Growing up, did you have a dream car? Please let me know because I am genuinely curious about you.
My dream car: I have always wanted a Jeep, until last week. At my high school, there was young man a few years older than me who had a Jeep YJ. I can still imagine it ripping into the parking lot with music blaring every morning as I walked up the path to D.P. Todd Secondary.
Ever since, I always thought that Jeeps were a “really cool car”. I wanted to own one until my car got rear-ended a few weeks ago and the rental company gave me a Jeep.
Yes, it looks like a “really cool car”, but it was a rough ride and remarkably uncomfortable. It’s amazing how you can take something for a drive and suddenly your whole life perspective can shift. I will never be able to look at a Jeep in the same light again.
Sidenote: Anyone guess the topic that I am using my Jeep metaphor to now talk to my boys about? Don’t judge things from an external vantage point, especially when choosing a partner for life.
I was hanging out with twin three years old last week and one of the sweet souls grabbed my hand and exclaimed, “You have grandma hands!”
I wanted to cry as I looked down at my hands.
I realized in this moment that I have MY MOM’S HANDS!
I almost bawled.
I cannot even put into words the pure JOY that I felt. If I can pour a portion of the love that my mom poured into the world through her life AND her hands, I will be blessed.
Grandma hands.
To bless.
To give.
To share.
To love.
Thank you Jesus for giving me this vision about my hands.
Thank you for the privilege to live long enough to have Grandma hands.
Happy Saturday lovely folks and love what you do. Xoxo
In early January, I posted five F’s that were my goals for 2024:
1️⃣ Fitness
2️⃣ Have Fun with Friends
3️⃣ Find Fantastic Fiction
4️⃣ Flourish in the Fine Art of Frosting a Fabulous Cake
5️⃣ Frolic Across Canada
I feel eager to share that that I am rocking and rolling through the top 3 F’s. 6 workouts done, lots of fun with friends and I have been reading some fantastic fiction. WOOP WOOP! We have our first birthday in the house in April, so I have a few months to find someone who will lead me in the art of frosting a cake and our frolicking across Canada dates are booked! Can I get another woop woop?
I had left my goals out on the kitchen counter for a week or so and suddenly I started seeing more F’s for 2024, so I have added to my list.
Here are the latest F’s I am excited about for 2024:
🤩 Faith-filled, festive fun with the boys: I have been trying to play more games, plan more get togethers and surprises for the boys the last few weeks. It’s brought a beautiful lightness and joy to our home.
🤩 Flourishing romance with Sexy Neck: After Steve was able to take a whole two weeks off at Christmas, the first in seven years, I realized how much I really missed spending time with him. We have been enjoying working out together, doing projects together and talking about daily life on a regular basis. What a gift!
🤩 Fun with Finances: As a girl who loves a good spreadsheet budget, this is a really fun activity for Steve and I to do together. We are updating our expenses and especially looking at our grocery bill and “extras” that we spent our money on. I am excited to see what shakes down and how we can save and give away more. Earn more, give more! That’s fun!
And that’s all folks, just a little update on the F’s goals that keep morphing into more in twenty twenty-four.
If you have a word or goals or some F’s to share for 2024, I would love to hear them. Big hugs to you all.
I am a bit of an enigma in my blue crew. I will honestly talk to anyone at anytime. It has become somewhat embarrassing to my lovely teenage boys. My heart in doing this is to help: Help people feel seen and connected to the community around them.
If I walk by something and I feel God prompting me, I will strike up a conversation by saying hi or sharing something I “notice”: A beautiful scarf, something about the environment around us in the moment or recognizing that we may have crossed paths before.
The other way I have used this choice to talk to anyone at anytime is that I will reach out to friends or friends of friends to help my boys on their journey to learn and find out what their passions are. I believe my job is to expose the boys to as many different situations and people so that they can make the best choices for themselves. This is a benefit of not having to sit six hours per day in a campus school building and is something I don’t take for granted.
Sidenote: I believe that when you are looking at a career, you need to actually talk to people doing the work you want to do to learn about what it entails and the friction points. Every job has friction and it’s all about deciding if you can deal with the heat it creates.
In our five year home learning journey, the boys have been fortunate to talk to:
A friend’s son who works for SpaceX.
A cousin who is the CEO for a mutual fund company. (I just learned he was a CEO after talking to a random stranger on a plane that ended up working for my cousin. HAHA)
A friend’s brother who is a Conservation Officer in the Yukon. (We even did a field trip to visit him in person.)
Friends who payed off their mortgage early and manage their money very well. Thanks Bubba and Shane for sharing your wealth of knowledge.
A friend who owns an Engineering firm in San Fransisco and does work for Google, Ebay, Stanford, to name a few well known companies.
A friend of a friend of a friend who works as a Conservation Officer alongside his hounds at the head office in Kamloops.
A friend of the above Conversation Officer who works in B.C. Fisheries.
A husband of a colleague that I worked with in Vernon who is a truck driver.
Two friends who are RCMP officers who we currently message frequently.
A Gymnastic/Strength and Conditioning Coach.
Currently, I am talking to people to find someone that works as a mechanic in F1, F2 or F3. I cannot wait to see how this shakes down.
I love how God wants us to be connected.
It’s fun to see who He brings across our paths, especially when we are open to talk to anyone at anytime. Humans have incredible stories to tell and the connections between us are often very deep and sometimes hilarious.
Happy Sunday (and blessed back to school, for those heading back tomorrow). Love what you do!
Our twelve year old, OC, has been sharing “random shower thoughts” from various websites he has found through his searches. (Sidenote: Through writing this blog, he showed me he has a whole files section on his device with these random shower thought jokes.) OC will share these thoughts at meals and on car rides and it’s always fun to see what makes our family howl. Here’s a few that made me chuckle out loud:
😂 “Go to bed, you’ll feel better in the morning” is the human version of “Did you turn it off and turn it back on again?”
🤣 “Beans bags are just boneless sofas.”
😅 “Math is the only place where someone would buy 60 watermelons and 40 cantaloupes and no one asks any questions.”
😉 “If the earth was flat, the edge would be a tourist attraction.”
😝 “I correct autocorrect more than it corrects me.”
🎢 “Theme parks can snap a crystal clear picture of you on a roller coaster going 100 km/h, but a security camera can’t get a clear photo of a robber standing still.”
🍅🤮”If tomatoes are fruit, then ketchup is jam.”
🍎”Why aren’t iPhone chargers called Apple juice?”
💪🏻 “Pregnant women are the only true body builders.”
🤣”Maybe urinals were invented when a tall guy walked by the sinks and asked, ‘Why not?’.”
😂 Watching a graduation ceremony is like sitting through a movie that’s entirely credits.” (Shoutout to all my friends with Grad’s this year – both high school and university. There are quite a few of you!)
🤣 “Remember when teachers use to say, ‘You will never be walking around with a calculator in your pocket!’. Well look at us now.”
🌮 “If you weigh 99 pounds and you eat a pound of nachos, are you now 1% nachos?”.
🧼 “If you drop soap on the floor, is the floor now clean or is the soap dirty?”.
💻 “If Apple made a car, would it still have windows?”
😜 “If you are waiting for the waiter, are you the waiter?”.
🤣 “If you work as security at a Samsung store, does that make you a Guardian of the Galaxy?” (Throwback to our Disneyland trip in 2023.)
😂 “Why is the pizza box a square if the pizza is a circle and the slice is a triangle?”
And that’s all folks, I hope you have a fun start to the year in all ways.
I love listening to podcasts when I fold laundry or am doing some other routine tasks. One of my favourites right now is Mel Robbins. I listened to this particular podcast on the weekend. The focus was on six questions you can ask yourself to have the very best 2024. I won’t get into the nitty gritty about what she shared because you can dive deeper and listen, if you are compelled, but I did want to convey that for 2024: I am going to bring the FUN! (And yes, I have a fondness for fine alliteration, so prepare yourselves for this linguistic journey..)
Here are five things that I want to do for pure FUN in 2024:
1️⃣ Fitness : This fall, Sexy Neck and I went back to the gym together for the first time since we lived in Bad Saulgau, Germany. YIKES! That was interesting to think about and realize how long again that was. For my personal fun fitness routine, I want to lift weights three times per week and then have fun adding in walking, cycling, skate skiing and downhill skiing. All just for fun!!!
2️⃣ Have Fun with Friends: I want to host, organize or become involved with a game night or book club again. When I lived in Vernon, I organized a wonderful book club with seven other very diverse, intelligent, fun women. We chose eight books to read and we met to talk about one per month. Once a year, we also met to do a retreat. Moving to KCity in 2013, while having a 2, 4 and 6 year old, plus supporting my mom with cancer, made the book club fall to the wayside. I simply lacked the mental space to continue to organize it. Let’s see what I can make happen for 2024.
3️⃣ Find Fantastic Fiction: I love reading books, but I often bend towards non-fiction as I love to grow myself. This year, I want to find some fun and fantastic fiction books to put into the mix. I already Gael 10 good old “mind candy” books on hold from our fabulous library.
4️⃣ Flourish in the Fine Art of Frosting a Fabulous Cake: My mom always made the best cakes for the boys’ birthdays. Two years ago, my goal was to simply make all the boys cakes from scratch. This year, I want to be able to decorate them well too! (Anyone know someone that could teach me? I don’t want to use fondant, but good old icing!)
5️⃣ Frolic across Canada (Yukon + Quebec) and perhaps even enjoy a far-flung trip to enjoy the beauty of skiing in Japan: These are three trips that are on our radar for 2024, on top of our regular jaunts to Vancouver for sports. I am wanting to do these three trips as JC goes into grade 12 next year and these are places we have always wanted to go together as a family. Bring on the 2024 frolicking!
And that’s it folks. Enjoy these last beautiful days of 2023 and pray about what the future of the year two thousand and twenty-four, since Christ, could bring. Our Heavenly Father loves you so much and has a beautiful plan and purpose to your life. My one ragged, righteous, and radical life is proof of that. I am skidding into the end of 2023 with a smile on my face at all the non-coincidences that have happened this year.
Reliving ten years ago these last few weeks has been a very tender and vulnerable experience for me. I have cried more times than I can count. I have felt so much sadness seeing grandchildren with their grandparents as it has showcased such a profound loss that my sweet boys have endured these last ten years with losing both their Nana and Grandma alongside watching how their Papa’s grieved. I have felt like a failure as I have tried to weather all these big feelings while being a present wife, parent, employee, colleague, neighbour…all while preparing for Christmas. The circle of support around me, again, I have purposely made smaller so that I can show up entirely authentically, just as I am, in this messy human experience that we call grief. (Any other grief sojourners strongly dislike these three words: How are you?) Our golden doodle, Winnie, has been especially close to me, often with her head on my foot (or on my lap when she gets invited on the couch!).
Today is ten years since I wrote these words below. My mom, aka Super Nana’s, presence is still felt on a daily basis and her legacy truly does live on through our five lives and many others who knew her. For this I am extremely grateful. Thank you to my “salty” friends who have walked these years with us step-by-step in person and with us from afar. You mean the world to us. Thank you to everyone reading my words today, I am incredibly grateful for you.
When the world shut down in 2020, I was in a place where many of my dreams got shut down too.
It hurt more than I realized at the time.
Fulfilling a dream to take our family to Japan.
Achieving a dream of finishing a 3.8km swim, 180km bike ride and 42km marathon run (Ironman triathlon) that I had spent two years training for.
Living the dream of being surrounded by likeminded, healthy individuals who loved to workout, but couldn’t as the fitness centres and pools were shut down.
On top of losing these dreams, I have now fully realized that I had lost hope.
I lost hope for a future for our boys in a world that was moving towards kindness, peace and acceptance. Instead I saw and personally experienced polarization, judgement, discrimination and all out war in families and in the world.
As I end 2023, I can fully say that my hope and dreams have returned amongst the polarization, judgement, discrimination and wars around the world.
My dreams now exist more within me and our family.
I love living the dream of being able to have our three boys learn at home for the fifth year.
I love planning our summer adventures: Our third trip to the Yukon and our sixth Cann-Sharpe Adventure with friends.
I love my new calling working alongside 15 wonderful, inspiring teachers that support over 450 northern British Columbia home learning students. This group of people are the most heartfelt, insightful, hardworking group of educators that I have ever had the privilege to work with in my over twenty years in education.
I love simply feeling hopeful.
Hopeful because of the love and care I see around me through our friends and my work.
Hopeful that God is working everything out in His timing.
Let go and let God.
Hopeful of the uprising I see of saints who love people and want to show up louder, with this cloak of love, despite the hurts and harm they have experienced in their lives.
I love dreaming again.
Dreaming about what physical feat I will move towards next.
Dreaming about who my boys are becoming and who they want to be.
Dreaming about how I can show more love and care to those around me as I move through my own healing journey.
Love truly conquers all and is the greatest power in our world that brings hope and dreams into the hearts of all who choose.
More love.
More hope.
More dreams.
Bring on 2024.
Have an epic Christmas and end of the year folks and love what you do!
"Be" ENOUGH 