot to mention that.

But be all this as it may, I’m still going to make New Year’s goal charts and add more tabs and page protectors to my planners. I’m still going to buy more curriculum than I could possibly need in all four of my children’s life times and make more attempts at teaching them dead languages!  Some of my plans work out too.  I did write and publish a 400 page novel last year.  That’s not nothing.  Zig Ziglar taught me all growing up (through his tapes, not personally) that you reach 100% of the goals you never set.  So … I guess it’s pretty inevitable that if you do set goals, you won’t reach all of them.  Still, I get more accomplished when I plan to accomplish something.  And then I try super hard not to get too emotionally attached to my checklist.  I remind myself to live the life that is happening to me right now.  Smiling at my kids and so forth.  I write that on my list too sometimes.  I know.  I need therapy… and chocolate.  Oh, and more play doh, if anyone has extra lying around.

 

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

Jeremiah 29:11