A New Ring Tone

It's the honeymoon and I get that. But we are just loving our new church and our new friends. This is a place that understands what it means to take care of people. And we are having a blast being taken care of.

I have spent a total of an hour school shopping this year. Friends from church have taken the kids school supply shopping and clothes shopping because they think it is FUN. I never thought it was fun -- ever. Part of it is back pain -- part of it is just that I never have in all my life enjoyed shopping. But the kids had really good times -- Dominyk even got taken out for lunch as part of the deal! And we avoided arguments and stress. Very good deal.

Yesterday I went clothes shopping for my new job with Sadie and two new friends from church who view shopping as a hobby instead of purgatory. I brought my credit card and my body (since apparently you have to try things on when you shop -- a new concept for me) but they did everything else. I sat in a chair and they went through nearly every item in the super fat store.

Which leads me to a tangent. Yesterday we were having lunch with some new friends and we were talking about my upcoming shopping trip that afternoon. I explained that I was going to Catherines, and that if you get too fat for JCPenney Women's Sizes, you go to Lane Bryant -- the Fat Store. If you get too fat for that you head to Catherine's, the Super Fat Store. But, I pointed out, that isn't their byline. They don't advertise themselves as Catherine's: The Super Fat Store. And Bart quipped, "Nope, it's called Catherine's Tent and Awning."

So, anyway, back to the shopping story. So, I was sitting in this chair, playing mindless IPhone games and checking my Facebook, while Sadie, Karen and Joy looked at every single item in the store and choose about 420 items (ok, I think it was more like 19, but that is still more than I have ever tried on in one day in my life). After they gathered the stuff they made me go into a dressing room and try everything on!!! So i tried it on, flung the door open for their approval or disapproval, got the yay or nay, took off the item, threw it over the changing room door, chucked a hanger over the top of the door attempting to hit one of them, and then tried on the next item. By the time we were done we got a LOT of clothes that they say looked good on me (I never bothered to look at the mirror). And they thought this was a very fun day.

I hope they don't read the blog because it would blow my crabby cover, but it was actually a pretty fun day... and I think the items will make me look about as good as a super fat person can. :-)

People are offering to take the boys places, to do special things with them individually, to keep them when we are out of town. Sadie has begun to sing in the praise band at our church and they are like family and are treating her as such. Bart and I are making close friends already and our social calendar is out of control.

Looking back, our years in Mankato were spent under a cloud of anxiety and depression. We had really good friends there and there were glimpses of fun and hope in the midst of it all -- which is why we were able to make it through. But generally there were so many traumatic events that occurred there that we lived in a fog. And now we can see clearly again.

Sometimes when I think about it I wish we could have been better friends in Mankato -- less self centered and less obsessed with our own drama -- and we are super grateful that those people were in our lives to get us through those six years. We couldn't have done it without them.

I recognize that our drama certainly isn't over as a family. We are probably just experiencing a reprieve right now (Ok, so maybe I have a bit of PTSD since I keep waiting for things to fall apart). But for now I'm going to enjoy it. Life is Good.

I changed the ring tone on my phone. For the past 7 years it has been the song from Super Chick that says: We live, We Love, we forgive and we never give up. That song got me through calls from police officers, probation officers, chemical dependency counselors, psychiatrists, psych hospitals, you name it. It reminded me of our philosophy of commitment to our kids.

But I think that I started to associate it with negative things and so when I heard the ring tone...

So, I have changed it to this. Because I really do have 10,000 reasons.....