It's been one heck of a year and I'm glad to see it go!

Less than 30 minutes to the New Year and looking back, I'm glad it's finally ending even though it seems to have gone faster than ever. It was a really difficult year though, pretty much from the beginning when my adopted dad started getting worse on Natalie's birthday. He died 9 months ago, on March 31st, of lung cancer. I miss him very much and think of him often. Of course, that loss for me just made the loss of my parents (not to death but to prison due to their own extremely selfish actions) even more difficult to bear. The weather added to things with spring being delayed and then when it did come, it came with severe weather. We had a close call when the tornado sirens went off in early April but nothing came of it thankfully other than severe hail damage on the southside of town. I was very grateful that John was sent home early and he came home just before it all hit. That wasn't the case six weeks later. I had been aware that we were to get severe storms so had stayed home and had been watching the weather all day. I had this sense of dread during the afternoon, felt very anxious. Kept watching the radar and saw a storm off to the SE that looked bad. It was and this storm was heading right for my town. Warnings started popping up in the SE so I started to get things together in preparation for going down to the basement with the two girls John was still at work. When the sirens went off (late, I found out later), we all went down. This time the warning was for real. The southside of my town took a direct hit from a rain wrapped tornado. This happened just an hour or so before Joplin Missouri was hit. Thankfully, it was a fairly week tornado. If it had been the size of the one that hit Joplin, we would have taken damage and loss of life similar to theirs, I'm sure. The tornado touched down not very far from the hospital and there were numerous stories of close calls. It hit near the neighborhood I had lived in when my brother-in-law was killed so I have had a hard time dealing with that. Tornadoes have been a huge fear of mine since losing my house to a fire when I was a kid and that combined with what happened in that area back when I was living there just made it worse (ironically, while houses on either side of my old apartment took damage, the house I lived in was untouched). It was just really weird to see all the damage down there and to realize that I was less than four miles away. It could have just as easily hit where I lived. Still kind of freaks me out, in all honesty.

So those two events and some other struggles have made this a particularly difficult year and so I'm not sad to see it go. I'm really hoping that this next year is a much better year because I kind of need a break here!

As usual I've been neglecting my blog.

And since this is supposed to be the blog where I'm posting about the girls, that's kind of sad so one of my big resolutions this year is to focus more on this blog and make this the main blog I post on. It will mean a name change since it won't just be about the girls but about family life in general and other things. It will be a work in progress but I'm hoping that I'll get better at updates and pictures and all that good stuff. A lot has been going on which is to be expected with two girls and I know if I don't post and take pictures and things, things will happen that I will forget about later on. So that is my plan.

I will also be taking The Mom Pledge. You can find out what that is all about here. I want to be more positive about parenting and do what I can to be a better parent. It's not easy though and a good part of it will be figuring out what I need to do to better myself and feel better about myself because I think that is for me the biggest challenge, feeling good about myself and feeling confident and finding value in myself as well.

I was really hoping things were turning around.

But nope, they weren't. It's just me being stupid again. I had decided that I was, no matter what, going to celebrate the holidays. I was going to take the girls trick-or-treating and I did (and their dad STILL does not know I took them) and I was going to celebrate Christmas. He had actually been pretty laid back about the whole Christmas thing, keeping fairly mum on it all and I was thinking that while he wasn't going to join in, he was AT LEAST going to respect MY beliefs for once. UGH! How stupid can I be?! I should have realized something was up when he wasn't sleeping in our room at night. For the longest time we had been sleeping in separate rooms and we finally got them switched around so that the larger bed was just for us to sleep in and the girls shared their own room. Before, I was sleeping in our daughter's room on her bed and she slept in the larger room with her dad and sister. And I figured this way they would have the larger room for their toys and stuff and my husband and I would have a place to sleep together. But lately, he had been falling asleep in the room with the girls and not coming to bed. Intimacy was declining again. And now, he's back to telling me how defiant and rebellious I am. For crying out loud, it's CHRISTMAS. I'm not sleeping around on him. I'm not going out and drinking with strange men or being gone all hours of the night. He's calling me this because I went out with my sister last night to WALMART and bought CHRISTMAS presents for my oldest daughter who had a birthday two days after Christmas anyway! Seriously! I got THREE gifts that cost me less than $25. I got my younger daughter TWO gifts for about the same amount. I bought some gift wrapping stuff and things like that and because it's against HIS beliefs, because HE believes that HE will be thrown into the Lake of Fire for believing it, I am the one who is rebelling and being defiant. All I want to do is buy some presents for my kids, wrap them, and give the presents to them on Christmas Day. That's it. I have a small tree in my office. I did not buy any lights. I ended up not doing the Secret Santa thing I was part of because I ended up leaving the group I was in. The only decoration outside of my office are snowflake decals on the window that my older daughter put up. THAT IS IT. Oh and I mailed Christmas cards out. But to hear you, you'd think I was like the people down the street with the HUGE holiday display outside of their house or the people whose house I pass on the bus with all of the lights! I haven't even taken the kids to see Santa Claus (though after this, I think I just might, may as well be as rebellious as possible!).

I want to bang my head on a wall. I have tried and tried and tried and tried to make this work. I REALLY tried to give up Christmas. It was HARD. It was PAINFUL. It was DEPRESSING. I HATED IT. I HATED people who celebrated Christmas. I was becoming a Grinch about it all, seriously. I did not like myself. I did not like having to be isolated from everyone for a good four months because I didn't celebrate any of the holidays from Halloween on except for Thanksgiving. I have done SO MUCH for him and tried SO HARD to respect his beliefs only to have him ignore me and take me for granted anyway. It didn't seem to matter that I was making HUGE sacrifices for him. It was just expected because I was married to him never mind he lied to me about his beliefs to begin with.

I don't believe what he believes. It would make life (and for sure our marriage!) easier if I did but I don't. I just wish he would realize that and realize that all the crap he does just makes our marriage more unbearable for me.