Happy Mother's Day

Aloha! My mom is in Hawaii this week, on the garden isle of Kuaui.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom! 

I should be there too, but this just wasn't the year.

This photo was taken last time we went together in 2007. . . fun memories.

I am coming to another crossroads in my life again. I'm ready to give up blogging. Not that I do that much anymore, but it just feels like something hanging over my head.
Whenever I get that feeling, I know its time to make a change.

I still think its important to record our lives for those that come after us. I think its important for us to record our lives in any form, whether its journaling, scrapbooking, blogging. . . its all good. I guess for me its just overkill. I already have a scrapbook. I changed the way I do that to keep things simpler for me. I have been working with my children on setting goals lately and I realized blogging just isn't part of my goals. In some ways blogging is a distraction and looking at other people's blogs is the same. Do I love to keep in touch with people that I love and seldom see? Yes. But there are easier ways to do that. Its easy to send emails and attach photos. Perhaps I'll do that a couple of times a year besides Christmas. Perhaps I'll find an easier way to communicate as time moves on. Its important to me to connect but right now in my life it needs to be less public and less frequent. 

I have three church callings right now. Two keep me fairly busy. I have three children living at home right now. Even though two are adults, I find myself doing more cooking, more cleaning, more listening, and having to be more flexible because of their schedules. They all help, but with more at home there is more to do. Reduce and Simplify continues to be wise counsel I need to follow, and this is what has been crossing my mind at different times in the past month, and then this morning, it was clear. Time to be done. 

Its been four years. You've gotten a good glimpse into our life. The move was big. The creative projects along the way have been fun. I think, one of the most creative things we can do in our life, is to forge ahead in a new direction. That's what I feel like I am doing here. In good times and bad, I have continued to document. The children have all changed and grown up in so many ways. Yet, they are my biggest subjects and not always happy to be photographed. I respect that. Its their life.

I am grateful to my mother who taught me how to love unconditionally. I realize not all children have received that gift, and that I am most fortunate to have it in my life still. My mother taught me not to feel sorry for myself on Mother's Day.  I remember her clearly saying, its not about us, its about the gift of motherhood. We all have one. My grandfather lost his when he was ten. In the last year of his 89 year old life, he told me that was still the greatest tragedy of his life - losing her. I think of the new baby born this week to a mother who passed away giving him birth or the teenagers who were kidnapped and lost out on ten years of their lives with their mothers or those whose mothers never knew how to mother, and those who have passed on.  

Life isn't fair. It breaks our hearts sometimes, but there are different gifts that come to us along the way, and if you have a mother who loves you, who kissed your ouchies and got up with you in the middle of the night and told you as you were crying, that things would get better, or just listened and said, I'm sorry. I want to help you but I don't know what to do, you are most blessed. I know I am.