With less than two weeks to go, I need to find a way to kick it into gear. As I mentioned in my last post (a million years ago) we sold our house and bought a new one. We close on June 26th and need to be packing since we have a ton of stuff and no free weekends in June.

The excitement of having a bigger closet should be enough to motivate me, but I can’t seem to bring myself to get anything accomplished. We’ve started downstairs, but now our house just looks like a disheveled mess. Instead of organizing, my head is spinning with all the things left to do – it doesn’t help that I have a lot of other balls floating in the air (Ella’s surgery, Ella’s speech, Will’s surgery, summer weddings, my grandpas health, family pictures, ahhhh the list goes on and on and on…)

Deep breath! Back to the original thought – once we’re cleared to close and I can line up movers and someone to shampoo the carpets – I think I can just focus on packing. 

I shouldn’t be stressed, we had multiple offers and were lucky enough to sell our home within 1 day. While we’ll greatly miss the home we raised our babies in and our extremely kind neighbors, we were able to sell to someone we know will be a great addition to the neighborhood. Lets hope our new neighbors feel the same about us. If not I’ll just hide in my new closet!

Every 365 days I get one year older. It’s happened for the past 30 years, and yet each year I can’t believe how old I am and wonder how it happened so quickly.

It’s not unique to me, we all get older. However while I acknowledge my increased age every December, I somehow never remember that my elders continue to age also. In my mind, my grandparents remain 70 years old no matter how many birthdays they celebrate.

Sadly this past week I was reminded of this as a great family friend passed away. Once again, in my mind Howdy was 70 years old but the reality is, Howdy celebrated 85 years on this beautiful earth.

It makes sense. I’ve known Howdy my whole life and have tons of childhood memories that include his contagious belly laugh, his swimming pool that I swam in almost every summer and his always constant nickname for me, “Kelly with the green neck tie.” He was a great man and will be greatly missed by his family and community.

I’ve said before that I don’t love birthdays but not because of the aging. Do I love the growing amount of wrinkles each year? Of course not, but more than that I hate the reminder that my life and the lives of those who are so important to me, continues to shorten. In reality, my grandparents are not 70 but closer to 80 years old. I feel blessed to have them in my life and the lives of my children -most people aren’t so lucky.

Growing older can be sad sometimes and while I wish there was something that could be said to comfort Howdy’s family right now, there is only time. However it’s important to remember to count your lucky stars every single day. Go out and live life with the goal of making as many memories possible & experiencing all the opportunities you can. At the end of the road it’s what you’ll look back on to determine the quality of your life.

I do a lot of nice things for Ella. I play games with her, color with her, read to her, take her places, pick up after her, (etc. etc. etc.) and somehow, even after all of those things – we still manage to fight like crazy. Maybe we’re too similar, but I’m definitely not her favorite, no matter how many things I do for her. Today I decided that I would take the day off of work to spend some quality time together, just the two of us. Typically when you do something nice for her though, it ends up backfiring – so I knew going in that this would be no “vacation” day.

The morning started off pretty good. She took a bath while I cleaned up the house and afterwards we sat down to eat breakfast and watch Cars. Mornings are usually a good time for her, since she’s not overtired and watching television makes her happy almost any time of the day.

I then gave her a makeover, which included curling her hair and putting on makeup so that we could head out to buy our Easter goodies. On the way to the store there was an argument of course. She didn’t want to go to Target but to the mall instead. I tried to explain that we couldn’t buy eggs to dye at the mall, but she didn’t care. I finally was able to talk some sense into her and we continued on.

Getting into the store was okay. She wanted to head straight to the clothing section first because I had promised that Target not only carried eggs, but beautiful Easter dresses too! I bet we pulled up almost every dress in the girls section that she “really, really had to have!” After 20 minutes she finally settled on one and we were able to move on to look for Will’s outfit.

That’s when things went downhill. I should have known better – that activity wasn’t focused on her and therefore she got bored and moved on. She was running back and forth looking for things, climbing in and out of the cart, trying to escape to the toy department, pushing the cart into things, etc. I ended up cutting it short, threw a shirt in for Will and headed to grab the supplies we needed to color eggs and get out of there.

We got up to the front, unloaded the goods, paid, were walking towards the door and then I remembered…..eggs! The main reason we were there and due to all the ruckus – I forgot them. I parked the cart and we walked (read: I drug her) back to get the eggs. We paid again and were about to leave and of course this time, she HAD to have a hot dog. It was lunch time so I thought I would kill two birds with one stone – fill her belly and close her mouth!

We sat down to eat the hot dog, the worlds easiest food to consume (after pudding) and somehow it was dismantled in two seconds. Ketchup & mustard everywhere and the bun was shred to pieces. Only Ella. I ended up having to piece it back together and hold it as she tried to eat the rest.
I wiped up her face (she had ketchup on her forehead) and it was finally time to go. As we went to leave the food area was like Grand Central Station and we were stuck behind a large group, preventing us from getting to the doors. We finally got outside and were heading home when I reached in my pockets to determine….there were no keys. I then went to reach for my purse to grab them from their usual spot and …nothing!

Yep, sure enough – in the middle of fighting, I had left my entire purse behind. SO – back in we went. Thank goodness the purse was still there when we got back inside. As I grabbed the purse and was about to leave, again – Ella asked if we went back in so she could have another hot dog. I think she was trying to be funny, but I almost choked her!

We finally got back home where things improved. The sun was out today, making it the first really nice day of spring so we were able to go on a bike ride and we finally colored our eggs! After it was all said and done – I’m tired and it was definitely no vacation day, but spending time with Ella, even when it is frustrating – is well worth it and the most entertaining thing a mom could ask for!