I get all nostalgic and weepy before I ought to

When I was a kid, between the ages of about 10 and 20, we had a great dog, I adored him.  I loved that dog so much I couldn't even imagine loving anything more (of course now I can but that's beside the point).  I used to lay in bed at night and worry about how awful it would be when this dog eventually and inevitably died.  I would cry myself to sleep over it.  Looking back, it was such a waste of time and emotional energy, but I couldn't help it.

Fast forward to my life now, with two sweet girls.  Not dogs.  Actual children, who I love more than my own life.  A million, trillion times more than I loved that dog (I still keep photos of that dog up around my home, I loved him so dearly).  I find myself doing the same kind of thing, no not the scary what if they die stuff, because that is just too much.  No, I start thinking about how quickly they are growing up. How Karina's not a little baby anymore.  How she's growing SO fast. 

So today, I got to sleep in a little later than usual.  I did wake up at 630 (Thanks, Elena) but drifted back off.  I'm not sure if I was completely asleep and dreaming, or if I was just half asleep and sort of half dreaming, half imagining.  I'll call it dreaming just for ease of writing.  So I started dreaming about what it might be like when Karina is older, a teenager.  Coming into the kitchen for breakfast, dressed all crazy, like punky sort of 80s teens.  In my dream, I'm making sure she's not wearing anything risque, inappropriate, that sort of thing.  I imagine her saying good morning, but grudgingly.  (She would do it because she's polite, you know.)  And then suddenly, in the middle of this dream of Karina the teenager, just as she's sitting down to the kitchen table, she becomes superimposed over Karina the 4 year old, sitting at the table the way she does now.  I see Karina the imaginary teen, and Karina as she is now, but in the dream it's like 4 year old Karina is only a memory of her as a little girl.  I was awake so fast, BAWLING my brains out!  What a horrible way to wake up!

I hope I have explained that image well enough for you to imagine.  Sort of like in the movies, when they do those weird flashbacks, think "Father of the Bride" type stuff.  Yeah.  Exactly.

I have to find a way to stop doing this to myself because I can't spend the rest of my life doing this.  It's dumb.  It's annoying, and it bothers me.  And apparently it also ruins the one morning I get to sleep late!

Parents who might be reading this, does this kind of thing happen to you?  How do you make it stop???

The Great Yard Sale Post

Hey everyone, I'm belatedly posting some pictures and an update on the yard sale my youth group had last month.  It took 2 weeks of prep work, and then right after that my best friend Danise came to visit with her kids, and when she left, the yard sale seemed like an eternity ago.  So it slipped my mind until today, when I was uploading a lot of pictures so I could get some free prints.  (Oh, the things that motivate me...)

So here we are.  This is my friend who does youth group with me.  We're in the church elevator bringing stuff up from our youth room and the storage room in the basement of our building, to the first floor where the gym is.  After we get out of the elevator, we go left and down this big ramp and then down another long hallway.  It was quite a process. We did have some great help though.

 Below: stuff in piles where we tossed placed it after carrying it upstairs.  I have always wanted to type something with strikethrough.  :-)

 

This will become the linens section.

 And, thanks to Blogger uploading my photos incorrectly, here are the linens looking quite a bit nicer.

 Starting the sorting process.  This corner will become electronics and pets.  Trust me.  It makes sense to us later.

 

See?  Looks better now.

 Now here's some of the cool or interesting stuff we got this year.  These chairs are legitimately old.  They look so cute, but they are covered in some kind of plastic-y material, and would have been so much more awesome if that was a soft fabric.  I think they would have been cute in a little girl's room.

 Just a cool old table.  I like old furniture.  The fold-out mechanism on the leaves was pretty cool.

 We have had this china set for over 3 years and no one would buy it.  Most of the pieces are marked Limoges.  We looked it up and researched it the first year we had it, hoped to sell it for about $50, and when no one wanted it, we held it and reduced the price the following year.  And the year after that.  Green isn't my favorite color, but I thought it was so pretty anyway that I decided if no one bought it this year, I would.  It sold, of course.  I was actually very happy about that, and told the lady who bought it how glad I was that it was finally going home with someone who appreciated it.

 A gorgeous set of Noritake china.  It was donated by one of our youth kid's grandparents, and when the youth's mother came in and saw it, she was so upset that she bought it back!  Mom and I had tried to get my grandmother to buy it but she preferred to stick with her old, ugly, mismatched stuff instead.  Too bad.  It was just as beautiful as you please, a full 12 piece set.  But it had a happy ending, going home with the person who probably should have had it in the first place.

 Check out all the bikes!  We've never had that many bikes.  Over there you can see our lazy helpers.  They aren't really lazy.  We were just done for the day and waiting for parents to pick them up.  But it was funny to me to write lazy.  They were anything but.

 Some of the containers we had, plus you can kind of see some of the appliances, and in the background a rack of clothes that one of our awesome helpers put together for us. 

 A bunch of dolls were donated to us this year.  We actually had 2 Pillsbury Dough Boy figures, the one in this photo and another I didn't get a shot of for some reason. 

 Baby and toy section.  I didn't even get a chance to take pictures of the Legos we had.  We had about 10 boxes of the huge 600-800 piece sets, plus a giant bin of more sets all combined, with instruction booklets.  We probably made about $1000 off the Legos alone.  You can see a Star Wars toy here though. 

 Games

 We had a couple of nice bags this year, including this one.

 We always get some unique stuff.  I think you can see the standing cardboard cutout of the Nascar racer whose name I don't know.  She sold.  We had two antique sleds this year, too.  In fact, our sporting goods section was overflowing.

 A shot of about half the space.  Clothes, household, furniture (from near to far).  And the lazy helpers. 

 Now these sideways ones, I'm sorry about them.  I really thought I had figured out how to turn them in my posts, but now for the life of me I can't figure it out.  So I apologize and if I get around to figuring it out, I will fix it.  For now, just turn your heads.  :-) 

This is a view of our book section, which was rather small this year.

 Health and Beauty section.  Always some interesting stuff there.  Always a lot of stuff getting thrown out, too.  Ick.  Opened bottles of old shampoo?  Um, no thanks!

 Garden section, next to sporting goods.  There's that Nascar lady again.  We had two or three fountains this year.

 One of the old sleds.

 Christmas and holiday section.

 Old boat motor.

 Lazy helper.

 Jewelry.  Nothing amazing this year.

 An unusual piece.  It sold.

 Antique desk.  It sold. 

 Finally, just some of the pretty dishes we had.  I like that kind of stuff, too. 

 

Overall, a pretty great sale.  I think we raised almost $4500 this year.  So many people helped, and of course, I can't wait til next year's sale!

Love Hate Relationship with Facebook

Some days I love Facebook and other days I despise it.  Most of the time, I like the way I can see what people are up to, without having to commit to a full-blown phone call or letter.  Totally lazy, I know, but if I tried to keep up with that many people with phone or letter, I would have no time for my kids, and I pretty much put them first.  I like seeing snippets of people's days.  I like that I can get in touch with friends from way back.  I like that I can find them again and know they are okay.  And happy. 

But sometimes I seriously hate Facebook.  It brings out the worst in people sometimes.  Including me, which I hate even more than I hate Facebook, on my Facebook-hating days.  Here's what I see happening, and my opinion about it. 


Someone posts a comment, link, or photo about some topic.  Someone else disagrees.  Massive fighting ensues.  People write things they might not otherwise say to them face-to-face.  Because they aren't face-to-face. 

Friendships are destroyed with a few moments of typing insanity.  Friendships that, had the conversation been in person, might have made it.

It's like the technology is granting us this imagined anonymity.  Like we can say things to people because it's not 'real'.  It's only cyberspace, right?  It's just Facebook.  I think that's really the problem.  If we wouldn't say it to their face, then we shouldn't write it on their wall or their post, either.  Right?  People just seem to lose the ability to filter what streams out of their brains when they're on Facebook sometimes.

Just because I think it doesn't mean I should say it....or write it. 

And I learned this from personal experience.  Twice.  Yes, I'm that dumb.  (Both times it turned out okay, but it could easily have gone very badly.  I just don't want you all to think I'm spouting all this in a self-righteous kind of way; I'm not.  I'm totally guilty of this, like lots of people)

I wish there was a way to fix this.  (Wait. Why do I feel like I've written this post before?  Okay, well, maybe I have, with different words, for a different situation, but it really bothers me and I guess I feel strongly about it, maybe because I'm guilty of it too and I hate messing up.) 

Sigh.


Let's all just try to be nice out there if we can, okay?  Life's already hard enough.