By Nicole

...your bags are so full, they begin to multiply.  A few months ago I completed a What's in Your Bag? blog post.   That post is only a faint glimmer of the true, sloppy, hoarding, unorganized mess that is me.  I've never liked this part of the person that I am, and I have always had the desire to change, but somehow, I never really have.  Here is proof: 1.  I daily lose something inside my purse.  2.  I regularly think about cleaning it out.  3.  I rarely do. This time I don't have pictures to prove it, but I need it on the record about what I was doing last night that was more important than blogging.  The story starts with Monday night.  I was  getting ready for bed when Jason  asked me where a set of keys were.  That simple question resulted in a frantic search through all of my work bags, coats, and the office.  They were, of course, right where I had left them (that's not always the cas...

"It's the most wonderful time of the yearrrrrr..."  Has anyone seen that commercial for The Bachelor?  Normally, I wouldn't have, but we were visiting Jason's grandparents after Christmas and I saw it on TV.  I immediately started laughing.  A snarky type of laughter.  Not about those poor, beautiful girls crying over a situation that they, themselves , went through a rigorous auditioning process to be placed in.  No, instead, I was snickering about how the twisted humor to be found in sobbing hysterically at the most wonderful time of the year applies to this poor woman.  Aqui, estoy. Flashback, Christmas Eve. Okay... just before Christmas Eve... This year, I felt like I was pretty much on top of the whole holiday thing.  I wanted my family to be focused more on how important the birth of Christ is and not on how important the presents were.  I had persevered through the entire Christmas card stamp...

"Don't hold in your emotions; get them out now.  Or else you'll end up like me, cynical and unpredictable."  This was my advice to my coworker as we traveled out of state for a work conference.  Next to me, our other coworker burst out laughing... only because she knows it's true.  I'm not sure at what point I realized that I might be too cynical... but I can at least explain the unpredictable. About a month and a half ago, my brother and his wife told our family that he was going over to Afghanistan for a year in the middle of October.  When he told me, I was kind of shocked, but otherwise just asked questions about how R was going to handle being a new bride in their apartment all alone for a year.  About three weeks ago, my sister and I brought our kids to stay the weekend with them.  We went shopping and went to the zoo and had pizza and played X-box together.  The kids had a blast, which was what AJ wanted.  As we ...

The thing I dread the most is losing one of my children. Just the thought terrifies me. And of course, being a paranoid, crazy mother, just about everything sends my thoughts in that direction. That being said, I then begin to feel guilty about being so terrified of death and dying when I serve a God who is in total control. We can't run from death, we can't avoid the inevitable, and we live in a fallen world where tragedy happens every day. I do my best to comfort myself with the thought that my faith and relationship with God could get me through the worst possible thing. Recently God has been working on me. On my pride, on my procrastination and on my presumption that He doesn't care or need to know about every little thing. Leilee was recently diagnosed with a branchial cleft cyst or fistula, which is, most simply put, a hole in her neck. We are waiting for our appointment at Children's... they can't get us in until December. Instead of falling on my kne...