forgive me/update

To all the readers who are still sticking around:

I am sorry. I am sorry for not posting. I am sorry for not reading. I am sorry for not communicating.

I am suffering from a severe lack of attention span. I have always been a bit scatter-brained, but this summer it has escalated to new levels. I am not seeing a therapist or counselor right now, so I don't know if this is a normal issue or not when in the grieving process. I plan to start seeing someone when school starts. I have the boys both seeing someone, and arranging even more appointments and babysitters seems overwhelming to me right now. Not to mention that so far this summer, I have forgotten about an appointment or plans with friends and overbooked ourselves, on average, about once a week.

So, to make things kind of short. Our vacation week away in St. Louis, Lake of the Ozarks, and Kansas City was fantastic. We had a great time less the camera situation. The camera fell into the Lake of the Ozarks as we were ready to board the boat the first day. It was 100% and completely my fault as the bag was not zipped all the way. The heavy telescopic lens was on the DSLR Canon EOS and caused the bag to unzip all the way when I threw the bag over my shoulder. Every piece in the camera bag including the Camcorder fell into 15 feet of murky lake water. The camera is unsalvageable ( which spell check doesn't recognize, so I must have invented the word, but it makes sense to me), but the memory card is fine. The Camcorder is also unsalvageable, but after many attempts, I found the guy in Peoria that can recover the data if the data can be recovered. It is a hard drive Camcorder and has about 1-1/2 years of data that I have not downloaded or burned to DVD's. So the last year of Brian's life is on the hard drive. I am praying that the hard drive can be salvaged and the data is recoverable. We will see.

Other than that, our days have been filled with morning trips to the gym I am now a member of. Our afternoons have been filled with trips to the park, McDonald's, friends houses, the pool, a local lake beach, errands, and some QT at home. We are having a good summer, but the fighting between the boys is sometimes out of hand. I really miss having that extra set of hands and that extra voice to help level things out.

My meltdowns have decreased. I cry less. The boys seem less overall sad and angry. Gavin has stopped trying to convince me that Jesus COULD bring Daddy back. We talk about Brian a lot. We talk about our memories. We talk about when we really miss him. We talk about things that remind us of him. We all still have our major issues, but the grieving process is coming along. Which is bittersweet. Part of me doesn't want life to get easier. It is strange.

That is all I am writing for now. Forgive my lack of creativity and my direct, boring update. Just wanted to let everyone know a general "how we are doing." Many have asked.

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grocery list

Today I asked the boys to quickly add anything to my grocery list that they thought we needed or that they could use in the next couple weeks.

Gavin handed me a small memo pad piece of paper with the following items:

milk

fruit gushers

puppy

I need to change where I grocery shop.

(Gavin with his TRUE favorite cousin - Ziggy)

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to tell you more about our time, I have to find MORE TIME...

In order to tell you more details about our time on our touring vacation for the last week and a half, I have to find a schedule that allows for more hours in the day. I have to find a schedule that includes my children shutting their eyes prior to 10:00 pm, so I can shut mine prior to 11:00 pm. That hasn't been working out so well this summer.

Until I can establish a better routine or call upon the Almighty to add some hours to each night, I will leave you with this one snippet from our trip.

All of my pictures until about 3 days into our 11 day trip looked pretty cool like this:

After day 4, I didn't take any, but if I had they pretty much would have looked like THIS:

Can you guess what our 1 major catastrophy was?

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We're back

1200 miles
3 states
4 different destination stops
6 flags
2 bottles of sunscreen
1 boat
THE COOLEST FAMILY AND FRIENDS
144 bottle rockets
1500 snappers/pops
2 burned fingers
tons of fun
only 1 major catastrophe
60 gallons of gas

1 incredible vacation

2 very tired boys
1 very tired mommy

1 very lonely bed calling my name...

More to come...

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