Family

What is it about family?  My family is preparing for another family reunion in a couple of weeks.  This is going to be a special one because we are celebrating my parents 50th anniversary.  We are all congregating in their town and having a party.  What started out as two fifty years ago has swollen to forty something with great grandchildren on the way.   

I wonder if they had any idea what they were starting.  I know that when my husband and I were married 27 years ago, we didn’t. 

I love my family, I love being with them and spending time with them.  We talk on the phone with each other constantly and look forward to being together.  My hope is that someday my children will enjoy spending time together as much as me and my siblings do. 

I don’t know what it is about family, but it is amazing to me how you can see someone once a year and pick up like you spent every day with them.  I guess growing up together and having some of the same trials and triumphs together create bonds that never break. 

I know  that the sacrifice and traveling that we have done to be with our families has paid off for my children.  Their aunts and uncles have been great examples to them, they have set the bar high and my kids know what the expectations are.  My brothers have spent time with my sons that I know has helped them on their journey to manhood.  My sisters have done the same for my girls.  A great extended family is a wonderful thing.    I have also been lucky enough to have awesome in laws.  Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins make the best support system.  Thank goodness Heavenly Father gave us families. 

Changes

As some of you may have read in a past blog, we recently purchased new furniture for our family room.  It is fairly nice stuff, leather with recliners in both the love seat and the couch.  It is actually a bit rediculous to go down there and all the recliners are at attention.  This actually doesn’t happen very often, because we forget they are there.  Our family room for years has been kind of a kids den, with crappy couches, gaming systems and T.V.s.  We adults kept our distance, it was neither a necessary or pleasant experience to go down there.  I would only go down there out of dire urgency, like to find shoes, sox and dishes.  Times have changed.  We now have ‘normal’ couches down there, with only the wobbly entertainment center to remind us of yesterday.  This is all very stressful for me.  I can’t get my head around it. 

You may think this is strange, but for me it is not.  I am a creature of habit.  I have to put my car keys exactly in the same place or I will never find them again.  I don’t think about them.  I haven’t thought about the family room for a long long time.  I forget it is down there.  I was sitting at school during a particularly difficult day of subbing first grade, (I do not recommend this), and I thought, wow it would be nice to go home and sit on my new couch.  I have had to invent things to do down there.  I have to imagine myself sitting down there reading a book, and then thinking, yes, that would work.  I start to stress about the whole thing.  “What am I going to do with that room now that is not a pit?” and things like that.  Don’t despair for me though, I think I am getting the hang of it.  I find that when iI do get stressed, all I have to do is go downstairs and sit on the couch, swing out the recliner, and get comfortable.  I am finding that sitting down there in that soft leather comfort can be enough.  At times I go down there and do nothing at all.  i could really get used to this. 

Practicality

I have always considered myself a practical person.  I buy clothes more for comfort rather than fashion.  I don’t tend to get caught up in the infinity of things as my mother puts it.  I have begun to wonder lately if I am a little too practical.  We recently bought new furniture for our family room.  The couches we had downstairs were at least thirty years old.  We haven’t even been married that long, they were hand me downs and not in very good shape when we got them ten years ago.  When we purchased the new family room suite, the sales person offered us a ‘dispose of your old crap’ option for $15.  I thought about it for a minute and then decided it was rediculous to spend money to get rid of a couch, we could dispose of it ourselves.  When we got the nod from the delivery guys, (which was rather quickly, probably because it was my son-in-law), we hauled that baby out into the garden and sacrificed it to the sofa god. We lit that sucker on fire.  We doused it with gas and let it burn.  This is not the first time we have done this, I am afraid to admit.  This is the part that makes me wonder if I am a bit too pragmatic, what must the neighbors think, (the one closest to us is a fireman).  That lasted for about two seconds.  It was a beautiful fire.  I can understand why sofas are the main fuel in house fires.  It was awe inspiring.  One minute it was a couch, the next minute it was not, nothing from something, a perfect solution.  Lest you worry about the environment, don’t, we are green, very green.  The room that this sofa lived out it’s life in had green carpet.  No carbon footprint at all,which to me makes about as much sense as global warming anyway. But, lets not go there, I think I am a bit too practical for that. Maybe being practical isn’t so bad after all, especially when you enjoy a good bonfire.

Saturdays

I love Saturdays.  It is the one day of the week when I don’t have hard and fast commitments, sometimes.  I don’t think that people who don’t work during the week, truly appreciate the value of a blank Saturday.  If they did, they would never plan anything on this ‘sacred’ day.  There is not much worse than coming off of a week where one has worked every day and hitting a Saturday that is jam packed with obligations.  This means no housework gets done for the whole week, no laundry, no vacuuming, no dusting or window washing or mopping or toilet cleaning or anything.  I know to some, this may not be such a bad deal, but after you have wallowed in the filth of a week without a deep housecleaning you learn to appreciate a free day to clean. 

Saturday is also a day to spend with family.  Some days the school day and then homework and concerts etc. leaves little or no time to spend with the kids.  I guess I would rather cram every concert and activity into the week and be gone from dawn to dust than hack into a Saturday.  So a word to the wise, leave Saturday alone.  It is a precious commodity, one to be left alone, God himself doesn’t mess with this most awesome of all days except twice a year for Conference, so lay off, planning and Saturdays don’t mix.  Even the primary song says “Saturday is a special day”. I know it is tempting but don’t do it. Don’t plan your parties and junk and stuff on this holy day.  Remember you are dealing with some people who work all week and need a day, a simple no planned, nothing to do but clean day… A Saturday.   

Computers

Computers can be wonderful.  Can, being the operative word.  I love my laptop and would be lost without it (this could be a bad thing).  We recently moved our desktop up into the dinning room to have more control over the usage.  I swear I put everything back exactly they way I took it apart, but of course, when I fired the thing up, the internet didn’t work.  I messed with it for a while, until my husband finally called my 17 year old nephew to rescue me ( his exact words were, can you come help me so my wife will get off of my back).  It took him exactly three minutes to have the thing running.   

I am having trouble installing Adobe flash player 10 onto my laptop.  I have hit the troubleshooting for the sight, but they expect me to read several pages of crap and know a bunch of techno babble that I do not understand.  Do they not understand that the ‘end users’ are comparative novices.  I have often dreamed of coming out with a simple, secure computer system that can be taken care of without having to call Dell every couple of months for a fix.  My suspicion is that computers and programming is built this way for job protection.  After watching my nephew messing with our desktop getting it in top running order, maybe they deserve job security.  Until there is a system the a mere layman like myself can mess with, they’ve got it.