Tonight Nicks friends Silas came over to play – and all three of the boys had a great time together!  It always amazes me – and I love it – that some may buy their kids the most expensive toys…but give these two a tape measure, and the sky’s the limit on imagination and creativity!

And of course then there’s Tator – who is just happy with crayons!  Check out the concentration on that little face!

This blog was created for several reasons 1) to let our families and friends who live further away still know what is going on in our lives and see updated pictures of the boys and ourselves, and 2) to keep a running documentation of what our daily lives are like, as at some point my memory will fade, and unless I get my tush in gear with my scrapbooks, this will be the only thing my children have to look back on as a record of their and our lives.

That being said, I cannot leave items out that are unpleasant, as our life is not all roses.

So that is my disclaimer…read on if you will.

It is frustrating for me to hear people makes comments regarding the strike at Brians place of employment and hear “Poor Brian” “This must be hard on him” “How is Brian holding up.”  While I don’t feel that I am a what-about-me type of person, I want to scream “This is hard on all of us!” because it is. 

Sure we might look fine…even happy if you will…because we are all doing our best to keep things together.  All of us, Brian, myself and Nick and Nate are all doing what we can (well, maybe not Nate – he is still in the selfish, abet warranted, age of 1 ½).  This is all we can do as there are no other options. 

There are good days and bad days. 

There are good times and bad times. 

There are times when we are yelling at each other (Tator is included in this one) and there are times that we are very understanding of each others feelings and do our best to alleviate each others stress – which there is a lot of. 

My sons miss their father. 

I miss my husband. 

Brian misses his life, his wife and his children. 

We are not always pleasant.  We are not always happy. 

We do our best to get by.  We do our best to get through.

We have awesome friends that have done so much to make the time go by, put smiles on our faces and just be the best friends that we could have…and we don’t know what we would do without them.

But by no means think that this is secular to affecting just one of us.  We are a family.  What happens to one of us happens to us all. 

That is our burden. 

That is our gift. 

That is something we wouldn’t want to live without.