Our Family Christmas

     Wow!  Its hard to believe that Christmas has already come and gone!  Can you believe its actually 2014???  I was thinking the other day about something that had happened when I was 15 years old.  Then it hit me like a ton of bricks!  THAT WAS 16 YEARS AGO!!!!!!!  Why is it that time goes by so much faster the older you get?  I still feel like a kid at times, but then I realize that those days are many many years in the past.  Ok, I'm feeling old right now...  Want to know how old you are really getting?  Just take a picture of yourself, then dig out one of your wedding pictures and lay the two side by side.  Lets get off that depressing thought before I tear up!  At least I'm not as fat as I was on my wedding day.  :)   

  Andy the the kids had the ear infections and the stomach flu on Christmas.   Our Christmas dinner ended up being fruit smoothies instead of ham and mashed potatoes!  :)  We pulled a mattress out to the living room floor for the sickest ones while we opened presents.  It was still a fun time.  I love the gift giving part of Christmas more than ever now that we have children.  Watching the joy on my children's faces as they open their presents bring such love and joy to my own heart.   As I looked around at my family on Christmas, I fought back tears of thankfulness.  I am truly blessed!!!  I love my husband and my three children more than anything in this world.  God has been so good to me.

    We had a good trip to TN at the beginning of the month.  It was so nice seeing folks at our home church again!   We also got to spend an early Christmas with Andy's family.  We spent one day that week in McMinnville to visit with some of our old church members there.  I had a good cry at the cemetery as we visited Rebekah's grave.  I've really been missing her since Wesley was born.  Maybe its the infant stage that's bringing back all the memories.  Maybes its his dark blue eyes.  I don't really know.  I just think about her when I look at Wesley.  He looked so much like her at birth!  I do miss Rebekah and I guess I always will.  God's ways are not our own.  We can only trust Him to know and do what is best for us.  I do thank God for giving me three more beautiful children to take her place.  When you lose one, though, you learn to NEVER take the rest for granted.  They become so much more precious than ever before!  The little cemetery where Rebekah is buried is full of infants!  About 60 stones right around Rebekah's grave mark the place where another mother and father laid their own baby to rest.  One mother lost four of her small children within days of each other...one on Christmas Eve, one on Christmas days and the other two a couple days later, the year the Black Plague swept through.  I love walking through a cemetery reading stones.  It can be very eye opening. Each one tells a story.  As you think about the dates those people lived, you can sometimes guess how they were killed.  Some were buried during the civil war.  Some, like those four babies, died during plaques or other hard times that they faced during those years.  You can almost imagine what happened!  I always thought cemeteries were for old folks.  I was shocked at the number of infants buried beside Rebekah on that little tree covered hill!  Life is short!  And you never know when yours will be over.  I heard a preacher once say that the dash on a tombstone between the birthdate and the date of death represents our life.  Its just a short dash that we live on this earth.  What are you doing with your dash? 

   God has been very very good to me!