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    I realized how exhausted I was before I even woke up this morning.
    
    In my dream, I had won a trip to Hawaii for my husband, our two boys, and me.  I rode the small island hopper plane down into paradise, skimming over crystal clear water, white sand beaches, and tropical foliage.   It was just as I remembered it all from the honeymoon Duane and I took nearly 20 years ago.
    

    With 2009 safely behind us, my son asked me what I was going to name this year.
    I had declared last year  "The Year of Good Enough."
    It was a very difficult year in a number of ways, and since I was in survival mode at all times, things simply couldn't be perfect.
    Our meals weren't always square, the house wasn't usually clean, and my toenails never, ever, not ONCE got painted even though I bared them nakedly all summer.
    But we survived.  We made it through 2009.  I almost printed us T-shirts.

    This year I find myself thinking less about presents and Christmas trees,  and pondering more on Mary, the mother of God
    Motherhood been my favorite role ever since my firstborn was laid in my arms.  I never aspired to motherhood - never played with dolls or babysat.  I wasn't really crazy about kids, in fact, until I had my own.

    Our back yard borders on a wetlands and is so full of mosquitoes that we can't go outside unless we roll in citronella and cover ourselves in netting. So I was intrigued when I read a news item the other day which claimed that people who are stressed out don't get bit by mosquitoes as much as others.  Mosquitoes, according to the study, don't like to eat what's stressed, so they'll leave you alone.
    If that's the case, I should be able to sit inside the Off tent filled with thousands of mosquitoes and not get a bite.  I'm so stressed out that my eyelids twitch.

    I am an adventurer at heart.  I've back-packed through Europe, sleeping on a train car in France with two small bearded men below my bunk who didn't have tickets.  I've also slept on a train headed deep into Italy in a car shared with a Romanian family and the entire train guarded by heavily armed men in fatigues. I've witnessed drug sales in Rome, naked people in southern France, and eaten something I wasn't sure of in Paris.

   "You're gonna kill me," my husband said when he got home from work. "My boss is sending me to a conference at Disney World in a few weeks.  Of all places to go without you and the kids… It'll be hard."
    Ha! I laughed out loud, because it was funny. He actually thought he was going without us???
    Ha!
    It turns out that we can stay in his hotel room for FREE and get free admission to the parks! AND, my mother-in-law lives in Clearwater so after a week at Disney we're going to go spend another four days at her condo near the beach!!!

    I've kept track of my children's "firsts" in their baby books.
    First word.
    First tooth.
    First steps.   
    But it wasn't until the other day that I realized that their "lasts" are just as important. They're a different sort of milestone - and the realization that something is over, finished…gone forever except in the existence of memory.

    I went to a dog's birthday party on Saturday.
    It was cute.  Izzy, the dog being honored, showed up with bows in her hair and her nails painted a festive, matching pink. She received doggie presents and even got to gobble up a doggie-sized birthday cake with her two little bulldog friends watching and drooling nearby.
    It sounds corny, but it was a touching event that drew press coverage and brought people in from all over southeastern Michigan to help with the celebration.

            I recently broke my hand and it's in a cast. My thumb is immobile. "If you behave and keep this thing on, we'll give you a removable cast so you can take it off to shower, but only to shower," said my orthopedic hand surgeon. "If not, in three weeks you get the real thing."

            After receiving that threat from my doctor, I came home yesterday and realized that I couldn't peel the potatoes for dinner.

Both of my sons love the "bear of little brain", Winnie the Pooh, and his friends. The other night at dinner we were asking which one we liked best. (This is the deepest our dinner conversation gets…) Zachary likes Tigger, the happy, bouncy character. (All that bouncing not only gets on my nerves, it makes me think of checks).  Logan likes Eeyore, the slow, quiet and somewhat unhappy donkey. (My similarities with Eeyore's house situation stresses me out).  My husband likes Gopher and "whistles" through is teeth when he talks about him. (Enough said.)

But I like Rabbit.