Wow, I can't believe that it has been so long since I have written on this blog.  I have wanted to be a blogger for quite some time, but there is this thing going on called life and sometimes it gets in the way of things.

LIFE. That's such a big word or a small word. It can mean so many things.  Life is great, life is fun, life is boring, life is too busy...

Life, it happens to all of us and what I am learning is that I can either take it as it is, try to ignore it and move on, take what it hands me and try to make something positive of it, or try to take control of it.  I am still not quite sure what the best option is except that I am learning to respond and not react, although I am not perfect at it by a long shot.  There are just some situations that it is hard not to react to and this year has had quite a few of those situations.

We have had a lot to deal with in the past year or so.  We decided to move out of the apartment that we had been in for 7 years and try to find a bigger place.  That place happened to be a mobile home that had 4 bedrooms instead of 3, which had my oldest son over the moon because for once in his life he did not have to share a room, and at the age of 16, he more or less felt that was a right more than a privilege. No sooner did we get moved in and there were problems, culminating in everyone getting pneumonia and the house being declared toxic.

How did I react to that?  Probably better than I had in the past.  I didn't get really angry, I just decided to do something about it, but that didn't work out so well for me.  Try living in a hotel room with 6 people, 3 of them teenagers for 3 weeks.  Talk about working on patience and trying to respond instead of reacting.

We finally did find a new place to live and although it only has 3 bedrooms it is definitely bigger.  I actually really like it here, but there were still things that happened...such as sitting behind my steering wheel sobbing because of my brakes going out before my husband got to fix them and crashing into my house. I guess I didn't handle that so well.

Then there was my reaction to someone breaking into my van and not only going through it and stealing stuff like normal but actually egging it, on the inside. So there were eggshells and everything all over the interior of the van.  My reaction??? I posted something on Facebook that turned into a major thing, like a MAJOR thing.  I didn't respond to that situation, I reacted, and I reacted badly and I said some things that came back to bite me in the butt.

Not long after that, I was carjacked, in my own driveway none the less.  My husband's great little Chevy Cobalt was taken, and I was threatened with an assault rifle, which I later found out was most likely a BB gun. But I was held at gunpoint, told to turn and kneel in my driveway facing my house, which I wasn't about to do because my boys were sleeping just on the other side of that wall. So when he told me to give him my phone, I threw it at him and ran into the house screaming.  So that turned into a whole ordeal with me ending up in the hospital with a panic attack.  Apparently, I did not handle that situation well either.

A week later, a bullet went through our walls.  Yes, walls. It came through the outside wall over my eldest son's bed, and dropped and went through the next wall, barely missing my second eldest son by inches into the living room and we found the slug between our sofa and piano.  Of course in this situation, the first thing I did was grab my gun. This of course turned into yet another ordeal. 

We have learned lessons.  We have been angry, we have been depressed, we have been overjoyed by people who have loved us through it all.  More of life has happened to us, but that's life.  I guess what I am saying is that in this period of my life, I am learning, not perfectly, but working on and learning that how I respond to any given situation is more important than the situation itself. I am also learning, that I am not perfect, nor will I ever be perfect and it's o.k. when I mess up, because I have a God who loves me in spite of my flaws and my failures, and if I hold on to all of my mistakes then I turn into one miserable person. 

This has been my life for the past year.  I've learned, I've made mistakes, I've made people angry, I've had people stand beside me. It's been a year of lessons and growth and LIFE.  I hope that in the future, I continue to change for the better and can be an example to my family and that hopefully, knock on wood, we don't have another year that is as crazy as this last one has been.