One Year Later

I hope you'll all bear with me today.  My post is a tad more reflective/personal.  I'm spending a quiet day with my sister.  It's the one year 'anniversary' (if one can really call it that?!) of our mom passing away.  Going in to this week, I've been doing a lot of thinking back on the past year and just have some random thoughts I want to share.



I am fortunate to have the good friends who have supported me this past year.  Whether it was my friend Jeanie just letting me sit and babble, or Ginger showing up to watch TV and do nothing, or sitting down for a cup of tea with Nancy, I really appreciated the quiet times that I had with them (and others!).

My Stamping Sisters have also been a HUGE life/sanity saver.  Planning card swaps for various demo events was a way for me to get back to being creative and having some semblance of 'normal' in an otherwise non-normal time.  In addition, many of my friendship there have grown over the past year and I am so thankful for each and every one of them who has touched my life!!

One really cool thing that I've done this past year is to start building my family tree on Ancestry.com.  To this point I have about 300 relatives in the tree, and it's been fun to watch it grow!  I've also managed to connect with a couple second-cousins who I hadn't had contact with previously.  Establishing some of those tangible connections to my history has been a fun process, and I'm no where near done there yet, either!!

I don't think it's any surprise for me to admit that I miss my mom.  There will always be a part of me that will, I'm sure!  But I've also been trying to focus on remembering what she taught me, and celebrating the successes that she's helped set me up for.

Initially, I had this big long post planned in my head, but as I'm writing, I think I'm going to keep it short/simple instead.  I do want to share some favorite photos of Mom that I came across this past year as I had been scanning things in.

First of all, I have just LOVED this baby pic I found of Mom when I was working on her 80th Birthday surprise party a few years ago:

I just want to pinch those chubby cheeks!!  :)

And of course, there's the obligatory High School Graduation photo:

And this photo of her in her wedding dress has always been a favorite of mine:

I also had some cute ones I found of her and me together.  This one of me on her lap eating watermelon (my brother Tim is off to the side):

We had a furniture store in New Ulm as I was growing up, and I started young with helping out moving boxes in the store it seems!!  With Mom's help, of course!!

 I'll have to tell the story about my first sewing machine sometime, but here's a photo of me with Mom teaching me how to sew on it:

Mom actually did go riding, just not as much as the years went by, but here we got a pic of her on my gelding Balladeer!!

And finally, a cool pic from 2003 when Mom & I spend 2 1/2 weeks out in Washington D.C.--dog-sitting for my brother Tim and sight-seeing:

So, just a few photos I wanted to share today. 

Pam