Life changes

My brother and his family visited us over Memorial Day weekend.  They left Tuesday mid morning and we had a really good visit.  Sarah Bear loves her cousins.  She said she isn't to sure about L though.  She is too little to play with, according to her.  *grin*  Silly bug!  She has not stopped talking about her "girl cousins" and has requested that she be allowed to call occasionally.  I see no problem with that.  I grew up close to my cousin Julie until we were teenagers and nearly the same age spread separates Hannah and Sarah. 

The cousins had sleep overs, play time and Bear was able to show off her favorite activities, Owen Beach, several local parks, and digging in the dirt.  Yep, the girls dug holes in the dirt.

Speaking of holes in the dirt, I got the last of the garden planted.  My first batch of bush beans rotted and I had to re-buy and wait to plant them until it stopped raining long enough to not be dealing with mud.  Our radishes, lettuce, cucumbers, pumpkins, kale, chard, tomatoes, sunflowers, peppers, zucchinis and dill are doing well.  Surprisingly the carrots haven't sprouted noticeably yet.  I may be replanting those as well.  Many seeds I purchased this year were from Azure Standard. 

Sarah had her ballet recital and it went very well.  All the dancers did amazingly, and the actors did very well too.  Metro Parks outdid themselves yet again.  I am happy for a summer off ballet lessons though.  We will enjoy the break.  I will post pictures later on her ballet recital.

I am also doing away with my private Facebook account.  All in the course of my simpler life plan.  I am unable to regulate myself easily, so just dropping it is the plan.  Garden Tenders will still have a Facebook page, never fear, so I hope all my friends that are close and have hopes of keeping tabs on us will look for periodic updates on the Garden Tenders Facebook page. 

The message I had for my friends was one of hope and renewal for myself and my relationships.  Not those relationships just within my family, but also with God, and those people who are really friends.  I have stretched myself very thin the last few years.  I know with the deep soul searching I am doing that I have used Facebook  to replace the family sense I was missing with my church family.  We are now in a smaller church and feel a sense of family connectedness, but we also know that it isn't up to just them, we also need to work on watering the community of church brothers and sisters as well.  I am still here and alive and well, but my well-being and happiness was compromised with the escapism I persisted in doing on Facebook.  What started as a nifty way to "social network" has become something that is in no way an edification of God, and has taken me away from those things which are important too me.  We are also getting rid of all the extra cable.  We must keep basic for internet, but it will be severely limited.  We have been discussing this for months, its not a hasty decision, just as getting cable seven (7) years ago was not hastily done.

The internet gives you a false sense of who people are.  You can't really know someone from a Facebook page or a profile.  On-line relationships can't replace human relationships.  I want to have better real relationships.  I am still here, my friends.  You can still contact me via email and the phone, even via the "snail" mail, but for me, well, I need to break the ties of plastic computer generated personalities.  Real is were life is, you know?

Summer will hopefully find us exploring more as I embrace this new freedom, and it really will be a sense of freedom.  Fifteen minutes here, thirty minutes there, it all adds up.  I am actually excited at the new doors that will be opening for me as I actually cross the threshold of a life that looks to the simpler things, a life where relationships are real, a life where my husband and I spend a Sunday afternoon on the swing watching our daughter play in a bucket of water and chase poor Ollie with a hose.

Thank you my gentle friends.  I love you all. 

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