Good Birth Control

Happy birthday, Grandad.

I can’t believe you’ve been gone seven years. I miss your funny jokes, pranks and sense of humor. Your special charm never failed to bring a smile to people’s faces. The world could really use another dose of you to lighten up and get with the program.

I’m so sad that my two youngest will never know you except thru photos and that my oldest probably won’t remember enough about you. Though every grandfather is special, I know that I had the most unique and loveable grandfather a child could wish for. Boo and Uncle Keith dubbed the two youngest with their nicknames as you would have done, but I often wonder what you would have chosen for them.

Mom still struggles with you being gone, worse than others realize. She refuses to acknowledge her birthday anymore because not sharing a cake and family gathering without you every year is too painful.

I heard you and Dad talking the night you brought me home after a really low point in my life eight years ago. I’ll always remember what you said to Dad when you both thought I was sleeping. Thank you for always believing in me and supporting me. Thank you for being proud of me, no matter what I did or didn’t do.

Three days before you died, I called you from the hospital when Biscuit was born to tell you the news. You never knew it was me, as far as I know, because there were problems with the phone line and you never heard my voice. It was our last conversation and you said, “Hello, hello… hello?” and I hung up deciding I would call you when I got home from the hospital. How could I know that hello would be goodbye for us?

I took it really hard, being one of the few in the family that wasn’t able to say goodbye to you in person when you left us. Why didn’t phone work that night? Why didn’t I try to call back immediately? I wanted you, of all people, to know that Biscuit had arrived because of what you said to Dad that night. I never got to tell you. And I never had the chance to say goodbye.

Is there no goodbye for you and me? Did the phone problem happen for a reason? I’ll wonder for the rest of my life. Until I know for sure, I’ll be missing you and waiting to finish that conversation.

Love Always,
Toots

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I became familiar with Fun on the Ark after recently getting to know Annette Yen thru Twitter. The odd thing is that I’ve known of and worked with her over the years virtually, but I was never socially active enough to become personally acquainted with her. What a HUGE LOSS for me. It makes me sad to think of all the time I could have been enjoying such wonderful friendship with her.

Anyway, to get to the point… because of my friendship with Annette, I’ve also become more aware of Fun on the Ark, it’s adorably stuffable critters and her mission at Critters Who Care to help children in unfortunate situations. I helped Annette run a contest at Moms Love Shopping in December to donate stuffable critters to children in the Hospice program.

Some of these children are terminally ill and others have a parent in the program that is terminally ill. Annette donates her critters to these children to help them cope. You can read some of the great stories that are being reported back to Annette about the success of Critters Who Care.

Soon after Christmas, my children received their own critters from Fun on the Ark . Now, most 13 year old boys would probably consider an activity such as this with his mom and little brothers “uncool”. The two little ones sleep with their new critters and my oldest says he’s keeping it to remember our Christmas together this year (he currently lives two states away with his father during the school year).

So, I say to you… if my children enjoyed these critters and treasured them to this extent, can you imagine what these animals mean to a child that Annette donates animals to for grief therapy?

How can you help? I’m so glad you asked. You can find more information and get in touch with Annette to sponsor Critters Who Care.

On the other hand, if you know of a child that would benefit from this type of therapy, you can contact Annette to recommend children in need of stuffed animals.

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Last night I stayed up late to secure an airplane ticket for my first born son to come home for Christmas. Then this morning I found a cool site called Animoto that I thought I’d give a test drive for another project. So, I quickly uploaded some recent photos of the family, chose a song provided by Animoto and waited a few moments for it to provide it’s magic. I was blown away by what I saw. Actually, I started crying because it came out so great and I realized there were so many important people in it EXCEPT for my first born son, Alec. See what you think below.

We all miss you and can’t wait to see you for Christmas, Alec!
With Love: Mom, Nana, Nannie, Donald, Biscuit & Wrangler

You can make your own studio quality video at Animoto.

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Thanks to so many of you that have commented and contacted me via email and twitter with prayers and well wishes about my uncle’s accident. Your support and positive energy was much appreciated. I’m thankful for all of you.

My uncle has made enough improvement and proved stable enough to go home from the hospital earlier today. He will still need physical therapy and daily help from others for awhile as his injuries and surgeries from the accident has left him unable to function as usual. His being alive and recovering is definitely worth being thankful for this Thanksgiving.

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The past five days have been unbelievably emotional, exhausting and downright freakish. I apologize up front, because I will likely make several posts back to back about the past few days.

To start with, last Wednesday we heard that Donald’s aunt suffered a stroke. Biscuit and Wrangler are absolutely NUTS about her and I’ve always thought she was the sweetest little lady I’ve ever met. I suppose it goes without saying that Donald was upset.

Thursday morning as I’m hitting my work groove, I get a phone call from my mom telling me that my uncle (who just happened to drop in for an unscheduled visit on Wednesday for about an hour) was hit by a car. It took me several minutes to realize that her level of panic was because his BODY was hit by a car… it wasn’t a normal car accident.

Apparently, he was driving to work behind a feed truck carrying molasses on the two lane divided loop around town. Somehow, the load became unstable and spilled molasses while my uncle was behind it. Unable to see and losing control of his vehicle, he hit the embankment. Stunned, he crawled out of his vehicle only to be struck by another driver that lost control of their vehicle when they hit the molasses. There’s no way to be certain how fast the car was going, but the speed limit on the loop is 60 MPH.

Now, my uncle is a HUGE man. He’s probably about 6′4 and even though he has recently lost weight, (and was looking better than I’ve seen him in years the day before the accident) he’s still a guy you’d worry about fighting if you were the last two people on earth and there was only ONE bread crumb left to eat. Let me paint the picture a little better for you… he’s an ex-professional wrestler. I’m not talking fake Hulk Hogan television wrestling, folks. I’m talking about the real deal with barbed clubs, chairs, cages and blood. The kind of wrestling that scares the living poop out of you if you happen to be sitting in the front row…

So, as of yesterday, he was doing better, with surgeries completed. His thigh bone was shattered and a steel plate was put in to replace the bone. He has pins in both wrists. His forehead looks like one of the cavemen from the Geico commercials or the new sitcom (if you watch it). He’s pretty heavily medicated on pain killers and is unable to ring the call light for a nurse by himself. We thought the worst was over and recovery was ahead.

Today, it was discovered that his pelvic bone is probably broken as well. It gets worse… now it’s determined that he’s bleeding internally but the hospital hasn’t determined where yet. He is now receiving blood transfusions.

Through this ordeal, there has been many family members in and out as well as his friends, coworkers and church members. I’ve felt very helpless and the most help I’ve been able to be is keeping his daughter overnight the night of the accident. My mother and I also took her, another young cousin and my boys out to McDonald’s on Friday after school. We then took the kids to see the Bee Movie on Saturday then back to my house for pizza and playing.

I know that his injuries are so severe that it will be an extremely long recovery and much help will be needed from our family and community to get him and his family through it. I hope that I can be of help then because he’s never hesitated to drop everything he’s doing and come running to help me or my children when I’ve been in trouble.

Because I can think of nothing else I can do to make a difference now, I have decided that I will go down and donate blood tomorrow. Even though the odds are small that my blood will actually be used for him, it makes me feel good to know that I’ll be helping to refill what he has used for the next person that may desperately need it. What do you when you feel powerless and helpless in a family crisis?

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If you have a blog, then you know the frustration of getting traffic to your blog. It’s a lot more work than you anticipated, isn’t it? Always promoting, trading links, commenting… well, BlogRush might just be what you need!

You simply put a small widget on your blog that shows other related blog links and in return they show your link on their blog. Nifty, huh? You can also receive A LOT MORE FREE traffic by simply referring other others.

Their video can explain it so much better than I can. So go check it out… it’s a FREE service and could be just the thing you need to take your blog traffic to the next level! Click here to try BlogRush and let me know how it works out for you!

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After an unnecessary break from life as I knew it, I’m back for another stab at this blog.  Some things are just better left unsaid, so don’t bother asking (not that you would). 

Now that things are back to normal (or close enough… what is normal anyway?) I hope to be more committed to my birth control wisdom.  I hear the price of birth control is sky rocketing to enormous amounts of moolah so every little pearl of wisdom I can provide now is desperately needed.  ;-) 

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