Here it is. After a very long silence, my first thoughts of 2016. Not that I am just now thinking them. I am just now sharing them, that’s all 😉
New Year. Full of expectations. A new page. It comes just in time, after Christmas.?Christmas. We look forward to it for so long and it seldom fulfills our expectations. Or maybe we don’t even look forward to it anymore because after all, we are cynical Belgians, and we have to keep up our reputation.?So Christmas didn’t fulfill my expectation, although I knew that beforehand – because I wanted the Christmas of my childhood. The one with traditions and people who are not here anymore, or don’t live in the same house. I wanted the time of magic and fun times.I knew beforehand that I am not a child anymore, that I have children of my own now and that family gatherings?with small children are not all that.I knew that the Christmas parties of then are not now, that they have changed.
Still, it must have been there, deep down. Because there was an emptiness, a missing. Logic and understanding didn’t prevent it.
I couldn’t quite forgive the people […]
Mike’s grandmother passed away this week. It makes us think and stand still. Thinking about life, now and in eternity.
I wrote about it at Breeze.be. Since it’s Dutch there I put the translation up here.
The picture is not of my grandmother, because I didn’t have one right here. My mom-in-law is a dear and let me use one of hers. Not as long ago as my grandmother’s pictures, but still vintage 😉 And yes, she was and is really beautiful. Inside AND outside 🙂
I like looking at my grandmother?s old pictures. She?s young and she wears a dress. On another picture you see her in her nurses uniform. I always get melancholy.
You can see that life is smiling at her. She?s got her whole life ahead of her. She didn?t know how it would go, but she was eager to get started. It was still so long, so much. It stretched in front of her like a lazy country road with twists and turns she couldn?t see around, but she knew the road went on beyond them.
I know how it went. She was a nurse first, and later on she got married. With her […]
The title of this post is inspired by the song ‘Driving in my car’ from Mother Goose club, that I have heard about…oh…let’s say 9 billion times.?It haunts me in my sleep. I got my permit to drive when we lived in New Mexico, when I was 16 years old. Just a few months before I could get my licence, we moved back to Belgium. So I had to start all over. I will say nothing about how totally unfair it was, since my brother and sister had got their license by driving to and from the gas station down the road from the ‘exam center’. And their licence was traded in for a Belgian one with no problem. They were even allowed to drive a truck.?I will not mention the fact that my sister learned to drive automatic ?in the states, and that in Belgium people drive stick shift. Therefore, she got a licence but couldn’t drive. I will say nothing about all that.? But there you had it. Me, the poor middle child or somewhere in the middle anyway, had to start all over. I did my theoretical exam and since my boyfriend was 8 years older […]
This is an old piece from my journal. Back when Caleb was still a small sleeping baby that couldn’t crawl. An eternity ago. But the days aren’t all that different. Some start well, others start of on an off note but end pretty beautifully.
Today started of extremely lousy. And rotten.
Caleb ate at 4:30, and wouldn’t go back to sleep. As we all know, that translates into me not being able to sleep either. Not being able to sleep really stresses me out. Stress makes me really mean.
So I got mean at about 5:30 and by 6 I had lost it. I dumped him in the middle of the bed, but a little more to his daddy’s side. And I got up to take a shower. A long, hot shower.
When I came out out I very self-sacrificially went downstairs, mostly because I did not want to lie down in bed and talk to my husband, because I don’t feel like talking when grumpy. When I am grumpy or tired, do not touch, do not speak, do not suggest, do not talk, do not. Just don’t.
So I went down to make oatmeal while contemplating about how […]
Well, that was that. I didn’t write 31 days, but that’s absolutely fine, because I say so. As I daily tell Abel ‘Mama is the boss’.
I started way back, and I’ve ended up where I am now. So I will keep on going from here, about where I am and where I’m going.
I do hope you’ll stick around. That would be fun, I think.
I will probably be posting a little something about twice a week. And if I don’t, you’ll see. By which I mean, you won’t see anything, and you’ll see that.
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Recently I read, somewhere the ?’20 tips for worn out moms’. Some of it was funny, some of it was not. I get it, I really do, that it helps to laugh at the hard parts, to downplay it with humor and sarcasm. I do it, too. But I always think ‘do I want my sons to read this when they are 15?’ before I post.
I don’t want them to read things that hint I didn’t enjoy them when they were little, because that is not true. I don’t want them to get the idea that they ruined my life, messed up all my plans. Because they didn’t.
They enriched it, changed it, made me grow and will continue to do so. ?I hope. Some parts are hard, but that doesn’t mean I am going to curse at them or blame it on them. They can know that life is not always easy, but they don’t have to hear me complain and whine either.
And so, here are my own 20 tips for worn out moms. Revised and improved.
1.?Words have power. Build up, don’t break down
2. Try to clean up all of the clutter after supper, […]
This weekend we slept in a friend’s house. When putting Abel to bed, Mike told him there was no nightlight here. Abel told him confidently ‘that’s okay, papa. I’ve drawn the sun’. And he did:
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