Every Christmas Counts




Growing up making sugar cookies was a Christmas tradition in my family. I don’t know how it got started. But what I do know was my mom’s sugar cookies were the best!

With my sister years ago...

Then my mom passed away and somehow the tradition of sitting around the kitchen table frosting and sprinkling colored sugar on the cookies my mom made was no more. I really didn’t take noticed until Christmas Eve this year as my husband and I worked in the kitchen making sugar cookies. I made the dough the previous day and we just had to cut out the cookies, bake and decorate them.

Traditionally my mom had various cookie cutter shapes for Christmas; candy cane, bells, stars, Christmas trees, etc… but for us, we haven’t accumulated such things yet, so out cookies were cut out using a plastic cup. But my husband and I sat at our kitchen table and we frosted them and sprinkled colored sugar on them. I hope next year my twins will be up there with us sprinkling colored sugar on the frosted sugar cookies.

Now, as I was making these cookies I realized the last time I had sugar cookies at Christmas was my last Christmas with my mom back in 2007. It wasn’t just that the cookie making tradition stopped, but the traditional cookies seemed to have stopped when my mom wasn’t around anymore.

My nephew when he was little



 I don’t wish to sound sad at the happiest time of the year and I don’t wish to be pitied either. But thinking about my mom I realized that you never know when your last Christmas with a family member will be. Sure I will see my mom again, like every Christian I believe I will see all my loved ones again. But our time in this mortal life is so short and goes by in a blink of an eye and our world can change so easily that making the most of each moment and each holiday really matters.



This was my children’s first Christmas. I’ll never get that again. I’ll never have another Christmas where my husband and I were parents for the first time. There may not have been a lot under our tree this year. My kids won’t remember this Christmas, but I will.



My sister helping my dad

When it’s my turn to go home to heaven I want my mind to be full of loud, full Christmases, full of family, full of children anxiously waiting by the Christmas tree since 5am waiting to open their presents from Santa Claus.
I want holidays thick with family tradition and full of family and love. I want every year to have people around my kitchen table decorating sugar cookies because I’ve realized every Christmas counts in my book and I don’t want to have any regrets on any of them.

One Miracle at a Time

Long, long ago, in possibly my middle school time, I read this poem whos concept has stuck with me all these years. I don’t remember much about it just that it was about a mother and daughter talking after the death of the father and husband. The daughter asks “How will we survive?” And paraphrasing horribly the mother pretty much says “One day at a time.”

That’s kind of how it’s been for my family these past few months.

Now, don’t worry, nothing horribly tragic has happen to us, thank goodness. But, to keep a long story short my husband hasn’t had the best of luck with work. It hasn’t been an easy past four months. More often than not we had to take one day, and a few times one moment at a time. Sometimes I would have loved to have traded these months for prosperity and the assurance that a good job brings… sometimes I don’t.

It is said that retrospect is 20/20. Things become clearer about your life after you’ve gone through it. You can see the forest for the trees. Looking back right now I still don’t understand why my family and I have to go through this difficult time, but I can see that we’ve actually done really well.

Some days it feels like I don’t know how we are going to get through it all, bills, babies, more bills, sickness, horrible jobs, rough nights, and so on. Then the next day comes and we’ve made it through that day. Often with snatches of sleep and on the brink of sanity, but we survived by some miracle.

When October ended I was looking at our calendar at all the recorded milestones of our twins, appointments, and events I realized how much we have achieved, survived and witnessed just within that month alone.

My little girl was showing signs of developmental delay in her large motor skills. You see, at the end of September she hadn’t rolled over yet. Then in the middle of October, with help of physical therapy exercises she had finally rolled over, both ways. Her brother was leaving her in the dust when it came to large motor skills. I was afraid she was going to be far behind due to her and her brother being premature. I’ve just had learned that she does things on her own pace- much unlike her me growing up. (I didn’t learn to ride a two wheeler bike until I was eight-years-old)

Now, as each month passed kids are soaring along and bills were being paid because we had the money because of the generosity of an unknown person or people helping us along.

These past months sacrifices have had to be made as we’ve survived one miracle at a time. Sometimes I don’t know how we've been so blessed; we still have a roof over our heads, a good running car, our health (no counting the ocassional colds that come with winter) and we have gained several new talents and have gained a gratitude for the help we’ve received, the smaller things.

We’ve had to be humbled and reach out for help- which isn’t easy for us. For my husband and I, it’s important to us to be self-sufficient, but we exactly can’t do that right now if we want to survive. It has been a humbling experience. I just hope we can pay it forward or back all the kindness we’ve received.

And like I said we have gained new skills along the way because of this hard time. A few times I’ve had to improvised dinners with what I could scrap together in our cabinets. Several times I’ve created meals that are now our favorites. I learned to make soup, homemade noodles, spaghetti sauce, tortillas, and bread. I have learned how to patch up clothes, entertain my kids with things around the house; since we can’t go and buy a bunch of toys, and much more…

Now, I’m not writing this blog for people to feel sorry for us; that is far from my intent. I want to tell people who may be going through something similar or will go through something similar that it is possible to survive, even when the end is not in sight.

Just take one day at a time and you will be taken care of one miracle at a time just as we have.

             

I Remembered What My Mom Said...

I know, I know… I haven’t been great at keeping up with this blog. Life has gotten in the way. Well in all honesty my hands have been full. It’s been a year since I last posted something. I even had a list of topics I wanted to write about. I might post them later.

You see a few months after my last post I found out I was pregnant. Also, my last post was during my second to last semester at college. So in under a year I crammed in finishing school, moving and having babies.

No, that wasn’t a typo. Four months ago my husband and I were given two babies, twins, a boy and a girl. They came a little too early and that provided its own challenges, but I won’t go into, at least right now.

They are home and doing fantastic!

What I want write about is a funny little experience I had not long after our twins were born.

Since our babies came a little too early they had to spend some time in the hospital to get ready to face the world. And due to that fact we did a lot of commuting for a few weeks from home to the hospital.

It was on one of these commuting trips that this event I am getting to occurred.

My husband and I were driving back home after spending some time in the hospital with our children were driving alongside a school bus when I looked up and saw a boy, no older than twelve scowling at me while he was flipping me off.

I knew the boy was looking for a reaction and that he was trying to appear tough, like all boys try to do. I thought about how to respond when I remembered my mom telling me years ago, “When someone flips you off on the road or is rude give  them the I love you sign or the peace sign.”

So that’s what I did!

I gave the boy a smile and held up the “I love you” sign and held it there while the boy held his scowl and kept up his middle finger for several long moments. It was like a silent competition.

I won.

The boy put down his hand and a bashful smile came over his face ad he turned back around. His plan was thwarted.

It made me smile how the moment turned out.

I could have gotten mad at the boy flipping me off and complain about, “the children of today.” But I tried something different and fought fire with a little bit of kindness.