Thankful Mom of Five, Adoptive Mom of Two Ukrainian Beauties and Bereaved Mom

        Today I am thankful for finishing filling my pots with plants!! I love flowers!  After church, we came home and I finished with the trays of flowers.  I hope they all bloom well. I usually empty out half of the potting soil in a planter and then refill is with new soil before I put in the summer annuals. As soon as I finished, there was a huge downpour of rain.  I am glad because then I don't have to water al of the pots. It was like a gift from above. Now I just have to sweep up next to the plants(or maybe it will rain again and the dirt will wash away) but I am so thankful to be finished with the job! I couldn't stand looking at the little plants in their original slotted containers from the store! About twenty years ago, a guy I went to high school with worked in a local nursery.  He told me to pull the flower heads off of  the plants when I plant them  because then a...

        Today I am thankful that Dan and I took a ride to the Wild bird store to get more pepper seed for the outdoor birds.  Now that the raccoon is also eating their seed, the container empties so much sooner!  Who knew that raccoons te pepper seeds?  The squirrels don't eat that cayenne pepper seed. The raccoon eats from both feeders.  Maybe he mixes the sunflower seeds with the pepper seed so he doesn't taste the hot seeds as much.  He sticks in hands in both feeders and gobbles it up.  I also put bagels on the pole because Olya brings home bags of bagels from the place she works! A baker comes in early morning and makes fresh bagels everyday.  Sometimes they run out of  bagels on holidays, such as Mother's Day, and then they close early. The bagels last a day or two on the pole.  I see the birds pecking at them all day and there is usually one or no bagels left in the morning.  The squirrels a...

         Today I am thankful for an afternoon of reading and gardening. I had nothing important planned and my house is clean and most of my wash was done.  I was reading Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste NG.  The book was fabulous! I couldn't put it down! I was so sorry when it ended. I hope she writes a sequel to it. I had borrowed it from the library and it was due back today.  I got it out  almost two weeks ago from a waiting list but I was in the middle of reading something else for the library book club and I needed to get that read first. It was only a 14 day book and I just started it on Wed. this week.  This book is for my friend Jackie's book club which I am hosting next month.         When Renee, my third and youngest child at the time,  was in elementary school, I remember rushing to a school play she was in.  I had left work early ...

       Today I am so thankful that Renee graduated with distinction from PA school.  It was quite an exciting day!We went to the White Coat ceremony in the morning. The PA students each received their white coats with their names monogrammed above the pocket. It was very nice!  It was just amazing to see Renee and all of her friends receive their white coats.  They all looked so happy and so ready to go conquer the medical world! The ceremony was very touching! The class of about 55 students from two campuses was a mostly female class.  I only noticed a handful of males. Renee is on the left and her friend Ashley, who is on the right, both went to South Africa to do a clinical rotation.   My niece Erica also came to the ceremony.  We went to lunch afterwards with Renee's friends and their families.  The students came from all across America.  We met a student who came from Nevada ...

        Today I am thankful for the large photos of Amy that our attorney had blown up for the civil trial. I usually don't have anything under my bed except maybe a pair of slippers. Lately, our cat has been going under my bed.  He hides there whenever he is nervous or if we have strangers in the house.   He particularly does not care for male strangers. He has now started going under there for no reason.  I asked Dan and Olya to pull the bed away from the wall so that I could see if he had urinated or defecated under there. He had not done either!  Now I wonder why he goes under there.  During our 7 week trial about Amy's death, our attorney had blown up photos of Amy they were huge.  They were probably 5 or 6 ft by 7 or 8 ft. We took the photos when the trial was over. I stuck them under my bed and sort of forgot they were there. Dan and Olya had put them up against the wall when they moved the bed when I...

               Today I am thankful for the gift of friendship with other bereaved parents.  Last night Priscilla and I ran the bereaved parent meeting because Carol and her husband were away.  There was a really bad thunderstorm so only a total of five people attended.  Priscilla, me, Kathy and Al, and our new friend Ann(we met her at a yard sale two weeks ago and invited her to come).  It is so easy to talk about our deceased children and our grief journeys with each other. Other people get tired of our grief.  I had a meeting planned but since there were only 5 of us, we just chatted. But, since we are all friends, we also talk about other things!  Al was telling us about how he met Kathy forty years ago.  She was a secretary where he worked.  He kept asking her out and she kept saying no.  She was a divorced single mom with 4 children, and her mom lived wi...

     Today I am thankful that I  prepared enough food for the next few days.  I spent about 4 hours from the time I started until the time I had washed and put away all the pans and cutting boards The girls both have different work and school schedules so I just make the food, refrigerate it, and they heat it up when they are hungry.  The only problem is that sometimes they eat it all the first day or two.  I browned a lot of ground beef and ground turkey.  I do a mixture of 1/3 turkey to 2/3 beef.  It keeps the burgers really moist and you can't taste the ground turkey at all. Then I season it with onion powder and garlic powder. I made a lot of hamburger patties and froze them.  Then I mixed half of what was left with sloppy jo sauce and the other half with taco sauce.  Then I cut up all the fixings for the tacos. I also got two clusters of crab legs steamed and a pound of shrimp steamed.  As of 6:30 pm last night, most of th...