in pursuit of wild things

We are starting to get settled into our new home ever so slowly. I love being here and this house we built together. I feel so blessed to live here and call this little spot on planet earth my home. It feels like a dream that I might wake from. There is still plenty of work to do around here and the rest of my life to work on the task of beautification of the land. This winter I hope to work on a landscaping plan for around the house and gardening plans for next year. I’m not sure how far I’ll get on those plans since we may also start building a much needed garage and shop this winter.

We finally got the 20/21 school year started this past quarter. Oldest and Sparkles are now highschoolers! The years go by in a blink. Oldest is still struggling with tremors. He has and MRI, EEG and blood work scheduled for Christmas Eve. The follow up appointment isn’t until late January. Hopefully the neurologist will have answers for us then. My heart just aches every time I see him struggling with his hand or memory. I think he struggles far more than he lets on.

Sparkles is struggling a bit with her social anxiety this year, but not as awfully as a few months ago. She has two friends at co-op now. Both girls also have their own struggles with anxiety so they are a tight threesome. I’m glad they have each other these days even if some of the drama makes me want to run away. I never had close girlfriends growing up so I don’t really understand teenage girls and all their dramatic antics. I’m at a total loss over some of the silliness most days. Fortunately they are a close group and manage to work out most of it by themselves.

I’ve become close friends with one of the girl’s moms in the co-op group. She and I are so different and yet have so much in common. We are both much more spiritually guided instead of mainstream Catholic oriented in our beliefs. I love learning about her Cuban and Guatemalan religious traditions which seem much more intuitive than the Western Catholic traditions that are practiced by the group we are working with. I have struggled so much with expressing my faith lately that I am glad to learn about her perspective and experiences. She strengthens me and encourages me without any judgement. I have started to feel stronger in my faith but so much further from my religion. This is an odd time for me and I feel like I am warming out of a stagnant phase and into a much more aware phase of my spiritual beliefs. Like I am shaking off frozen beliefs and warming to something new. Or maybe since the hierarchy within the church has lost its collective mind I feel less beholden to traditional dogma. Something to ponder over for a while.

Christmas is nearly here. We were not able to put our usual tree up this year nor have we located all of our movies that we watch this time of year. No Elf, Die Hard or Christmas Vacation this year. The only movie I managed to find was The Fourth Wiseman. We’re also not traveling this year to visit with family. I’ve participated in potluck Christmas’s for eighteen years now. I’m not really sure what to fix for Christmas yet. We did get a spruce tree to decorate and plant in the yard this coming spring. I think it will be fun to decorate the tree outside in later years with treats for birds.

The pictures below are not exactly in order. I’m struggling with the changes to wordpress and my laptop…