Dancing with Daffodils

We recently returned to my hometown of Rochester, New York to visit family.  It is a joy to grocery shop at Wegmans, eat Abbotts custard as I walk along the Charlotte Beach pier and to drive through downtown, pointing out to my kids my two favorite buildings: the sandwich and the clippers.  These are moments from my childhood that I love living over again. I lived in a great neighborhood when I was a kid where my two best friends lived just across the street.  We would play board games or Atari at my house, Super Mario brothers at Laurie’s house and Sonic at Heather’s house.  We’d swim, play gymnastics, ride our bikes to the local grocery mart for candy, walk to school together, build leaf forts, have bouncy ball competitions and race in the snow.   Each May my family would go to the Lilac Festival.  We would take a picnic dinner, walk around the tulips beds first and then head over to the large hill covered in deep purple, light purple an...

A few weeks ago I was sitting outside with my very newborn baby watching my two older children play.  Like many Americans with kids, we have a Cozy Coupe and at one point my children went down our sloped driveway with my three-year-old son driving and my almost five-year-old daughter standing on the back.  I told her that she was being unsafe and warned her that she could easily fall off and get hurt and I asked her to get off.  She chose to ignore me and stayed on the car.  I asked her again and she just said, “No.”  At this point I decided to let it go.  Not ten seconds later, the car tipped over as they were crossing the road (having looked both ways, of course).  My daughter was able to jump off and was not hurt, but my son who had been inside the car was now in the road, stuck underneath the car.   Since I was still holding my newborn, I asked my daughter to go help her brother.  The tipping was a result of her bad choice and I want...

I was recently watching Cars 2 with my children and while it isn't unusual for me to be moved by Disney movies, this one surprised me.   Mater, a rusty old tow truck, is with some secret agents who are trying to put him in disguise.  To do so, they want to fix his dents but he says no.  He defends his dents because he got them while with his best friend and he doesn't want to erase those memories.  By the end of the movie, one of those secret agent cars leaves her dent in too because Mater helped her appreciate its value.   During this movie I was holding my five-week old baby.  While she is perfection itself, what she and my other children have done to my body is not.  Looking in the mirror recently has been painful because all I see is how I am 15 pounds overweight with a very flabby belly covered in stretch marks.  Getting dressed is depressing since none of my clothes fit well.  I hardly have time to exercise, shave my legs, do m...

Happy Father's Day!  I am very blessed in my life with a wonderful father and also an amazing husband who is father to my children.  I am not much of a poet but have written a few and this is one I wrote as a birthday present back for my dad when I was 18.  I thought it appropriate to share for Father's Day. A Tribute to my Father Being sent from above, I know it was trying leaving Father in Heaven was a new kind of dying. His promise was sure that love I would find in a father on earth, gentle and kind. I was sent to a home in which to prepare for the calling I accepted with great hope and care. The love that I found there made Heaven feel near I was meant to be there, it was perfectly clear. I was taught of my Savior and what He did for me to pray and serve others--that's the way it should be. I learned the only way back from whence I came was to know Him and love Him, take upon me His name. How could this be done whe...

I served for 18 months as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Kiev, Ukraine.  Every mission is led by a mission president and his wife who oversee all of the missionaries both spiritually and physically.  I was lucky enough to enter the country with President Frank Trythall and his wife, Nancy, there to greet me, ready to teach me and to make sure I was taken care of while serving as a missionary.  I immediately liked President Trythall.  Every week I wrote him a letter letting him know how things were going and every eight weeks, we sat down for an interview.  Those interviews were some of the most profound learning experiences of my  service and I came to respect President Trythall as a leader and love him like a dad.   Even with 150 missionaries in his care, somehow I felt like I was his favorite.  He has a gift for listening and understanding and saying just the right thing to make everything clear. ...

I've decided to start a blog. This is not going to be a diary though; this is an outlet for me to write. I love writing and haven't done any since I had children. I decided it is time again but since I'm not ready to jump back into freelancing or working for a newspaper or magazine, I'm going to blog. You are welcome to read it and I hope you enjoy it but my goal is not to write something that others enjoy reading. At this point, my goal is to write what is on my mind and just enjoy the process of writing.  My very favorite poem by William Wordsworth is below: I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high e'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.  Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way,  They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in ...