Mom! Dude!

I love Fall...the colors, the (hopeful) change in temperature, the events and holidays. I am very marked by the school year calendar, and Fall, to me, always feels like the first of the year. That’s when I take stock, and do inventory, make plans and decisions. First things first. We felt the need to do more in our church. We had been faithful church goers and Sunday school teachers up to 2004. When Angelia died in 2004, it’s not that we left God....far from it. It’s just that our church is so large, and hubby had been a member there since the 70s, and his older kids had basically grown up in that church, so for a long time after Angel’s passing, we stopped going, simply because there was always someone coming up to hubby, and wanting to know the details and needing to re-hash the story, and while everyone was sympathetic and understanding, it was a constant ripping open of Pete’s heart, every time someone, well-intentioned as they may have been, wanted to talk about it with him....

So Summer of 2006 kept rolling on....my “baby” got his first haircut, and his first pair of athletic shoes! My goodness, what a difference that made in him! I came home from work one evening, and there he sat in his high chair, his daddy feeding him supper, with a new, short haircut and light up, velco Elmo shoes! He almost didn’t look like my same baby! But then....he smiled, ah, that’s my boy! Alex was becoming very popular....he’s very friendly and says hello and waves to everyone! He had been to the beach a few times, and some play dates and birthday parties, and baptism receptions, and for the most part, he was very well behaved. I was very proud of my son. We had a wonderful, long, July 4th weekend that year. We kept very busy. On Saturday, we went to St. Augustine and Alex took his very first boat ride. It was a scenic cruise of the Matanza Bay, about an hour and a half long. We saw birds and dolphins and heard the cannon launch from the old Fort. Alex loved it, and did not get ...

Well, back to my time-line driven (or not so driven, sometimes) blog. Before I got sidetracked with being sick, and two of my kids being sick, I had taken you all through the beginning of 2006, with my hubby fresh out of the hospital and my Aunt Chris and cousin Tabatha having left, and Adrian returning home from her hard-partying New Year’s Eve weekend. So 2006 got underway, and even after the holidays, and a round of hospitalization, and relatives in the house, things just seem to stay hopping busy in our family. January alone contains 5 family birthdays: my mom, my dad, Adrian, me and Aunt Nell. February has Valentines Day (Alex’s very first chocolate, and a coloring book about dump trucks), as well as Alex’s very first steps, taken at my mother’s house on Valentine’s Day; March brought the birthdays of my step-son and his wife, my boss, Tabatha, and two dear friends, as well as remembering Angelia’s birthday again. April brought not only warmer weather, but also the celebration of ...

Well, back to blogging...it’s been a crazy couple of weeks, and not in a good way...but when I last blogged, it was a look back to Halloween of 2003, the hubby’s spider bite episode. I’m going to resume blogging where I left off before that, but before that, I had to share an odd episode that occurred after blogging the spider bite event. As I stated in that blog, I had to poke fun at hubby for the spider bite (after I knew he was going to be OK, of course) and bought a boat load of fake spiders to tease him with. He’s cool with that, and almost everyone who knows us was OK with it, too. A joke is a joke....looking at the bright side of things, taking it easy, etc., etc. Gotta laugh in life, right? Well, at the time the spider episode occurred, and hearing of my spider purchases, one person in particular thought my humor was in very poor taste, and told me so. Well, so what? I didn’t buy the spiders for him, did I? It was my hubby, and hubby thought it was funny, and that’s all ...