jennifer patel

I haven't written a post to my Dad on his birthday in awhile. As if my subconscious was aware of this fact, I started reading Promise Me, Dad by Joe Biden. Why? I guess I need to cry even more than I already do about everything. Such a cry baby in my years around 29*. As someone who lost a wife, a daughter and a son, Joe gives the same advice to all grieving people he meets. To slain, New York, officer Wenjian Liu's mother he said: "There will come a time when you'll go riding by a field that you both loved, or see a flower, or smell the fragrance of his suit when he took it off and hung it in the closet or you'll hear a song, or you'll look at the way someone walks, and it will all come back. But someday down the line, God knows when, you'll realize it doesn't make you want to cry. It makes you smile. The time will come when the memory will bring a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eyes. That will happen, I assured her. And that...

1/15/18 1st carousel ride. sure, it was cold and i forgot his jacket and he showed no emotion at all to gauge whether he liked it or not, but alex had fun! Can we revisit the Passion Planner ? It's a bit dramatic to use the word "passion" but I do love this planner. It is goal centered and you can write weekly and even daily focuses (foci?) to keep you on track. Like all goals, you have to stay motivated but getting to write on super, quality paper (sorry, trees) with different colored pens and markers pretty much does it for me. When I was sitting down yesterday to look at the week, I wrote, "Fun day with the kids" as today's focus since there was no school and Wintergeddon might trap us indoors for the next few days. There was so much to do around the house that I started working on things as soon as I woke up. To give Alex an answer to his never ending, "What can I do?" question, I started making a list of chores for him to comp...

On the last day of 2017, I experienced a miracle. I was driving Alex and myself to church in the frigid temperatures of the morning. As I got over on the freeway to take an exit ramp to the intersecting highway, a cop was slowing with his lights on. Even though he was close to my lane, I drove around him and looked in my rear view mirror, watching him stop across the two exit lanes to block the exit. Before I could process what that meant I felt rHonda, my white whale of a mini-van, begin to slide on ice. By some magic blessing from all that is holy, I manged to slide around the curve of the exit ramp past 4 cars who had crashed into the right side wall, staying in my lane the whole time until I found traction again on the ground-level road. I don't have a lot of positive things to say about driving rHonda, but the bitch can skate . I was overwhelmed with relief and thankfulness that we made it without crashing. My heart was working overtime in the cup holder next to me. Upo...