It’s official. Both college girls are back to school and we are left with an empty nest again. Well, almost empty…

We have one daughter left at home and she is loving being back to the ‘only child’ status again. Although she was glad to see her sisters (I think), she was a bit grumpy while her sisters were home, having two more people telling her what to do. Now, it’s back to having her way again.

She still won’t take a photo with me and her sisters though, so instead she took this photo of me and her big sister yesterday, on the way to dropping her off to school. I was getting so sleepy driving that we had to stop and stretch and wake up.

I just love the color of the woods in winter, don’t you?

I saw this on facebook. It was getting a lot of ‘likes’ and actually, I liked it too. Very few would disagree with the saying. It says:

“Family isn’t always blood. It’s the people in your life who want you in theirs; the one’s who accept you for who you are. The ones who would do anything to see you smile and who love you no matter what.”
~Unknown

We all certainly have friends who are like family. Sometimes, they even seem more like family. They are so much like us that it’s a wonder we are not attached physically.

But you know what, the older I get the more I realize that there are great friends, but there is also family and family always trumps friends.

The people in you life who will want you in theirs, the ones who accept you for who you are and the ones who would do anything to see you smile and love you no matter what…

They are your friends when they do all that for you for a time. We all move on in life and very few of our friends will be there from beginning to the end. Enjoy the phase of your life with them. You will treasure them forever.

Now your blood, your family, they have no choice but to do all that. Your family had no choice whether they want you in their life or not, but they accept you for who you are and love you no matter what anyway. They would do anything for you including make you smile, make you cry, and make you so frustrated you wonder what you’re doing with these people.

Sometimes you may wonder how you even became part of ‘that’ bunch. They are so nothing like you. Your friends are more like you.

But the thing is, your friends only reflect how you are on the outside. They are like mirrors. That’s why you are so much alike.

Family is what makes you tick inside. Family is all that gory, unsightly stuff inside you that somehow makes you work the way you do. Family is what makes you able to see, to feel, to breath, to think, to move.

Family is what makes you who you are inside so that you can look good outside.

So maybe next time you think your friends are your ‘real’ family, think again. No matter how awful or how diseased your family, it’s what’s inside you and when you don’t take care of what’s inside you, nothing you do outside will ever work right.

Tick, tock…
 
 

Tags: family, friends, musings

Today is my youngest daughter’s 14th birthday. We are not having a birthday pary. She doesn’t even want us to sing to her! I suppose she is now officially a teen ager. One tradition that we do have for their birthdays that she still wants to stick to is the one that involves food.

Every year on their birthdays, they get to choose the meal. On previous years, when it came time to my youngest daughter’s birthday, everyone else in the house will start dreading the day because they know what is coming. SPAGHETTI!

No, my spaghetti isn’t that awful! It’s just that it’s the Clone’s favorite meal. She requests it at least once a month but especially on her birthday because she knows she’ll definitely have her wish granted.

This year though, you can tell someone is getting older because spaghetti did not even come into play. What did come into play though is spaghetti’s more sophisticated cousin, LASAGNA!

This year, she requested Spinach Lasagna, roast beef with lots of gravy and collard greens. Yes, she specified COLLARDS because she was tired of malabar spinach which is the only green that we had a lot of from our garden this year. She didn’t want anymore spinach, well except for the small amount used in her lasagna, so off to the market we went to buy collards.

Her main request of spinach lasagna, we discovered a year or so ago when I participated on a blogging carnival called Daring Kitchen where food bloggers were encouraged to try challenging recipes that they would normally not cook in their kitchen. For this particular challenge, it was making your own pasta, and spinach pasta at that!

The recipe looks a bit daunting, but I assure you, by the time you’ve made this dish a couple of times, it really does get a lot easier. This time around, I was thankful for the girl’s penchant to play with dough. I still haven’t got a pasta maker so was I glad when she asked if she could roll out the pasta! She did a great job, too, even managing to roll out wide sheets that almost covered the whole pan in one whole swoop!

It was also a great way to spend a birthday afternoon together. Fun and satisfying

Tags: birthdays, family, food

Happy Fathers Day to all the great dads out there!

We are a family of mostly girls and we were blessed to have fathers who loved us and nurtured us and molded the women that we are today. They guided us to do the right things for ourselves and for others but they also indulged our whims and catered to our whining. They were our first knights and protectors. With them watching our backs, we felt we could conquer anything in our realm. We are princesses and these are the men who made us.

So thank you, Papa, Uncle, Lolo and Husband. Thank you from your daughters who will always remember all the gestures, labors of love and sacrifices you made on our behalf.
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Tags: father's day, fathers