I have such a busy summer ahead of me, that I am already feeling quite overwhelmed. We are moving to a new city at the end of the month and I have so much packing and organizing to do. We have been living in our current house for several years and I am amazed at the mass of things we have accumulated in that time.

I am hoping to be completely unpacked and organized by the time school starts for my son. I know that it will be a big adjustment for him, having to be the new kid. I am just happy that he is outgoing and I know that he will not have a problem making new friends.

Once we get that underway, we have to travel back home to attend the wedding of my husband’s brother. I am sure that it will be good to see everyone again at this point, and I am sure that everything will come together in the end, but for now, I am just going to have my pity party while I pack.

We finally broke down and bought our son a video gaming system for Christmas this past year. He has been begging us for three years to get him one and we just now decided that he was old enough to own one. We told him, when he opened it, that it came with a large set of rules, but he was so excited that this did not seem to phase him one little bit.

Imagine his dismay when we hooked it all up and it did not work. Being it was Christmas Day and nothing was open, we decided to try and call the toll free service for the company and see if there was something that we were not doing properly.

After calling about four different toll free numbers, we deduced that it was actually a problem with the system and that we were going to have to send it in to the company for a replacement. What was supposed to be the happiest Christmas of my son’s life turned out to be the most disappointing.

When I found out that my husband had been cheating on me for months, I was devastated. I had not seen it coming and I felt like I had been blindsided. I was worried about the future of our two children and I was scared that I was going to have to do it all by myself for the first time in my life.

When he told me that he wanted a divorce because his girlfriend was pregnant, I decided that I was going to find the best Salt Lake divorce attorney that I could. I did not want him and his girlfriend to take over the only home my children had ever known.

Early on into the proceedings, it was clear that I was going to be awarded with everything that I had asked for. I did not want to leave him with nothing, but I felt he still had a family to support and my awesome lawyer, Eric K. Johnson, agreed. In the end, we won the case and I no longer worry about being able to provide for my kids.

When I was taking my massage therapist training, I met the most handsome man. He came in for a massage, and for the first time since I had started my schooling, I was not able to perform as I was expected to.

Sensing that he was making me nervous, he started making light-hearted conversation with me. I think that this only made it worse and I eventually had to hand him off to one of the other students.
The next time he came in, he asked for me by name and I thought that I was absolutely going to die if I had to massage him again.

He told me that if I would go for coffee with him after classes than he would give me a break and let someone else work on him. I agreed, knowing that I would not be able to do his aching body justice.
We went for coffee and three years later, he became my husband.

And, I no longer have issues with giving him a massage!

My friend and I decided that we were going to go all out for our senior prom. We wanted to have really fancy dresses, hummer limos, champagne and the whole bit. I also wanted to have an incredible date with dreamy blue eyes and I had just the guy in mind. It was an older cousin of another friend of mine and I wanted to ask him so badly.

I decided to make all the arrangements and then find my date. I called about the wheels and a dreamy voice answered on the other end, “Limo Hire Kent is speaking.” I could not believe that I happened to be talking to the one guy that I wanted to take to the prom.

I worked up the courage to book a limo hire through him and then ask if he would come along with it. He figured out who I was and told me that he would love nothing more than to go with me. We have been together ever since.

The summer after we built a deck onto our house — there were four new decks  on our street alone — our baby was eight months old. In addition to undergoing another hot summer, we had a huge yellow jacket infestation in our neighborhood.

One of the problems with wood decks is that they are, unfortunately, a place yellow jackets like to build their colonies. We had a particular problem with them appearing through the gaps in the decking.

Our daughter was too little to understand what they were and when she was playing her little pool and a yellow jacket crawled up between the boards, she reached down to pick it up. The look on my child’s face nearly broke my heart. Why did it hurt her? Why would anyone or anything hurt her? It was such a harsh lesson for such a little girl. She wasn’t totally traumatized, but she also never tried to pick up a yellow jacket again. She was nothing, if not smart.

I was lunching with a friend the other day and we had one of those conversations that was all over the place. Call it joint ADD, if you will.

We started out talking about wholesale lingerie, but somehow we moved on to Victoria’s Secret®. From there we segued into our local mall and the Mom and Pop cookie store next to the lingerie chain. We’d heard the cookie shop was going to close soon. Where would we get those fabulous turtle cookies we were both hooked on? It would be like going to a carnival or street fair and not finding cotton candy and sugar waffles!

When that topic was exhausted — or nearly so, since a new subject almost always raised its head — we quickly moved to dates for the county fair, what “names” were performing on Friday and Saturday nights, and how it wasn’t nearly as much fun at the fair without children around to go along.

My friend got a call saying she’d just gotten a package at home — the lingerie she’d ordered wholesale. So there we were full circle,. Who says ADD people never finish anything?

When some friends of ours, who owned a portable amusements company, decided to move, they asked if we could help them sell off their stock. There was a lot of it, and they had tried to sell the company as a whole, but when that didn’t work, they decided to try and sell their equipment piece by piece.

I advertised on a local radio station that they had some bouncy castles for sale and when that was not productive, we decided to build a web page and list them on that. That was slightly more productive than the radio and they were eventually able to get rid of most of their inventory.

When all was said and done, they were left with a couple of inflatable slides and everything else had been sold. They gave one of the slides to us for all of our help and our kids thought it was the greatest thing in the world.

It seems to me that my son has done a complete Jekyll and Hyde change overnight. He was always my bright eyed morning person and I am not sure what happened to him. I guess the fact that his teenage years are approaching may be the answer to some of my questions.

He used to awaken on his own very early in the morning and was like al little ray of sunshine. Now, it is nearly impossible to get him out of bed and when I do manage to get him up, he is as grouchy as a bear being pulled out of hibernation.

Though I can’t help mourning the little boy of the past, I am relieved to know that I am not the first mother to experience the metamorphosis of a little boy into a teenager. It makes me savor the odd moment that he is still the happy go lucky little boy, all that much more.

The most important decision I have made in my life so far was to pack up and move to another country. When I was finished high school, I wanted to experience the world. All of my friends were going off to college, and I did not feel like I was ready for this quite yet. I wanted to do more and experience more before I committed to another four years of school.

Part of my reasoning behind this is that I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do or study. I wanted to learn about other cultures and I decided to move to South America and do a little bit of studying on my own. I was going to be going to school, but it was not going to be the conventional kind that all parents want their kids to do.

I enrolled myself in Spanish School Antigua Guatemala and I packed my bags and boarded a plane. I was on my way to what would become my home for the next five years. I found that I was much happier doing this than I would have been if I had gone straight to college. And, now that I am in college, studying Anthropology, I feel that my experience has really opened my mind to learning.